Donald Trump has reignited this issue with his wonderful immigration position paper.
So the Left is starting a counter-barrage. The New York Daily News has published a pompous piece A history lesson for Donald Trump and his supporters: In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark and safeguarded birthright citizenship for millions by Erika Lee Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Erika Lee (email her) is Professor of Chinese chauvinism at the University of Minnesota. Her essay is a simple-minded gloat about an early example of Supreme Court judicial legislation with no account (of course) of the dissents. Of this case I wrote in Chinese 19th Century California Immivasion Triggered America's Birthright Citizenship Disaster that in 1898
…the Supreme Court wanted to award citizenship to the son of non-citizen Chinese legal immigrants. So they simply wrote new law…However, Lee does add information I did not know(The issue of granting of citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants has never reached the Supreme Court.)
The best that can be said for the 1898 Supreme Court was that they were acting just out of class prejudice, registering a protest that these deplorable white peasants were reversing the Asian immivasion.
Like all Chinese in America, Wong was required to carry a “Certificate of Identity” at all times to verify his status as a legal resident….As a result of his unequal status, Wong eventually turned his back on the United States. He married and had four sons, but they remained in China. Eventually, Wong retired to China at the age of 62 and never returned to the United States. He died in China shortly after World War II.He must have had to show photo ID!
In other words, Wong Kim Ark cared so little about America that he preferred the tumult of early 20th Century China.
In fact, this is the usual attitude of many immigrants, which is why self-deportation would be so effective,
What a real scholar would be asking is: who financed this case?