This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Over the last decade or so, concern about illegal immigration has sporadically led to a re-examination of a long-established tenet of U.S. citizenship, codified in the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), that a person who is born in the U.S., is a citizen of the U.S. regardless of the race, ethnicity, or alienage of the parents. Some congressional Members have supported a revision of the Citizenship Clause or at least holding hearings for a serious consideration of it. Contents of this report: (1) Intro.; (2) Historical Development: Jus Soli Doctrine Before the 14th Amend.; The 14th Amend. and the Civil Rights Act of 1866; U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark and Elk v. Wilkins; (3) Legislative Proposals.

Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.

American by Birth explores the history and legacy of Wong Kim Ark and the 1898 Supreme Court case that bears his name, which established the automatic citizenship of individuals born within the geographic boundaries of the United States. In the late nineteenth century, much like the present, the United States was a difficult, and at times threatening, environment for people of color. Chinese immigrants, invited into the United States in the 1850s and 1860s as laborers and merchants, faced a wave of hostility that played out in organized private violence, discriminatory state laws, and increasing congressional efforts to throttle immigration and remove many long-term residents. The federal courts, backed by the Supreme Court, supervised the development of an increasingly restrictive and exclusionary immigration regime that targeted Chinese people. This was the situation faced by Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in the 1870s and who earned his living as a cook. Like many members of the Chinese community in the American West he maintained ties to China. He traveled there more than once, carrying required reentry documents, but when he attempted to return to the United States after a journey from 1894 to 1895, he was refused entry and detained. Protesting that he was a citizen and therefore entitled to come home, he challenged the administrative decision in court. Remarkably, the Supreme Court granted him victory. This victory was important for Wong Kim Ark, for the ethnic Chinese community in the United States, and for all immigrant communities then and to this day. Though the principle had links to seventeenth-century English common law and in the United States back to well before the American Civil War, the Supreme Court’s ruling was significant because it both inscribed the principle in constitutional terms and clarified that it extended even to the children of immigrants who were legally barred from becoming citizens. American by Birth is a richly detailed account of the case and its implications in the ongoing conflicts over race and immigration in US history; it also includes a discussion of current controversies over limiting the scope of birthright citizenship.

Deportation has again taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states. Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation addresses the social responses to deportation, in particular the growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status. The book brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. However, rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of ‘regular’ citizens into deportable ‘irregular’ citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. This includes unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, as well as through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment. The book features eleven ‘acts of citizenship’ that occur in the context of deportation and anti-deportation, arguing that these struggles for rights, recognition, and return are fundamentally struggles over political subjectivity – of citizenship. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of citizenship, migration and security studies.

Securitizations of Citizenship critically assesses the fate of citizenship in relation to securitized practices of surveillance and control that have emerged in the post-9/11 period.

This open access book discusses how national citizenship is being transformed by economic, social and political change. It focuses on the emergence of global markets where citizenship is for sale and on how new reproduction technologies impact citizenship by descent. It also discusses the return of banishment through denationalisation of terrorist suspects, and the impact of digital technologies, such as blockchain, on the future of democratic citizenship. The book provides a wide range of views on these issues from legal scholars, political scientists, and political practitioners. It is structured as a series of four conversations in which authors respond to each other. This exchange of arguments provides unique depth to current debates about the future of citizenship.

This volume uses introductory essays followed by point/counterpoint articles to explore prominent and perennially important debates, providing readers with views on multiple sides of the complex issue of US immigration.