[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 184 (Wednesday, December 11, 2024)] [Senate] [Pages S6950-S6951] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] Birthright Citizenship Mr. KAINE. Madam President, I rise today to discuss a fundamental question: Who is a citizen of the United States? My comments are inspired by an interview given recently by the President-elect in which he announced that he would try to end birthright citizenship on day one of his Presidency. In the same interview, he claimed that the United States was the only nation on Earth offering birthright citizenship. What is birthright citizenship? Is the United States the only nation that has it? Let's start with the Constitution. The 14th Amendment enacted by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the States in 1868 contains a clear definition of citizen. Section 1 states: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. A very straightforward definition. If you are born in the United States or naturalized by law--and that is covered in article I of the Constitution that Congress may set up a process for naturalizing--you are a U.S. citizen so long as you are subject to the jurisdiction of this country. And there is no equivocation, ``all persons'' in either category are U.S. citizens. The Constitution was first adopted, as we all know, in 1787. Why was this definition of citizen added to the Constitution in 1868--90 years later? Surprisingly, there was no definition of citizen in the Constitution as originally issued. The word ``citizen'' was used once without definition. Article II defines the qualifications to be President as follows: No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States . . . shall be eligible to the Office of President. But the word ``citizen'' was not defined. The records of the Constitutional Convention show that the Framers considered defining the term ``citizen,'' but they had disagreements. And they couldn't reach a definition that satisfied them, and so they left the term ``citizen'' undefined in the Constitution as originally promulgated. This definition was added in the 14th Amendment in 1868 to fix a problem, a grievous problem: America's embrace of slavery. Dred Scott was born enslaved in Virginia in 1799. His parents were also enslaved, and his family had likely resided in this country for generations. Scott's owner took him first to Alabama and then to St. Louis and finally sold him to Army surgeon John Emerson when he was about 31 years old in 1830. Dr. Emerson then took Dred Scott first to Illinois, a free State, and then to the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was prohibited. Dred Scott worked as an enslaved laborer for the Emerson family for 16 years after they had purchased him. And he had attempted, over the course of those years, to purchase his own freedom and also the freedom of his wife Harriet. But the Emerson family refused to allow him to purchase his own freedom. So he eventually filed a freedom suit in St. Louis, seeking to be released from slavery on the grounds that when he resided in Illinois, a free State, and then in the Wisconsin Territory, a free territory, that residence extinguished his slavery and rendered him a freedman. The trial court in St. Louis ruled in his favor, granting him his freedom. But the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision. The matter was then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court: Was Dred Scott free or enslaved? The U.S. Supreme Court rendered one of its most notorious decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857. Under the guidance of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court didn't simply confront the lower court issue, whether an enslaved person traveling to a free State or territory thereby gains freedom; instead the Court went much further, finding that no person of African descent, free or enslaved, no matter how long they or their family had lived here, could ever be considered a citizen of the United States. And without being a citizen, Dred Scott did not even have the right to seek relief in an American court. The heart of the Dred Scott opinion is very, very chilling. Justice Taney, in writing about African descendants living in the United States, said this: We think . . . that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ``citizens'' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none [none] of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. Even though the Constitution contained no definition of citizen, the Court declared broadly that no one of African descent could ever--could ever--attain that status. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision was immensely controversial. It went far beyond Dred Scott's situation and held that all 4 million enslaved Black Americans in 1857, as well as hundreds of thousands of free men and women, were not and could not nor ever be citizens of the only country they had ever known. Two of the Justices of the Court dissented from the ruling, and one resigned partially to protest it. The backlash over Dred Scott v. Sandford was so severe that it became one of the precipitating causes of the Civil War a few years later. As the Civil War came to a close, with hundreds of thousands dead, with [[Page S6951]] much of the South in ruins, with President Lincoln assassinated, and with slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment, the reunited Nation realized it needed to fix the damage done by the Dred Scott case, and to do so, it needed to finally add a definition of citizen to the American Constitution. And that is what Congress and the States did in adopting section 1 of the 14th Amendment. All persons--all persons--either born in the United States or naturalized by law are citizens so long as they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction. This sentence, this one sentence, turned the formerly enslaved and all free African-Americans born here into citizens. The 13th Amendment rendered them not slaves, and yet they were not yet citizens so long as Dred Scott was the law of the land. This sentence was what turned liberated slaves and free African-Americans into U.S. citizens: If you are born in America, citizenship is your birthright. In the 1890s, the notion of birthright citizenship was tested in the Supreme Court. A man by the name of Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were not U.S. citizens. He traveled to China, and then, in traveling back to the United States, his birthplace and home, he was denied reentry into this country based on the Chinese Exclusion Act, an egregious law of the time attempting to bar Chinese immigration. He sued to overturn the congressional ban, and the Court ruled in 1898 that he was a U.S. citizen based on the plain language of the 14th Amendment, and the Chinese Exclusion Act could therefore not apply to bar him entry into this country. Lawyers in the case attempted to argue, as some do today, that Wong Kim Ark, although born in the United States, was not subject to the jurisdiction of this country, but the Court dispatched this argument quickly by finding that Wong Kim Ark was clearly subject to the laws of the land of his birth. This ruling from 1898 has been the clear understanding of American law ever since. Birthright citizenship means that you are a U.S. citizen if you are born in America. Your right to citizenship does not depend upon the status of your parents. Dred Scott, Wong Kim Ark, and Donald Trump all meet that test. This birthright was only guaranteed following incalculable bloodshed, the centuries-long depravity of slavery, and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. The citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment was meant as an atonement for and a repair of that suffering. Anyone who wants to reverse or curtail birthright citizenship is acting directly contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitution, and they are attempting to move the United States back to a pre-Civil War mentality where certain kinds of people, although born in and long residing in the United States, are viewed as subordinate and unequal because of their parents' status or their ancestry. One additional point is important: The President-elect's claim that only the United States recognizes birthright citizenship. This statement is either ignorant or willfully deceptive. Thirty-three nations--many in the Americas, including Canada and Mexico--grant full birthright citizenship to all born within their borders. The United States is not alone in embracing birthright citizenship. In fact, I would argue that the United States has been the leader of a global movement to embrace birthright citizenship. I have described the painful history of how America reached the conclusion that all born here are entitled to citizenship so long as they are subject to the jurisdiction of this country. In future weeks, I will return to the Senate floor to describe the many benefits that birthright citizenship has bestowed on our Nation, and I will do so by telling the stories of Americans born to immigrant parents, whose contributions have enriched this country and even enriched the place we stand today--the U.S. Senate. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Baldwin). The Senator from Florida.