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With the current GOP Presidential smack talk concerning the 14th amendment, I though a video was warranted. My Johnny Cash "Walk the Line" lecture looking at the text, judicial interpretation and arguments for and against it.

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Read ONE opinion piece for each political ideology.

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Birthright citizenship has exploded into the national discourse. The issue is generating a lot of heat on the Republican side of the aisle in particular, because it threatens to expose the long-standing rift between the party's base and its pro-crony-capitalism establishment.

Unfortunately, in arguing that the 14th Amendment requires citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants, some of the more prominent interlocutors are promoting an incorrect understanding of history. The Wall Street Journal's recent editorial on the matter is a case in point, and my good friend John Yoo's NR essay repeats one of the same basic flaws.

The first clause of the 14th Amendment provides that "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." The Journal thinks the meaning is "straightforward": "Subject to the jurisdiction" covers everyone born on U.S. soil (except the children of diplomats and invading armies), because "'jurisdiction' defines the territory where the force of law applies and to whom - and this principle is well settled to include almost everyone within U.S. borders, regardless of their home country or the circumstances of their birth." It then states: "By the circular restrictionist logic, illegal immigrants could not be prosecuted for committing crimes because they are not U.S. citizens."
RELATED: Trump's Critics Are Wrong About the 14th Amendment and Birthright Citizenship
Professor Yoo makes the same claim (absent the ad hominem word "restrictionist"): "Almost all aliens in the United States, even citizens of other nations, still fall within our jurisdiction while they are in our territory: Otherwise they could commit crimes of all sorts without fear of punishment."

This claim plays off a widespread ignorance about the meaning of the word "jurisdiction." It fails to recognize that the same word covers two distinctly different ideas: 1) complete, political jurisdiction; and 2) partial, territorial jurisdiction.

Think of it this way. When a British tourist visits the United States, he subjects himself to our laws as long as he remains within our borders. He must drive on the right side of the road, for example. He is subject to our partial, territorial jurisdiction, but he does not thereby subject himself to our complete, political jurisdiction. He does not get to vote, or serve on a jury; he cannot be drafted into our armed forces; and he cannot be prosecuted for treason if he takes up arms against us, because he owes us no allegiance. He is merely a "temporary sojourner," to use the language employed by those who wrote the 14th Amendment, and not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States in the full and complete sense intended by that language in the 14th Amendment.
RELATED: On Citizenship, the 'Birthers' Are Right
The same is true for those who are in this country illegally. They are subject to our laws by their presence within our borders, but they are not subject to the more complete jurisdiction envisioned by the 14th Amendment as a precondition for automatic citizenship. It is just silliness to contend, as the Journal does, that this is "circular restrictionist logic" that would prevent illegal immigrants from being "prosecuted for committing crimes because they are not U.S. citizens."

Moreover, contrary to Professor Yoo's contention, the text elsewhere in the 14th Amendment supports this distinction. Unlike the Citizenship Clause, which uses the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction," the Equal Protection Clause bars a state from "deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." (Emphasis added.) The phrase "within its jurisdiction" is territorial, whereas the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" is political.

There were no restrictions on immigration in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was being drafted and ratified, so there was no debate on whether the Citizenship Clause confers automatic citizenship on the children of illegal immigrants. But we do have debate on the analogous circumstance of Native Americans who continued to owe allegiance to their tribes. One senator - exhibiting the same confusion today exhibited by the Journal - asked Senator Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the drafting and adoption of the 14th Amendment, whether Indians living on reservations would be covered by the clause, since they were "most clearly subject to our jurisdiction, both civil and military."
RELATED: Not Hard to Read 14th Amendment As Not Requiring Birthright Citizenship - And Nothing Odd About Reporting Such a Reading
Trumbull responded that "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States meant subject to its "complete" jurisdiction, "not owing allegiance to anybody else." And Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the language of the jurisdiction clause on the floor of the Senate, contended that it should be construed to mean "a full and complete jurisdiction," "the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now" - that is, under the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which the 14th Amendment was intended to codify. That act made the point even more clearly: "All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States." (Emphasis added.) As the debate over the 14th Amendment makes clear, the shift in language from the 1866 Civil Rights Act to what became the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was not intended to provide citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, but rather to shift away from the "not subject to any foreign power" language out of recognition that the Indian tribes were not foreign powers but domestic (albeit dependent) powers. As Senator Howard explained, the Citizenship Clause excludes not only Indians but "persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers."

The leading treatise writer of the day, Thomas Cooley, confirmed this was the understanding of the 14th Amendment. As he wrote in his treatise, The General Principles of Constitutional Law in America, "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States "meant full and complete jurisdiction to which citizens are generally subject, and not any qualified and partial jurisdiction, such as may consist with allegiance to some other government."

When the Supreme Court first addressed the Citizenship Clause in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases, both the majority and dissenting opinions recognized this same understanding. The majority in that case correctly noted that the "main purpose" of the clause "was to establish the citizenship of the negro" and that "the phrase, 'subject to its jurisdiction' was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States." (Emphasis added).

That language in Slaughterhouse was dicta (a comment not strictly relevant to the decision), but it became holding a decade later in the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins. The Supreme Court held in that case that the claimant - a Native American born on a tribal reservation - was not a citizen because he was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States at birth, which required that he be "not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance." Elk did not meet the jurisdictional test because, as a member of an Indian tribe at his birth, he "owed immediate allegiance to" his tribe and not to the United States. Although "Indian tribes, being within the territorial limits of the United States, were not, strictly speaking, foreign states," "they were alien nations, distinct political communities," according to the Court, thereby making clear that its holding was about allegiance and not the reservation's geographic territory. Then, drawing explicitly on the language of the 1866 Civil Rights Act from which the 14th Amendment was drawn, the Court continued: "Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of, and owing immediate allegiance to, one of the Indian tribes (an alien though dependent power), although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more 'born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' within the meaning of the first section of the fourteenth amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States, of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations."
RELATED: What Conservatives Get Wrong about Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution
Professor Yoo is therefore simply mistaken in his claim that "the Supreme Court has consistently read Section One as granting birthright citizenship to the children of aliens on U.S. territory." In fact, it has never held that the children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in this country illegally are citizens. In the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, the Court simply held that a child born of Chinese immigrants who were lawfully and permanently in the United States - "domiciled" here, to use the Court's phrase - was a citizen. Language in the opinion that can be read as suggesting that birth on U.S. soil alone, no matter what the circumstances, confers automatic citizenship is pure dicta, because no claim was at issue in the case other than whether the child of lawful, permanent residents was a citizen.

Professor Yoo's contention to the contrary overlooks the Court's use of the word "domiciled" in describing the nature of Wong Kim Ark's relationship to the United States. "Domicile" is a legal term of art; it means "a person's legal home," according to Black's law dictionary, and is often used synonymously with "citizenship." Wong Kim Ark's parents were not allowed to become citizens because the U.S. had entered into a nefarious treaty with the Emperor of China that refused to recognize their natural right to emigrate, but they were "domiciled" in the United States, which is to say, lawfully present in the United States. The holding of the case, as opposed to its broader dicta, does not mandate citizenship for children born to those who are unlawfully present in the United States, and it does not even mandate citizenship for those who are visiting the United States temporarily but lawfully. In both cases, the children, through their parents, retain allegiance to their parents' home country - to a "foreign power," to return to the language of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. They are therefore not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States in the way intended by the 14th Amendment, and therefore not automatic citizens.
RELATED: Good Faith Is Measured by the Constitution Not Predictions about the Supreme Court
As I said, no Supreme Court case has held otherwise. Wong Kim Ark did not so hold. Neither did Plyler v. Doe in 1982, contrary to the Journal 's assertion; the relevant language in that case is simply a footnote for comparison with the Equal Protection Clause, and pure dicta.

Professor Yoo's description of the debate between Senators Cowan and Conness likewise misses the point. Cowan asked whether the Citizenship Clause would confer citizenship upon the children of Chinese parents who were living in California, or the children of Gypsies living in Pennsylvania. "Have they any more rights than a sojourner in the United States?" he asked. He was attempting to draw a distinction based on race or ethnic background, not on lawful versus unlawful presence in the United States, or even on permanent versus temporary presence. It was for that reason that Conness began his reply by stating that he failed to see what relation Cowan's question had to do with the Citizenship Clause.

The 14th Amendment did not do away with sovereignty.

Conness then responded that automatic citizenship would be available to the "children begotten of Chinese parents in California" just as existed under existing law - that is, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which extended citizenship to "all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power." That guarantee was available no matter the ethnic background of the parents - we were not extending citizenship only to the descendants of white Europeans - but his response did not suggest that the children of those who were not lawfully present in the United States, or who were mere temporary visitors, would be automatic citizens. Indeed, Cowan's own question - "Have [the children of Chinese or Gypsies domiciled in the United States] any more rights than a sojourner?" - demonstrates that he was also aware of the distinction between territorial and political jurisdiction. For the debate to support Professor Yoo's position, Conness would have had to respond that even the children of sojourners would be entitled to automatic citizenship. There is not a hint in his response to suggest such an answer, nor in any other part of the entire debate.

So, truth be told, the 14th Amendment does not need to be repealed in order to fix the problem of birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. It just needs to be understood and applied correctly. The Journal's contention that conservatives who insist upon this understanding of the law "are promising a GOP version of President Obama's 'illegal amnesty order'" could therefore not be further from the truth. Constitutional originalism requires that we give effect to the public meaning of the words actually used, even if the Wall Street Journal would wish the meaning were otherwise. And the Journal 's further contention that anyone who wishes to see the 14th Amendment faithfully applied is claiming "that some people are not real Americans and have no right to be," is simply another ad hominem attack and mischaracterization not worthy of an otherwise great newspaper.
RELATED: The Very Real Economic Costs of Birthright Citizenship
Finally, let me close with some agreement with Professor Yoo's soaring rhetoric at the end of his piece, much of which is entirely true. Yes, "rather than being a misguided act of generosity, the 14th Amendment marks one of the great achievements of the Republican party." And yes, "It was the Republican party that opposed Dred Scott." And yes, "It was the Republican Party that fought and won the Civil War." And definitely yes, "it was the Republican party that drafted and ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which did away with slavery and any distinction between Americans based on race."

But the 14th Amendment did not do away with sovereignty. It did not do away with the importance of citizenship, or with the idea, rooted in the Declaration of Independence, that legitimate governments are grounded on the consent of the governed. Birthright citizenship, as currently practiced, allows those who continue to owe allegiance to a foreign power to demand American citizenship for their children, unilaterally and as a result of their illegal conduct. Those who oppose such an abuse do not support Dred Scott. They are drawing distinctions based not on race, but on the rule of law.

Professor Yoo need not worry, therefore, that applying the 14th Amendment faithfully would "discard one of the greatest attributes of American exceptionalism." The welcome mat to American citizenship is open to anyone in the world regardless of race or ethnic background, as long as they adhere to the legal rules set out by Congress for immigration to this country.

- John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former dean at the Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He also serves as the director of the Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

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We Can Apply the 14th Amendment While Also Reforming Birthright Citizenship

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Birthright citizenship has exploded into the national discourse. The issue is generating a lot of heat on the Republican side of the aisle in particular, because it threatens to expose the long-standing rift between the party's base and its pro-crony-capitalism establishment.

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Read ONE opinion piece for each political ideology.

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The following is an entry concerning the first section of Amendment 14 of the Constitution as found in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution.

Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the states were automatically considered citizens of the United States. In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision had held that no black of African descent (even a freed black) could be a citizen of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment was thus necessary to overturn Dred Scott and to settle the question of the citizenship of the newly freed slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment made United States citizenship primary and state citizenship derivative. The primacy of federal citizenship made it impossible for states to prevent former slaves from becoming United States citizens by withholding state citizenship. States could no longer prevent any black from United States citizenship or from state citizenship either.

The Civil rights Act of 1866 had previously asserted that "All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States." The immediate impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment was to constitutionalize and validate the Civil rights Act because some had questioned whether the Thirteenth Amendment was a sufficient basis for its constitutionality. A constitutional amendment would also have the advantage of preventing a later unfriendly Congress from repealing it.

One conspicuous departure from the language of the Civil rights Act was the elimination of the phrase "Indians not taxed." Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio, the author of the citizenship Clause, defended the new language against the charge that it would make Indians citizens of the United States. Howard assured skeptics that "Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States." Senator Lyman Trumbull, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, supported Howard, contending that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" meant "not owing allegiance to anybody else . . . subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States." Indians, he concluded, were not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States because they owed allegiance-even if only partial allegiance-to their tribes. Thus, two requirements were set for United States citizenship: born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction.

By itself, birth within the territorial limits of the United States, as the case of the Indians indicated, did not make one automatically "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. And "jurisdiction" did not mean simply subject to the laws of the United States or subject to the jurisdiction of its courts. Rather, "jurisdiction" meant exclusive "allegiance" to the United States. Not all who were subject to the laws owed allegiance to the United States. As Senator Howard remarked, the requirement of "jurisdiction," understood in the sense of "allegiance," "will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States."

Most revealing, however, was Senator Howard's contention that "every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States." Almost everyone certainly would have understood "natural law" to refer to the social compact basis of citizenship, the basis for citizenship adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence.

The argument of the Declaration grounded citizenship in consent. The natural law argument of the Declaration was a repudiation of the notion of birthright citizenship that had been the basis of British citizenship (i.e., being a British "subject") ever since it was first articulated in Calvin's Case in 1608. Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, had argued that the idea of birthright citizenship was an inheritance from the "foedal system"-it derives from the "mutual trust or confidence subsisting between the lord and vassal." "Natural allegiance," says Blackstone, is "due from all men born within the king's dominion immediately upon their birth. [It] is a debt of gratitude which cannot be forfeited, cancelled, or altered, by any change of time, place or circumstance. . . . [T]he natural-born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another put off or discharge his natural allegiance."

In the Summary View of the rights of British America (1774), Thomas Jefferson argued that it was a natural right possessed by all men to leave the country where "chance and not choice" had placed them. The notion of a natural right to expatriation has no place in the scheme of an indefeasible birthright citizenship. Furthermore, the natural right to revolution is the perfect antithesis of "perpetual allegiance." In 1868, the Reconstruction Congress passed an Expatriation Act. The act provided, in pertinent part, that "the right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Senator Howard was an enthusiastic supporter of the bill, describing the right of expatriation as the necessary counterpart of citizenship based on consent. During debate, commentators frequently described Blackstone's view of birthright citizenship as an "indefensible feudal doctrine of indefeasible allegiance" that was incompatible with republican government.

In Elk v. Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court decided that a native Indian who had renounced allegiance to his tribe did not become "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States by virtue of the renunciation. "The alien and dependent condition of the members of the Indian Tribes could not be put off at their own will, without the action or assent of the United States" signified either by treaty or legislation. Neither the "Indian Tribes" nor "individual members of those Tribes," no more than "other foreigners" can "become citizens of their own will."

Beginning in 1870 Congress began extending offers of citizenship to various Indian tribes. Any member of a specified tribe could become an American citizen if he so desired. Congress thus demonstrated that, using its Section 5 powers to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, it could define who was properly within the jurisdiction of the United States.

In 1898, the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark declared that the Fourteenth Amendment adopted the common-law definition of birthright citizenship. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller's dissenting opinion, however, argued that birthright citizenship had been repealed by the principles of the American Revolution and rejected by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nonetheless, the decision conferred birthright citizenship on a child of legal residents of the United States. Although the language of the majority opinion in Wong Kim Ark is certainly broad enough to include the children born in the United States of illegal as well as legal immigrants, there is no case in which the Supreme Court has explicitly held that this is the unambiguous command of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Based on the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, some believe that Congress could exercise its Section 5 powers to prevent the children of illegal aliens from automatically becoming citizens of the United States. An effort in 1997 failed in the face of intense political opposition from immigrant rights groups. Apparently, the question remains open to the determination of the political and legal processes.
Edward Erler is Professor of Political Science at California State University, San Bernadino.

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Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution

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The following is an entry concerning the first section of Amendment 14 of the Constitution as found in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution . Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the states were automatically considered citizens of the United States. In 1857, the Dred Scott v.

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Read ONE opinion piece for each political ideology.

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Every few years, the common law concept of jus soli - or birthright citizenship - comes back into the news.

This time, it was thrust onto the stage by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who just unveiled an immigration plan. One of his proposals is to stop automatically giving citizenship to most people born on U.S. soil. Rival GOP candidate Scott Walker issued a similar call.

The concept of jus soli has a storied history in the United States that dates to the late 1800s.

Here are three things that will bring you up to speed on the issue:
1. It's in the Constitution
The issue of citizenship was brought into focus by a Supreme Court ruling in 1857 that essentially declared that blacks - even the daughters and sons of freed slaves - were not U.S. citizens.

In 1868, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The first sentence reads: "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."

That language made it clear the Supreme Court's ruling in the Dred Scott case was overturned and that black Americans would enjoy U.S. citizenship.
2. It still left some big, open questions
As we've explained in the past, there's one key clause in that sentence from the 14th Amendment - "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" - that left wiggle room for interpretation.

As a Congressional Research Service report from 2010 puts it, what that clause means has been the subject of great debate. Did it mean that the children born to Chinese immigrants - who were once under law not permitted to become naturalized citizens - conferred birthright citizenship? Did it include Native Americans born on sovereign reservations?

All those questions were eventually settled in the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Essentially, the court said the common law concept of jus soli should be applied to the 14th Amendment. Congressional Research Service explains:

"The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed the traditional jus soli rule, including the exceptions of children born to foreign diplomats, to hostile occupying forces or on foreign public ships, and added a new exception of children of Indians owing direct allegiance to their tribes. It further held that the 'Fourteenth Amendment ... has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship' and that it is 'throughout affirmative and declaratory, intended to allay doubts and settle controversies which had arisen, and not to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship."

In other words, the 14th Amendment excludes children born to diplomats or hostile occupying forces and those born on foreign public ships.

Those are some very narrow restrictions that most legal scholars agree do not exclude the children of illegal immigrants from receiving automatic citizenship. To be clear, it means that current jurisprudence indicates the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are given citizenship by the 14th Amendment.

As for Native Americans, the court ruled that the amendment did not confer birthright citizenship to those born on reservations, because they are not technically subject to U.S. jurisdiction. As Congressional Research Service reports, the Nationality Act of 1940 "finally and unambiguously declared all Native Americans born in the United States to be U.S. citizens."
3. Birthright citizenship is a New World philosophy
As University of California, San Diego sociologist John Skrentny told NPR in 2010, the U.S. is an anomaly in the world when it comes to this issue.

Most of the rest of the world, for example, gives people citizenship based on a concept known as jus sanguinis, literally "by right of blood."

"The idea there is that the nation, the people are bonded together through ancestry," Skrentny said. "The other notion of nationhood is generally understood as a civic notion of nationhood. And this is the idea that folks are bonded together by where they are, by locality and by the ideas that they might share. And that's what we have in the United States. There are folks who say that, you know, to be an American is to embrace an idea."

It is, Skrentny added, a philosophy that works well for countries made up of immigrants, such as the U.S. and Canada.

In 2012, the Law Library of Congress took a comprehensive look at France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. and found that none of those countries automatically give citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrant parents.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which tends to favor more restrictive immigration policies in the U.S., took a worldwide look at the issue in 2010 and found that "only 30 of the world's 194 countries grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens."

Here's a map of their findings:

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3 Things You Should Know About Birthright Citizenship

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Every few years, the common law concept of jus soli - or birthright citizenship - comes back into the news. This time, it was thrust onto the stage by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who just unveiled an immigration plan. One of his proposals is to stop automatically giving citizenship to most people born on U.S.

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Read ONE opinion piece for each political ideology.

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One-hundred-fifty years ago, the United States was hard at work defining citizenship. It was an effort to fix one of the central oversights of the Constitution: Who counts as a citizen is fundamental to a democracy, yet the nation's founding document was silent on the subject. Some argued that the framers intended citizenship only for white Americans, others that free black Americans must be treated as citizens, as well. Absent an express constitutional provision, a debate grew up around the relationship between race and citizenship. In the wake of a Civil War that abolished slavery, this question demanded resolution.

Before the war, no community had been more haunted by the Constitution's absence of a citizenship clause than freed slaves and their descendants. They had lived and labored for generations in a legal limbo that the new 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause promised to resolve. In July 1868, when Secretary of State William Seward ratified the amendment, black Americans, along with all those born in the United States, were declared citizens.

There is much to admire in the work of Reconstruction-era lawmakers who took this step toward a more complete democracy. But today, their definition of what makes an American falls short of resolving our citizenship crisis. Unauthorized immigrants and their communities find too little recourse in the birthright principle. Despite building families and institutions across generations, they are, not unlike former slaves, excluded from the nation's borders of belonging.

These two communities - former slaves and unauthorized immigrants - might appear far apart in time and circumstance. Free African Americans had origins in a system of captivity, brutal compulsion and forced labor, while unauthorized migrants are here by way of economic or political coercion and work as free laborers.

Still, their experiences converge when it comes to citizenship. In both instances, the nation permitted people to establish thriving communities without resolving their legal status. This history and two enduring aspirations link former slaves and unauthorized immigrants across 150 years: The desire to remain within the nation's territory and to defend against the constant threat that, at any moment, officials might arbitrarily remove them beyond its borders.

Former slaves and their descendants faced grave threats as noncitizens. In the decade before the Civil War, free African Americans numbered nearly 500,000, or 1.6 percent of the nation's population. Most had lived in the United States for generations, building families, schools and churches. Their labor was the engine of prosperity, whether on rural farmlands or urban cityscapes.

Still, free black Americans lived under constant pressure to leave the country. So-called black laws limited their travel, work, and public gatherings. Colonization societies organized to send them to Africa, the Caribbean or Canada. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people were not citizens of the United States, barring them from suing in federal courts. These forces all aimed to remove African Americans from the nation, whether by coercion or force.

A lack of citizenship defined a decades-long reign of terror that reached into daily life. If they were not citizens, could black Americans own homes and businesses? Could they worship freely and govern their own churches? Could they control the custody and education of their children? Could they travel to visit family or secure jobs? Could they use the courts to protect their wages or their personal safety? No authority would say for certain where these noncitizens stood.

The answers came about only through a revolution. Four years of civil war and the near dissolution of the nation brought an end to slavery and the enactment of a new constitutional regime. The adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868 guaranteed citizenship to those born or naturalized in the United States, including former slaves. Black Americans would face subsequent challenges to their civil and political rights, but the 14th Amendment ensured that they would never again face the threat of removal.

For today's unauthorized immigrants, however, the 14th Amendment provides no relief. The once-radical promise of birthright citizenship is beyond their reach. Their lives tell part of the story. The Pew Research Center estimated that in 2015, 11 million unauthorized immigrants - 3.4 percent of the overall population - lived in the United States. These men, women and children have built families, homes and businesses across generations. Their labors drive economic growth, especially in agriculture, industry and the service sector.

Integral to the country in which they live, today's unauthorized immigrants nonetheless have no access to the rights of citizens. They have no unassailable claim to place. This year began with anti-immigrant threats of mass deportation. What followed has been more quotidian but no less harrowing. Workplace raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement discourage even documented immigrants from their jobs. Public gatherings are canceled because community celebrations invite surveillance and detention.

With no path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, the 14th Amendment instead becomes a generational scythe. Families of mixed status confront dislocation and separation as birthright slices through households, severing cross-generational ties. It is a haunted existence that produces lives subject to the arbitrary winds of politics and policy.

For communities that include unauthorized immigrants, a new reign of terror is underway. As in 1867, people living in the United States today face schemes that aim to forcibly excise them from the nation.

And so we are confronted with the limits of the 14th Amendment in another chapter of America's longer struggle to define who has access to the rights and privileges of belonging. The 19th-century solution, citizenship by birth, no longer reaches far enough.

Ambiguities about the belonging of unauthorized immigrants, who have no clear route to citizenship, represent a new challenge to our democratic ideals: How will we create a more expansive definition of citizenship that reaches all those whose labor and lives contribute to the prosperity and strength of the nation - and whose children are, thanks to the 14th Amendment, citizens in their own right. Until we resolve this dilemma, we will continue to watch as a cramped definition of citizenship makes outlaws of friends, neighbors, co-workers and family members.

The 14th Amendment - passed on this day nearly 150 years ago - resolved the most pressing citizenship question of the 19th century. It was an instrument of hope as birthright extinguished threats of removal and opened doors to membership in the body politic for former slaves. Nearly a century and half later, a new citizenship crisis exposes the Amendment's unintended but tragic limits and calls out for solutions as bold and imaginative as the 14th Amendment once was.

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Analysis | The 14th Amendment solved one citizenship crisis, but it created a new one

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One-hundred-fifty years ago, the United States was hard at work defining citizenship. It was an effort to fix one of the central oversights of the Constitution: Who counts as a citizen is fundamental to a democracy, yet the nation's founding document was silent on the subject.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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What was it's original intent?

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Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside." The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the "equal protection of the laws."

In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, "colored" facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

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14th Amendment adopted - Jul 28, 1868 - HISTORY.com

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Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution. Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established.

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Click here to read the 14th Amendment.

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Amendment XIV

Section 1.

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. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

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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.