Americans Once Understood Birthright Citizenship

“Please inform me of the following,” someone who signed off as “Farmhand” inquired in a letter to The Buffalo News on March 13, 1926. “Is a child born in this country of foreign parents a citizen provided said parents have not been naturalized? If you will give me this information I will be greatly obliged to you.” Below his query, the editors responded, “According to the constitution of the United States all children born in the United States are citizens thereof regardless of the nationality of their parents, and as such are entitled to the rights and privileges of American citizens.”

This letter was, in many ways, typical. In the century after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, many people across the United States sent similar questions to their local newspaper about the citizenship status of children born to immigrants. The Buffalo News had answered a comparable question before. In 1894, a reader known only as W.F.S. had another such query replied to in the paper’s Answers in Brief section: “Children born in the United States are citizens by right, no matter of what nationality their parents were.”

With birthright citizenship on the Supreme Court docket in the case Trump v. Barbara, the largely unexplored history of popular discourse on this topic is especially—if perhaps surprisingly—relevant. The focus in legal arguments has been around the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although constitutional experts and other scholars have relied on the amendment’s legal history to show that birthright citizenship has been the law without exception for well more than a century, newspaper archives offer another useful trove of evidence. These archives reveal that the Trump administration is not challenging some “woke” legal interpretation, but a settled consensus that has been reinforced across American law and culture, including through the quotidian mechanism of the popular newspaper, since the late 19th century.

Newspapers in the era before the internet and Wikipedia served as clearinghouses for information, efficiently sharing expertise with the general population. Advice columns and letters-to-the-editor pages became key sites for the circulation of knowledge.

In column after column, from the late 19th century onward, writers and editors treated questions about the citizenship status of the children of unnaturalized parents as a no-brainer. “Every child born in the United States is a citizen. Whether his parents were naturalized or not cuts no figure,” an editorial item reads in the Tecumseh, Oklahoma, County Democrat from 1904. In quite a few cases, the answers were monosyllabic, as was the case when someone from Orofino, Idaho, wrote to the Service Department section of the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review in June 1937 to ask, “If the father was not a citizen of the United States will his children born here be American citizens?” The editor’s laconic response—“Yes”—indicated that this was not a complicated question.

Newspapers welcomed the give-and-take with their readers. “You can get an answer to any question of fact or information by writing to The Questions Editor,” a journalist at The Modesto Bee wrote in 1926, introducing the “Questions and Answers” column. On that day, following a question about whether women had more ribs than men and a query about the richest people in the world (the answers, respectively: “No” and “Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon”), a reader inquired, “Of what nationality is a person born in the United States of Polish parents?” The answer: “A child born in the United States is a citizen thereof, regardless of the citizenship of the parents.”Expounding further, the editor noted, “The child in question would be an American of Polish descent.” Newspapers, then and now, have not always gotten things right. But it’s revealing that so many papers, across regions and decades, were straightforwardly in agreement on this issue.

Unlike those engaged in congressional debate or the adversarial legal system, newspaper columnists (or the experts to whom they turned) were not forced to take seriously arguments that they found absurd, and so they reproduced through repetition a powerful common sense. In the case of birthright citizenship, conventional and legal wisdom thus converged on the belief that the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was crystal clear. Reflecting this, in 1940 the Ask section of The Minneapolis Times-Tribune offered space to O. S. Remington, the assistant district director of the local immigration office, to respond to a question about the American-born children of a “foreign-born person.” Remington, paraphrasing the Fourteenth Amendment, wrote, “Yes, as the law states ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens.’” Twenty-five years earlier, in a 1915 column, “Are You a Citizen?,” The Marquette Tribune began by noting that “the U.S. Naturalization Examiner” had requested “that we call sharp and pointed attention to the laws concerning naturalization.” Among those that the columnist highlighted was that “children born here are citizens.”

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s absurd citizenship argument went nowhere]

In many cases, questions along these lines came from people who described themselves as the children of immigrants and were wondering about their own status. “My father is not a citizen,” A.C. wrote to the New York Daily News in October 1925, noting that they and their siblings were all born in the United States. “Are we citizens or do we have to become naturalized?” The editor’s answer: “All persons born in the United States are citizens.” In 1959, J.A. from Glen Cove, New York, wrote to Newsday: “My mother and father were born in Poland and then came to live in the U.S. but did not become citizens. Are their children, born here, U.S. citizens?” In reply, the editors quoted the part of the Fourteenth Amendment “applicable to your question,” assuaging J.A.’s fears by confirming that he and his siblings were, indeed, lawful American citizens. But far more frequently, the letter writers asked for information without expressing a direct stake in the answer.

Typically, the questions and answers appeared together within a single column, although one syndicated column that went by the name “Answer Me This—” or “Whaddayaknow?” in papers across the country made readers wait until the next edition of their paper to find each question’s answer. So readers of question No. 5 posed on September 17, 1928, “What persons are citizens according to the Fourteenth amendment?,” had to wait until the next day to get the answer: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States of America.”

In many cases, advice columns were run by anonymous editors, but sometimes these were produced by named columnists, including “Bring Your Problem! Cynthia Grey Will Help You” in The Spokane Press. In her column for January 11, 1913, below letters asking for relationship advice and one seeking to learn the correct gift for a 14th wedding anniversary (ivory), she informed a correspondent of some bad news: “If an American born woman married a foreigner who has not taken out his papers, she loses her right to vote and becomes a citizen of the country he is in.” But Grey offered reassurance as well: “If they have any children born in the United States, they are citizens of this country.”

Similarly, the “Answers by Mrs. Maxwell” column, in the Cleveland Press, in August 1914 replied to H.A.W.’s question about the citizenship status of children of an American-born woman who marries an “alien,” affirming that “her children, born the United States, are American citizens,” even as the woman would become “a subject of her husband’s country.”

Sometimes, readers may have been disappointed with the answers they received. In 1942, C.R.W. of Sacramento asked, “If Chinese and Japanese cannot become citizens of the United States why are their children, if born here, considered citizens?” The Sacramento Bee’s editor replied, “The constitution declares every person born in the United States is a citizen thereof.” Notably, this exchange, which was reprinted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, took place amid World War II and after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens.

[Amanda L. Tyler: The Supreme Court has heard this one before]

If the answers in newspapers across the country for more than a century were so strikingly consistent, why did subscribers persist in asking variations of the same question? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that immigrants came in waves, and each generation faced questions about their children’s citizenship status anew. Questions were frequently posed during the great immigration surge in the five decades from the 1880s to the 1920s. Even though strict immigration quotas and bans became the law of the land in 1924, the issue persisted as babies born prior to passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act came of age into the 1930s. As World War II approached, a period of concern about the status of Japanese citizens set off a new round of questions. As immigration fears slackened in the post–World War II years, such questions were asked far less frequently, and they remained relatively rare until the 1990s, when some conservatives began to call for the renunciation of birthright citizenship, a view that has been somewhat mainstreamed under Donald Trump.

For Trump and a group of conservative legal scholars and politicians to demand now that courts ignore the legal consensus of the past century-plus is effectively to command Americans to collectively engage in an act of historical amnesia. With the media ecosystem what it is today, they just might succeed. But a glimpse at an earlier journalistic universe—newspapers in the era before social media—shows the dishonesty at the center of the project to treat the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as up for grabs.