The Value of Citizenship

The U.S. Constitution does not define citizenship. It was less an oversight than a concession to slavery that the process of defining American citizenship had to wait until after the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, declared "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." In terms of Constitutional Amendments, up to the present, that's all that there is; thus, the definition of citizenship remains less than entirely clear. Though over the years the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of cases regarding citizenship issues, the conventional wisdom, that the Court has determined that a person becomes a citizen at the time of birth in the U.S., is not exactly true. The Court has never explicitly said, for example, whether or not, under the 14th Amendment, the children of illegal aliens are citizens. The closest the Court came was in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in 1898, but in that case the question involved becoming a citizen at birth when the parents were in the country legally. Moreover, apart from the parents' legal status, additional extenuating circumstances not considered in Wong could conceivably apply. To put it bluntly, appropriate laws defining American citizenship have never been written, nor tested in court.