American by Birth : University Press of Kansas : 9780700632886 : 0700632883 : 30 Jan 2022 : "In his infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Taney had denied that any American descended from Africans, whether free or slave, could claim citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause repudiated this principle. The Fourteenth Amendment's connection to birthright citizenship, however, is not built exclusively through the lives and fortunes of black citizens. It requires an understanding of the Chinese experience of migration to the United States, and Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898) lies at the center of this story. Wong Kim Ark, a man in his mid-twenties who had been born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was refused entry into the United States upon returning from a visit to China. By 1898, the strict policy forbidding most Chinese from entering the United States was well established, and Wong Kim Ark did not claim to fall into one of the narrow