Why were they assumed citizens? How were they assumed citizens? The court simply assumes that they were assumed citizens and this interpretation would void that assumption. The majority offers no grounds for such an assumption of citizenship that would make a ruling against such an assumption unreasonable.
The truth is that it was not legally certain that children of white aliens were indisputably citizens. The majority makes this claim but does not offer support. In the end we are left with two opinions, the majority that excepts an entire class of people based on the novelty of Native Americans and presumes that the Ammendment did alter the treaty makimg powers of the United states. And the Dissent which assumes absent clear evidence that common law was not assumed throughout the history of the U.S. concerning natural born citizens and that the 14th Ammendment was to limit citizenship more clearly than the law already provided.
If there is a problem with me suggesting what I have please point it out without appealing to the authority of the very court i am questioning while ignoring that same court (in the dissent) when it suits your interest.
There were hundreds of thousands of citizens of Ireland alone who had migrated to the US during the 50-year period prior to
Wong. There were also great waves of German and Italian immigrants to the US during this same period. The very idea that all of these shoeless, starving, tired, poor huddled masses went through the naturalization process and officially became US citizens before they began giving birth to children in the US is laughable. When these children became adults, they were allowed to vote, were counted in the census, and, unlike Wong on return from his second trip out of the country, were allowed re-enter the country. These were among the ways that these people were considered and treated as US citizens despite their parents being citizens of another country, despite their parents having not “renounced their allegiance to their former country” before the births of their children.
For the Court to have used Fuller's tendentious interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” in the Citizenship Clause, it would have rendered all of these persons non-citizens--even though they may have generally continued on being considered and treated as US citizens. Under Fuller's interpretation of the Citizenship Clause, undoubtedly only people who looked like Wong would have been treated as aliens. There is nothing
reasonable about such an interpretation of Citizenship Clause. It only sets up the conditions for invidious discrimination. Indeed, it only makes a mockery of the Equal Protection and Due Process provisions of the same Section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which are explicitly intended to apply to
any person. It isn't
reasonable to impose this tendentious distinction between the meaning of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" in the Citizenship Clause and the meaning of "within [the] jurisdiction" in the Equal Protection Clause.