Birthright citizenship is constitutional. But some Americans have always had to prove themselves worthy.

As the Supreme Court considers President Donald Trump’s effort to narrow birthright citizenship, the administration has cast the issue as a defense of the value of U.S. citizenship rather than simply a change in immigration policy. In court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that automatic citizenship “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” and Trump later called the current system “STUPID” on Truth Social.

But the current fight is about much more than constitutional wording. It is the latest chapter in a long history of deciding that some people born in the United States still must prove they deserve to belong.

That is not a new problem in American history. Birthright citizenship has long been one of the clearest places where the United States has worked out the boundaries of national belonging. On paper, the 14th Amendment seemed to settle the question after the Civil War. Anyone born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction was a citizen. But almost immediately, that promise ran into a familiar problem: many Americans were willing to defend universal principles only until those principles extended to people they considered outsiders.

That tension came into full view in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. Wong was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. When he returned to the United States after a trip abroad, officials detained him and argued that his birth on American soil did not make him a citizen after all. The logic was plain enough. His parents were Chinese, Chinese immigrants were racially excluded from naturalization, and anti-Chinese officials insisted that the children of such immigrants could not truly belong either. The Supreme Court rejected that argument. It affirmed that birth in the United States, not the race or legal status of one’s parents, established citizenship. But the case mattered precisely because it revealed how badly exclusionists wanted a different outcome. They wanted citizenship to depend on lineage, not principle.

Wong Kim Ark clarified the constitutional rule, but it did not end the effort to define the nation more narrowly. That effort moved simply moved elsewhere. Lawmakers could not easily strip citizenship from people born here, but they could still shape the nation by trying to restrict who could enter in the first place.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 did exactly that. It used national-origins quotas to privilege immigrants from northern and western Europe while sharply restricting others and effectively excluding most Asians on explicitly racial grounds. The law did not abolish birthright citizenship but rather worked around it. It sought to preserve a preferred vision of the nation by controlling the people who might one day reproduce it. Immigration control became a way to manage the future population of the nation.

That narrowing of belonging did not stop at the border. During the Great Depression, Mexican repatriation campaigns pushed hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican descent out of the United States, including many U.S. citizens. As historian Adam Goodman argues, the long history of expulsion in the United States has always been about power: the power to determine who may remain, who can be removed, and who gets cast as outside the nation in the first place.

That history is worth dwelling on because it makes something painfully clear. Even formal citizenship has not always guaranteed a person’s recognition as fully American. In moments of panic and xenophobia—such as when the U.S. forcibly removed and incarcerated Japanese-American citizens during World War II—race and presumed foreignness could override legal status.

The United States also developed a more selective politics of inclusion. During the Cold War, the country welcomed many refugees, but it did so unevenly and strategically. As historians like Carl Bon Tempo have shown, this process was shaped by foreign policy goals, domestic political pressures, public attitudes toward newcomers, and changing ideas of American identity. For example, refugees fleeing communist regimes like Hungary and Cuba were often easier to recognize as worthy because their stories served a larger ideological purpose for the United States. Their flight to the U.S. helped tell a flattering story about the United States as a refuge of freedom standing against communism. On the other hand, asylum claims of those fleeing right-wing regimes such as El Salvador and Haiti, were denied en masse. The United States distinguished between the refugees it wanted and the refugees it preferred not to see.

That is the longer history behind the present fight. American policy has repeatedly distinguished between the people imagined as rightful members of the nation and those treated as suspect, alien, or disposable. Sometimes exclusion worked through immigration restriction. Sometimes it worked through expulsion. Sometimes it worked through selective refuge. But the basic logic remained recognizable across time. Belonging was never simply given. It was sorted, ranked, and politically constructed.

And that is still the case. In my current work as a fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), I study how immigration debates continue to function as debates over nationhood and belonging.

On one level, Americans still describe the nation in civic terms. In PRRI’s 2025 American Values Survey, 93% said that believing in individual freedoms is important to being truly American, 91% said believing in the Constitution, and 89% said accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds. Those are the kinds of answers Americans like to give about themselves. They describe a nation rooted in principle, rights, and pluralism.

But the same survey points to another vision of the country, one that is narrower and more exclusionary. Seventy-five percent of Americans polled said speaking English is important to being truly American. Fifty-four percent said being born in America. And 57% said believing in God, with 43% explicitly saying being a Christian. Those numbers matter because they show that civic ideas of membership still coexist with older assumptions about inherited religious and cultural belonging. The nation may be described in universal terms, but many Americans still imagine it in more bounded ways.

That same tension appears in immigration attitudes more broadly. PRRI found strong support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements. But it also found that 37% of Americans support detaining undocumented immigrants in internment camps until they can be deported, and 32% favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court. Those are not just policy preferences. They reveal how easily legal exclusion and coercive state power remain available when migrants are cast as outside the circle of national concern.

That is why the present debate over birthright citizenship matters so much. The Supreme Court case may seem technical or narrowly constitutional. The irony is that the legal principle itself is not especially ambiguous. Wong Kim Ark settled the matter more than a century ago.

What remains unsettled is the political desire to narrow the boundaries of belonging. Again and again, Americans have used citizenship and immigration law to distinguish between those whose presence affirms the nation and those whose presence is treated as a problem. The country remains divided over a deeper question. Is the United States really a civic nation, or will it reserve full belonging for those who fit more narrow criteria of who Americans are supposed to be.

E. Kyle Romero is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Florida where he writes and teaches on the history of U.S. foreign policy, immigration, and humanitarianism; he has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and is currently a fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Inquirer editors.