A is for Asylum Seeker: Words for People on the Move A de asilo: palabras para personas en movimiento by Rachel Ida Buff Alejandra Oliva

Author:Rachel Ida Buff, Alejandra Oliva [Rachel Ida Buff, Alejandra Oliva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823289158
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Véase también: Indocumentado, Visa

Illegal Alien

San Francisco, California – 1894: Returning from a trip to visit his parents in China, twenty-one-year-old Wong Kim Ark is denied re-entry into the United States at Angel Island. Even though he was born in California and lived most of his life there, the Immigration Service holds that, as the Chinese American son of immigrant parents, Wong cannot possibly be a citizen. They consider him to be an alien, barred from entry by law.

Wong was born in 1873, before the U.S. Congress passed immigration restrictions specifically designed to prevent people from Asia from settling permanently in the country. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chinese workers labored to cultivate crops and build crucial infrastructure, such as the transcontinental railroad. But xenophobic politicians warned of their inability to become true Americans. Subsequently, exclusion laws prevented first Chinese women, and then almost all Chinese workers from entering the country. Laws designed to prevent Chinese migration eventually applied to people from other parts of Asia.

By the time Wong returns from his second trip to visit his parents, who fled the rising xenophobia in California, the Chinese Exclusion Act is law. Along with federal exclusion laws came a host of regulations governing the inspection of Asians who arrived at ports like San Francisco. Many are detained at Angel Island before being deported.

Like many other Asian Americans in this period, Wong chooses to fight the injustices perpetrated by exclusion laws. He is a native Californian who chose to stay in the land of his birth, and he believes that he is a citizen, not an alien. With the help of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Organization, or Six Companies, Wong takes his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, Justice Samuel Miller refers back to the Dred Scott decision, which split the court before the Civil War. In it, Chief Justice Roger Taney, a slave holder, denied the petition of Dred Scott, a former slave living in the “free” Missouri Territory, for his freedom and for the citizenship of his two children, who were born in free territory. In a 6–2 decision in Wong’s case, the Supreme Court acknowledges that the 14th amendment extends birthright citizenship to everyone born in the country, including Asian Americans.

Birthright citizenship, or jus soli, is the primary source of U.S. citizenship: those who are born on U.S. soil are citizens. Legally, many others present in the country are considered aliens.

Since Wong Kim Ark won his case, there have been constant challenges to the legal practice of birthright citizenship. Xenophobic opponents refer to the U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents as “anchor babies,” inventing a scenario in which pregnant non-citizen women cross the border for the sole purpose of delivering American citizens. In this scenario, the presence of one citizen child in a family makes it easier for everyone else to immigrate. This is not the case.

In 1929, Congress passed an immigration act making unlawful entry a federal misdemeanor.

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