Although there is no statue, park, or even a postage stamp honoring him today, Wong Kim Ark was a central figure in the history of American citizenship. He was born in San Francisco, the child of Chinese merchants, and in 1898 the US Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment had made him, and by extension all children of Chinese immigrants born in the United States, a US citizen. His was the case that clarified that the relatively new amendment had established birthright citizenship, despite an extremely harsh political climate excluding new Chinese immigration or naturalization at that time. In other words, the Wong Kim Ark decision prevented the erection of an internal legal wall between white and nonwhite children of immigrants, even as the external border was hardening against Asian people.

This powerful new book by Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov provides us with what they call an “extended biography” of the Wong Kim Ark case (p. x). It tells the history of citizenship policy and immigration politics leading up to the case, provides a detailed account and analysis of the case itself, and presents a thorough discussion of the long-term impacts of the decision and contemporary controversies related to birthright citizenship. Along the way, we learn about the man, whose first name was Kim Ark. His parents sent him to visit China at the age of 19 to find a wife because US immigration laws prevented all but a small number of Chinese women from entering. Once married in China, Kim Ark could not bring his wife to live with him in his home country because of Chinese exclusion laws, so he returned home alone and went back to China four years later to visit her. He brought with him records of his US birth and the testimony of three white witnesses, as the law required. Yet, when he returned to the United States, a customs agent was skeptical of his right to enter and detained him on a ship in San Francisco Bay for many months while his case was pending. We also learn about the central role of the Six Companies, a consortium of Chinese mutual aid associations that worked with high-profile attorneys to challenge the most draconian enforcement mechanisms of Chinese exclusion law. Without these networks, legal mobilization to protect Wong’s citizenship rights would not have been possible.

The book is a fascinating account of a man’s life and of the test case he brought to the highest court in the land. But beyond that, it is really a biography of American citizenship. In addition to illustrating how Chinese immigrants were central to the legal development of US citizenship, Nackenoff and Novkov also weave in the histories of Native American and African American citizenship, threads that are intimately intertwined but that are studied far too often in a siloed fashion. I was already inclined to believe that our collective understanding of US citizenship would be greatly enhanced by an examination of how it developed across these distinct marginalized populations, but I finished the book all the more enthusiastic about this approach.

I also really appreciated the authors’ perspective that the questionable political choices of the United States—to continue slavery, to push Indigenous peoples off their territories, to aggressively acquire new territories through imperialism—have always complicated American citizenship law. For example, in their lucid overview of US case law on citizenship up until the Wong Kim Ark decision, the authors convincingly demonstrate how the assumption of jus soli (territorial citizenship) that had transferred over from British law became more complicated in the US context because of the existence of free Black people, which directly challenged the assumption that citizenship and whiteness were linked. Even long after the question of birthright citizenship was settled, the authors show how new questions of citizenship arose due to American imperialism. For example, the matter of Puerto Rican citizenship was not resolved until 1940, and the status of people in American Samoa is still being litigated.

The book also plainly illustrates the degree to which the powerful elites of the United States were still very much debating the question of whether nonwhite people can truly be citizens in the 1890s. We say now that the Fourteenth Amendment definitively overturned the Dred Scott decision, but this book makes clear that in 1898, the core premise of that decision— that nonwhite people could never truly be US citizens—was still alive in many people’s minds and could have gained traction had the Wong Kim Ark decision gone the other way. This book reminds us that many people at the turn of the twentieth century were still actively trying to read the central provision of the Fourteenth Amendment into oblivion, so that it did not fundamentally change the nature of US citizenship.

Finally, the book also does an excellent job of making clear that having US citizenship rights on paper does not guarantee full citizenship in practice. Both Wong Kim Ark and his son experienced harassment and even detention during subsequent return trips to China and home again, despite their undeniable citizenship status.

The one area of the book that I found slightly underdeveloped was the question of Native American citizenship. The 1884 Supreme Court decision in Elk v. Wilkins is referenced many times, as is the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. The Elk decision read the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude Indians born on tribal land from birthright US citizenship, and the 1924 act declared all Indians not yet naturalized to be US citizens in one fell swoop. The authors imply a reading of the Elk decision as exclusionary and the 1924 act as inclusionary, but the Elk decision to some degree preserved Native sovereignty while the 1924 act undermined it. I recognize that Native citizenship was not the focus of the book, but a bit more exploration of the role of consent in Native citizenship policy would have enriched the work. It would have clarified that the United States has not just withheld or granted citizenship to various groups and individuals at particular moments but has also imposed citizenship on people who did not want it.

Nackenoff and Novkov end the book with the optimistic claim that Wong Kim Ark is settled law. They disagree with Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith’s 1985 argument in Citizenship without Consent that Congress could end birthright citizenship without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment. The authors assert instead that not only does birthright citizenship have widespread public support but also were Congress were to pass a law ending it, the Supreme Court would likely strike it down.

The authors also remind us that efforts to amend the Constitution and overturn Wong Kim Ark have appeared periodically during moments of nationalism and xenophobia. They describe how efforts to restrict naturalization for people from Asia continued for many decades after the decision. And they provide examples from other countries of the revocation or restriction of birthright citizenship in moments of racialized backlash politics. The authors concede that the United States is at risk of a similar politics taking hold. Former President Trump was openly opposed to birthright citizenship, complaining bitterly about so-called anchor babies and chain migration. Some on the Right have suggested that the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to children of undocumented immigrants. However, Nackenoff and Novkov ultimately read current attacks on the Wong Kim Ark decision as political mobilization and messaging to the base, rather than a legitimate attempt to change US citizenship law.

I was not completely convinced by the authors’ reassurances, leaning in a more pessimistic direction about what the current Supreme Court may be willing to do. However, it was comforting to know that such esteemed experts on the topic are confident in the durability of the right to be American by birth.