Wong Kim Ark prior to his 1894 visit to China.

February 4, 2025

What is a birthright in 2025?

As our community celebrates the most important holiday of the Lunar New Year, a time for family, completion, and renewal, we reflect on the bonds we have here in Chicago—among generations of Chinese Americans, with our neighbors, and our dynamic city.

This new year begins under a shadow for many immigrant communities. Today, the museum, its board of directors and its staff want to acknowledge the distress of the raids and debates targeting Chinatown, Chinese Americans, and Chicago’s working-class and immigrant residents, whether recent or generations old. These debates are not just about policies or national security; they are about families, about ideas of fairness, and about what defines an “American.”

Ratified in 1868, a few years after the American Civil War, the 14th Amendment to our Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship to all persons born in the United States, finally granting citizenship rights to the Black Americans who had been enslaved in this country for over two hundred years. This principle was affirmed in the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that a Chinese American born on U.S. soil was, unequivocally, a U.S. citizen—despite the Exclusion laws that kept his parents from naturalization.

This is the ruling that reaffirmed the promise of equality, guaranteeing rights of citizenship to all who were born in this country from then on.

The history of birthright citizenship reminds us that systemic inequities have shaped our national story.

Did you know that Native Americans, who are the only Americans who have always been born here, were not granted citizenship rights until 1924?
For so many, laws have not always been a source for justice, but a barrier to overcome.

Chinese immigrants were first brought to this country en masse to be used as cheap labor after the loss of free labor, and they were welcomed with the cruelty of Exclusion laws, alien land laws, and anti-miscegenation laws. All these laws were written to make sure that our predecessors were here only to labor, that having laid the tracks for westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, they would not secure an acre of land that they could call home. The country they shed blood and sweat to build would make no room for their bloodline. This is history that has shaped all our paths since. Nevertheless, we remain.

As the anxieties around immigration and citizenship rise to a fever again, we see the label “China” used more and more as dog whistles in political debates, and stereotypes about Chinese people and Asians multiply.

Sinophobia is an easy litmus test for restrictive policies, and can excuse new ways to erode rights for more and more people. Our stories are turned into cartoons that justify opinions about others, whether or not we agree or consent or protest. While some things have changed since 1868, many have not. This is part of the Chinese American experience.

Immigration is of course a many-layered thing, and many Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, or paying off mortgages, or caring for parents, are worried about what it means for our jobs and resources. While these worries often feel isolating and singular, we remember this issue we face not only in our country, or our city, or just our neighborhood, or just as Chinese. It is on the minds of ordinary people all around the world today. This is a story that always begins with individual families shouldering immense pressures of change together, and reaching out, sometimes across oceans, to try to help each other find a way out of no way. We made the fabric of this nation this way, braiding values of enterprise, imagination, togetherness and striving, seeing them into each generation, sometimes by just will and a fixedness on the possible futures.

In the places that were left behind as in this country today, we at times feel helpless to struggle against the decisions made that govern our fates, just watching and waiting. In claims to be for, of, and by its own people, the country we love seems to struggle with its ideals and making laws for all of us. In unpredictable times, we’ll find the way forward from our common heritage–the many generations of determined sojourners, optimistic hustlers, unsung genius grandmothers, brave enterprising brothers–from regular Americans.

Our adventures towards self-determination continue into another new year, which began last Wednesday with a new moon. When no sunlight falls on the side that faces us here on the Earth, the moon disappears from our sight for a little while. Over the month, little by little, as we move through the universe together, we see it reveals itself again. At the museum we continue to watch, record, and tell this story, and look to learn from every phase and every season. Please keep telling your stories, too.

Sincerely,

Caroline Kawen Ng
Executive Director