CITIZENSHIP DOCUMENTATION AND EXCLUSION IN WONG KIM ARK Legal scholar and former vice consul in the U.S. embassy in Kampala, Uganda, Beatrice McKenzie, has conducted a forensic examination of the documentary proof used in the famous Wong Kim Ark case, and in Mr. Wong’s four sons’ immigration files. She describes Mr. Wong’s early life in California: “In 1870, Wong Kim Ark was born in an apartment over a storefront in San Francisco’s Chinatown. While Wong’s parents were Chinese nationals, his birth on U.S. soil made him a U.S. citizen. When Wong was quite young, his parents took him to their ancestral village in China, Ong Sing, in Taishan Province, where he attended school for three years. He returned to the United States at age eleven, entering with a ‘native born affidavit,’ and worked as a cook’s apprentice in a Sierra Nevada mining camp. At age nineteen Wong returned to China and married Yee Shee. In keeping with the custom at the time, Wong traveled back and forth across the Pacific in adulthood to visit his wife and young children, who remained in the home village.” (119) Later, U.S. officials charged with implementing Chinese exclusion policy took an interest in Mr. Wong, as evidenced in his immigration file, according to McKenzie’s review of it: “An unnamed Bureau of Immigration official investigated the truth of Wong’s claim to birth in the United States.” His note in Wong’s immigration file read “I believe this [case] is fraudulent.” (121) On his next trip back to the United States, Mr. Wong was held by border officials on the steamship Coptic in San Francisco harbor for three months. He filed a habeas petition and won in the district court, but the United States appealed not on the facts of Mr. Wong’s case, but on the merits of the notion that children born to “Chinese subjects” in the United States were citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court eventually heard the case and found in Mr. Wong’s favor: “in clear words and in manifest intent, [the Fourteenth Amendment] includes the children born within the territory of the United States, or all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.” (121-22) All quotes and factual background are from Beatrice McKenzie, “To Know a Citizen: Birthright Citizenship Documents Regimes in U.S. History,” in Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness, Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, eds. (2014). Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration 156 UNMAKING AMERICANS