When Senator Jacob Howard explained the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, he said: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States."

Most people today read this statement and assume Howard was listing four separate categories of people who would not receive birthright citizenship:

In my book The Birthright: A History of Citizenship in America, I devoted three separate chapters to the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" found in the Fourteenth Amendment.  With all of the present controversy surrounding this phrase, I thought it would be good to make those three chapters available here.  The first two are from the section dealing with the debates in the senate, and the third chapter is from my analysis of the Supreme Court case United States vs. Wong Kim Ark.  These three chapters provide a clear explanation of this phrase supported by historical documents.

President Trump likes to pretend that he's the first person to ever think of denying due process to illegal aliens, but that's far from the case.  America's history is sadly replete with attempts to deny immigrants the equal protection of the law.  Fortunately, this is one area in which our Supreme Court has a remarkably good track record.  The Court has touched on the question of the rights due to illegal aliens on many occasions, and I've put together a small sample of their findings to help with refuting the claims made by Trump and his supporters.

President Trump’s denial of due process for non-citizens is not without precedent.  The same thing was attempted by President Van Buren in the mid-nineteenth century.  In that case, a group of about forty slaves were being transported from Cuba when they rebelled against the ship’s company and attempted to sail back to Africa.  The former slaves strayed into American waters where they were captured and taken ashore.  Van Buren attempted to circumvent the courts and send the escaped slaves back to Spanish Cuba without trial.  His plans were foiled, and John Quincy Adams defended the rights of the former slaves before the Supreme Court.  The arguments made by Adams have direct bearing on President Trump’s current immigration policies, and I’ve compiled the following excerpts from a speech that was more than eight hours in length.

One of the major factors that led to the War of 1812 was the practice of impressment.  Under English law, a ship of the British navy could board any vessel and force just about any able-bodied British subjects on that vessel into naval service.  This practice often led to the impressment of American citizens into the British navy if Americans traveling abroad could not prove their citizenship. 
 
Because of this, America passed the 1796 Act for the Relief and Protection of American Seamen, which was designed to protect American sailors from being impressed into the navies of foreign nations.  Part of that protection consisted of giving American sailors certificates of citizenship to show foreign governments that they were in fact citizens of the United States.  Here is the text of the 1796 act requiring these certificates to be made available:

Every game has a set of rules that govern how the gameplay proceeds.

On January 30, 1750, Jonathan Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Old West Church in Boston and preached what was to become one of the most famous sermons in history.  The occasion was the 101st anniversary of the death of King Charles I.  The challenge that Mayhew addressed before his congregation was the question of whether rebellion against a tyrant was a violation of the Bible's command in Romans 13 for Christians to submit to political rulers.

When considering Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, most people only consider how the phrase “wall of separation” sounds to our modern ears.  To us, this phrase sounds as if it is describing an impenetrable impasse which stands between our nation’s religious institutions and her political institutions.  Consider, for example, the following opinion of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in McCollum v. Board of Education:

There is a theory about the history of socialism that has annoyed me for some time now, and that is the theory that a man named James Harrington (whose writings had a powerful influence on America's founders) essentially taught socialism when he used the term "agrarian balance."  I have encountered this claim in the writings and lectures of Harvard historian Eric Nelson who wrote "The Hebrew Republic," a book that I highly recommend in spite of this particular error, and in discussions with Jon Rowe of the American Creation Blog.  The remainder of this article is a response that I made to one of Jon's reiterations of this claim. 

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
 
These famous words form the opening paragraph of one of the most influential documents in all of human history – the American Declaration of Independence.  According to this paragraph, the American claim to independence was established upon “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” but what did Thomas Jefferson mean by this phrase?  Nearly all of the modern historians who have written about this phrase have accused Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration of abandoning the God of the Bible and erecting a more deistic god of nature in His place.  But this accusation is entirely false.  Jefferson’s reference to the laws of nature and of nature’s God had a very specific meaning that was well understood by eighteenth century Americans.