Heirs of the American Experiment
Asian Americans have a long history of fight for equality before the law
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The US Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on two cases regarding whether affirmative action in college admissions is constitutional.
The Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, alleging Harvard’s race-based admission discriminates against Asian American students and a similar admission policy at UNC discriminates against both Asian and white students. I’ve written several op-eds about the SFFA vs. Harvard case (see here, here, and here).
A diverse student body on campus, measured not only by race and ethnicity but also by life experiences, thoughts, and ideas, benefits everyone involved. But the affirmative action approach, which lowers academic standards for some groups while holding a selected group to unusually high standards, is the wrong way to do it. Regardless of race, well-qualified students shouldn’t be denied admission by educational institutions based on a factor (race) they have no control over.
Based on the oral arguments in both cases, most expect the Court to rule in SFFA’s favor. Realistically, even if the Court rules that affirmative action is unconstitutional, it won’t end in practice because colleges have already planned to continue their race-based admissions, albeit in more discrete forms, i.e., dropping SAT and ACT requirements. Still, we should celebrate and appreciate the long history of Asian Americans fighting for equality before the law in this country.
To commemorate this special occasion, I’d like to share an excerpt from my book, "The Broken Welcome Mat: America’s unAmerican immigration policy and how we can fix it." The except covers five Supreme Court cases brought by Asian Americans.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
Wong was born in 1873 in San Francisco, and his parents were legally domiciled and residents of the U.S. In 1894, he left the U.S. to visit China and returned in August of the same year. He was denied reentry based on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which wouldn’t grant Chinese immigrants naturalized U.S. citizenship. Wong challenged the government that he was a natural-born U.S. citizen per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Supreme Court ruled in Wong’s favor based on their interpretation of the critical phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which they believed referred to being required to obey U.S. law. On this basis, the majority of the Supreme Court interpreted the language of the 14th Amendment in a way that granted U.S. citizenship to at least some children born to foreigners because they were born on American soil (a concept known as jus soli). Until recently, this landmark decision and the parameters of the jus soli principle haven’t been seriously challenged.
United States v. Takao Ozawa and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
Ozawa, born in Japan but had lived in the United States for 20 years, filed for United States citizenship in 1915 under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed only “free white persons” and “persons of African nativity or persons of African descent” to naturalize. He argued in his legal brief, “My honesty and industriousness are well known among my Japanese and American friends. In name, Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart, he was a traitor. In name, I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.” His case reached the Supreme Court, and in 1922, Justice George Sutherland deemed Ozawa racially “ineligible for citizenship” because Justice Sutherland believed the word “white” was synonymous with “what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.”
Justice Sutherland seemed to change his understanding of “white” when he ruled in another case, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind Thind, an immigrant from India and a U.S. Army veteran from World War I, argued that he was Caucasian because he was a “high caste Hindu.” While conceding that people of Hindu descent were part of the Caucasian race (per anthropology), Justice Sutherland still deemed Thind ineligible for naturalization. In his opinion, Justice Sutherland reasoned that the phrase “white person” in the Naturalization Act was “synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” Thus, a “white person” means one has to be of the Caucasian race and have a white complexion.
United States v. Hirabayashi and Korematsu v. United States
Two Japanese Americans challenged the legality of the US government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans in WWII without due process of law. One of them was Gordon Hirabayashi, a student at the University of Washington and a Quaker. Gordon refused to register for the forced “relocation.” Instead, he turned himself in and filed a legal challenge. His case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Rather than ruling on the constitutionality of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order, the court convicted Gordon of disobeying the war-time curfew and sentenced him to 90 days in jail.
Fred Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of Roosevelt’s executive order in the landmark case Korematsu v. United States. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court sided with the government in a 6-3 decision. In his dissent, Justice Frank Murphy rightly called the incarceration of Japanese Americans the “legalization of racism,” and declared that
“Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”
We are all heirs of the American experiment and are equal before the law!
P.S. If you enjoy reading “The Broken Welcome Mat,” please leave a review and a rating on Amazon.com to help other readers find it. Thank you.