As the Supreme Court considers Trump v. Barbara, a birthright citizenship case that grew out of New Hampshire, it is worth remembering Charlotte Ah Tye Chang, a woman who was born an American and nevertheless saw her citizenship stripped away.
Charlotte was born in California. By birth, she was a citizen of the United States. She did not need to earn that status, apply for it or prove she deserved it. Being an American was her right from the beginning. Yet after she married Hong Yen Chang in 1897, officials later treated her under the 1907 expatriation law as if her American citizenship had disappeared because she had married a non U.S. citizen. She was no longer considered one either.
That fact should still unsettle us. Charlotte’s citizenship was not treated as a secure birthright. Because of her gender, it was treated as conditional based on her husband’s race and nationality.
Her husband’s story shows the other side of the same injustice. Hong Yen Chang, also known as Zhang Kangren, had come to the U.S. as a teenager in the 1870s as part of the Chinese Educational Mission. He lived with New England families and studied at New England schools, including Phillips Academy in Andover and Yale. He later returned to the U.S., graduated with honors from Columbia Law School and sought to practice law in California.
By the standards Americans often claim to value, Hong had done everything right. He learned the language, mastered the institutions and pursued the American dream. But California denied him admission to the bar because federal and state law made Chinese immigrants ineligible for the citizenship required to practice law. In 2015, 125 years later, California posthumously admitted him.
In the same household, one person could not become American, while the other could not remain so.
This is not merely a historical curiosity. It is a reminder that American citizenship has not always been as fixed or self-evident as we like to imagine. The law has, at times, narrowed belonging in ways that later generations come to regard as indefensible.
The case now being considered by the Supreme Court is not the same as Charlotte Chang’s. It concerns President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship for some children born in the U.S. to undocumented or temporary-status parents. At issue is the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.
But Charlotte’s story speaks directly to the deeper danger. Once citizenship is treated as
conditional on the status of someone else — a husband, a parent, a race, an ancestry — the promise of citizenship becomes fragile. What should be a constitutional guarantee becomes something the government can adjust to fit the fears of the moment.
To be clear, reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy. Border security, legal status and national cohesion are serious questions. But birthright citizenship is different. It is not simply an immigration rule. It is one of the Constitution’s clearest answers to the question of who belongs.
That answer was born from the failures of an earlier America. The 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War to reject a vision of citizenship based on race and exclusion. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court later affirmed that a child born in this country to noncitizen Chinese parents domiciled here was a citizen. That decision did not end discrimination or settle every dispute about immigration. But it recognized a principle both practical and profound: a child’s citizenship should not rise or fall with the government’s view of the child’s parents.
Charlotte Ah Tye Chang’s life reminds us why that principle matters. If a woman born in California could be told that marriage had undone her citizenship, then we should be cautious about any theory that makes citizenship depend less on birth than on the legal ancestry of a family member.
As the Court weighs the future of birthright citizenship, it should remember how often America has regretted making belonging conditional. The lesson of Charlotte and Hong Yen Chang is not that every citizenship question is simple. It is that when the law narrows the circle of belonging in response to fear, the harm can last for generations.
No person born an American should have to fear that their own government may someday decide otherwise.
Christopher J. Dawe, Ph.D., is a historian of education and a New Hampshire native.