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SECTION 1. RIGHTS GUARANTEED: CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES
While clearly establishing a national rule on national citizenship and settling a controversy of long standing with regard to the derivation of national citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not obliterate the distinction between national and state citizenship, but rather preserved it. 6 The Court has accorded the first sentence of Sec. 1 a construction in accordance with the congressional intentions, holding that a child born in the United States of Chinese parents who themselves were ineligible to be naturalized is nevertheless a citizen of the United States entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship. 7 Congress' intent in including the qualifying phrase ''and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' was apparently to exclude from the reach of the language children born of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state and children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, both recognized exceptions to the common-law rule of acquired citizenship by birth, 8 as well as children of members of Indian tribes subject to tribal laws. 9 The lower courts have generally held that the citizenship of the parents determines the citizenship of children born on vessels in United States territorial waters or on the high seas. 10
Citizens of the United States within the meaning of this Amendment must be natural and not artificial persons; a corporate body is not a citizen of the United States. 14
Footnotes
[Footnote 1] Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 404 -06, 417-18, 419-20 (1857).
[Footnote 2] The controversy, political as well as constitutional, which this case stirred and still stirs, is exemplified and analyzed in the material collected in S. Kutler, The Dred Scott Decision: Law or Politics? (1967).
[Footnote 3] ''That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude . . . shall have the same right[s]. . . .'' Ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27.
[Footnote 4] The proposed amendment as it passed the House contained no such provision, and it was decided in the Senate to include language like that finally adopted. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 2560, 2768-69, 2869 (1866). The sponsor of the language said: ''This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is . . . a citizen of the United States.'' Id. at 2890. The legislative history is discussed at some length in Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 282 -86 (1967) (Justice Harlan dissenting).
[Footnote 5] United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 688 (1898).
[Footnote 6] Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 74 (1873).
[Footnote 7] United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).
[Footnote 8] Id. at 682.
[Footnote 9] Id. at 680-82; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 99 (1884).
[Footnote 10] United States v. Gordon, 25 Fed. Cas. 1364 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1861) (No. 15,231); In re Look Tin Sing, 21 F. 905 (C.C.Cal. 1884); Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir. 1928).
[Footnote 11] 387 U.S. 253 (1967). Though the Court upheld the involuntary expatriation of a woman citizen of the United States during her marriage to a foreign citizen in Mackenzie v. Hare, 239 U.S. 299 (1915), the subject first received extended judicial treatment in Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), in which by a five-to-four decision the Court upheld a statute denaturalizing a native-born citizen for having voted in a foreign election. For the Court, Justice Frankfurter reasoned that Congress' power to regulate foreign affairs carried with it the authority to sever the relationship of this country with one of its citizens to avoid national implication in acts of that citizen which might embarrass relations with a foreign nation. Id. at 60-62. Three of the dissenters denied that Congress had any power to denaturalize. See discussion supra pp. 272-76. In the years before Afroyim, a series of decisions had curbed congressional power.
