It's 1895 and waves are slapping against a groaning steamship, a captic, docked in San Francisco Bay.

There's a young man named Wong Kim Ark, only 22 years old, confined below deck.

He stuck on board because when he went to get off the ship, after a long trip back to the US from China,

the customs collector in San Francisco must have said,

you're Chinese, you're not allowed onto US soil.

The commissioner was enforcing a nationwide exclusion act that banned all Chinese workers from entering the United States.

It was the first time America had any ban of this kind.

Well, no, I'm actually American, Wong Kim Ark said.

My parents are Chinese, but I was born right here in San Francisco. See here are my papers.

I'm a citizen and I'm just coming home.

That doesn't make you an American, the collector said.

It doesn't matter that you were born here. Your parents are Chinese, so you're Chinese and you can't come in.

But was the customs collector right?

That question, whether citizenship is the birthright of anyone born in the United States, would go to the courts.

And while it did, Wong Kim Ark is left here rocking out on the chopping waters of the bay,

waiting for a judge to decide whether he's American and can disembark.

At the same time, on the other side of America, waves are laughing around a colossal statue fixed in New York Harbor.

It was a recent gift from France to the United States, celebrating the country's founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Wong Kim Ark would never see the statue of liberty.

Yet there she was immense and demovable.

Welcoming immigrants to her shores with the promise, here you are free.

I'm Lillian Cunningham with the Washington Post, and this is Constitutional.

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