Jus soli Heirs
Citizens Without Ancestors: Making Law Where There Were No Roots
September 29, 2025
“The land is the mother, and we are of her. We do not own her. She owns us.”
—Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation
Preface
This is not a neat history lesson. It is an excavation.
Jus soli Heirs traces what happens when citizenship is built not from ancestry but from paper—when statutes stand in for blood, when law masquerades as permanence, when forgetting is weaponized as belonging.
The path winds wide: from Roman law to American burial grounds, from Wong Kim Ark’s courtroom to a hospital nursery divided by seventeen inches, from cliffs of the Pacific Northwest to roots beneath Manhattan. Every section is another layer of the same inheritance—a record written in both statute and soil.
Read slowly. Let the ground speak.
The Paper That Stood In for Blood
Birthright citizenship in America was not born of generosity, but of desperation. Jus soli—Latin for “right of soil”—long predates the United States, but on this continent it became a mask, an alibi. Europeans arriving without ancestors in this land bent the principle to their needs, using law to graft themselves where no lineage tied them.
The ship docks at dawn. Salt and wood rot in the air, gulls cutting through fog. Men step off with no roots beneath them. No grandmother’s grandmother in this earth, no graves that know their names. The ground does not recognize their weight.
But parchment does.
In the America they were building, belonging would not come from blood, but from paper. Jus soli, the right of soil, sounded ancient, almost holy. In truth, it was improvisation: a law to stitch permanence where there was only trespass.
Other nations didn’t need such fabrications. In Ghana, in France, in Japan, you belonged because your ancestors already lay in that earth, their bones becoming mineral, their memory becoming myth. Citizenship was the echo of generations, not a signature on a document.
Here, it was different. Here, the law became the ancestor. The Naturalization Act of 1790 declared only “free white persons” eligible. Black, Indigenous, Asian: written out, even as their lives tilled the land and their labor built its wealth. But for Europeans, the law bent itself like a branch to carry them. Any child they birthed on this continent would be American. Heir by ink, not by lineage.
Paper stood in for blood. And with it, the right to belong was claimed by those who had none.
The Ground Beneath the Myth
The soil remembers what law chooses to forget.
Thirty feet below Manhattan’s street level, construction workers in 1991 struck bone. Not one skeleton but hundreds. Fifteen thousand Africans buried in what was once called the Negroes Burial Ground. The bones told their own citizenship story: children’s teeth smaller than fingernails, a braid preserved in clay still holding the shape of someone’s last loving touch.
Meanwhile, in Nevada granite, 1,200 Chinese railroad workers’ bones waited to be shipped home. Twenty thousand pounds of remains, the newspapers reported in 1870, as if human bodies were freight. Their names never recorded, just “Chinamen” in the payroll ledgers. But the earth knew them: in the nitroglycerine burns that changed the soil’s chemistry, in the opium pipe fragments they left behind to manage pain no doctor would treat.
The Indigenous dead lie deeper still, unnamed because they never needed naming, the land itself their birth certificate.
When Language Itself Became Territory
Words shifted their meaning like borders redrawn in the night.
“Native” once meant those whose ancestors shaped this land for millennia. By the 1890s, it meant anyone born here: a semantic coup that let the children of settlers claim indigeneity while actual Indigenous people remained legally foreign on their own soil.
“American” transformed from geographic description to legal fortress. The same mouths that had begged for entry in 1850, Irish fleeing famine, Germans fleeing revolution, produced children who by 1920 voted to slam the door. The Immigration Act of 1924: quotas designed to keep out the very kinds of people their own parents had been.
There’s a photograph from 1921: Irish-American police officers arresting newer Italian immigrants. The descendants of those once called “white Negroes” now wielding the club of belonging against the next wave. Paper citizens becoming paper police, enforcing borders their grandparents had desperately crossed.
Wong Kim Ark’s Mother’s Knowledge
Lee Wee, they called her in court documents, as if her name were just sounds to transcribe. Mother of Wong Kim Ark, wife of Wong Si Ping, living above a shop on Sacramento Street where fog rolled in each evening like a familiar ghost.
What did she whisper to her son before his first trip back to China in 1890? What did she know that no Supreme Court could ratify?
Perhaps this: that citizenship is not what a nation grants but what a body remembers. The way her hands prepared food carried more belonging than any document. The songs she hummed while working contained maps no surveyor could draw. When she and her husband returned to Taishan permanently, leaving their American-born son behind, what they took with them was not disappointment but a different kind of citizenship. The kind written in the curve of a spine bent over gold-country streams, in the peculiar ache that follows thirteen-hour workdays building someone else’s fortune.
When customs officials stopped her son at San Francisco’s port in 1895, declaring his birth on this soil insufficient, she was in China, tending to ancestors who needed no papers to belong. Her absence from his Supreme Court victory might have looked like distance. But what if it was something else? A knowledge that real belonging can never be granted by nine men in robes, only recognized?
The Hospital Room, 2025
Two infants, same fluorescent light making their skin translucent, same first cry into American air.
The one on the left: parents with papers. Born American.
The one on the right: parents without. Born stateless.
Between their plastic bassinets, seventeen inches of space. The distance between citizen and exile measured in the width of a medical chart.
Listen to what fills that space: the undocumented mother’s breathing, deep and controlled, knowing her body has just produced what the executive order calls a “legal impossibility.” An American without papers for being American. The documented mother’s easier breath, unaware that her relief is built on the other woman’s terror.
The fluorescent hum contains frequencies only the stateless baby will learn to hear. The pitch of perpetual questioning, the white noise of not-quite-belonging. Both infants’ eyes are still adjusting to light, but one is already learning to see borders.
What the Soil Actually Holds
Not metaphor. Evidence:
In Lower Manhattan: Burial 340, a woman age 25-30. Lead isotope analysis shows West African birth. Her teeth contain lead from pewter dishes that mark her as enslaved. She died here. Her citizenship: property.
Along the Central Pacific Railroad: A 17th-century Chinese coin kept for luck across an ocean. Gaming pieces cut from tin cans. Mercury in the soil from mining work. Ten percent death rate in the camps. Their citizenship: excluded by law even as their labor connected the continent.
In California’s Central Valley: Pesticide layers from the Bracero years, 1942-1964. Mexican hands feeding America while laws ensured they could never belong to the land they enriched.
The soil’s pH changes where blood soaked earth. Mineral composition altered by generations of burial. Concrete never quite settles over sacred ground. Small rebellions of geology against legal fictions.
The Reversal
The exact moment: November 3, 1920, when Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington stood before the House and declared, “The United States is our land. If it was not the land of our fathers, at least it may be, and it should be, the land of our children.”
Johnson’s grandparents: Scottish and Welsh immigrants who arrived in the 1840s.
Johnson’s citizenship: birthright, unquestioned.
Johnson’s legacy: the Immigration Act of 1924, reducing immigration by 97%.
Watch how quickly paper citizens become paper walls. The Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s targeted Irish Catholics. By 1920, Irish-Americans were inside the machine, crafting restrictions against Italians, Jews, Slavs. Each generation pulling up the ladder they’d just climbed.
“Illegal” enters American vocabulary in the 1920s, not coincidentally. Before, there were “undesirable immigrants.” Now, human beings themselves become illegal. A grammatical violence that makes flesh criminal for existing.
The Question Never Asked
What if we actually listened to what the soil recognizes?
Not the liberal fantasy of “everyone belongs” but the harder truth: the earth knows exactly who has loved it and who has violated it. Every acre remembers whether it was tended or taken.
If citizenship aligned with what the ground actually knows, America would empty and fill simultaneously. The Mississippi Delta would call back the descendants of those who died in its fields. The Sierra Nevada would sing Chinese names never recorded in any census. Manhattan would remember Lenape paths beneath its subway lines.
This is the terror no politician will name: that legitimate belonging might have nothing to do with law and everything to do with relationship. How you’ve touched this earth, what you’ve given it, what it has taken from you.
Paper’s Betrayal
Executive Order 14203, January 2025: “Birthright citizenship shall not extend to children born on United States soil unless at least one parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of birth.”
Paper, which once stood in for blood, now tears.
Picture the courthouse where this will be tested: oak benches polished by decades of bodies, the hollow thud of a gavel, the sound paper makes when it determines flesh. Two lawyers, both birthright citizens, arguing over which babies deserve America. Their own citizenship, unquestioned inheritance from European ancestors who needed law to make them American, hovering in the courtroom’s recycled air.
The documented mother from the hospital watches the news. The undocumented mother has already moved, left no forwarding address. Their babies, six months old now, have begun to recognize faces. Only one has a social security number.
Beyond Paper
But the ground remembers.
In Flatbush, Brooklyn, construction workers find bone fragments. African ancestry confirmed. The church that once excluded these bodies from its cemetery now holds them.
In Terrace, Utah, archaeologists unearth a Chinese worker’s house. Inside: a child’s marble, though records show no families were allowed.
In Arizona, the Tohono O’odham Nation continues to exist across a border drawn through their bodies in 1854. Their citizenship: a federal card to cross land they’ve inhabited for 4,000 years.
Each discovery cracks the fiction wider. Paper made heirs where there were none, but it could never make the ground forget who actually belongs to it.
Lee Wee’s Answer
What did Wong Kim Ark’s mother know that the Supreme Court couldn’t grant?
Maybe just this: The earth recognizes its children not by the papers they carry but by what they’ve planted and what’s been taken from them, what they’ve built and what they’ve buried, the songs they know and the silence they’ve learned to survive in.
Her son won his case. His name entered law books as precedent. But she had already returned to China, to soil that knew her footsteps without documentation. She died in Taishan in 1903, five years after the Supreme Court declared her son American.
The last sound she heard might have been rain on familiar roof tiles, or her grandson speaking Taishanese, or her own breath releasing into air that required no permission to breathe it. A citizen of the earth itself, which keeps its own records in root systems and water tables, in seed dispersal and soil composition, in the patient memory of stones.
Let that be enough—for now.
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Citations
The Paper That Stood In for Blood
Naturalization Act of 1790: “An Act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” 1 Stat. 103 (1790), limiting naturalization to “free white persons.”
The Ground Beneath the Myth
African Burial Ground statistics: The site contains the remains of more than 419 Africans buried during the late 17th and 18th centuries, with historians estimating there may have been as many as 10,000–20,000 burials in what was called the Negroes Burial Ground. Excavations revealed the remains of 419 Africans and over 500 individual artifacts.
Disease evidence in burial ground: Diseases identified include tuberculosis, legionella (Legionnaire’s disease), and Yersinia pestis (Bubonic plague), found in the soil samples.
Chinese railroad worker remains: June 30, 1870, Sacramento Reporter: “Bones in Transit—The accumulated bones of perhaps 1,200 Chinamen came in by the eastern train yesterday from along the line of the Central Pacific Railroad. The lot comprises about 20,000 pounds.”
Wong Kim Ark’s Mother’s Knowledge
Lee Wee and Wong Si Ping: His father, Wong Si Ping, and mother, Lee Wee, emigrated from Taishan, Guangdong, China and were not United States citizens. Wong Kim Ark was born at 751 Sacramento Street, the address of a Chinatown business.
Wong Kim Ark’s return to China: In 1889, Wong Kim Ark, then in his late teens, left for China with his parents, who decided to repatriate to China and to their ancestral village in Taishan.
The Hospital Room, 2025
Executive Order on birthright citizenship: Based on Trump’s actual January 2025 executive order attempting to redefine birthright citizenship for children born to non-citizen parents.
What the Soil Actually Holds
African Burial Ground bioarchaeological details: Analysis of remains at Lehman College and later Howard University’s Department of Anthropology revealed disease patterns and evidence of lead exposure.
Chinese railroad archaeological findings: Archaeologists found Chinese coins from Szechuan and Yunnan Provinces, porcelain bowls, medicine bottles, gaming pieces cut from tin cans, melon seeds, peanut shells, and evidence of opium use for pain management.
Chinese worker mortality: Approximately 1,200 died while building the Transcontinental Railroad.
The Reversal
Immigration Act of 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 limits the number of immigrants allowed into the United States yearly through nationality quotas. The United States issues immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States at the 1890 census.
Know-Nothing movement: Irish and German Catholic immigration was opposed in the 1850s by the nativist movement, originating in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party.
The Question Never Asked
Native American citizenship: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 finally granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States, decades after birthright citizenship was established for others.
Paper’s Betrayal
Wong Kim Ark case: United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898): In a 6-to-2 decision, the Court ruled that because Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States and his parents were not “employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China,” the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment automatically made him a U.S. citizen.
Beyond Paper
Flatbush African Burial Ground: Disarticulated fragments of human remains were uncovered in 2001. A physical anthropologist conducted analysis and affirmed the likelihood that the human remains are of African ancestry. The human remains were reburied at the Flatbush Reformed Church.
Terrace, Utah excavation: This is the first fully excavated Chinese home on the transcontinental railroad. Materials found include peanut shells, melon seeds, Chinese dates, and a 17th-century Chinese coin kept as a good luck charm.
Sandra Wong (descendant): Sandra Wong, great-granddaughter of Wong Kim Ark, noted that even after he won the Supreme Court case, “he would leave the country, and he would come back, and he would have to provide these sworn documents showing he was Wong Kim Ark, a citizen who was born here.”
Additional Historical Context
European immigration patterns: Between 1820 and 1930, 3.5 million British and 4.5 million Irish entered America. Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French Canadians left Quebec and migrated to the United States.
Shift in immigration opposition: The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 broke with previous immigration laws by establishing a cap on the number of quota admissions, allocating 55 percent to Northern and Western European countries.