Historian Martha S. Jones on Why the U.S. Keeps Debating Citizenship Rights and Who Qualifies as a U.S. Citizen

'Since its adoption in 1868, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has inspired advances in legal rights by guaranteeing U.S. citizens and people in the country “the equal protection of the laws.” Yet politicians, the courts, and American society at large have clashed repeatedly over who legally qualifies as a U.S. citizen. And millions of people at various times have not been afforded the law’s equal protection – from Black slaves to Japanese Americans who were put in concentration camps during World War II. Indeed, “there hasn’t been a moment when citizenship and the rights of citizens hasn’t been a debate,” as Johns Hopkins legal historian Martha S. Jones, author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, put it during a Zócalo/Daniel K. Inouye Institute Event titled “How Can Americans Defend the 14th Amendment When the Government Won’t?”'