{"id":91,"date":"2026-05-26T18:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T18:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2026-05-26T18:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T18:09:08","slug":"trumps-attacks-on-the-lawyer-who-argued-birthright-citizenship-give-the-game-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=91","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Attacks on the Lawyer Who Argued Birthright Citizenship Give the Game Away"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sign up for\u00a0<\/em>Executive Dysfunction<\/em>, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law\u2014or how the law is pushing back. You\u2019ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate\u2019s Jurisprudence team.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more The San Diego Mosque Killers Weren\u2019t Just Islamophobic. They Had Another Terrifying Motive.<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month, Cecillia Wang, the head of the ACLU, asked\u00a0the Supreme Court to preserve birthright citizenship, a pillar of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment. Born in Oregon to Taiwanese immigrants, Wang is herself a\u00a0beneficiary\u00a0of the doctrine she defended during the historic oral argument\u2014as am I. Following the argument, interest in her background exploded.<\/p>\n

So did the backlash. The host of the right-wing podcast The Savage Nation<\/em>, for example,\u00a0told\u00a0his listeners that Wang is \u201cvery smart, very evil, and very devious.\u201d He then widened his lens, claiming that families that come from \u201chellhole\u201d countries like China and India do not \u201cintegrate\u201d as European American immigrants did. Instead, he said, they have converted our \u201cmelting pot\u201d into a \u201cchamber pot.\u201d The transcript of the podcast went viral. President Donald Trump\u00a0reposted\u00a0it in full.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

The assertion that Asian Americans and other nonwhite immigrants don\u2019t \u201cassimilate\u201d\u2014a\u00a0freighted\u00a0term, to be sure\u2014is both easy and hard to refute. Easy because it is demonstrably false: The English language acquisition rate among immigrants, for example, was relatively high even at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century. Today it\u2019s even\u00a0higher, at 91 percent.<\/p>\n

Hard, however, because the claim is a red herring. While \u201cassimilation\u201d and \u201cintegration\u201d arguments present themselves as a neutral, civic concern about internal cohesion, they\u2019re anything but. The podcast suggests that Asian Americans as a whole cannot integrate. Yet it simultaneously professes anxiety about an Asian American who has decidedly\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0stood apart from American institutions and culture: After graduating from Yale Law School, Wang clerked for two Supreme Court justices. Then she took a landmark case to our nation\u2019s highest court. For that, the podcast dubbed her a \u201csnake\u201d intent on stealing the country away from \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The assimilability argument has deep historical roots. In the 1854 case\u00a0, the California Supreme Court reviewed the trial of a white man accused of murdering a Chinese victim. The prosecution had called three Chinese witnesses. The court ruled that they could not testify because they belonged to \u201ca race of people whom nature has marked as inferior,\u00a0\u2026 differing in language, opinions, color, and physical conformation\u201d and marked with \u201cimpassable difference.\u201d The murderer walked free.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court historically used Asian Americans\u2019 supposedly implacable foreignness to justify greater, institutionally enforced apartness. Consider the 1923 case\u00a0, which prevented an Indian national from naturalizing because \u201cthe physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from\u201d white Americans; the 1927 case\u00a0, which excluded a Chinese American student from her local, white high school, based on segregationist principles; and, most infamously, the 1944 case\u00a0, which permitted the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the suspicion that some might retain loyalty to Japan.<\/p>\n

Read more A Modest Proposal for How Democrats Can Improve the 2028 Primary<\/a><\/p>\n

These decisions came down in the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century. But as the Savage Nation<\/em> transcript indicates, they reflect an enduring attitude.<\/p>\n

It may well be true that stitching multicultural communities together requires us to be more curious, inclusive neighbors. But the \u201cassimilation\u201d camp\u2019s actual issue is not an unwillingness to participate. Rather, immigrants and their children, like Wang, seem to pose the biggest threat when they participate\u00a0too much<\/em>. At bottom, the point has always been disenfranchisement.<\/p>\n

Our legal institutions and the broader culture refract their policy values back at each other. The specter of the unassimilable Asian American was embodied most infamously in\u00a0Fu Manchu, a fictional doctor-slash-supervillain who endured in Marvel comics, on television, and in theaters across much of the 20th<\/sup> century. Fu lived in American communities but sought to use mind control and esoteric sciences to bring down the Western empire. In him is embodied the fear that a foreigner might ingratiate himself\u00a0too much<\/em>\u2014mastering Western tools only to deploy them against blue-blooded Americans. Again, the parallels to Michael Savage\u2019s podcast are obvious.<\/p>\n

Overinclusive national-security initiatives have often fed on the same fear of the unassimilable. The incarceration of Japanese Americans and nationals is our country\u2019s ugliest result, but other punitive dragnets have followed. McCarthyists indiscriminately\u00a0portrayed\u00a0Chinese immigrants as Communist subversives and sought to deport as many as possible. After 9\/11, the government\u00a0punished\u00a0ordinary Muslim Americans who refused its overtures to spy, at great personal cost, for it.\u00a0Today similar patterns have emerged as economic and military competition with China intensifies.<\/p>\n

This Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we should honor the Asian Americans who are robustly participating in our body politic: not only attorneys defending the rule of law, but also teachers, librarians, social workers, local government employees, and those who engage in domestic labor, among others. Their work caring for others in the name of enacting a more just vision of our country, whether on the national stage or in their everyday lives, is profoundly, fundamentally American.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Two Conservatives Justices Just Took a Surprising Step to Save a Death Row Inmate\u2019s Life. Why?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, Cecillia Wang, the head of the ACLU, asked the Supreme Court to preserve the legal principle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[74,10,64,18,11,15],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-constitution","tag-donald-trump","tag-immigration","tag-judiciary","tag-jurisprudence","tag-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s Attacks on the Lawyer Who Argued Birthright Citizenship Give the Game Away - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=91\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s Attacks on the Lawyer Who Argued Birthright Citizenship Give the Game Away - 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