I’m sorry, I cited wrong case seee this, from earlier thread today:
The basic principle is stated in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 702-3 (1898):
The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution . . . contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two only: birth and naturalization. . . . Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization. A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized, either by treaty, as in the case of the annexation of foreign territory, or by authority of Congress, exercised either by declaring certain classes of persons to be citizens, as in the enactments conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens, or by enabling foreigners individually to become citizens by proceedings in the judicial tribunals, as in the ordinary provisions of the naturalization acts.
Granted that it is precedent, but it is probably the worst and most egregiously erroneous decision ever handed down the the Supreme Court.
The legal reasoning is atrocious, the citations are inappropriate and irrelevant in many cases, and however bad the decision itself was, the dicta in the case is even worse.
For myself, a new decision of the Court overturning Kim Wong Ark would not be sufficient. It needs to be expunged from the record in its wretched entirety.
In the meantime any argument buttressed by quotations from that decision simply cannot be taken seriously.