I was born behind barbed wire to parents the United States classified as “enemy aliens” during World War II. Yet because of the Constitution’s assurance of birthright citizenship, I was born an American citizen.
That fact is a lesson in American law and character — one that should matter now as President Trump attempts through a new executive order to evade last month’s Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship.
The new executive order purports to bar the children of “alien enemies” from acquiring birthright citizenship. It is wrong on multiple levels. It misapplies a wartime concept for lands seized by foreign armies. More fundamentally, it again would strip children of their right to citizenship based on their parents’ actions — exactly what the Supreme Court rejected.
Since the War of 1812, and through two world wars, children born in the United States to parents classified as alien enemies have been recognized as American citizens. I know this history personally because I was born at the Crystal City WWII Department of Justice Family Internment Camp in Texas, alongside many other children of German, Italian and Japanese descent. Their parents had been swept up in a period of wartime hysteria and the deliberate imprisonment of Japanese community leaders. They had done nothing against the United States.
Yet even in that dark period, the United States recognized something fundamental: The circumstances or ancestry of a child’s parents did not determine the child’s citizenship. Because we were born on American soil, we were afforded the right to belong. And we exercised that right.
Many of the children with whom I grew up in camp went on to make significant contributions to this country. We served in the military. We built successful careers and businesses. We became educators, community leaders, civil rights advocates and public servants. We demonstrated, in countless ways, that citizenship is not merely a legal status — it is an opportunity to participate fully in the American experiment.
I have tried to do my part as well. I am a veteran. During the Vietnam War, I served in the U.S. Navy aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, working in the Integrated Operational Intelligence Center with a top-secret security clearance. After the war, I returned to college and earned a master’s degree and enjoyed a career in public service. I have also had the privilege of serving four terms as president of the Japanese American Citizens League, the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization.
I share this history because it demonstrates something essential about America: children should not inherit the political status, fears or accusations directed at their parents.
The current executive order is part of a years-long effort to retreat from that principle. It invokes the language of wartime “alien enemies” in a time of peace and attempts to impose a restriction on citizenship that, historically, only applied when an enemy captured and took control of land during a war.
The lessons of Japanese American incarceration should make us especially wary when our government once again suggests that the children of immigrants should be treated as less American because of who their parents are. We have seen where that thinking can lead.
I have confidence that the courts will continue to uphold the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship and reject efforts to circumvent those protections through executive action.
But courts cannot be the only line of defense. The American people must draw the line as well.
We must reject the notion that citizenship can be conditioned on ancestry, the nationality of one’s parents or the government’s judgment about whether a family belongs here. We must remember that the strength of American citizenship comes precisely from the fact that it is not inherited from one’s parents’ nationality or withheld because of their circumstances.
As the Supreme Court concluded, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’” That promise extended to me. No president has the power to decide that children born in America today belong any less than I did.
Larry Oda is a former national president of the Japanese American Citizens League, a retired maintenance superintendent for the city of Salinas and a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War.