San Jose, CA – “Coast to coast – the Freedom Road Socialist Organization condemns President Trump’s plan to issue an executive order against birthright citizenship,” said Masao Suzuki, chair of the FRSO Joint Nationalities Commission. Suzuki said that proposed executive order would be the most infamous presidential order since President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in concentrations camps during World War II.
Suzuki pointed out that fight for citizenship rights date back to Dred Scott, whose fight for freedom ended in 1857 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves, former slaves and the descendants of slave were not eligible for citizenship rights. This case led to the U.S. Civil War, where tens of thousands of African American gave their lives in a fight for freedom, along with hundreds of thousands of white Americans. After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution passed, ending slavery, establishing birthright citizenship, and protecting the voting rights of African Americans.
Suzuki went on to say that with the rise of the anti-Chinese movement in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, there were attempts to strip citizenship from the American-born children of Chinese immigrants. This led to the 1898 Supreme Court of the United States ruling 6-2 in the case of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the children of immigrants were U.S. citizens.
Suzuki said that Trump, the Republicans in congress and state governments, and the right-wing Supreme Court have been rolling back the 15th Amendment to carry out widespread voter suppression, especially against African Americans. Now they are trying to roll back the 14th Amendment to strip millions of Chicanos, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Blacks and other oppressed nationalities of the citizenship and deny them the right to vote. Suzuki noted that Trump’s call is in line with his other anti-immigrant actions such as the anti-Muslim travel ban and sending troops to the Mexico-U.S. border in response to the large caravan of Central American refugees seeking asylum in the United States.
“We condemn all of these racist and outrageous actions by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans,” said Suzuki.
