Congress Has Established That People Here Illegally Are Not Residents
The 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark made “residency” and being “domiciled” the operative terms, and Congress has since made clear what they mean.
Button Gwinnett | April 24, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
You can read here about how the Supreme Court, in the seminal 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision, ruled on some aspects of birthright citizenship. The Court ignored the ratifiers’ intent for both the original Constitution and the 14th Amendment and instead focused on English common-law terms. By doing so, they opened a portal through which alien invaders would one day pour into the United States without the consent of its people and in defiance of the laws of Congress.
There is hope this portal may be closed and the invasion stemmed without further Amendment to the Constitution. One key is to eliminate “anchor babies,” putative birthright citizens who in nearly all cases have no connection whatever to the Republic or its people. In the extreme, these include “birthright tourists,” pregnant women who intentionally enter the US at the end of their pregnancy, deliver a child on US soil, then return home to raise that “US citizen” child as the foreigner it is.
This key lies in the several laws Congress enacted between 1898 and today. The underpinnings of the Court’s decision in Wong saw it arrogate to itself the authority to decide the meaning of “domiciled,” “under the jurisdiction therefore,” residence,” and visitor” meant with respect to immigration.
We can recall that Article I, Section 8, confers plenary power on Congress to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. It also implicitly defines the aboriginal citizenry (“We the People of the United States”) as the citizens of the several states when the Constitution was ratified. The Wong Kim Ark court found that Congress had not used this power sufficiently to resolve Wong’s citizenship. However, since that time, Congress has acted.
SCOTUS determined that Wong’s parents were “domiciled” in California. However, the Constitution never mentions that word. Instead, it mentions variations of “reside,” as in, “the state in which they reside,” or “a resident of these states at the adoption.”
Congress began to provide a legal definition of permanent legal residency beginning with the Alien Registration Act of 1940 and subsequent immigration laws establishing rules for obtaining and maintaining an Alien Registration Card (green card). We can infer from these laws that any alien present in the US without this card is not a resident of the United States and may be subject to arrest and removal for various reasons. The law governing lawful alien admission and permanent residency is available here.
The Constitution assigns no authority whatsoever to the Supreme Court to decide what constitutes permanent residence in the US or who qualifies as a permanent resident. Only Congress has that authority. An honest court must be compelled to accept Congress’s definition of “resident.” In today’s legal environment, any alien present in the United States without a permanent resident card is either a visitor or an invader and is ineligible to give birth to US-citizen children.
In addition, since the Wong Kim Ark decision, Congress has determined who are visitors to the US vs who are invaders, beginning with the Immigration Act of 1917, which introduced the first formal visa system. The present visa law can be found here. It is instructive to note that the current visa law clearly distinguishes immigrant visas from nonimmigrant visas:
(a) Immigrants; nonimmigrants
(1) Under the conditions hereinafter prescribed and subject to the limitations prescribed in this chapter or regulations issued thereunder, a consular officer may issue
(A) to an immigrant who has made proper application therefor, an immigrant visa which shall consist of the application provided for in section 1202 of this title, visaed by such consular officer, and shall specify the foreign state, if any, to which the immigrant is charged, the immigrant’s particular status under such foreign state, the preference, immediate relative, or special immigrant classification to which the alien is charged, the date on which the validity of the visa shall expire, and such additional information as may be required; and
(B) to a nonimmigrant who has made proper application therefor, a nonimmigrant visa, which shall specify the classification under section 1101(a)(15) of this title of the nonimmigrant, the period during which the nonimmigrant visa shall be valid, and such additional information as may be required.
But what about refugees, you ask? Congress has established extensive definitions for what constitutes a legitimate refugee. That law states that “The burden of proof is on the applicant to establish that the applicant is a refugee...”
The law spends a great deal of time discussing what disqualifies someone from refugee status.
Much of the law is about the various disqualifiers that reject refugee claims. One such holds that “the alien was firmly resettled in another country prior to arriving in the United States.”
That calls to mind the horde of Haitians who appeared at the southern border en masse during the Biden regime after having been previously granted asylum in a third country, yet Biden nevertheless granted them Temporary Protected Status. They are clearly not refugees under the law and should be deported immediately.
Now that Congress has defined who are permanent residents, who are immigrants, who are visitors, and who are asylees, it is possible to discern by implication who are invaders. The law divides invaders into two subgroups.
Generally, there are persons who were lawfully admitted to the United States on any type of visa who subsequently violate their conditions of entry. There is a lengthy list of actions and conditions that lead to deportation (see Title 8 Section 1227). Some of these violations are civil offenses. Most are criminal violations under state or federal law.
The other group is more overt. These are persons who have entered the country without leave and in defiance of established entry procedures. The entire tidal wave of entrants who crossed the southern border without a visa is members of this class. It does not matter whether they were illegally passed by the Biden regime or entered surreptitiously via human smugglers or other criminal means.
Referring back to Wong Kim Ark, it is clear that Alien Registration Card holders qualify as residents domiciled in the United States. It is likely that the present court could well decide that immigrant visa holders are also domiciled in the US since they have declared their intention to naturalize. Asylees have been granted permission to reside in the US. Asylum seekers whose applications are still pending have not been granted resident status. Visitor visa holders, tourists, and invaders cannot be regarded as residents.
