The 14th Amendment Was Built for the Freed Slaves, Not Ellis Island

The clip went something like this: every American who is a natural-born U.S. citizen is only a couple generations removed from somebody who wasn’t, go back far enough and every single American is the child of a migrant, this is literally the United States of America, so trying to end birthright citizenship is the most un-American thing you could push for. And on the surface that sound like solidarity. On the surface that sound like a man with a big heart standing up for immigrants against a cruel policy. Ahh, but words have meaning.My grandfather used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and what that means in this context is I’m not about to sit here and accuse this man of evil, I’m not about to pretend Hasan woke up trying to harm nobody, because I don’t believe that he did. I believe his heart was in the right place. I also believe his analysis was empirically false. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Lefty to lefty, that’s the whole conversation.Because here go the problem. There is a difference between an immigrant and a settler, and calling the descendants of settlers “immigrants” ain’t a cute simplification — it’s a misnomer, and a dangerous one, and the danger is exactly what it erases.Words Have Meaning — Immigrant, Settler, ArrivantLet me put the definitions on the table, because this whole disagreement live and die on the definitions.A migrant — say it with me — a migrant moves into a political order that already exists. The migrant recognizes a sovereignty that is already sitting there, submits to a state that is already built, knocks on a door that is already hung. That is Lorenzo Veracini’s whole point in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview: not all migrants are settlers. The migrant enters somebody else’s house. The migrant don’t own the deed.A settler is a different animal. The settler don’t come to join the order — the settler come to found one. Veracini says settlers “come to stay,” and they carry a sovereign capacity with them, they bring the state in their pocket, they plant a flag and call the planting “discovery.” Patrick Wolfe gave us the line everybody quotes: settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that structure runs on a logic of elimination — the native is in the way, so the native has got to be made to vanish, made into a ghost, made into the past tense.And then there is the third category, the one Hasan’s “we’re all immigrants” math leaves no room for. Jodi Byrd, in The Transit of Empire, borrows a word from the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, arrivant for the people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism. Not settlers, because they founded nothing and owned nothing, not even themselves. Not migrants, because didn’t nobody migrate in the belly of a slave ship. Arrivants. Forced arrivals.Tuck and Yang built the whole frame in Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor: settler colonialism stands on a triad settler, native, slave. Three positions, three different relationships to the land, three completely different stories about how a body ended up standing on this soil. And when you take that triad and you blend it all into one smoothie called “we’re all the children of immigrants,” you ain’t being inclusive. You collapsing three histories into one. And the one you keep is the settler’s.So when I say what I said “African Americans, we ain’t settle here, we ain’t migrate either, we was forced here,” I’m not being poetic. I’m being precise.The Math Don’t Math — Ellis Island Showed Up LateMost of the people who repeat the “we’re all immigrants” line are picturing Ellis Island. The huddled masses, the manifests, the new name the clerk gave grandpa. Beautiful image. Wrong amendment. Let me walk the timeline, because the dates do the arguing for me.1790. The very first Naturalization Act says the path from immigrant to citizen is open to “free white persons.” Free. White. Persons. That is the law. For most of this country’s history, the immigrant-to-citizen pipeline that the clip is romanticizing was, by statute, a whites-only pipeline.1857. Dred Scott. The Supreme Court looks a Black man in the face and rules that Black people, free or enslaved, are not citizens and cannot ever be that we hold no rights the white man is bound to respect.1868. The 14th Amendment. Born out of the Civil War, written in the blood of four years of war, ratified specifically to take Dred Scott and tear it up: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That is the root of birthright citizenship in this country. Not Ellis Island. My ancestors. The freed people. Birthright citizenship was built to account for the descendants of forced labor, to finally make citizens of the people this country had spent two and a half centuries treating as property.1884. Elk v. Wilkins. The same court rules that Native Americans the actual indigenous people, the people who were here before “here” had a name are not made citizens by the 14th Amendment.1892. Ellis Island finally opens its doors. Twenty-four years after the 14th Amendment had already settled birthright. The immigration mythology the clip is leaning on shows up almost a quarter-century after the clause it thinks it explains.1898. Wong Kim Ark. Now the court extends birthright to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants a real and important expansion, but notice the order of operations. The freed slaves first. The immigrant’s child after, standing on a foundation the freed people had already laid.1924. The Indian Citizenship Act. The first peoples of this land had to wait until nineteen twenty-four to be granted citizenship by an act of Congress — granted, like a favor, like a permission slip — while the descendants of European settlers had been citizens by default the whole time.Read that timeline back. The settler’s grandchild was a citizen automatically. The freed slave needed a constitutional amendment. The native had to wait on Congress until 1924. So when somebody tells me every single American is a generation or two removed from being an immigrant, what they are telling me whether they mean it or not is that Native Americans and Black Americans don’t count as Americans, because our citizenship did not come from Ellis Island. It came from a war, an amendment, and a sixty-year wait.Whose Womb, Whose NationAnd here is where I have to do the both/and work, because this fight has never been only about race it has been litigated, every single time, on and through the bodies of women of color. Intersection ain’t a decoration on this argument. It’s the engine.Go back to 1662, Virginia, the doctrine the lawyers called partus sequitur ventrem — “that which is born follows the womb.” English common law said a child’s status followed the father. The colony flipped it: a child’s status would follow the mother. And that one flip turned every enslaved Black woman’s womb into a factory for the institution her children born into bondage automatically, hereditary slavery reproduced through her body, by law. Hortense Spillers taught us to read that ungendering, that reduction of the mother to flesh and the flesh to capital. Dorothy Roberts taught us this country has always claimed the right to police who Black women are allowed to bring into the world.Now hold that against 1868. The 14th Amendment takes partus sequitur ventrem and turns it inside out. Under slavery, the womb made you a slave; under the Citizenship Clause, birth on this soil makes you a citizen. The same site, the birth, the body, the mother went from the mechanism of bondage to the doorway of belonging. That is not a small thing. That is the whole revolution of Reconstruction compressed into one clause.So watch what happened the same week the Supreme Court upheld birthright in 2026. Within hours, the Justice Department announced it would prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism.” Birth tourism. The phrase itself points the finger straight back at the racialized woman’s womb, the Chinese mother, the Nigerian mother, the woman who had the nerve to give birth on the wrong soil. From 1662 to 2026 the through-line never breaks: in America, the question of who gets to belong has always been answered at the site of a woman of color’s body. Crazy how that part stays the same.The Melting Pot Makes Whiteness DisappearLet me name the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole point. When you say “we’re all the descendants of immigrants,” it feel generous. It feel like everybody invited to the cookout. But watch who that sentence actually disappears.It disappears the native, who was already here and didn’t immigrate to nowhere. It disappears the arrivant, who was dragged here in chains and didn’t choose nothing. And it takes the one figure who actually did come from somewhere else to take this land the settler and it rebrands him as just another immigrant, just another striver, just another huddled mass.That is the trick. Tuck and Yang call it a “settler move to innocence” — a story you tell so the settling stops feeling like settling. And the slickest part, the part you almost can’t see, is that the melting-pot story makes the white settler the invisible default, the normal one, the natural American against whom everybody else has to be measured. Veracini said it plain: the settler positions himself as both superior and normal, while the native and the slave are the ones who have to keep explaining themselves.So when you flatten all of us into “immigrants,” you do not make everybody equal. You make whiteness the water nobody can see they swimming in. By doing the inclusion, you do the erasure. By trying to put everybody on the same boat, you let the people who built the boat out of stolen wood and stolen labor pretend they bought a ticket like everybody else.Same Framework, Different ContinentNow let me talk to Hasan directly, lefty to lefty, because this is where the disappointment comes from and the disappointment comes from respect.When it comes to Palestine, the man is sharp. He’ll walk you through settler colonialism with the precision of somebody who actually read the literature — the dispossession, the logic of replacement, the difference between a person fleeing into a land and a project built on taking it. He acknowledges indigeneity over there without blinking.Ahh, but bring that same framework home and something seizes up. The man who can see the settler clearly in one hemisphere suddenly can’t acknowledge that Native Americans exist as indigenous people here, can’t see that the descendants of colonists are not the descendants of immigrants, can’t apply the analysis to the soil he is standing on. And I don’t think that’s malice. I think that’s a blind spot — the specific blind spot a lot of the broader Left carries the second Black and native specificity is the thing on the table. A bunch of us been feeling it: brilliant on so many issues, breadth and depth for days, and then a flatness, a quickness, an intellectual laziness that only seems to show up when the subject is us.That matters because of the platform. Millions of mostly white folks love following this man, and they learn from him, and when he says “we’re all immigrants” with that much conviction and that much reach, he ain’t just making a point, he’s teaching. He’s miseducating an audience that trusts him, even if he’s doing it passionately, even if he’s doing it by accident. I speak passionately too. I make sentences out of words too. I get it. Which is exactly why I’d rather call him in than call him out. Lefty to lefty: let’s talk, let’s fix the blind spot, because right now it’s doing both of us a disservice.And Then the Court Said It TooHere’s the part that would be funny if it wasn’t so on time. The same day I’m making this argument, June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court hands down Trump v. Barbara and upholds birthright citizenship six to three, striking down the executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office. And read how Chief Justice Roberts grounds it: in the Reconstruction Congress, in the abolitionists, in the men who wrote the 14th Amendment and defined citizenship broadly on purpose, because they were trying to secure freedom for people coming up out of slavery.Even the government’s own lawyer, arguing to gut the thing, conceded the root. The Solicitor General stood up and said the Citizenship Clause was meant to give citizenship to those newly freed from slavery and their descendants that was his argument, the argument for the restriction. Both sides in front of the highest court in the land agreed on the origin: the freed slaves, not Ellis Island. The exact distinction I’m drawing isn’t fringe. It’s the holding.And lest anybody think this is settled and soft: within hours of the ruling, the Justice Department sent every U.S. attorney a letter telling them to go prosecute “birth tourism,” and the President got on his platform telling Congress to end birthright by statute. So no, this is not a history lecture. This is a live wire. Which is exactly why getting the words right matters right now, today, not as an academic flex but as a matter of who this country is going to admit it owes.So let me bring it back to where the clip pointed and then refused to look. Birthright citizenship in this country has got nothing to do with Ellis Island and everything to do with settlers trying to account for the free labor of my ancestors… people who did not come here voluntarily, who were not migrating toward a dream, who were forced, forced laborers, and whose forced presence is the actual root of the 14th Amendment. Wolfe gives us the structure. Veracini gives us the difference between the one who founds the order and the one who enters it. Byrd gives us the word for the ones who were dragged into it. Tuck and Yang give us the triad so we never flatten the three into one. And the freed people themselves, through a war and an amendment, gave us the very birthright the whole country is now fighting over.We ain’t settle here. We ain’t migrate either. We was forced here. Hold the distinction, because the distinction is the history, and the history is the receipt.Lefty to lefty, Hasan — let’s talk.Five Key Takeaways* Immigrant, settler, and arrivant are three different categories with three different relationships to the land and the law — a migrant enters an order that already exists, a settler founds one and comes to stay, and an arrivant is forced in. Collapsing all three into “immigrant” is the original error.* Birthright citizenship is older than Ellis Island. The 14th Amendment (1868) predates the opening of Ellis Island (1892) by twenty-four years, and it was written to overturn Dred Scott and make citizens of the freed people — not to romanticize immigration.* The immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, a whites-only pathway. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” Black citizenship came through the 14th Amendment (1868); Native citizenship had to be granted by the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). Different routes, both forced or delayed.* Who counts as American has always been decided at the site of the racialized woman’s womb — from partus sequitur ventrem (1662), which made the enslaved mother’s womb reproduce slavery, to the 14th Amendment that inverted it, to the “birth tourism” panic the DOJ revived in 2026.* “We’re all immigrants” is a settler move to innocence: it erases the native and the arrivant and makes the white settler the invisible, natural default American. Even Trump v. Barbara (June 30, 2026) grounds birthright in the freed slaves — the distinction isn’t fringe, it’s the holding.Annotated BibliographyVeracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (2nd ed., 2024).The load-bearing distinction for the whole piece: “not all migrants are settlers.” Settlers “come to stay” and carry a sovereign capacity, founding political orders by disavowing Indigenous sovereignty; migrants enter an order already constituted and submit to a sovereignty they did not make.Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.Source of “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event” and the “logic of elimination.” Establishes that settlement is ongoing, not a finished historical moment, and that the native is targeted for disappearance so the settler can become the natural inhabitant.Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.Introduces the arrivant a term Byrd borrows from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite for peoples forced into the Americas through colonial violence. This is the precise category for enslaved Africans and their descendants: neither settler nor native, but forced arrival.Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.Frames settler colonialism as an “entangled triad” of settler–native–slave and names the “settler moves to innocence” the evasions (like “we’re all immigrants”) that reconcile settler guilt without returning land or reckoning with the triad.Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.The theory of “flesh” and the ungendering of the enslaved — essential for reading how the maternal body was reduced to capital, which is the foundation the womb argument in this piece stands on.Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Pantheon, 1997.Documents the long American project of policing Black women’s reproduction. Grounds the claim that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. have always been adjudicated through control of racialized women’s childbearing.Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.Theorizes the tripled antagonism of settler, native (“Savage”), and slave as structurally distinct positions reinforcing why the three cannot be collapsed into a single “immigrant” narrative without erasing two of them.Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).The decision the 14th Amendment was written to overturn: held that Black people, free or enslaved, were not and could not be citizens. The before-picture for birthright citizenship.Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).Held that the 14th Amendment did not confer citizenship on Native Americans the legal basis for why indigenous citizenship had to wait for separate statutory action in 1924.United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).Extended birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants. Important, but chronologically and logically downstream of the 14th Amendment’s original purpose for the freed people.Indian Citizenship Act (Snyder Act), 43 Stat. 253 (1924).Granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans by act of Congress — nineteen years into the twentieth century, and decades after settler descendants held citizenship by default.Naturalization Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103.Limited naturalization to “free white persons,” establishing that the immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, racially restricted for most of U.S. history.Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (U.S. June 30, 2026).The 6–3 decision upholding birthright citizenship and striking Executive Order 14160. Chief Justice Roberts grounds the holding in the Reconstruction framers and abolitionists; even the Solicitor General conceded the Citizenship Clause’s origin in the newly freed and their descendants. 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