Sir,—James Chandler’s article on ‘Know-Nothingism in America, then and now’ (HI 34.4, July/Aug. 2026) resonates with current news from our US Supreme Court. American civil liberties lawyer Cecillia Wang in her oral arguments before the Court regarding the challenge to birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment on 1 April 2026 said:
‘Recall that at the time [1866] the framers [of the 14th Amendment] were thinking about birthright citizenship there had just been 15 to 20 years of unprecedented immigration from Ireland. The Know Nothing party was dominant in the 1850s just a decade earlier and they were vehemently opposed to Irish immigration. They believed Irish Catholic immigrants were unassimilable and could never become Americans. But even the Know Nothing party members of Congress believed that the children born in the United States to those Irish immigrants were citizens like anyone else. That’s the intuition that the framers of the 14th Amendment had, contrary to the government’s arguments now. They wanted to grow this country, they wanted to make sure we had citizenship to populate the military, to settle the country, and they also had an intuition that was consistent with the founding aversion to inherited rights and disabilities.’
The US Supreme Court on 30 June 2026 ruled against President Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship.
I was saddened to learn that Ireland by referendum amended its constitution in 2004 and banned birthright citizenship. Apparently, the Irish—like some Americans today—fell victim to this shibboleth first satirised by Daniel Defoe in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1700):
‘We have been Europe’s sink, the jakes, where she
Voids all her offal out-cast progeny.’
—Yours etc.,
ROBERT LYONS
Chicago