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In two weeks, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the term’s vitally important birthright citizenship case. On April 1, the court will address whether the words in the 14th Amendment, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” apply to children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents at the time of their birth. Because so many of us approach this issue with an imperfect understanding of the American history of migration, deportation, citizenship, and nationality, a whole lot of bad originalism seeps into the legal discourse about an issue so crucial that the drafters of the 14th Amendment chose to locate it in the Constitution itself. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. Her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship, will be published on March 24. You should not listen to the oral arguments in this case without understanding the long and complicated history of American citizenship. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: You start the book by just staking out this elaborate mythology that we all seem to buy into about how migration worked throughout American history. And as you say, this is “belied by actual historical fact, by actual political practice.” What is it that most of us are told about how citizenship has been handled from the Colonial era until today, and how wrong have most of us gotten that history?

Anna O. Law: The biggest myth about American immigration is that until the federal government started enforcing our borders in the late 19th century, it was just open borders. And so everybody who wanted to come could just show up, work hard, and it feeds right into the American dream myth, right? My ancestors came with nothing but the clothes on their back and a willingness to work hard. But the period before the federal government took over immigration didn’t mean there were no laws and that there were no migration restrictions. There’s plenty of work and existing scholarship that says the states were enforcing migration laws in the 19th century. But since I started in the Colonial period, I realized, and it even shocked me, that some of the stuff in U.S. immigration law today, like “likely to become a public charge,” that says People who can’t economically take care of themselves: We don’t want them, well that originated in the Colonial period. So stretching from the Colonial period to 1888, first the colonies, and then the states had elaborate sets of laws recruiting certain groups of people to come and restricting other people so they could not come.

Bad originalism works because it mines these deeply held myths, these altogether false narratives about American history. And it sounds plausible even when it’s wrong. In........

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