Chief Justice John Roberts' legal reasoning in the birthright citizenship case is careful and narrow. But it misses the bigger point: The 14th Amendment was written to prevent a permanent underclass in America.

President Donald Trump's claim that American-born children of undocumented immigrants have no right to citizenship would have created exactly the evil the amendment was meant to prevent. But the citizenship clause alone doesn't solve that evil. Trump has already built an oppressed class: millions of undocumented immigrants who work and raise families here while living in fear of being sent to countries many of them barely know.

The 14th Amendment overruled Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States. The framers, the nation's highest court declared, regarded Black people as "a subordinate and inferior class of beings" who "had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them."

After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery but did not make former slaves citizens. Legislatures in the former Confederacy, still controlled by White politicians, wrote laws that recreated many of slavery's legal restrictions. The 14th Amendment was meant to stop that. Its language is plain: "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........

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