When the 14th Amendment was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1866, the first senator to speak out in opposition to it was a Pennsylvania Republican named Edgar Cowan. He objected in part because the Citizenship Clause of the proposed amendment would make American citizens out of the U.S.-born children of unwelcome immigrants. "Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race?" Cowan asked. And what about the "Gypsies" that he claimed were present in his own state? "These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society," he declared. Yet the 14th Amendment's grant of birthright citizenship would cover them, too. "If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right," Cowan said, "then they will have it; and I think it will be mischievous."
Cowan's objections were answered by another Republican senator, John Conness of California. "I beg my honorable friend from Pennsylvania to give himself no further trouble on account of the Chinese in California or on the Pacific coast," Conness said. "We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others."
