Nina Totenberg

How will we know if they believe themselves to be legally in the country, even if you don't think they're legally in the country?

And John Sauer, the Solicitor General, said in response to that last year, he said, well, we'd have to, you know, there are people would have to figure that out after the fact.

Which is a very unsatisfactory answer actually.

It's very unclear.

That's the point because even if you assume that Won Kim Ark's –

parents came here legally.

You didn't have to produce documents in those days.

They were coming.

We don't know if they owned the business that they ran.

We know remarkably little about them.

They went back to China, I think probably because they felt under siege, because that was that period of time in which the Chinese Exclusion Act was about to pass.

And

Chinese had no rights, basically, other than to be here if they're already here.

So there's very little we know about Wan Kim Ark's parents and where their so-called allegiance really was, but they never became citizens.

They were

According to the Won Kim Ark Court that ruled on that, they were legal domiciles.

But as far as we know, there was no paper that made them legal.

It's not like today.

Well, I guess at the end of June or conceivably the first couple of days of July.

This is pretty late to be arguing a big case like this, but on the other hand, this court