Ramteen Arablui
speaker
199 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Aug
Ramteen Arablui’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Wong Kim Ark was still stuck on a steamer off the coast while his case played out in court. It had been months, and he was right in the middle of a bigger battle between the U.S. government and Chinese Americans.
Finally, in the fall of 1895, the court came to a decision. He wins. He wins.
Wong Kim Ark was technically free, but his victory was short-lived.
the government appealed the case up to the Supreme Court. They did this because they wanted to enforce and expand the Chinese Exclusion Act. Even the president at the time, Grover Cleveland, was in full support of excluding Chinese immigrants.
So the government did it. It appealed the case all the way up to the US Supreme Court. And the Solicitor General, the lawyer who represents the government in front of the Supreme Court, was right out of central casting. A man named Holmes Conrad.
Holmes Conrad came from a prominent slave-owning family. He had spent the Civil War as an officer, fighting for the Confederacy. And here's some nice irony for you. Because he fought for secession during the Civil War, Conrad actually had his citizenship revoked.
Meanwhile, Wong Kim Ark, after being detained those horrible four months on ships, was back to his hardscrabble life in San Francisco. He was earning money and sending it to his wife and kids in China. And all the while, the government was trying to beat him in court, questioning his citizenship.
Yet behind the scenes, he's got an all-star, high-powered legal team on his side, paid for by the Chinese six companies.
This is political scientist Carol Nakanoff, who co-authored the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.
— For this case, they hired two accomplished white lawyers. One was Maxwell Evarts.
Many big businesses had a keen interest in the Wang Kimark case. They needed labor, cheap labor, to expand and be profitable. So they jumped to support Wang Kimark's case.
Evarts and Ashton had argued cases before the Supreme Court before, but... I would have to think that they were pessimistic at this point. The two of them were coming off a loss in a high-profile case involving a Chinese client. Going into this case, they had every reason to doubt the outcome, an outcome that would be potentially devastating for Wong Kim Ark and thousands like him.
Coming up, Wong Kim Ark heads to the Supreme Court.
On the ThruLine podcast, the myth linking autism and vaccines was decades in the making and was a major moment for vaccine hesitancy in America, tapping into fears involving the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government.
Listen to ThruLine from NPR wherever you get your podcasts.
Amanda Frost is a professor of immigration law and author of You Are Not American, Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.
Julie Novkov is a political scientist and co-author of the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark, and the Battle for Citizenship.
Carol Nakanoff co-authored the book American by Birth, Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship.
Okay, so several months back, one of ThruLine's producers, Lawrence Wu, came to a pitch meeting with this wild story. It was one of those pitches that immediately made all of us sit up in our seats and listen.
It had layers that just kept getting deeper and deeper, and I don't want to ruin it for you, so obviously I will just say that it's about an object, a thing that just sat around on a shelf for decades, going pretty much unnoticed. But in 2015, that changed. And it changed because a first-year college student decided it needed to change.
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