Plenary-Power

Movement claim: Fong Yue Ting v. United States establishes that the 14th Amendment created 'a kind of citizen of an inferior order' modeled on Vattel's resident minister. The 'inferior order' language is Justice Brewer's DISSENT, it describes resident ALIENS (not 14th Amendment citizens), and the majority upheld plenary deportation power — a double miscitation

Byron Beers's Treatise #7 cites Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893), for the proposition that the 14th Amendment established a public 'inferior' citizenship modeled on Vattel's resident minister — 'a kind of citizen of an inferior order... united and subject to the society.' The citation is a double miscitation. First, the 'inferior order' language is from Justice Brewer's DISSENT, not Justice Gray's majority opinion. Second, the language describes domiciled resident ALIENS, not 14th Amendment CITIZENS — Brewer quoted Vattel to argue that resident aliens deserved MORE protection than the majority was giving them, not that constitutional citizens are an inferior class. The Fong Yue Ting majority (Gray, J.) upheld Congress's plenary sovereign power to deport resident Chinese laborers who failed to obtain residence certificates under the Geary Act, treating deportation as non-punitive civil process outside full criminal-trial protections — one of the high-water marks of the plenary-power doctrine in immigration law. Beers's reading inverts both the opinion's posture (a dissent objecting to harsh treatment of aliens, recast as the Court endorsing inferior citizenship) and its subject (resident aliens recast as 14th Amendment citizens). This is the recurring dissent-as-Court miscitation pattern documented across the Beers corpus — the Treatise 5 Slaughter-House finding, the Treatise 6 Dred Scott finding — appearing here in one of its clearest forms. Foreclosed.