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Article: Aliens, Rights of
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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ALIENS, RIGHTS OF
ALIENS, RIGHTS OF.
For more than a century, the Supreme Court has distinguished between the rights of aliens to enter the United States and the rights that arise after entry or admission. The so-called plenary power doctrine of the Chinese Exclusion Case (1889) held that aliens seeking to enter the United States could claim no constitutional rights. Although more recent cases, such as
Landon v. Plasencia
(1982), have recognized a limited right to procedural due process for certain returning permanent-resident aliens, the basic principle is that aliens have no procedural or substantive constitutional right to enter the United States. The Court has also held that aliens ...