Networks of Power and Relationality: US Citizenship and Migration in the Twentieth Century

MANY AMERICANS AND OBSERVERS AROUND THE WORLD perceive the history of US citizenship and immigration as a linear narrative, where US naturalization policy evolved from its origins—which limited US citizenship to “free white persons . . . of good character” in 1790—to include all individuals during the Cold War. On one hand, these progressive narratives emerged from the sense that changes to US law developed in the direction of greater inclusion over time. On the other, they evolved in response to the advocacy of immigration reformers who popularized the United States as a “nation of immigrants” after World War II. Some of the United States’ most iconic historical figures were among these advocates. In 1958, for example, Senator John F. Kennedy published A Nation of Immigrants while eyeing a presidential run. “The contribution of immigrants can be seen in every aspect of our national life . . . There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background. Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life,” Kennedy wrote.1 In Kennedy's narrative, “a nation of immigrants” welcomed newcomers, seamlessly integrated immigrant communities into US society, and celebrated immigrants’ contributions.2 This narrative of US history, which suggests a frictionless transition from an immigrant's arrival in the United States to their naturalization and assimilation, popularized a progressive teleology without an eye toward history.A closer examination of immigration throughout US history reveals how US lawmakers and community advocates used legal status to differentiate rights and resources among citizens and between citizens and non-citizens.3 The authors in this special issue examine this shifting relationship between power, rights, and legal status, demonstrating the importance of using US citizenship as a useful category of historical analysis.4 We illustrate how US lawmakers and community advocates continuously redefined the rights and privileges of Americans through a complex web of power relations centered on inclusion, exclusion, and dispossession. Throughout the twentieth century, every major change to federal naturalization and immigration law folded some individuals into US citizenship, while excluding or dispossessing others.5 These changes also denied some communities of their existing rights and privileges by incorporating them into US citizenship or denying them citizenship based on racial, political, and economic priorities.6 A relational approach that focuses on networks of inclusion, exclusion, and dispossession allows us to more accurately capture the power relations that define the history of US citizenship.Women's history in the early twentieth century provides a powerful example of how US lawmakers and community advocates operationalized citizenship to differentiate rights and resources among citizens, as well as between citizens and non-citizens. As Congress became increasingly aware of the impact of marriage on American women's citizenship claims, members distinguished that a woman's nationality was derived from her father's legal status before marriage, and from her husband's after. In 1907, Congress passed the Expatriation Act, which declared that “any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband.”7 The rise of women's movements, along with the pressures of divorce, widowhood, and transnational family distress, left many women in precarious situations and heightened support for women's independent nationality rights. American women demanded reforms in federal law to ensure that, like American men, they could retain their right to US citizenship regardless of whom they married.Congress—controlled by men—felt compelled to amend women's nationality rights after American women gained the right to vote across the country in 1920 and continued to campaign for independent nationality rights. In 1922, Congress made changes to existing federal law on naturalization and nationality that gave women the right to retain US citizenship if they married men who met specific racial criteria. The Married Women's Independent Nationality Act of 1922, also known as the Cable Act, reflected complex developments in citizenship, political influence, and American identity. One of the Cable Act's critical provisions allowed US-born and naturalized women who married non-citizens to retain their citizenship only if their husbands were eligible to naturalize: “any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States.”8 In practice, this provision functioned as a federal corollary to state anti-miscegenation laws, because existing laws limited naturalization rights to white immigrants and immigrants of African ancestry and nativity, and restricted Asian immigrants from naturalizing in the United States.9 Congress's intent with the Cable Act was clear—any woman who married an Asian immigrant or left the United States for a foreign husband could be excluded from or dispossessed of US citizenship.10The Cable Act reshaped the lives and legal status of thousands of women. Women of color were dispossessed of their status as US citizens at much higher rates than their white and European counterparts and the impact remains understudied within US women's history. US legislators and bureaucrats disproportionately stripped Asian American women—who married Asian immigrant men in more significant numbers—of US citizenship.11 In 1931, Emma Wold, the legislative secretary of the National Woman's Party, commented on this impact of the Cable Act: “A provision that seemed originally intended to penalize a marriage of American women of the Caucasian race with Asiatics became, in reality, a heavy penalty upon American-Chinese and American-Japanese girls for marrying aliens of their own race.”12 Wold also explained the dispossession of these women's rights, which included “rights to property, to continue in a profession, to earn a living, even to seek an opportunity to work,” in addition to the right to vote, remain in the country, or return after leaving the United States. Wold was not wrong. Women who married Asian immigrants were routinely stripped of US citizenship even if they were born in the United States. In 1931, when Felicita Soto traveled back to the United States from India with her husband and four children—three of whom were born in the United States—immigration inspectors at Angel Island insisted on deporting her. Inspectors argued that although Soto was born in the United States, she lost her status as a US citizen because she had married Harnam Singh, an immigrant from colonial India. They advised the young mother of mixed Mexican heritage to divorce her husband and find an avenue to naturalize if she wished to re-enter the country.13Congressional restrictions on women's independent nationality rights also shaped the exclusion and dispossession of women who may have previously acquired derivative citizenship from their husbands. Section 2 of the Cable Act stipulated that women who married US citizens could only “be naturalized upon full and complete compliance with all requirements of the naturalization laws.” The provision directly impacted Asian women. Since existing racial prerequisites in naturalization law limited naturalization to white persons and individuals of African ancestry and nativity, foreign-born women of Asian origin no longer had the right to secure US citizenship if they married US citizens. The provision also subjected Native American women to the Cable Act, at times disrupting existing precedent, which often allowed them to negotiate their legal rights in relation to existing treaty rights.14Two years after the passage of the Cable Act, Congress's passage of the 1924 Immigration Act introduced a new layer of dispossession and exclusion for American and immigrant women through detention and deportation.15 Among its many provisions, the 1924 law excluded any immigrant ineligible for citizenship by race or nationality. Operating under the provisions of the Cable Act and Immigration Act of 1924, immigration officials deported women born in the United States married to Asian men who were not US citizens, and Asian women who migrated to the United States after marrying US citizens. In 1928, immigration authorities detained Toshiko Inaba, a twenty-year-old Japanese American woman born in the United States, after they discovered she had married a Japanese man while living in Japan. Insisting Inaba was no longer a US citizen due to her marriage, immigration authorities deported her.16 They also detained and deported most women from Asia who married US citizens of Asian ancestry, arguing they were ineligible to enter the United States—despite being married to US citizens—because federal law prohibited them from naturalization.17 At the same time, immigration officers and bureaucrats in the Department of State encouraged Black women and women considered white under US law, including Latinx women, to divorce their husbands and naturalize if they hoped to regain US citizenship. As these examples show, the histories of women married to men ineligible to naturalize due to crime, political activities, and other reasons merit further study.This special issue, much like our analysis of two key provisions of the Cable Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, delves into the complex web of power relations that shaped the lives of both citizens and non-citizens in America. We purposefully refer to the analyses of migration and citizenship within this special issue as “critical histories” because they challenge narratives of US citizenship that adhere to liberal narratives of progress and liberal political theory, as Mae Ngai highlights in the epilogue. Moreover, they emphasize human agency and how everyday people understood and redefined US citizenship and their relationship to the law and legal status. In effect, this special issue showcases how individuals challenged the boundaries of who should be entitled to US citizenship and on what grounds, but also how and why some communities refused or renounced US citizenship.Yukako Otori's article focuses on the rights of foreign-born children of naturalized US citizens during a critical chapter in America's eugenics movement. Otori historicizes how immigration officials at Ellis Island targeted child migrants with disabilities and diseases for deportation even when they could claim derivative citizenship from their fathers. Otori shows that this exclusion of child migrants coincided with the rise of the eugenics movement, which heightened concerns about race, disability, and class at US borders during the Progressive Era. Disability, in effect, became a tool on which the federal government relied to dispossess children of derivative citizenship, resulting in new forms of exclusion from US citizenship, detention, and deportation at the nation's borders.18Turning to the intersections of migration, citizenship, and Indigenous history, Lila Teeters Knolle explores how settlers employed US citizenship and taxation to empower local state governments to erode tribal sovereignty, nationhood, and wealth. Examining the history of European settlement in the US Midwest, Knolle demonstrates how Lakota residents became subject to and resisted taxation policies implemented by officials in Dewey County, South Dakota. Before the twentieth century, federal policies largely prohibited taxes on Native communities, which differentiated their rights and status as non-citizens. While non-citizen Natives were exempt from taxes, county officials, desperate for tax revenue to support local infrastructure, advocated for including the Lakota in US citizenship. Knolle's analysis of US citizenship highlights that the formation of Native, emigrant, and immigrant citizens was relational and tied to ambitious forms of colonial settlement. Moreover, it underscores how taxation became a powerful rationale for incorporating Native communities into US citizenship.This special issue initially included Violet Showers Johnson. Johnson's article was slated to detail the history of citizenship among Black migrants from the West Indies in the early twentieth century. Johnson's research was in draft form when two family tragedies struck, and we supported her in taking leave from this project.19Moving from the Progressive Era to World War II, Michael R. Jin develops a counter-narrative of immigration history from inclusion to exclusion through a critique of birthright citizenship. Jin emphasizes that including immigrant communities into US citizenship was not linear or progressive. Excavating the experiences of birthright citizens of Japanese descent incarcerated at Tule Lake during World War II, Jin details how the Kibei, Japanese Americans born in the US who had spent time in Japan before the war, renounced their US citizenship as a critique of US imperialism, militarization, and the treatment of Japanese American internees. In his analysis, Jin captures the precarity of birthright citizenship, develops critical insights into the relationship between US citizenship and national belonging, and uncovers the power structures that shaped the transformation of citizens into non-citizens.The final article in this special issue illustrates how state data collection fueled conflicts between citizen communities over the inclusion of undocumented immigration for the distribution of federal representation and resources. Benjamin Francis-Fallon examines the struggle that arose with the proposal of a new “Spanish/Hispanic origin or descent” category for the 1980 census. As Francis-Fallon shows, this category had the potential to unite US communities of Latin American origin, but it also raised challenging questions about the risks that undocumented immigrants should take to expand Latino visibility, political integration, and influence in interest group negotiations. The debate surrounding the census energized conservative lobbying groups that sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from being recognized as members of the nation. These groups prioritized citizen control over state resource allocation and political representation. The efforts of some US citizens to dismiss legally vulnerable immigrants contrasted with those advocating for their inclusion in the federal census, and highlight the battles over state representation, resources, and the demographic stakes of “counting” undocumented immigrants.20In capturing these histories, the authors illustrate how US citizenship (and legal status more widely) has become a powerful means of differentiating rights and resources among citizens and between citizens and non-citizens. What these scholars confirm is the need to wrestle with the power dynamics involved in the pursuit, acquisition, and maintenance of US citizenship, including how it has become normalized as a means of regulating power within and across communities.