America's Foreign-Born “Citizens”: Disability and the Politics of Child Exclusion

Abstract Examining the histories of children and citizenship derivation, this article argues that eugenicist fears of disability transformed the governance of citizenship at the US border. For years, naturalization provided benefits to white immigrants who sought to reunite their families in the United States. Even after the federal government introduced quarantine restrictions in the late nineteenth century, foreign-born children of naturalized citizens were considered immune from immigration law enforcement. Some immigrant fathers leveraged their own naturalization to reunify their families, converting their children into “citizens” before their arrival at the US border. In the early twentieth century, however, this strategy was no longer effective. In Zartarian v. Billings (1907), the Supreme Court of the United States established the alien status of foreign-born children of naturalized citizens. Although some families continued to resist, the federal government subjected children to increasingly restrictive immigration laws. The rise of eugenics reinforced this shift in the provision of US citizenship, as desires to eliminate disabilities from American soil confirmed the outsider status of foreign-born children of naturalized citizens. This article analyzes cases of children diagnosed with deportable conditions to reveal how eugenicist ideas facilitated the dispossession of their derivative citizenship.