Comment

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ON IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP is a welcome contribution to the evolving scholarship in the field. The original essays help us think about the linkages and distinctions between histories of immigration and citizenship, two concepts that are often thought about together but whose relationship is worth considering more closely. Perhaps the most enduring link between the two is the conventional understanding that citizenship is the ultimate achievement of membership in the nation, the idea that a kind of assimilation conveyor belt leads immigrants to full inclusion. As editors Hardeep Dhillon and Maddalena Marinari point out in their introduction, this idea, captured in the well-worn “nation of immigrants” trope, has been subject to much critique. The two main angles of revisionist scholarship are, first, the recognition of transnational subjects, who do not necessarily migrate to settle permanently; and second, the myriad ways in which host societies exclude migrants from full membership on account of their national origin, race, or other markers of difference. The editors’ discussion of a 1907 US law expatriating women citizens who married non-citizens and its repeal in 1922 (save for women who married immigrants ineligible for citizenship, i.e. many Asian American women) is a stark example of how gender and race politics operated to nullify citizenship. In similar fashion the essays in this special issue disrupt and complicate the migration-assimilation-citizenship telos. The authors draw from various fields, among them ethnic, settler colonial, and disability studies, giving us a rich array of perspectives of citizenship.1At another level, the essays disrupt the very category of the “citizen” itself. If, for example, the citizen is legally understood to be a member of a nation-state, what about transnational subjects? Transnational methods and frameworks have enabled us to see that migrants may go back and forth between homeland and destination countries, living simultaneously in two social spaces geographically distant and sustaining attachments to both nations’ cultures and politics. These dynamics help us understand the richness and diversity of migrant experience. They also pose new questions, both empirical and theoretical, for questions of belonging in both homeland and adoptive countries. How do transnational practices and identities impinge on the concept of national citizenship?2From another angle, we can think about how the “citizen” is conceived in liberal political theory. Here, the citizen is understood as an abstract, universal subject, the bearer of rights and an actor in the polis. Collectively, they comprise an abstract citizenry unified by a solidaristic identity. These definitions of the citizen and the citizenry help us think about the normative expectations of civic life in democratic societies. But empirically, of course, citizens are not abstract universal subjects. They are diverse human beings who are products of history and its contingencies. In the European and American contexts, the abstract “citizen” is, in fact, presumed to be native-born, white, and male; he is also economically independent and able-bodied. Others who may legally be citizens—women, foreign-born naturalized citizens, formerly enslaved Black people, and others—face disabilities and exclusions from citizenship. The normative categories of citizenship as status, rights, participation, and recognition can help us understand how subaltern subjects might be excluded (or struggle to become included) in the body politic as citizens.3One might assume that these categories of citizenship are building blocks, starting with legal status, which bear rights and encourage participation, which become the ground for a culture of solidarity. But that is not necessarily the case. Cultural misrecognition can loop back to debase or nullify legal status. That dynamic is manifest in the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, the subject of Michael R. Jin's essay. US authorities operated on the racist premise that “the Japanese race is an enemy race” and rounded up both non-citizens and citizens. Jin focuses on the predicaments facing the Kibei, second-generation US-born Japanese Americans who were raised in Japan or went there for schooling. Those who returned to the United States in the years leading up to the war faced a full-scale crisis during the internment. They were especially targeted because of their transnational identity, believed to be the most unassimilated and therefore the most suspect and dangerous Japanese Americans. Scholars of the internment have shown that the Kibei were prominent among the population of those who refused to answer affirmatively to the notorious loyalty tests. But Jin complicates the story by showing that the Kibei were not a monolithic group. Many did pledge their loyalty to the United States, including those who volunteered to work as translators in the US Army's Military Intelligence Service and served in combat in the Pacific theater. While some Kibei renounced their American citizenship and asked for repatriation to Japan, others joined militant demonstrations demanding their rights as US citizens. The heterogenous practices of the Kibei caution us against assuming that legal categories are reliable predictors of political behavior. Jin's discussion of the ongoing marginalization of the Kibei is also a critical appraisal of the hyper-assimilationist trend within the Japanese American community that echoed the same suspicions of transnational experiences that drove government authorities.The citizenship renunciation cases during the internment exemplify how subaltern subjects have insisted on their own definitions of citizenship in order to control their lives and protect their families and communities. In many cases, assuming or rejecting the legal status of citizenship was not necessarily based on patriotic commitments but a practical pursuit of personal interests. Many Kibei answered “no” to the loyalty test and renounced their American citizenship to avoid separation from their non-citizen parents. Their pragmatic commitments became clear when Japan lost the war and the overwhelming majority of renunciants sought to restore their American citizenship.4 In our own time we can think about pragmatic citizenship in the case of immigrants who naturalize in order to have access to social welfare benefits, or Americans of European descent who seek an E.U. passport to facilitate work and travel abroad.These dynamics are evident in other essays in this forum. Lila Teeters Knolle's essay on the Lakota people's resistance to paying taxes in South Dakota examines the way in which the Lakota—despite having become citizens and property owners after the Dawes Act—rejected the presumption that taxation was a core obligation of citizenship. The Dawes Act (1887) strove to “assimilate” Indians by severing them from tribal affiliations, making them US citizens, and “allotting” them individual plots of land. (Of course, the general aim was to further dispossess Native peoples of their lands and sovereignty.) Local white-settler governments aggressively taxed Indian property on grounds that they were subject to their jurisdiction and that public revenues were needed to support ever-growing settler communities. But treaty agreements, the Dawes Act, and other laws stipulated that allotments would transfer to fee-simple ownership and that Indians would become full citizens only after twenty-five years. Until that time Indians remained exempt from taxation. The Indians persisted with petitions and lawsuits to uphold their right to remain “untaxed” and prevailed in several federal cases. Even after Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, which forcibly imposed US citizenship on all Native Americans, Indians could not be forced to pay taxes prematurely.The question of Indian taxation highlights the vexed legal position of Native Americans in US settler-colonial historical contexts, in which treaties between Indian nations and the United States recognized Indian sovereignty while simultaneously abridging it with legal status categories that designated them as “domestic dependent nations” and “wards” of the United States. These contradictions, as well as ambiguities in the terms and meaning of US citizenship itself, created opportunities for Native people to resist and survive the relentless imperatives of settler-colonial dispossession. From the 1850s to the 1870s (before Dawes), Native peoples in Wisconsin, Iowa, and other areas in the upper Midwest negotiated agreements with the government that ceded portions of their lands in exchange for the right to purchase property, become citizens, and live permanently on their land. They even continued to receive tribal annuities while becoming voters. These cases illustrate the argument made by historians Stephen Kantrowitz and Michael John Witgen: that colonial interests and relations, whereby white settlers relied on Native peoples for resources and trade, modified the drive for complete removal.5Knolle's examination of the relationship between taxation and citizenship helps us think about taxation as a proxy for belonging more broadly. In principle, taxation is a two-way proposition, in which the state imposes taxes on those within its jurisdiction in exchange for protection and resources. But whether either party fulfils their obligation to the other is a matter of contingency, power, and purpose. For example, during the early years of the California Gold Rush, the state passed a hefty tax on non-citizens. In fact, because the tax amounted more than what the average person earned from gold mining, its purpose was not to license or protect but to drive non-citizens from the goldfields. It was largely successful in eliminating French, Sonoran, Chilean, and other non-citizens from gold mining, even though public outcry and violent resistance led the legislature to the repeal of the tax. A few years later the state levied another foreign miner's tax against Chinese gold miners, again intending to drive them out. Leaders of the Chinese community did not reject the tax but argued with state officials that if they paid the tax, they should be allowed to remain. In other words, they considered the tax a social contract, or a license. Moreover, they proposed that revenue from the taxes would be evenly split between the state and the county, to give local officials incentive to allow the Chinese to remain. Although county tax collectors could be corrupt and even violent, the proposition that the Chinese would be allowed to remain generally held. In contrast, during the Australian gold rush, Chinese gold diggers resisted the special taxes imposed upon them on grounds that they were onerous and discriminatory. They sent petitions, held mass demonstrations, and simply refused to pay until they were drastically reduced or withdrawn.6As Dhillon and Marinari show in their discussion of the Cable Act, citizenship could be conferred (or annulled) by marriage. Another kind of conferral is derivative citizenship, the subject of Yukako Otori's essay. Since 1790 US citizens have had the right to confer citizenship upon their children if they were born abroad. Customary practice recognized the parental rights of naturalized citizens and their foreign-born children, who were easily admitted and naturalized upon their arrival in the United States. But the advent of restrictive immigration laws in the late nineteenth century wreaked havoc on the rights of citizen parents and children by excluding two categories of derivative child citizens: those deemed “defective” or “diseased” and young Chinese sons of Chinese American citizens. Otori's essay, focusing on the former, examines the ideological and practical influence of eugenics on immigration, border, and citizenship policies. In effect, immigration officials and courts applied to citizens immigration restrictions designed to exclude non-citizens.7 The medicalization of border control, driven by eugenics and the imperative for immigrant labor for the nation's industrialization—healthy, able-bodied, and mentally competent—spilled over to undermine the status and rights of citizens. Viewed as future workers (rather than future citizens), they became subject to exclusion if the state believed they were “defective.”What I find fascinating here is how the immigration authorities and local courts devised new rules to serve political goals. Some might appear to be rather picky in their detail, but in fact the authorities were mindful of the letter of the law and the rights of citizens, at least abstractly. They did not claim outright that a person could be excluded from the country of their citizenship, which would have been akin to banishment. Rather, they wrote specific rules that parsed, for example, what constituted an “arrival”—did a child “arrive” upon stepping ashore, or were they “landed” only after passing inspection? In effect the rule stripped these children of their citizenship status by requiring them to go through the same procedures as new immigrants, by which they could be excluded.The rules governing derivative citizenship became increasingly strict in other ways, in order to exclude Chinese American derivative citizens. In the 1920s and 1930s immigration officials rewrote the rules to require that the father must have lived in the United States before the birth of his foreign-born child in order to confer citizenship to them, in effect nullifying citizenship rights of those who naturalized after the child was born. Also, they held that a child had to be resident in the United States for at least five years before they could claim their citizenship, and that they had to claim it at the age of eighteen. These rules created a kind of dead zone for Chinese Americans, because a thirteen-year-old Chinese boy or girl whose US citizenship was not yet officially recognized was perforce excludable under the Chinese exclusion laws.8The imperiousness by which immigration authorities and federal courts constrained the rights of citizen parents and their derivative-citizen children reminds us that only birthright (jus soli) and naturalized citizenship are constitutional rights, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Derivative citizenship (jus sanguinis) is granted by statute and not guaranteed.Benjamin Francis-Fallon's essay on the “Hispanic” census category highlights that aspect of citizenship that concerns participation. The campaign to include a Hispanic-origin question on the 1980 population census is an example of proactive ethnic political organizing, in this case aimed at securing official recognition for Latinx communities. Mexican Americans and other communities of Latin American and Caribbean descent were not full beneficiaries of the 1960s Civil Rights Era, which created redistributive programs primarily for African Americans. In order to fully claim their civil rights, Latinx peoples had to make themselves legible—recognized and enumerated—to the government.9 As Francis-Fallon shows, the process to create a Hispanic census category was fraught with challenges, including the construction of a pan-ethnic identity from diverse national-origin groups and the potential benefits and perils of counting undocumented migrants—more resources based on a larger population but exposing the undocumented to the danger of deportation. Latinx activists navigated these challenges with remarkable political sophistication.Asian Americans pursued a similar process of political activism to gain recognition as a “minority” group by the Office of Management and Budget (1977) and listing in the census as a “racial” category (1980).10 The struggles for official recognition of “Hispanics” and “Asian Americans and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders” (the new nomenclature starting in 2020) has been manifestly a political project. Their aim is to promote inclusion of their respective communities, broadly defined. In effect Latinx and AANAPI activists summoned into being identities that are pan-ethnic and cross legal-status categories. The creation and use of pan-ethnic identities is not unproblematic: they blur distinctions of national origin and arguably reify racial categories. (Indeed, Asian nationalities are listed under the “race” heading of the census.) Proponents of race and ethnic categories in the census make the counterargument that as long as race and ethnic discrimination persist, data are needed to identify and rectify it.If these political projects for recognition aim to create the grounds for political inclusion and justice, they have also promoted solidarities across society. It was a long struggle to win formal civil rights for all and to win social acceptance that the United States is a multi-racial society. Today, right-wing attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) criticize racial distinctions to eliminate the civil rights gains of the middle and late twentieth century and to fracture solidarities across a diverse citizenry. As the essays in this special issue suggest, such solidarities are not a given. They must be imagined, generated, and defended.