Family Ties in the Age of Exclusion: A Microhistory of Immigration, Childhood, and U.S. Citizenship

Abstract Drawing on women’s writing, family oral histories, and legal records, this article reveals how a patchwork of state and federal laws systematically undermined the rights and protections of U.S. citizenship for children. In the early twentieth century, Asian and Latinx immigrant families’ advocacy for their children’s citizenship and protections provoked a xenophobic backlash. Opponents argued that children born to immigrant families—particularly Asian American and Latinx children—were undeserving of U.S. citizenship. Avoiding explicit references to race, they weaponized the legal status of children’s parents—a thinly veiled proxy for race—to deepen segregation and strip these children of fundamental rights associated with citizenship. These rights included voting, owning property, and the right to remain in or return to the United States. Reinforced by congressional and state support for anti-miscegenation laws, citizen-only policies, and restrictive immigration and naturalization laws, these efforts entrenched profound inequities, creating intergenerational legal harms inherited by children, including those born in the United States. Even as court victories affirmed birthright citizenship and federal officials, along with progressive reformers, expanded initiatives to promote child welfare across the United States, immigrant families continued to navigate racialized laws and practices designed to undermine child and family welfare through legal knowledge, familial ties, and community networks. Their stories illuminate how immigrant families navigated immigration, naturalization, and state policies to preserve family ties in the age of exclusion.