An overview.
The first piece of U.S. legislation on citizenship was passed in 1790. This act declared that any free, white, foreign-born adult, male or female who had lived in the U.S. for two years was eligible for citizenship. Applicants were required to prove to any federal, state, or local court that “they were of good moral character” and pledge allegiance to the Constitution (Bolger, 2017). However, the citizenship successful applicants received looked different for men and for women. While white women were permitted to vote in some of the colonies, women’s suffrage was systematically revoked beginning in 1777 and ending in 1802 when New Jersey revoked its women’s right to vote. (Small, 1998).
The second piece of legislation covering citizenship passed in 1795 and extended the prerequisite amount of time residing in the U.S. to five years (Bolger, 2017). It also required that applicants publicly declare their intent to become citizens and renounce any allegiance to their former country three years before they can naturalize. Lastly, it opened such action to occur in the supreme, superior, district, or circuit court of any state or territory, or before any Federal circuit or district court (Bolger, 2017). Again, this legislation did not formally mention the differences between citizenship rights for women and those for men. And, until 1839, no American women could legally own their own property. Beginning with Mississippi’s passage of the Married Women's Property Act, married women slowly began to hold their own property and inherit property from others (Small, 1998).
In 1802, the first immigration papers were issued upon entry into the U.S. (Bolger, 2017). Congress passed an act so that court clerks must record every immigrant’s name, birthplace, age, nation of allegiance, country of emigration, and place of intended settlement. It also required courts to grant each entrant a certificate that could be exhibited to as evidence of time of arrival in the United States (Bolger, 2017). Another revision of immigration policy took place in 1855 when Congress decided citizenship would be automatically granted to foreign-born wives of U.S. citizens (Bolger, 2017). With this decision, Congress legalized one of its earliest practices linking women’s citizenship to the citizenship of their fathers and husbands. The naturalization process was further amended in 1870 when it was first opened to applicants of African descent (Bolger, 2017).
In 1869, the Wyoming Territory granted suffrage to white women (Small, 1998). It was followed by the Utah Territory in 1870, Colorado in 1893, and Idaho in 1896. However, before Colorado and Idaho passed their laws, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett (1875) that Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which, in effect if not specifically, extended citizenship to male former slaves, did not extend suffrage to women. In reality, it didn’t even extend suffrage to male former slaves. For reference, female U.S. citizens gained the right to vote in 1920 (Small, 1998). Legal and social hindrances at the regional and state level kept African Americans from legally voting until the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and have continued doing so in practice to varying extents up to present day.
Amid racial tensions, Congress continued the U.S. naturalization and immigration processes’ history of exclusion in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act. The act denied citizenship to all Chinese immigrants and began a ten-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. It also instituted a more elaborate registration system for Chinese immigrants. Chinese people, called “laborers” in the official documents, who were already in the U.S. were required to obtain “return certificates” before traveling abroad (Morawetz & Fernandez-Silber, 2014). Regardless of the original document’s language, the act affected more than just laborers from the then completed Central Pacific Railroad and defunct gold mines. It also affected non-manual laborers such as merchants and students who did not technically need to register, effectively making arrest and deportation a possibility simply because of Chinese ancestry (Morawetz & Fernandez-Silber, 2014).
Legislation enacted in 1902 added bureaucratic complications to the structure of naturalization and made the petition to become a citizen subject to a sort of investigation and hearing before a judge. The 1902 legislation also moved oversight of naturalization processes to the new Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. This status quo remained in effect until 1952 (Bolger, 2017). This move also consolidated immigration law and added polygamists and political radicals to the growing immigration exclusion list (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). In 1906, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization began requiring knowledge of English for naturalization applicants (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). The next year, a bill increased the tax for immigration and added people with physical disabilities, mental disabilities or tuberculosis and children unaccompanied by parents to the exclusion list. The 1907 law also began restricting Japanese immigration. The exclusion list grew again in 1917 when Congress added “illiterates, persons of psychopathic inferiority, men as well as women entering for immoral purposes, alcoholics, stowaways, and vagrants” to the exclusion list (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). The first numeric limits on immigration began in 1921. This quantitative policy set temporary annual maximums for different nationalities. These temporary quotas were made permanent in 1924 by a law that also established the Border Patrol (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.).
In 1943, legislation ended Chinese exclusion and began the import of agricultural workers through the Bracero Program. The program allowed agricultural workers, mostly from Latin America, to gain temporary work visas. However, the program was often exploitative and dangerous for workers. For example, in a Bracero processing center near El Paso, Texas, incoming workers were sprayed with the carcinogenic insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, also known as DDT (Photos: Bracero workers, n.d.).
This period also saw the inception of the green card with the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (History of the Green Card, 2017). Because of the rise in nationalism and xenophobia during World War II, Congress began requiring the registration of every foreign-born resident over 14 years of age (Morawetz and Fernandez-Silber, 2014). The act also made advocating for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government a criminal offense. This act led to convictions of several leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of the United States of America. This form of identification was used until the late 1970s (History of the Green Card, 2017). Though its official name was the Alien Registration Receipt Card, it became colloquially known as the “green card” because of its green color. In 1977, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, formerly the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, issued a new harder-to-counterfeit card and called it the “Resident Alien” card. These cards were issued until 1997 when the technology was improved and the card changed names again to the “Permanent Resident” card (History of the Green Card, 2017).
The last wave of major immigration legislation began with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). The policies which were in place before the act’s implementation were consolidated and expanded. With this legislation, Congress reaffirmed the quota system by country of origin, limited immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere leaving the Western Hemisphere unrestricted, established preferences for skilled workers and relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, and intensified security and screening standards (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). The next intensive piece of legislation, known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 or the Hart-Cellar Act, ended the national origins quota system but established numerical ceilings of 20,000 per country and 170,000 per hemisphere, favoring the traditional nuclear family of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The reforms of the late 20th century (1986 and 1996) continued Congress’ attempts to limit illegal immigration and create new regulations for legal immigrants (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.).
While most historical legislation on immigration and naturalization has failed to mention any sexual minority, the Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996 defined marriage as being only between one man and one woman, officially restricting the spousal legal resident rights to heterosexual couples only (History of U.S. Immigration Laws, n.d.). This exclusion was ended with a recent policy change by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2013. USCIS will now, “determine people's marital status by the place they were wed, not where they are now living” (Fischer, 2013). Since a majority of the U.S. citizenship policies are based around the nuclear family, this change allowed for homosexual couples to take advantage federal laws giving U.S. citizens and permanent lawful residents the ability to sponsor a spouse for an immigrant visa (Fischer, 2013). However, this change still favors homosexual relationships that mirror heteronormative ideals.
It is clear from this history that the processes of citizenship have been structured to create citizens out of the white and the male and exclude the racial, sexual, and gender minority.
The documentation and registration policies prominent in immigration law throughout the country’s history create unique costs for minority populations (Morawetz & Fernandez-Silber, 2014).
“As social scientists describe the problem, ‘population data systems’ often prove dangerous because they ‘permit the identification of vulnerable subpopulations within the larger population, or even the definition of entire populations as ‘outcasts’ and a threat to the overall health of the state’” (Morawetz & Fernandez-Silber, 2014 and Seltzer & Anderson, 2001).
For example, the U.S. founders emphasized a model of citizenship based on civic responsibility and “active consent rather than passive inheritance” (Somerville, 2005). Following that logic, it would make sense that naturalization, or active pursuit of citizenship and political belonging, would be the ideal model. However, the ideal citizenship status remains to be inherited citizenship (Somerville, 2005). Immigrants like my father, Luis Navarro, can innately feel that social hierarchy that places inherited citizenship above naturalized citizenship. In addition, articulations of naturalization dating back to the Naturalization Act of 1790 revert to the logic that sexual reproduction within traditional nuclear families are above all else in that social hierarchy (Somerville, 2005). This construction puts individuals and families outside of the legal and social norm, including transgender, gay, queer, lesbian, and other gender and sexual minorities, at a severe disadvantage (Somerville, 2005).
(See the blogpost titled "References" for bibliography)