Making Foreigners

In Making Foreigners, Kunal M. Parker synthesizes four hundred years of American immigration and nationality law and posits that the law marginalizes certain groups of noncitizens, particularly people of color, the poor, women, and others, in ways similar to the subordination of disfavored minorities in American social life. The book considers “the multiple processes of rendering foreign that have been at work vis-à-vis outsiders and insiders over the long span of American history” (pp. ix–x, emphasis in original). Chapter 2 summarizes seventeenth-century English conceptions of birthright citizenship and perpetual allegiance: “Most British subjects were slotted into legal statuses that meant that they shared legal disabilities with aliens when it came to voting, holding office, and even exercising rights over property” (p. 47). Chapter 3 probes the emerging conception of volitional citizenship in the fledgling United States after the American Revolution. Focusing on the pre–Civil War period, chapter 4 describes the adoption of universal white male suffrage combined with second-class citizenship for women, the poor, and free blacks, and noncitizenship for certain free blacks and Native Americans. Foreigners had limited legal rights as well. Chapter 5 analyzes the “rise of the federal immigration order” in the late 1800s with the enactment by Congress of a series of discriminatory acts known as the Chinese Exclusion Laws, which the Supreme Court immunized from ordinary constitutional review. Not surprisingly, “Chinese Americans were frequently subjected to the same treatment as Chinese immigrants” (p. 119). Chapter 6 summarizes the emergence in the early twentieth century of a system of immigration controls, including ceilings on immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Minorities already living in the United States suffered similar legal disabilities and controls. The internment of persons of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens and immigrants, during World War II was “the most egregious instance of impressing non-belonging upon Asian-American citizens” (p. 179). Chapter 7 reviews the post–World War II “rights revolution,” a period when immigration and nationality laws became color-blind but, as implemented, had racially disparate impacts

Allegiance · Chinese americans · Citizenship · Dissenting opinion · Immigration · Immigration law · Nationality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suffrage · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy