MOVEMENTS AND MOMENTS
Asian Exclusion: Aliens Ineligible to Citizenship
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Who “belongs” in the United States?
Chapter objectives
- Learn how laws have influenced understandings of race, citizenship, and belonging for Asians throughout US history.
- Understand how race was developed as a construct to confer benefits, privileges, and greater opportunities for white people, especially in cases of citizenship and immigration.
- Explore how these legacies of exclusion affect Asian American communities today, and the strategies developed by Asian Americans to combat restriction, detention, and deportation.
For most of US history, Asian immigrants were considered “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Even their US-born descendants, who held citizenship by birth, were racialized as “essential foreigners” and faced many forms of segregation. Laws and institutions excluded and restricted various Asian groups from immigrating, owning property, participating in electoral politics, marrying white people, and receiving due process in courts. Even though many of these exclusionary practices have now been overturned, their legacies have a lasting impact today, where some Asian American groups are still at greater risk for detention and deportation. This chapter explores how “Asian” became a racial category through laws and policies that deemed them “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”
Modules in this chapter
Overview
Restriction and Exclusion from Migration
Exclusion from Naturalization and Rights to Property
Anti-Miscegenation Laws
Current Exclusionary Policies
Overview
Restriction and Exclusion from Migration
Exclusion from Naturalization and Rights to Property
Anti-Miscegenation Laws
Current Exclusionary Policies
Chapter Sources
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Constante, Anges, “Immigration reform bill could allow Southeast Asian American deportees to return,” NBC News, January 27, 2021, NBCUniversal/Comcast.
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