The Making of Modern US Citizenship andAlienage: The History of Asian Immigration,Racial Capital, and US Law

Abstract

This article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US
citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state’s regulation of naturalization as it
relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is
to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between
the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference and racial capital.
Specifically, this article argues that Asian immigration to the United States remade
the modern US citizen and alien in two significant and interconnected ways. First,
it underscores how the adjudication of race in US courts and connected political
campaigns re-mapped race in the United States and sharpened the racialization
of Asia and Europe in profound ways that ultimately produced immigrants
from southern, central, and eastern parts of Asia as the modern US alien. Second,
the debate over Asian immigrants’ eligibility to naturalize refashioned legal status
as a normative avenue to sustain a regime of racial capital. It cast citizenship as a
legal avenue for White men and families to acquire and protect a proprietary interest
in citizenship and recast some Asian immigrants as permanent aliens in a period
when alienage came to signify disposable immigrant labor. The article concludes
by distinguishing how the struggle for US citizenship by Asian immigrants frames
the epistemological parameters and political vocabulary of immigration and
naturalization reform.