Authors

Amanda Frost

Paradoxical Citizenship

Abstract

In their article, The “Free White Person” Clause of the Naturalization Act of 1790 as Super-Statute, Gabriel J. Chin and Paul Finkelman make a powerful case that the Naturalization Act of 1790 is a “super-statute” that has shaped not only U.S. immigration law and policy, but also America’s conception of itself as a “White nation.”

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This Comment explores the conflict between the Naturalization Act’s racial restrictions on citizenship (and its proponents’ vision of the United States as a White nation) and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause (and its proponents’ vision of the United States as a multiracial nation). In important and interesting ways, the Citizenship Clause complicates the story Chin and Finkelman are telling. America has always been a bundle of contradictions, with a paradoxical view of itself as a White European nation on the one hand and a nation of immigrants that eschews bloodline and caste on the other. Those contradictions are on vivid display in the interplay between America’s worst impulses, as exhibited by the White supremacist naturalization law, and its better angels, displayed in the multiracial promise of birthright citizenship.

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Part I of this Comment describes how the Citizenship Clause bestowed universal citizenship that extended beyond the newly freed slaves to the children of non-White immigrants. Birthright citizenship provides a counterpoint to the racial bars in the Naturalization Act, demonstrating that—if only fleetingly—the Reconstruction Congress embraced equality for all, including for children of non-White immigrants. Part II describes how the contradiction between the racially exclusive Naturalization Act and the universal Citizenship Clause played out in politics, law, and immigration policy in the following years. For decades, the government tried to reconcile the conflict between these two laws by denying birthright citizenship to non-Whites. Not until 1952 did the pendulum swing the other way, resolving this legal anomaly by eliminating all racial bars to naturalization.

This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.

Repository Citation

Amanda Frost, Paradoxical Citizenship, 65 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1177 (2024), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol65/iss5/7