The question of who is born an American is on the national stage.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in the case about whether President Donald Trump can limit birthright citizenship via executive order, restricting that status to children born in the country to U.S. citizens or legal residents.
This would mark a historic change to the 14th Amendment which has long been interpreted as granting citizenship to any person born in the United States.
The debate about who should, or should not, be a citizen of the United States has deep roots, and California is a prime case study.
Jane Hong is an Associate Professor of History at Occidental College and is a historian of U.S. immigration. She spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about how immigration policy has been shaped in the Golden State.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
When looking at the history of U.S. immigration laws, which go back more than a century, what is unique about California?
There's so much that's unique about California. I’m from New Jersey, and there’s this idea of “California exceptionalism” that I think a lot of folks bristle at in other parts of the country. But when it comes to immigration history, California really is a special place.
California, from its very beginnings as a territory and as a state, had a much more multiracial population than most other states in the country, particularly states in the Northeast. You had indigenous populations, large Latinx populations, Asian Americans, as well as Black Americans and White Americans… even before the Gold Rush days. When you think about that multiracial history, that just creates an entire set of dynamics where folks are not just thinking about the black-white color line, they're not just thinking about race through that lens.
Even today just thinking about how many immigrants live in California, I think nationally the average of foreign-born residents is something around 15%. In California over one-fourth of the population is foreign-born.
How did this diversity in the Golden State’s early days shape immigration and policy?
If you take a look at some of the earliest laws passed by the California territorial legislature and once it became a state, many of [them] aiming to restrict folks from coming in didn't just target Black Americans, but actually targeted Chinese. There were laws passed to restrict where different folks could settle.
Another thing that has to be said is that California used to be Mexico. And so when you think about how California came into the United States, it was captured after the Mexican-American War of 1848. So you already had a lot of folks who were just Mexican, who were living on this land. They didn’t move, but the government of the territory — who was controlling the land — changed after 1848. Not to mention the indigenous folks who have been here before everyone else was here, and who continue to be here today.
How did this complicate immigration policy, deciding who gets to live where and who gets to be part of this country, through that California lens?
There is a longer history. Folks will often ask, “was the U.S. open borders before the 1880s [or] 1870s?” I think a lot of historians have done work to show that individual states and territories tried really hard to restrict who was coming into their jurisdiction. Massachusetts [and] New York, they were trying to keep out Irish paupers. Oregon tried to ban Black residents in the 1840s, back when it was a territory.
But the way that the government set up it's really the U.S. Congress that was supposed to be in charge of U.S. immigration and naturalization policy. So we begin to see federal immigration restrictions targeting Chinese in the 1870s and 1880s. That's around the time that the United States doesn't just create an anti-Chinese exclusion regime, it also creates an entire U.S. immigration bureaucracy with the 1882 Immigration Act.
Things really do change because now the federal government hires immigration officials. They begin to monitor or track who’s coming into the United States, what kinds of people they’re trying to bring in, what kinds of people they eventually try to exclude. Chinese are obviously some of the first people, but later a lot of those exclusions and restrictions get expanded to other groups, including all Asians by the early 20th century.
Has race always been connected to U.S. immigration policy?
I would say so. I think immigration and naturalization policy have always been kind of entangled. The fact that the Chinese Exclusion Act gets passed the same year as the 1882 Immigration Act and Chinese are the first targets of U.S. federal immigration restrictions, that tells you something about how people are imagining who is part of the American nation.
You can see it as early as the 1790 Naturalization [Act] which restricts U.S. citizenship to “free white persons.” That law sets the groundwork for a racialized idea of who belongs to the nation, and who can actually exercise voting rights and other privileges in the nation.
Of course that changes as time goes on. After the Civil War, once formerly-enslaved Black Americans are emancipated, the 14th Amendment was created. The birthright citizenship piece that we're talking about now, that gets created and passed primarily to create a legal status for Black Americans. And so 1860s onward, persons of African descent are able to become citizens, anyone born on U.S. soil is able to become a U.S. citizen. [In the] 1880s certain Native Americans, indigenous folks are able to become U.S. citizens under very specific circumstances… that's the Dawes Act.
I need to say this because I don't think most folks realize this. U.S. citizenship [was] racially restricted; there are racial restrictions until 1952. I study Asian immigration at length; one of the things that really distinguishes Asian immigration to the U.S. is that unless you were born on U.S. soil, if you came from Asia you could not become a citizen because of your race…. That did not change until the Cold War.
So much of that history looked at race, but also the timing and era in which you’re looking at U.S. policies.
Those histories are really fascinating to think about. I think there are contemporary parallels as well. When you think about the politics of immigrants, the children of immigrants, and then once you get to the third, fourth, fifth generation, I think there's a way in which people who feel kind of far from the migration experience might not think about these laws as relevant to them or to their lives.
But for all people who live in the United States, immigration and naturalization policy matter a lot because they really set the stage for what this country is. Is this country a multiracial democracy or is it something else? When you think about what it means to be American, the United States is not exceptional. But because of how powerful it has been, especially since the World War II period, you can't ignore the United States. What the U.S. does in terms of which immigrants it admits [and] which ones it doesn’t, those decisions have huge implications globally.
I just want to emphasize again how much power law has to shape and transform people's lives. For folks who are watching the news and thinking, "birthright citizenship, this doesn't really apply to me,” it kind of does insofar as we have to think about what kind of nation we want to live in? If you have children or other folks in your life, what kind of nation do you want them to live in… who should be able to participate?
What would you like people to better understand about why birthright citizenship, as it has been interpreted in the United States, has existed this way?
First I would say out of 190+ countries in the world, about 30-35 countries offer unconditional birthright citizenship, this includes the United States. This means citizenship goes to children born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents' status.
Every country has its own very distinct history, but [in] the United States if you even just look back at early American writings — late 1700s, early 1800s, people are thinking about the United States as a nation of immigrants. A speech by the famed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass writing in the 1860s is called the “Composite Nationa.” Douglass is writing about Black folks, white folks, indigenous folks, Chinese and Japanese immigrants coming to the U.S., and he’s describing really a multiracial democracy where all of those people can coexist and participate in the nation.
I think this idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy has very long historical origin, so the proposal to change the way that it gets practiced today after more than a century, that's really something to take very seriously and to watch very carefully.
What are some big misconceptions that you'd like to address?
One thing I'd like to make sure folks realize is just how hard it is to become a U.S. citizen. There’s this conception that folks are just willy-nilly entering, and just everyone can become a citizen. That has never really been true. As I just described, there have been racial restrictions on U.S. citizenship from most of U.S. history.
But if you even think about the immigration system today, I can't tell you how long the lines are for people who are trying to apply for legal pathways to enter the United States, much less become U.S. citizens. The backlog is many years, decades in some cases. It really isn't a matter of people showing up and getting what they want, that's not how it works.
The other thing I want to emphasize is just how contingent and arbitrary immigration naturalization policies have been in the United States. The way that these laws develop, ordinary folks don't have a lot of control over [them] and yet these laws shape and impact so many people's lives.
But I think it's really important to have empathy and to understand contingency in these histories. And also to think about what could have been, but also to think about what could still be.
