Citizen Constrained: Selective Inclusion and the Racial Limits of American Immigration Law

Abstract

Between 1900 and the 1950s, the United States constructed an elaborate legal and administrative regime that rendered citizenship–particularly for racialized Asian Americans–far from the stable guarantee it appeared on paper. This thesis examines the mechanisms through which Chinese, Indian, and Japanese Americans encountered citizenship stripping in distinct but structurally related forms: bureaucratic de facto denial, retroactive racial denaturalization, and wartime coerced renunciation. Drawing on archival research at the National Archives, the South Asian American Digital Archive and the Japanese American Densho Digital Repository, the Bancroft Library’s Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, and the Princeton University Archives, this thesis traces how state actors–courts, immigration bureaucracies, and wartime authorities–deployed racial classification, administrative discretion, and crisis frameworks to undermine the citizenship of Asian Americans even when constitutional or statutory recognition formally existed. For Chinese Americans, the Supreme Court’s 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision affirmed birthright citizenship while leaving intact an interrogation and documentation regime that treated Chinese claimants as presumptively fraudulent. For Indian Americans, the 1923 Thind decision precipitated the nation’s first mass race-based denaturalization campaign, retroactively stripping citizenship from naturalized immigrants. For Japanese Americans, wartime incarceration culminated in the Renunciation Act of 1944, which coerced thousands into relinquishing citizenship under conditions that fundamentally compromised free consent. At the same time, this thesis recovers the organized resistance each community mounted: legal campaigns, community institutions, knowledge networks, and collective advocacy that challenged their exclusion and asserted claims to belonging. By analyzing these histories comparatively, this thesis argues that citizenship has functioned not as a fixed legal endpoint but as a contested and negotiated terrain whose instability carries direct implications for understanding contemporary debates over denaturalization and birthright citizenship.