Inmigration In Usa

History of Migration and Immigration Laws in the United States
General Premises of U.S. Citizenship:
"From a legal perspective, the peoples previously known as Orientals and now designated as Asian Americans have
almost all, at one time or another, been excluded from U.S. citizenship. (Recent refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia in the wake of Vietnam War constitute an exception.)"(From Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 5).
"The McCarran-Walter Act establishes the basic laws of U.S. citizenship and immigration. This act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, has undergone several changes since its adoption. Originally, the law admitted only a certain numberof immigrants of each nationality. But a law passed by Congress in 1965 gave preference to immigrants with skills needed in the United States and to close relatives of U.S. citizens. A 1990 law continued these preferences. Aliens must be admitted as legal immigrants to get U.S. citizenship. People who flee to the United States after being officially certified as refugees may receive immigrantstatus" (World Book Encyclopedia)Naturalization Act (1790)
"The Naturalization Act of 1790 passed by Congress employed explicitly racial criteria limiting citizenship to ëfree white personsí; after this act was successfully challenged on behalf of blacks after the Civil War, ëAsian immigrants became the most significant ëotherí in terms of citizenship eligibilityí (Lesser, 85)" (Wong 5).
Criticalrace theorists and legal scholars have also explored the imbrications of race, citizenship and the American legal system. In addition to whiteness defining the legal status of a person as slave or free (in the pre-Emancipation period), Cheryl I Harris argues that "white identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits" and was "central to national identity and to the republicanproject" (280, 285). Harrisís essay explores the valencesólegally, historically, and ideologicallyóof "whiteness as property," and she extends this analysis to the changing definitions of citizenship as introduced in the Naturalization Act of 1790: "The franchise, for example, was broadened to extend voting rights to unpropertied white men at the same time that black voters were specificallydisenfranchised, arguably shifting the property required for voting from land to whiteness" (286). [Harris, "Whiteness as Property," from Critical Race Theory].
National Amendments or Prohibitions to Citizenship:
Amendment 14: Civil RightsóCitizenship Granted to freed African Americans (ratified in 1868).
Amendment 15: Black SuffrageóVoting rights extended to African Americans (ratified in 1870).
AsianExclusion Acts: barring immigrants from citizenship & ownership of property.
"Though Congress never enacted a law that specifically names 'Asians' or 'Orientals' as an Asiatic racial category, legal theorist Neil Gotanda has argued that the sequence of laws in 1882, 1917, 1924 and 1934 that excluded immigrants from China, Japan, India and the Philippines, combined with the series of repealacts overturning these exclusions, construct a common racial categorization for Asians that depended on consistently racializing each national-origin group as 'nonwhite'" (Lowe 19).
Chinese Exclusion Acts / Immigration Exclusion Act (1882)óprohibited citizenship for Chinese immigrants. Subsequent acts reinforcing the exclusion of Chinese immigrant were passed in 1884, 1886 and 1888.
"In 1882, 1884,1886, and 1888, Congress passed Chinese exclusion acts, suspending immigration of Chinese laborers and barring reentry of all Chinese laborers who departed and did not return before the passage of the Act" (Lowe 180-81fn14).
Immigration Act of 1917: Exclusion of Asian Indians (1917)
"A geographical criterion was used to exclude Asian Indians, because their racial or ethnic status was unclear"...