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Asian Americans and Citizenship
Rights Racial exclusion has been a defining feature of the Asian American experience. In limiting naturalization rights to ìfree white personsî in the 1790 Naturalization Act, the Founding Fathers excluded Asian migrants from their new nation early on. The 1790 law was not overturned completely until 1952. Beginning in 1875, Asians were also targets of a series of immigration laws that denied them entry into the ìnation of immigrants.î These racially discriminatory immigration laws remained in effect until the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. The systematic exclusion of Asian Americans from U.S. society was perhaps most clearly illustrated during World War II, when Japanese Americansótwo thirds of them native-born U.S. citizensówere incarcerated in Americaís concentration camps. Asian Americans have not been mere victims. Though Asian migrants were shut out of the electoral arena, they challenged racist immigration and naturalization laws through the court system. The courts often ruled against them but not in every case. In Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898), for example, the Supreme Court affirmed that all persons born in the U.S. were indeed citizens, a concept established under the Fourteenth Amendment. Through such legal battles and broader struggles for social justice and equality, Asian Americansóalong with other marginalized groupsóhave changed and democratized American society. Citizenship rights, including the right to vote, had been denied to Asian Americans, who, in turn, fought hard to secure them for themselves and their children. For generations of Asian Americans, the right to vote was never something they could take for granted. Given this historical context, it must, in my view, represent a means to demand further change for justice and equality. <back> |