Search Results

This chapter examines the nationality acts of 1940 and 1952. These measures made it almost impossible under U.S. law to actively maintain another nationality without forfeiting one’s U.S. citizenship. Many were born in the United States with dual nationality, inheriting the nationality of immigrant parents while acquiring United States citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. As state competition reached the bloody zenith of world wars, it became imperative to keep lines neatly drawn among them. Hair-trigger expatriation rules were the result, under which individuals were stripped of their citizenship for any conduct evidencing ongoing ties to another state. These rules were consistently upheld by the Supreme Court against constitutional challenges so long as the expatriating conduct was undertaken voluntarily, for instance, the mere act of voting in a foreign political election.

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration reform to undermine the very premise of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Contrary to what the sponsors and supporters of the 1952 immigration law had envisioned, the number of immigrants entering the United States steadily went up during the rest of the decade in part thanks to many of the small legislative changes pushed by Italian and Jewish immigration reform activists. Many immigrants from Asia took advantage of the preference for family reunification and skill-based immigration and began to change the migratory flows to the United States, thus paving the way for the diversification of U.S. society usually associated with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, while these changes helped immigrants with family ties and desirable skills, they did little to help unskilled temporary migrants or to address the racialization of and violence against immigrants illegally in the country.

Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing for immigration reform for over forty years, many of them, sensing that the window for reform was closing, realized that they had to compromise to accomplish their goal. Although Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration marginalized the voices of Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates who had long fought for immigration reform, many of these activists remained quiet as the negotiations over the final bill hinged on the imposition of a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. For many of them, in the end, their priority remained the abolition of the national origins quota system, which they regarded as marking them as undesirable, second-class citizens. As many of them had hoped, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national origins quota system and prioritized immigrants with family ties and skills, but it also imposed global quotas, including on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which created new barriers for migrants from the Americas and exacerbated the debate over illegal immigration.

This chapter explores how Asian American advocates negotiated the growing marginalization of Asians and Asia within the immigration debates between 1952 and 1965. If the McCarran-Walter campaign marked a peak in Asian Americans’ influence amid unprecedented U.S. intervention in East Asia, the revision efforts that followed relegated Asians, and by extension Asian Americans, to the periphery of the national conversation on immigration. This chapter examines Chinese and Japanese Americans’ efforts to include Asians in 1950s refugee admissions, experiments in interethnic cooperation, and role in shaping the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Hawaii’s admission as the nation’s fiftieth state and the election of the first U.S. congresspersons of Chinese and Japanese descent helped institutionalize Asian Americans’ political voice in Washington, DC, with important ramifications for 1960s immigration reform.

This chapter shows that recent efforts to deport criminals also serve to underline citizenship's fragility and its contested nature. Drawing upon the example of the United Kingdom, it shows how governments have redrawn the boundaries of membership to bring some groups of people previously accepted as members into the reach of deportation power, generating controversy and contention. The changing historical contours of deportation are examined through the parliamentary discussions surrounding four pieces of UK legislation relating to the British state's deportation power. These are Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962; the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act 2002; the Immigration, Asylum, and Nationality Act 2006; and the UK Borders Act 2007.

Although the British Nationality Act of 1948 formally established a British Commonwealth citizenship that applied universally to all British subjects, irrespective of race, color, or origin, policy makers had no intention that nationality law would facilitate an unprecedented non-White migration from the Commonwealth. During the 1950s and 1960s, Afro-Caribbean migrants comprised the largest segments of newcomers from the Commonwealth. This chapter demonstrates how these migrations effectively destabilized racially exclusive boundaries of Britishness. In addition to exploring some of the factors facilitating Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain following World War II, this chapter examines the demographic character of this migration as well as some of the ways in which the arenas of housing and employment proved to be areas where the day-to-day dilemmas of being Black in Britain were most acutely felt by newcomers.

This chapter examines the U.S. government's systematic monitoring of the political activities and loyalty of Chinese Americans in the country in response to the communist revolution in China and the outbreak of the Korean War. It considers the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which related racial equality to the advancement of the U.S. Cold War foreign policy of internationalism, as an illustration of America's attempt to contain communism. Focusing on the 1951 Chinese extortion racket and the 1956 Chinese slot racket, it also demonstrates how the government incorporated Chinese loyalty into its expansionist goals in Asia to promote the extension of civil rights to Chinese Americans through immigration reform. It argues that immigration reform helped secure the rights of all and promote the credibility of U.S. democracy during the early Cold War years.

Family reunification provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) allowed ethnic women, for the first time, to sponsor the migration of their alien husbands and children outside the limited quota slots for Southern and Eastern Europeans. This chapter explores advice columns in New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano to examine the gendered implications of the 1952 act on postwar Italian migration. The 1952 act granted Italian women a new and controversial visibility in the Italian-language press and in the larger ethnic community as instigators of immigration. During the 1950s, this chapter argues, advice columns about the 1952 act turned into platforms for both exalting and policing Italian women’s roles in initiating postwar migrations, marriages, and families.

This chapter considers stylistic developments in Pandit Chitresh Das’s manner of teaching and performing kathak through the lens of Indian gender theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pandit Das began teaching mostly first- and second-generation South Asian American students whose families established themselves in the States following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This demographic shift led to broad changes in Pandit Das’s teaching, reflected in softer, rounded hand positions, upper-body movements, and repertoire considered more feminine. The chapter’s second section discusses masculine aspects of Pandit Das’s own dance, including his practice of dancing with dumbbells. Together, these sections consider how concepts of gender were expressed in Pandit Das’s evolving kathak style and how the half-male, half-female Hindu deity ardhanārīśvara influenced Pandit Das’s dance philosophy.

This chapter studies how immigration policy can be deployed as a key instrument of grand strategy, a site where state actors might use the levers of immigrant and refugee admissions to advance both a comprehensive and integrated set of social, economic, and security goals at home. Indeed, a diverse array of US presidents, lawmakers, and activists have had grand strategies in mind as they pursued major immigration reform. The chapter focuses on a particularly significant effort to remake the US immigration system—the 1960s struggle to dismantle national origins quotas and reopen US gates to immigrants and refugees—in order to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of grand strategizing in this policy realm. One can discern these dynamics in immigration reforms and executive actions from the 1920s to the present, but the successful battle for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 provides an especially illuminating example. Before turning to this case, however, the chapter first considers immigration control and grand strategy in the early American republic and the rise of rival interests and ideals that make significant policy innovation contingent on incongruous coalitions and uneasy compromises.

This chapter recounts how President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law (PL) 405 on July 1, 1944, which amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to allow U.S. citizens living in the United States to renounce their citizenship during wartime. Although not stated explicitly, the law was aimed at dissident Nisei. As Manzanar Project Director Ralph Merritt remarked of the statute, “This is the first time in the history of a civilized nation that a government has permitted a citizen, during a state of war, to renounce his citizenship.” Officials had several motives for favoring such a law. Some sought to have renunciants exchanged for U.S. citizens detained in Japan. Indeed, the chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Samuel Dickstein, suggested that the law's provisions be publicized in the camps, to be followed by notices “calling for volunteers to go to Japan in trade for Americans.”

The conclusion examines the impact Italian American involvement in immigration reform campaigns and interactions with Italian newcomers had on their racial and ethnic identities in the postwar period. The prevailing literature in the field contends that white ethnic revivals in the late twentieth century emerged primarily as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement as groups like Italian Americans attempted to distance themselves from the nation’s history of racial oppression and articulated their culture of white ethnic grievance in response to minority rights movements. This chapter, however, suggests an earlier chronology and more diverse origins for the roots of those ethnic revivals.

The introduction complicates the Orwellian orthodoxies we have inherited regarding literary vulnerability and monolithic state power by explaining how Matthew Arnold’s ideas about the state a guardian of culture found full expression in post-war Britain. Moving from examples including Reith’s BBC and Keynes’ Arts Council, it then discusses how institutional beliefs about the identity of literature’s publics and what they needed were gradually disrupted by the increasing ethnic and cultural diversification of Britain after the 1948 Nationality Act. The final sections of the Introduction set out the book’s conceptual challenge to the Manicheanism structuring both Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field, and ideas of the state as either censor or ultimate saviour. It concludes by evaluating the implications of viewing sponsorship as an expressive act for ideas of autonomy, and why archival work has the potential to transform our understanding of literature and its reading publics.

“West Indies to London” tracks the migration process—its triumphs and challenges—for a generation of West Indians at the twilight of the British Empire. Their journey was facilitated by postwar economic growth and the 1948 British Nationality Act, which granted full citizenship to Commonwealth subjects who settled in Britain. Synthesizing both secondary and original research, including records of the London Council of Social Service, this chapter argues that whether they were colonial students, artists, or professionals in other fields, West Indian settlers in London shared powerful connections to British culture and society through bonds of language, education, and class.

This chapter examines how border policies have evolved in Europe and the United States. It goes beyond law and deals more broadly with what has been termed “policy output. ” The chapter considers how policies have varied over time and space, and the author argues that in both Europe and the United States immigration policy has increasingly become focused on the border, the reinforcement of border controls, and the link between other aspects of immigration to these controls. The framing of the political problem of immigration—as one of legal entry in the United States, and integration in Europe—has been connected to questions of border control and enforcement. Even as levels of immigration have been stable, or even in decline, policy on the border has become more important. The chapter concludes by dealing with outcomes, which help us to understand the relevance of policy objectives.