Race, Nation, and Refuge: The Rhetoric of Race in Asian American Citizenship Cases

Explores the role of rhetoric and the racial classification of Asian American immigrants in the early twentieth century.

From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent," and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because the distinction between white and Asian w...