Abstract
The Cable Act of 1922 provided for the first time in U.S. history, independent citizenship for married women. Henceforth, a woman’s citizenship was a status separate from her husband’s. A victory for activists, including many prominent social workers who had long-pursued equal political status for women, the Cable Act benefited many but not all women. Using primary archival data and published social work writings from the era, this study analyzes how prominent immigrant-serving social workers responded to the Cable Act, and the bifurcated sets of raced and gendered biases that shaped this and other policies and practices of immigration and citizenship.
Keywords
Introduction
The Cable Act of 1922 provided for the first time in U.S. history, independent citizenship for married women. Henceforth, a married woman’s citizenship was a status separate from her husband’s. The Act was a victory for women’s rights activists, including many prominent social workers such as Jane Addams, Sophonisba Breckenridge, and Grace and Edith Abbott who had for decades marched, lobbied, wrote, and lectured on behalf of suffrage and equal political status for women. 1 The provisions of the Cable Act did not, however, benefit all women. The interwoven laws of immigration and citizenship in the early part of the 20th-century constituted a complex web of hierarchical reckoning. Immigrants’ fitness for inclusion into American society—whether as contingent migrant or as permanent citizen—was adjudicated through the logic of contemporary racial, cultural, and gendered calculations of worth. The Cable Act’s provisions followed this discriminatory logic and, doing so, produced starkly different outcomes for women of different races. Focusing on the primary data from the archival holdings of the Immigrants’ Protective League (IPL), Hull House, and others in the University of Chicago and University of Illinois, Chicago archives, and a wider range of published social work writings from the era, this study analyzes how renowned immigrant-serving social workers viewed and responded to the Cable Act, and the bifurcated sets of raced and gendered biases that shaped this and other policies and practices of immigration and citizenship in this era.
The Provisions of the Cable Act
If indeed “citizenship is generally understood to connote ‘full membership’ in a state” (Aleinikoff & Klusmeyer, 2001, p. 1), prior to the passage of the Cable Act of 1922 (ch. 411, 42 Stat. 1021), the Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act, a woman’s membership in the United States was a partial one, an insecure status subject to change according to her marital standing. Prior to the Act, if an American woman married a noncitizen man, her citizenship automatically converted to that of her husband, and she was no longer an American citizen in U.S. law, regardless of whether or not the country of the husband’s citizenship conferred her citizenship. Conversely, if an alien woman who had no racial or other impediment that rendered her ineligible for citizenship married an American man, she automatically sheds her foreign citizenship and gained American citizenship in U.S. law, regardless of the laws of her country of citizenship. 2 Because a married woman’s citizenship was always determined by—derived from—that of her husband, prior to the Cable Act, a married immigrant woman could not file for naturalization on her own behalf (M. L. Smith, 2006). The gains of the 19th Amendment notwithstanding, “deeply ingrained notions of male dominance and female passivity” (Bredbenner, 1998, p. 105)—ideas that assumed “woman’s political non-entity” (Addams, 1933)—worked against women’s demands for equal participation as members of the polity.
The main purpose of enacting the Cable Act was, according to Cecila Razovsky (1926) of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), an established leader in the field of immigrant social work, “to grant women, in so far as it is possible, citizenship on equal terms with men” (p. 5). 3 The Act established that henceforth, a married woman’s citizenship was a status separate from her husband’s, and a woman’s citizenship would not be altered by marriage unless she took affirmative legal action to do so. The law also provided an expedited naturalization mechanism through which eligible American women who had hitherto lost their U.S. citizenship through marriage to an alien could regain it.
According to Adena Miller Rich, the long-time head of Chicago’s IPL, appointed the Head Resident of Hull House upon the death of Jane Addams, 4 the “Cable Act was vigorously supported by groups of those who had secured the passage of the Suffrage Amendment, and who saw it at once as the spirit of the Amendment in action” (Rich, 1928a, p. 66). It was also welcomed by social work organizations such as the IPL and the NCJW, long involved in aiding women and families affected by the exigencies created by the tangled set of laws on naturalization and immigration.
The new law benefited many women, allowing them, for the first time in U.S. history, the right to choose, within the bounds of a complex set of international laws, a citizenship of her own. The Cable Act was not designed, however, to benefit all women. The new law, enacted to ensure that a woman’s citizenship “may not be denied or abridged by reason of her sex or marital status” (Razovsky, 1925a, p. 5), was designed specifically to apply only to some women and to some marriages. “A curious inconsistency” (Addams, 1929, p. 136), as Jane Addams puts it, written into the law, excluded from the newly established right of independent citizenship, any American woman who married an alien ineligible for citizenship. Similarly, the right to regain U.S. citizenship through naturalization granted women who had been expatriated through marriage with an alien, excluded those women who themselves were deemed ineligible for naturalization. Established by the Naturalization Act of 1790 and upheld by numerous U.S. Supreme Court cases (Gross, 2008; Jacobson, 1998; Lopez, 1995), and applied to these circumstances, was a racial bar for eligibility. “Thus while the Cable Act separated marriage from citizenship, it re-inscribed the significance of race to both” (Gardner, 2005, p. 140). The “curious inconsistency” of the Cable Act was, in other words, a border drawn precisely along the lines of existing racial biases codified in the laws and courts of the United States in matters of federal jurisdictions such as naturalization, and those of state jurisdiction such as marriage, evident in the antimiscegenation laws that dotted the country.
The bifurcated racio-cultural taxonomy presented at the 49th Conference of Charities and Corrections by the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser of the New York School of Social Research was the commonplace view of those biases—a hierarchical reckoning of racial superiority and inferiority in that era: The racio-cultural situation in the United States naturally falls into two categories. The first category embraces what may be called the major racio-cultural problems, those of the Negro, the Oriental (in particular the Japanese), and more recently, the Jew. The second category comprises the minor racio-cultural problems which arise out of the immigration into the United States of various European national and cultural groups, such as Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, and Slavs (the immigrant English, French, Germans, and Scandinavians take care of themselves so well that their presence in this country cannot be said to constitute a problem). (Goldenweiser, 1922, p. 474)
The Act and Its Effect on White Immigrants
The Quota Acts
The effects of the Cable Act on White immigrants—Goldenweiser’s “minor racio-cultural problems”—cannot be understood without taking into account the two restrictive immigration acts that bookended its passage: the Emergency Quota Act of May 19, 1921 (H.R. 4075; Pub.L. 67-5; 42 Stat. 5), the “Act to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States,” and the Immigration Act of May 26, 1924 (Pub.L. 68–139, 43 Stat. 153), known also as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
The 1921 Quota Act established the national origins quota system, the basic structure of the U.S. immigration system that stood until the reforms of 1965 replaced it with the preference category system in place today. In the era of the quota acts, the influx of “the Negro” immigrant was negligible in number, and “the Oriental” immigrant had already been largely excluded from entry into the United States through laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act” of 1917. The quota system was, thus, specifically designed to limit the entry of Eastern and Southern European immigrants.
During the economic crisis years between the world wars, the always present nativist and xenophobic tendencies of the nation had heightened into hysteria. Enacted during this crest of nativist fear that the “trend of the nation’s growth is toward Latin, Slav, and Semitic blend” (Laidlaw, 1922, p. 467), the quota laws were the legal actualization of the popular discourse that the United States suffered from “alien indigestion” (Divine, 1957, p. 7). This “social indigestion” (Gavit, 1922, p. 817) was caused by the indiscriminate admixing into the American melting pot of too many undesirable stock of “an ignorant, superstitious, and dishonest class, which would greatly reduce the moral average of any Anglo-Saxon society” (Garrett, 1888, p. 188). Except perhaps the Protestant English, all groups of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe who were reconfigured in this era as the desirable Nordics had been deemed similarly unpalatable and unassimilable immigrants in earlier generations (E. Abbott, 1924). But in this era, the desirable Nordics, an expansion on the Anglo-Saxon category, which embraced even the once-reviled Irish, was not only upheld as a racial stock of a “decidedly higher order of morality” (Garrett, 1888, p. 188) but identified as the founding population of the nation. Stemming the incursion of the Latin, Slav, and the Semitic hordes was, thus, articulated as an imperative to preserving the nation’s racio-cultural foundations.
The national origins scheme established by the 1921 quota Act limited the number of aliens entering the United States from a particular nation to 3% of the foreign-born persons of that nationality counted in the 1910 Census. The result was an allocation of entry permits that heavily favored the so-called old immigrant stock from Nordic Europe, immigration from which were held at the prewar level, while the entry of “the new immigrant” stock from southern and eastern Europe was reduced to about 20% of the prewar numbers. The second quota act passed in 1924, described in The Survey as “the absorption of the Nordic myth into the statute law” (Standing pat on the quota law, 1923, p. 771), furthered this disparity by adopting as the base of the quota calculations the 1890 Census which counted greater numbers of Nordic immigrants than did the 1910 Census used for the first Quota Act. As The Survey editorialized: Congress, like the public, is swayed by the catchy phrases “Nordic superiority” and “Mediterranean inferiority.” There is little doubt that such a point of view is accountable for the suggestion favored by the House Committee that the quota be based on the 1890 census rather than on that of 1910 (Standing pat on the quota law, 1923, p. 771).
Edith Bremer, the founding director of the International Institutes,
5
explained in 1924 that quotas and the resulting backlog were antithetical to the cycle of family immigration; for the millions of men who came to establish their place in the United States in order to send for their families, the “original purpose in coming to America will have been made futile when their right to send home for their relatives is cut off” (Bremer, 1924, p. 208). As Jane Addams explained in The Survey, moreover, the quotas could not have been enacted at a worse time: Because the quota act went into operation so soon after the war, many families who had been separated before the war could do nothing toward getting together during the years of broken-down transportation and closed frontiers … During the first months of its operation in 1921, hundreds of distracted relatives came to Hull-House begging for information as to this new governmental regulation, and the stream has scarcely ceased since. (Addams, 1929, p. 135–136) He may not return to Russia; he is not assured that he, a Russian subject, would be permitted to reside in the land where his wife is at present domiciled. The quota from European Russia is 1,892, and the number of applications for visas already on hand from that country will exhaust the quota for over fifty years to come. Shall he desert his wife? Shall he divorce her? (Razovsky, 1925b, p. 516)
The Benefits of Citizenship
Although wives and select family members of American men were given “preference quota” status—put at the top of the quota list ahead of nonpreference immigrants—under the 1921 Act, even families of American citizens were subject to quota limitations. The 1924 Act, however, changed this policy to allow the foreign wives, the parents, or children under the age of 18, of citizens in residence in the United States at the time of the immigration petition, to enter the United States outside the quota restrictions (Bredbenner, 1998). Obtaining U.S. citizenship, thus, became for many European immigrants, a matter of sudden urgency. As Adena Miller Rich explained, because citizenship and immigration laws were so imbricated in this way, citizenship through naturalization became the “pivot of a plan” (Rich, 1928a, p. 71) for immigration projects “about which whole family groups and their homes revolve” (Rich, 1928b, p. 13).
Naturalization of large numbers of new immigrants and the facilitation of the entry of their families was, obviously, the antithesis of the quota laws’ intent, and many hurdles blocked an immigrant’s path to citizenship. The juridical practice of naturalization followed the typically circuitous logic of nativism. The resident alien husband’s attempts to obtain citizenship in order to send for his family was often blocked by U.S. courts which held his absent family as the grounds upon which he could be refused citizenship (Rich, 1928a). As implausible as it may seem, depending on the presiding judge, being wifeless and childless could represent either proof of “sojourning,” which constituted enough grounds for refusal, or evidence of immorality based on the fact of wife desertion, which could also constitute reason enough for denial of the naturalization petition. At least for a brief period of time at the height of this wave of nativism, such practices were not only the idiosyncratic interpretation of individual judges but an official policy; “the Bureau of Naturalization at Washington, under date of February 14, 1925, instructed its naturalization examiners and clerks to oppose the granting of all petitions where the petitioner’s family is not living in this country” (Razovsky, 1925b, p. 516).
The crimes of wifelessness and childlessness were not the only obstructions. Insurmountable obstacles in bureaucratic red tape were also strewn in the way. The Survey reported, for instance, that the burden of proof of legal entry into the nation lay solely on the alien petitioner, but in many cases it was a proof impossible for the petitioner to furnish. Even where the entry had been perfectly legal, it was impossible to locate a record of such arrival. Differences in the spelling of names, especially where translation from a different alphabet was necessary, frequently resulted in failure to locate the record. (The common welfare, 1925, p. 519) The one that surpassed all others in preventing naturalization was economic: the heavy increase in naturalization fees on July 1, 1929. The effect upon application was sudden and startling. To have increased the fees by 300 per cent at the beginning of the depression was incredible if assimilation by naturalization was the end desired. (Rich, 1936, p. 570) An Armenian, who happened to have lived in Italy for fifteen years, could not make the mistake of renouncing allegiance to the King of Italy instead of to “the Republic of Turkey” without being compelled to begin the naturalization process over again. (Rich, 1927, p. 535)
The Confluence of the Quotas and the Cable Act
In light of the strictures of the quota acts, the benefits of the Cable Act’s untethering of a woman’s citizenship from that of her husband were arguably more symbolic than real for many women. As University of Chicago Settlement’s Mary McDowell remarked: When we women secured the passage of the Cable Act, giving to women their own political status independent of the husband we did not dream that the passage of other laws, such as the Quota Act, superimposed upon the Cable Act, would bring great hardship to many women. (McDowell, 1930, p. 481) A case in point is that of an American-born wife who cannot return because her husband, a Lithuanian, is not a full citizen. She was married before September 22, 1922, and thereby lost her own citizenship. (Razovsky, 1925b)
In a 1928 study entitled “Administrative Organization and Extent of Naturalization in the Chicago District” conducted by the IPL, Adena Rich described a similar case of an expatriated American woman born in New York City, now living in rural Greece and unable to return home to the United States. A new law in 1928, the Copeland-Jenkins Act, provided American women expatriated through marriage to an alien an immigration visa outside the quota. But the nonquota status was afforded only to women unmarried—divorced or widowed—at the time of the visa application. The woman could leave the Greek hills behind, therefore, and return to the United States only if she divorced her husband and leave her children behind (Rich, 1928a).
Despite the several advantages the Cable Act brought to women, the Act also rescinded “certain civil rights and political privileges which were automatically bestowed” on foreign-born wife of a U.S. citizen prior to its passage. Jane Addams recounted the history of one such case. I know a charming Roumanian woman married to a prosperous American. For three years she has wished to go back to visit her aged parents. The Roumanian consul will not give her a passport because under the laws of his country she is an American. She is not eligible to an American passport under our laws since she is a Roumanian, and once out of the country she could only return as a part of the Roumanian quota. She cannot bring her parents here because only full citizens of the United States can bring parents outside the quota. The family are as completely separated as if steamships had never been invented, and afford one more corroboration of the dictum that our political concepts lag far behind our material achievements. (Addams, 1929, p. 136) She was a widow with a girl of six and a boy of eight. She left them with her mother. When she wanted to bring them, she could not do so because of the difficulty in the Roumanian quota. Their grandmother died. Then the aunt to whom they went to live, also died. Rudolf Petrof is a citizen, but as this does not affect his wife’s status, she is becoming naturalized in order to bring the children. (Wood, 1927, p. 1) A natural American citizen, who leaves the United States for business or personal reasons and resides abroad permanently, may still keep his or her American nationality. A naturalized American citizen, who leaves the United States, loses his or her American citizenship if he or she lives abroad for five years, or in certain cases even for two years. (Razovsky, 1926, p. 6)
The Act and Its Effect on Asian Immigrants
Race-Based Exclusions in Immigration
Since 1875, a series of federal laws designed to cull the undesirable immigrant based on individual factors such as character, employment, mental, or physical disability had restricted the entry of Europeans. The restrictions culminated in the two quota acts of the 1920s that, in essence, applied those individual characteristics deemed undesirable to whole nationalities. However draconian the restrictions became, however, White European immigrants were never excluded wholesale from entry into the United States. No matter how despised groups such as the Irish, the Russian Jew, the Southern Italian immigrant were at various times in history, their ability to become a naturalized citizen of the United States was never seriously challenged. This was not the case for Asian immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882 (22 Statutes-at-Large 58), passed in the peak year for Chinese immigration (39,579), was the first federal restriction on immigration of an entire nationality. The Act would become extended and reformulated repeatedly in the next four decades to culminate in 1924 as the total exclusion of all Asian immigration, making Asians the only group in U.S. history to have been explicitly excluded from immigration by reason of race. Comprehending the particular illogic undergirding the discriminatory treatment of Asian immigrants under the Cable Act requires an understanding of the long history of racialized discrimination meted out to Asian immigrants under U.S. immigration and naturalization laws well into the mid-20th century.
Although the Chinese were already deemed ineligible for naturalization not only because of the 1790 Naturalization Act which limited the right to only “free White persons” but a section of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty made between the United States and China, the 1882 Exclusion Act explicitly confirmed the Chinese as aliens barred from naturalization. The “Geary Act” of May 5, 1892, The Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States (ch. 60, 27 Stat. 25), again extended the exclusion measures, and attached an additional provision requiring all Chinese in the United States to carry certificates of residence to be obtained within one year of the passage of the Act. Those in violation of the requirement to carry the certificates at all times were liable for deportation, imprisonment, and heavy fines. The Act of April 29, 1902 (c. 641, 32 Stat. 176), extended the existing Chinese exclusion acts indefinitely and extended the exclusion to insular territories of the United States, such as Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, which had hitherto been open to Chinese immigration.
The “Asiatic Barred Zone Act,” the Immigration Act of February 5, 1917 (H.R. 10384; Pub.L. 301; 39 Stat. 874), expanded the exclusions hitherto restricted to the Chinese to all natives of the newly created “Asia-Pacific triangle,” with the exception of the Japanese, exempted from this exclusion by the provisions of a treaty, and natives of the Philippines excepted because of its status as a U.S. protectorate. The 1924 National Origins Quota Act eliminated all such exceptions to the exclusion by shifting the categorical ban on Asian immigration from the geographical to the explicitly racial. As will be discussed in more detail in the following section, the Act’s specific exclusion of the immigration of aliens ineligible for naturalization brought into alignment the law regarding Asians immigration with that of naturalization, as interpreted repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court. The restrictive measures were eliminated in part on the eve of the Second World War. In December 17, 1943, the racial ban against the Chinese was lifted and a trifling quota of 105 persons per year was allotted to China. Similar quotas for other Asian nations were established also through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (Pub.L. 82-414, 66 Stat. 163) known as the McCarran–Walter Act. Large-scale Asian immigration would not be permitted until the passage of the 1965 immigration act removed all national-origins quota restrictions.
The Citizenship Bar
The Cable Act’s extension of independent citizenship to women, a positive step in the long march toward gender equality, did not broach the strictures of racial inequality in citizenship, the foundation for which was laid by the Act of March 26, 1790 (1 Stat. 103) which restricted the right of naturalization to only “free White persons.” Prior to the 1868 adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment which declared “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside,” the U.S. Constitution was “silent as to the meaning of the word citizen, either by way of inclusion or exclusion” (Kansas, 1948, p. 275), making the 1790 Act the main legal statute defining the parameters of eligibility. It took the Civil War and the Naturalization Act of July 14, 1870 (ch. 254, 16 Stat. 254), to extend naturalization rights to aliens of African nativity and to person of African descent. Naturalization rights for Asian immigrants were not granted in U.S. law for many years hence. The Supreme Court never overturned the 1790 law or made interpretations of the “free White” bar in favor of Asians; the right of Asians to become naturalized citizens was ultimately obtained, piecemeal, through Congressional measures enacted well into 20th century. 6
The 1790 Naturalization Act did not define “White persons,” and no uniform standard of practice governed its interpretation. That the logic of contemporary discourses of race, racial boundaries, and racial definitions were not evident, seamless, and fully accomplished truths, but projects in constant flux in need of readjustment, modification, and realignment is demonstrated by the fact that decisions and opinions among the lower courts, between lower courts and the higher, among justices in the highest, and within congress and between congressional sessions, were often inconsistent and contradictory (Jacobson, 1998; Lopez, 1995). Prior to formal annexation, Hawaiian natives were declared aliens ineligible for naturalization in lower courts, 7 but they were later collectively naturalized by territorial accession. Many Japanese and Indian immigrants were naturalized prior to the 1882 congressional ban on Chinese naturalization and two crucial Supreme Court decisions in the 1920s. The 1910 census, for example, counted more than 400 naturalized Japanese in the United States (Gettys, 1934; Ichioka, 1988). Chinese petition for naturalization had, however, been denied even before the Exclusion act of 1882 (see In re Ah Yup, 5 Sawyer 155, 1878; In re Gee Hop, 71 Fed. 274, 1895).
The numerous petitions by Asians for naturalization and suits mounted to challenge the denial of those petitions forced the judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to repeatedly rule on the meaning of whiteness and to justify the logic of racial exclusion. In ruling usually for the denial of Asian access to naturalization, the courts consolidated as juridical truths the powerful discourses of Asian racial and hereditary inferiority, which included in their wake, Asians’ cultural undesirability and lack of fitness for participation in U.S. society. In doing so, perhaps more importantly, the courts time after time reinforced as juridical truths the construct of race and racial hierarchy as logical and legitimate taxonomies. The question at hand was whether Asians could be included as an acceptable race, not whether race was a valid criterion for adjudicating inclusion.
The 1922 Supreme Court case of Seiji Ozawa (Ozawa v. United States 260 U.S. 178) was instrumental in clarifying the legal definition of “White persons” for Japanese immigrants. Mr. Ozawa, a 20-year resident of Hawaii, born in Japan and educated in California, petitioned for naturalization on the argument that the phrase “free White persons” connoted assimilability rather than racial categorization and that as such, he was eligible under the law. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, insisting that to be “White,” one must be “Caucasian.” In the words of Justice Sutherland: The determination that the words “White persons” are synonymous with the words “a person of the Caucasian race” simplifies the problem, although it does not entirely dispose of it. Controversies have arisen and will do doubt arise again in respect to the proper classification of individuals in border-line cases. The effect of the conclusion that the words “White person” mean a “Caucasian” is to not to establish a sharp line of demarcation between those who are entitled and those who are not entitled to naturalization, but rather a zone of more or less debatable ground outside of which, upon the one hand, are those clearly eligible, and outside of which, upon the other hand, are those clearly ineligible for citizenship. Individual cases falling within this zone must be determined as they arise from time to time by what this Court has called in another connection … the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion. The appellant in the case now under consideration, however, is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian, and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side. (Cited in Gettys, 1934, p. 64) The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man which they knew as White [ … ]. There is much in the origin and historic development of the statue to suggest that no Asiatic whatever was included [ … ]. What we now hold is that the words “free White persons” are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs. (Cited in Gettys, 1934, p. 65)
The Confluence of the Quotas and the Cable Act
As complex and difficult as the catastrophic convergence of the quota acts and the Cable Act made immigration and naturalization for White women, the consequences were far worse for women of Asian descent. As Cecila Razovsky explained, under the Cable Act, marriage no longer altered a woman’s citizenship without affirmative action to change it on her part “unless she marries a Chinese, a Japanese or a Hindu” (Razovsky, 1926, p. 10). Similarly, for women who had lost their American citizenship through marriage to a noncitizen prior to the Cable Act, she explained, “you may again become an American citizen—unless you have married a Chinese, Japanese, or Hindu” (Razovsky, 1926, p. 10). This, of course, was a discrimination which did not extend to husbands of ineligible women, since a man’s citizenship was an independent status. An American man may marry a Japanese, Chinese, Hindu-any woman he pleases. To do so does not lose him his citizenship. But an American woman is penalized when she exercises this right granted the American man. She may marry a Negro from Africa and not lose her American citizenship, but if she marries a Hindu, Chinese, or Japanese, however high his reputation as a scholar, she loses her American citizenship. I feel that American woman should not be penalized for marrying the person she loves. Marriage is not a matter of convenience; it has a spiritual bearing and none has the right to dictate the inner life of an individual. (Das, 1926, p. 105; Rich, 1940, p. 274)
Moreover, the quota acts which had made it so difficult for expatriated White women to return home to the United States made that return impossible for Asian women, since the second quota act, the 1924 Immigration Act, specifically barred all aliens ineligibles for naturalization from immigration to the United States. The case of Fung Sing, decided by the District Court for the Western District of Washington in 1925, is an example of the implausible web of obstacles created by the sum of the Cable Act and exclusion laws. Fung Sing was a U.S.-born citizen of Chinese descent who went to China in 1903, married a Chinese citizen in 1920, and was widowed in 1924. In 1925, she attempted to return to the United States to resume her life in the country of her birth. While the Cable Act provided a simplified naturalization process for U.S.-born women who had been denaturalized through marriage, naturalization was not open to a woman who lost her citizenship by marriage to a “Chinese, a Japanese, or a Hindu.” In marrying a Chinese man, Fung Sing, a U.S.-born woman had, de facto, relinquished her U.S. citizenship and had become a Chinese subject. Moreover, given the Act of 1924 which denied admission to aliens “ineligible to citizenship” and the weight of the multiple Supreme Court decisions that determined Asians were ineligible for naturalization, Fung Sing had been rendered, by nationality and by race, a person ineligible to enter the United States (Gettys, 1934).
Racial ineligibility as a factor in the application of the Cable Act became modified in 1931. The provisions of the Act determining (1) that a woman citizen who married an alien ineligible to citizenship should cease to be a citizen of the United States and (2) that while she remained in that marriage she could not be naturalized were rescinded by the Act of March 3, 1931. For a U.S.-born woman of Asian descent, the changes meant that henceforth she would not lose her birthright citizenship even if she married a foreign-born man of Asian descent. But the right of naturalization, which retrospectively included women who had lost their citizenship between the passage of the Cable Act in 1922 and this 1931 amendment did not apply to her, since citizenship by naturalization was still barred to her because of her race. 9
The Ozawa and Thind decisions resulted in a series of cancellation of naturalization certificates previously granted or upheld through lower court decisions. The consequences were particularly dire for the dozens of “Hindus” whose citizenship was revoked. Whereas Japan did not recognize the U.S. naturalization process as an automatic annulment of Japanese citizenship, the British Commonwealth did. Having renounced their British citizenship in order to gain U.S. citizenship, the revocation of U.S. citizenship meant statelessness for the “Hindus,” and they were now people without a country entitled to the protection of none (Gettys, 1934). As Marian Schisby explained at the 54th conference of social work, the “situation has produced much dismay among the Hindus in this country, of whom there are about 3,000, and especially among such of their wives as are American born” (Schisby, 1927, p. 580). Any American woman who had married a naturalized South Asian prior to the Cable Act now found herself not only denaturalized by her marriage to an alien but rendered stateless along with her husband. Any American woman who married a South Asian after the Cable Act fared slightly better, since she lost her U.S. citizenship but was not necessarily rendered stateless. The differences in options and outcomes between White women and women of Asian descent described previously applied here as elsewhere.
Conclusion—Discursive Elusions
The “vexed problem of immigration” (1909, p. 214), as Jane Addams termed it, was a central issue for the emerging social work profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Work with immigrants who constituted the poorest subsections of the growing urban population and occupied the worst spaces in the burgeoning city landscapes, shaped the nature, and the direction of social work in the crucial early years of the profession. Most “modern programs for organized and scientific philanthropy” (Schlesinger, 1921, p. 83), whether conducted by charity organization caseworkers or the resident workers of settlement houses, had their origin in the effort to cure the spectrum of problems presented by the great tide of immigrants flooding into American cities (Y. Park, 2006; Y. Park & Kemp, 2006).
Social work’s attention did not, however, extend to all immigrants. European immigration and various aspects of work with those immigrants was the major preoccupation of social workers in the early years of the profession. The topic of Asian immigration and the issues of Asian immigrants, a population systematically persecuted in law and in practice, cannot be characterized as anything other than sites of total neglect. The near-total silence on the affairs of Asian immigrants is perhaps best exemplified by what is missing from Edith Abbott’s two massive tomes on the topic of immigration edited for the University of Chicago Social Service Series. Neither the 801-page Immigration: select documents and case records (1924) nor the 862-page Historical aspects of immigration: select documents (1926) devoted a single page to the topic of Asian immigration. On the few occasions in which Asian immigrants did appear in the discourse of social work, they did so as the archetype of the undesirable alien. They were useful as counterexamples that underscored some factor of immigrant undesirability: If the immediate development of all material resources were the chief end in view, regardless of political or social effects, then the introduction of low-grade people, merely because they are cheap laborers, could perhaps be justified, but in that event we should admit also the Chinese, who are amongst the most efficient in the world. (Williams, 1906, p. 289) Those who from the immigration offices behold the masses of men, brown-colored, circumspect, silently awaiting their turn with that air of indifference which reminds us of the oriental peoples. (Alvarado, 1920, p. 479)
Prior to the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, a federal incarceration program in which hundreds of social workers became actively involved in working with large numbers of Asians for the first time in U.S. history, social work as a profession had little contact with Asian America. A 1918 report by the California State Commission of Immigration and Housing on Fresno County, California, an area of high concentration of Asians, detailed the use of County Relief by 25 nationalities; not a single individual among the total population of 3,000 Japanese Americans in the county appeared to have received this or any other type of County aid (State Commission of Immigration and Housing of California, 1918). The reports counted one Chinese on the Relief rolls, though a total of 700 Chinese were estimated in the city of Fresno (no county number was provided). Even in Hawaii, where Asian immigrant numbers were high, those that “demand the attention of the public systems of charity” (Lind, 1930, p. 214) were few. But this was not due to a lack of need, but because, as Lind, a University of Hawaii sociologist explained, formal and informal systems of mutual aid provided the needed assistance.
Immigrants’ development and use of mutual aid has been much written about (Beito, 1990; Ishisaka & Takagi, 1982; Leiby, 1962; Light, 1972; Portes & Manning, 1986; Reisch, 2008). For Asian immigrants, mutual aid associations and other internal systems of support were necessary buffers that aided in carving out lives amidst “the powerful forces of racism” (Matsuoka & Ryujin, 1991, p. 230) that threw up discriminatory blocks in all domains of life. Mutual aid organizations provided, in other words, a variety of assistance and support that Asian immigrants did not have access to elsewhere. The Chicago sociologist Robert Park’s conclusion that “no Japanese become public charges” (R. E. Park & Miller, 1969; 1912, p. 130) due to the combined efforts of mutual aid societies was a widely shared view about such ethnic organizations. Moreover, as a 1915 study commissioned by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America implies, mutual aid societies were evidence of the lack of need among the Japanese: Not only are the Japanese industrious; they are well organized to care for those who are unfortunate enough to be in need of assistance, so that few have become dependent upon the public. (Millis, 1978; 1915 p. 237)
The organized system of mutual aid among the “isolated and seemingly self-sufficient” (Reisch, 2008, p. 792) Asian immigrants must be understood at least in part as a product of exigency rather than simple choice, and no other options were available. For White immigrants, mutual aid organizations were temporary measures. As the various White immigrant groups melted into the proverbial American pot, the ethnic associations became combined under religious auspices as Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic charities that melded into the social work mainstream (Leiby, 1962). Asian immigrant groups, for whom such melding into the American mainstream was continuously blocked, the access to social work attention was correspondingly slow in emergence.
In his 1995 Colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and race (1995), the cultural theorist Robert Young offers a possible explanation for the absence of interest in and advocacy for Asian immigrants in the discourse of social work. Asiatics, according to the scientific discourses of the period were the “distant races,” while those lesser Europeans—the Irish, the southern Italians, the Russian Jews, the Eastern Europeans who were all, for a period of time, feared and vilified as unfit ingredients in the melting pot—were the “proximate races” (p. 11). The imputed distance and proximity were measured against the Anglo-Saxon, the normative center of the “American” ideal in the mid- to late 19th century period of mass immigration, then became transmuted into the larger category of “Nordic races” valorized in the early parts of the 20th century This differentiation between the two kinds of races “became a standard discursive feature of any book on natural history or race, and one of the most persuasive means through which any writer on racial theory established himself as being, in Foucault’s phrase, ‘in the true’” (Young, 1995, p. 11). Whatever the underlying explanation for their status as the epitome of undesirability and unassimilatability, Asians, the only “racial” grouping to be categorically and deliberately excluded from both naturalization and immigration by U.S. law, did not figure in the discourse of social work.
For Asian populations in the United States, even birthright, or jus soli (right of the soil), citizenship was a contested status not established in law until 1898, via the United States v. Wong Kim Ark (169 US 649). The case established citizenship by the fact of birth on U.S. soil for a U.S.-born child of Chinese parents legally residing in the United Statesas permanent residents at the time of the child’s birth. Mr. Wong Kim Ark, a U.S.-born person with Chinese immigrant parents, left the country for a visit to China and was denied entry into the United States upon his return. His case was pursued to the Supreme Court and in 1898, Justice Gray delivered the opinion of the court: The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children born of resident aliens, with the exception or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of Indian tribes owing directly allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled with in the United States. (Gettys, 1934, p. 18)
This rare Supreme Court ruling made in favor of an Asiatic claimant was not unanimous. The dissent, led by Chief Justice Fuller, opined in essence that the 14th amendment did not “arbitrarily make citizens of children born in the United States of parents who, according to the law, are and must remain aliens because of their ineligibility” (Konvitz, 1946, p. 109). Justice Fuller would not be the last to uphold the ineligibility for naturalization—a race-based bar—as an argument against citizenship by birthright. In a 1921 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science largely dedicated to the “Japanese problem” in the Coastal states, California State Controller John S. Chambers lamented that “California has gone as far as she could go under the federal and state constitutions and the American-Japanese treaty. If she could have gone further she would have done so” in its persecution of the state’s Japanese Americans, explained that the one of the next steps to be taken was “the amending of the Constitution of the United States to the effect that children born in this country of parents ineligible to citizenship themselves shall be ineligible to citizenship” (Chambers, 1921, p. 23).
More recently, the 113th Congress introduced bills challenging the right of jus soli citizenship, targeting another population: U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. The two “Birthright Citizenship” bills were Senate bill 301, introduced in February 2013 by three republican senators from Louisiana, Utah, and Arkansas, and H.R.140 introduced January 2013 by a republican congressman from Iowa and cosponsored by 29 other republicans from 13 different states. Similar bills had been introduced also in the 111th and the 112th congress (Congress.gov: United States Legislative Information, 2013a, 2013b). The fear-imagery behind the bills, that of the hordes of young, hyper-fertile, and largely Hispanic women and their wrongly legalized children who are rapidly and insidiously Hispanicizing this Anglo-Saxon nation (Huntington, 2004) is all too reminiscent of the 1920’s nativist laments for the disappearing Nordics and against the influx of Jews, Slavics, and Mediterraneans. The menace of birth tourism perhaps the newest nativist apparition, resides in the bodies of the young, fecund, and shrewdly calculating Asian women “Arriving as pregnant tourists, leaving with American babies” (Feere, 2012). It is clear that nearly a century after the era of the quotas and the Cable Act, the notion of citizenship as protected property—the idea that full membership to the nation should be a guarded good available only to the select few—remains intact. Since the era of the Cable Act, examined in this article, the field of social work has, unarguably, widened its purview to serve and attend to a diversity of populations, including Asian Americans. But if indeed the fact of exclusionary logic, the idea that particular kinds of raced, gendered, and otherwise marked bodies should not be allowed access to full membership in this nation remains stubbornly embedded, despite the many social and political shifts toward inclusion that the past decades have brought, it is a question worth pondering in social work whether access to its attention also remains similarly exclusionary.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Study funded in part by The Smith College Brown Foundation Clinical Research Institute.