INS granted Arabs citizenship eligibility by classifying them white and separate from Asians.

Evidence

By 1943, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) determined that Arabs were white and eligible for citizenship due to having a shared culture and civilization with Western countries. INS relied on the case United States v. Thind (1923) to argue that Arabs were not like Asians, who were ineligible for naturalization. — , Selod, Saher - Forever Suspect_…, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Documents that Arabs and South Asians occupied different slots in the racial hierarchy by administrative fiat — the differentiation the reader wants to trace. — connects to: The US Supreme Court manufactured whiteness to permanently exclude Asians from citizenship — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 951

Related

• Courts disagreed across jurisdictions about whether Arabs were white (similarity 0.91)
• INS declared Arabs white by shared civilization, reversing court rulings to the contrary (similarity 0.91)
• Arabs were legally classified as white in 1943 to distinguish them from ineligible Asians. (similarity 0.88)
• INS formally classified Arabs as white via a nationwide instruction in 1943 (similarity 0.88)
• Arabs gained whiteness-status in 1943 while Muslims generally remained excluded because Islam signified non-whiteness. (similarity 0.87)
• Whiteness was defined through exclusion of non-black immigrant groups too. (similarity 0.85)
• Arabs had to litigate their whiteness to gain US citizenship (similarity 0.85)
• Arab Muslims won US citizenship via the Semitic-race argument in the mid-1940s (similarity 0.83)
• Arab Muslims gained US citizenship rights by being classified as a Semitic white race (similarity 0.83)
• The US Supreme Court manufactured whiteness to permanently exclude Asians from citizenship (similarity 0.81)
• Arab Christians were denied US naturalization through conflation with Islamic racial otherness (similarity 0.80)
• Islam was not associated with whiteness, blocking Muslim naturalization (similarity 0.80)
• Early American courts inconsistently classified Syrians as white for citizenship. (similarity 0.80)
• Arabs were classified white for citizenship so they could be distinguished from ineligible Asians (similarity 0.80)
• Courts admitted Arabs to whiteness via cultural contribution discourse, not religion (similarity 0.79)