The US government reclassified Syrians from Caucasian to Mongoloid within a decade

Evidence

However, as xenophobia and White nativism against Southern and Eastern European immigrants escalated in the early 1900s, Syrians found themselves caught in the crosshairs. In 1909, the US government classified Syrians as Mongoloid. Within a decade, their racial status had shifted from Caucasian to Asian. At a time when four schemas—biology, phenotype, common knowledge, and geographic origin—complicated racial categorizations, naturalization cases produced different definitions of Whiteness across the country. Anti-immigrant politicians used the newly created Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization (BIN) to decrease the number of naturalizations. Under the pretext of eliminating fraud, corruption, and low standards for admission, Congress ordered the BIN to heavily scrutinize naturalization applications, with an unfavorable bias against non-Europeans and non-Christians. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 534

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on racial formation and citizenship in the early 20th century, similar to work on whiteness as a legal category (e.g., Ian Haney López’s ‘White by Law’).