U.S. citizenship law barred Asians until the twentieth century

Evidence

The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted citizenship only to “aliens being free white persons.” When Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, it extended citizenship “to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” excluding Asians from citizenship, which, thus, permitted discrimination against them in immigration and naturalization laws well into the middle of the twentieth century. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s comparative chapter on how ‘us’ versus ‘them’ was legally codified; pairs with the Beydoun-Grosfoguel chapter comparison. — connects to: Women were largely barred from law practice until the twentieth century. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663; US courts redefined race socially to permanently exclude Asians from whiteness and citizenship — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 966