"Throughout the nation's first century, the Supreme Court found nothing constitutionally exceptional about a statute that governed foreigners engaged in the process of immigration. Immigrants' non-citizenship was incidental to the nature of the regulatory authority to which they were subject. Non-citizenship became a trigger for extra-constitutional authority only in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Chinese and "new" European migrants alike increasingly became understood as fundamentally and permanently alien to the national character. This Article demonstrates that it was precisely this perception of immigrants' essential, indelible foreignness-their racial difference, their inability to assimilate, their corrosive effect on American citizenship-that gave substance to the metaphor of racial invasion, and thus to the Court's analogy between immigration regulation and war. The Court's intemperate defense of American citizenship against invading foreign races cannot, therefore, be swept aside as anachronistic dicta cluttering the otherwise logically sound foundation of immigration exceptionalism; rather, it is the cornerstone of the entire edifice."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p.743
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Immigration to the United States
279 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Immigration to the United States →
Related Quotes
"As part of its commitment to human rights, the United States offers asylum to foreign nation-als who flee to its shor…"
"The narrative of immigration as regeneration imagined the republican system itself, as well the economic arrangements…"
"Immigrants were legally reconstructed as foreigners only in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as Europeans…"
"Human judgment can never be eliminated from any system of justice. But we believe that the outcome of a refugee’s que…"
"If the adoption of the Alien Friends Act represented a dramatic short-term political triumph for the Federalist Party…"
"The history of immigration law and politics in the nineteenth century is, in an important respect, a history of repea…"
"Although the fact that the Constitution vests the authority to enact naturalization laws in Congress suggests that so…"
"Collectively, asylum officers, immigration judges, members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, and judges of U.S. co…"
"In crafting a naturalization law, prudence thus counseled that immigrants undergo a period of probation before being …"
"Over the first half of the nineteenth century, even as Americans developed progressively sharper critiques of immigra…"