Week 13 Discussion — Who Could Belong, and Who Decided — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

For most of the country's history, a law decided who could become a citizen, and a later law decided how many people from each country could come at all. This week you traced that line from the naturalization law of 1790 to the 1952 law, read the 1924 quotas and the 1986 law, compared the archive's E3 and E5 excerpts, and met two concepts, nativism and xenophobia.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Nativism is hostility to immigrants in the name of protecting people regarded as native-born; xenophobia is fear or hatred of people seen as foreign. The Immigration Act of 1924 gave visas to two percent of each nationality's number in the 1890 census and completely excluded immigrants from Asia. The archive's E5 excerpt (illustrative) comes from a woman who resettled as a refugee in the early 1980s; when she names this town as where she is from, people ask again. Which concept, nativism or xenophobia, reads each of those two records better, or does one of them need both? Say what each concept misses, and give the other reading its strongest case.

Option B: The citizenship thread runs through eleven dated events, from the naturalization law of 1790, which limited naturalization to an alien "being a free white person", to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians but kept the 1924 quotas. Along the way come the 1848 treaty, the 14th Amendment (1868), the 1870 extension to persons of African nativity and descent, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Jones-Shafroth Act (1917), Ozawa v. United States (1922), United States v. Thind (1923), and the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). Suppose a public library has room for one panel on who could become a citizen. Which single event would you choose as the turning point, and what would visitors miss without another event you left off? Make the strongest case for a different choice.

There is no single right answer. A concept can fit one record well and another poorly, and a long thread can turn in more than one place; pick the option you care about, and show us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Working on your own: this version of the discussion is written entirely from your own reasoning, in your own words.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say which concept, nativism or xenophobia, reads the 1924 law better and which reads E5's second question better, and why; for Option B, say which event you would put on the library panel as the turning point and what visitors would miss without another.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (nativism, xenophobia, the naturalization law of 1790, the 1952 law, race and nationality) correctly, and keep documented history plain.
• Give your judgment, with a reason, and give the other reading or the other event its strongest form.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: point out what a classmate's chosen concept or event leaves out, offer the strongest case for the reading they did not take, or name a dated event from this week that supports or complicates their reading. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B and would put the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 on the panel. It ended the racial bar that the naturalization law of 1790 began, 162 years later, so visitors would see that race decided a nationality for most of the country's history. The other side has a point: the 1952 law kept the 1924 quotas, so a visitor might think the door opened all the way when it opened only half. I would still look for the text of the 1870 extension to see who it left out.

Notice how it names the law and its year, keeps race and nationality apart, gives the other reading its due, and says what it would still check. That is the bar.

This discussion is about the records from 1790 to the 1980s; it does not ask for your view on any current immigration or enforcement question, and no post is scored on one. Describe people by their roles rather than their names.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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