Lecture: Immigration, Citizenship, and Belonging Across Groups
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 13
Opening
Think about a form you've filled in more than once. The first time, it listed four boxes for race. Years later, the same form had more boxes, and one you'd checked before was split in two. You didn't change. The form did.
Here's why that matters beyond one form. You may help families fill out forms at a clinic, a school office, or a legal-aid desk. You may hire workers for a small business. You may analyze census data for a city or a public-health agency. In every one of those places, you'll read a form, a law, or a count that someone decided on, in some year, for some purpose.
Let me remind you where we've been. In Week 2, you separated race, ethnicity, and nationality, and you first met the federal categories. In Weeks 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11, you met citizenship one group at a time: a treaty, an amendment, a statute, and a string of court cases. In Week 12, you read the 1965 law and met two narrators from the course archive.
This week, I want to lay all of that on one line. We'll trace who could become a citizen, read three immigration laws, compare two arrivals, name two concepts, meet Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African communities, and count the federal boxes. One word on names first. Arab American names people whose families trace their roots to Arabic-speaking countries. Middle Eastern or North African is the wider federal term, and many people name themselves by a country or a community first. And for people living here without the papers the law requires, I'll use the record's words, undocumented or unauthorized.
1. Who could become a citizen
Imagine a club that writes its membership rule at its very first meeting. The rule lets in only people who look like the founders. Decades later, the club opens the door a little. Many more decades pass before the last part of that rule is gone.
That's the shape of naturalization law. Naturalization is the legal process by which a person born in another country becomes a citizen. The naturalization law of 1790 limited it to an alien "being a free white person". Alien is the law's word for someone who isn't a citizen.
In 1870, Congress extended naturalization to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent". That's 80 years after the first law. But Asian immigrants stayed barred. In Week 11, you saw the Supreme Court hold that line in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 and United States v. Thind in 1923. The racial bar for Asians ended only with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. From 1790 to 1952 is 162 years.
Now step back and read the citizenship thread as one line. It has 11 dated events, and they touch five groups. Mexicans who stayed after the 1848 treaty could become citizens. The 14th Amendment made citizens of people born here. Puerto Ricans gained statutory citizenship by an act of 1917. Native Americans born in the country were granted citizenship in 1924. Each group got there by a different road, and race was the line the law kept drawing.
Pause and try this. The 1790 law used race to decide who could gain a nationality. Which two of Week 2's three words did it blur together?
Think about what citizenship is, and what "white" is.
Here's the answer. It blurred race and nationality. Citizenship is a legal membership, but the 1790 law handed it out by a racial line, which is why this course keeps race, ethnicity, and nationality apart.
2. The 1924 quotas and the 1952 law
Picture a ticket office that hands out concert tickets by neighborhood. It decides how many each neighborhood gets by counting how many people lived there 34 years ago. Old, large neighborhoods get plenty. Newer ones get few. One part of town gets none at all.
That's close to how the Immigration Act of 1924 worked. Also called the Johnson-Reed Act, it gave visas to two percent of each nationality's number in the 1890 census. Two percent means 2 of every 100 people of that nationality in the old count. And the count was 34 years old by 1924. On top of the quotas, the law completely excluded immigrants from Asia.
Here's a detail people miss. Every nationality had a quota, European ones included. Asia was shut out on top of that.
Then came the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It ended the racial bar to naturalization for Asians but kept the national-origins quota system built in 1924. By 1952, those quotas had already run 28 years. The 1965 law, which you read in Week 12, abolished them 13 years after the 1952 law. So in 1952, a person could become a citizen whatever their race, but how many people from their country could come in was still set by the 1924 rule.
Pause and try this. A classmate says the 1924 quotas were aimed only at Asia. What would you add?
Think about the two parts of that law.
Here's the answer. The quotas covered every nationality, European ones included, based on the 1890 count. Asia faced something harsher on top of the quotas: complete exclusion.
3. Two arrivals from the archive
Two students start at the same school in the same year. One transferred because a parent took a new job. The other arrived after the family fled a war. They sit in the same classroom, but they came through different doors.
The course archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection. Its excerpts are constructed for this course and never a real person's words. You met these two narrators in Week 12.
E3 is a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 immigration law, interviewed in the 2010s. The nurse says there was hardly a way in before 1965, that hospitals here needed nurses and the training counted, and that the nurse came alone in 1972. That's 7 years after the 1965 law. Later the nurse sponsored a sister, and the sister sponsored her husband.
E5 is a woman who resettled as a refugee in the early 1980s, interviewed in the 2010s. She waited two years in a camp before a church group sponsored her family. At school she was seated in the back with a dictionary, and by her last year she translated for her parents. When she names this town as where she's from, people ask again. She came under the Refugee Act of 1980, which passed 8 years after E3 arrived.
Now walk the reading. Neither excerpt names a country, a hospital, a camp, or a church, so we check their years against the laws. And here's the comparison: both could naturalize only because the racial bar ended in 1952 and the quotas ended in 1965.
Pause and try this. E3 and E5 both arrived after 1965. Did they come in under the same law?
Think about what kind of door each one walked through.
Here's the answer. No. E3 came under the 1965 immigration law's preferences, as a nurse whose training counted. E5 came under refugee law, which has its own definition and its own door.
4. The 1986 law: status and penalties
Think about the first day at a new job. Someone hands you paperwork to prove you're allowed to work there, and the business keeps it on file. If the business ignores that rule, the business can be penalized.
Rules like that have a history. Undocumented means living in the country without the papers the law requires. The record and the agencies also use the word unauthorized, especially for work.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, signed in November 1986, did two things at once. It offered legal status to undocumented migrants who had entered before 1982. And it penalized employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers. That entry cutoff fell 4 years before the signing, so a person who arrived after it fell on the other side of the line.
Now I want to be careful with you here. The 1986 law is documented history, so I state what it did plainly. But how immigration law should be enforced now is a live public question, and this course names that debate without arguing it. One side stresses the rule of law, border security, and the wages of workers already here. The other side stresses family unity, the work immigrants already do, and humane treatment. Each side has a serious case. The course takes no side.
Pause and try this. A summary says the 1986 law only legalized people. What did it leave out?
Count the things the law did.
Here's the answer. It left out the employer penalties. The law offered legal status to people who had entered before 1982, and it penalized employers who knowingly hired unauthorized workers.
5. Nativism and xenophobia
Picture a corner store. A customer mutters that newcomers should go back where they came from, then pays and leaves. Down the street, a shop posts a sign saying only people born in the country need apply. The first is a feeling said out loud. The second is a rule about who gets a job.
Two words help you tell those apart. Nativism is hostility to immigrants in the name of protecting people regarded as native-born. The native in that word means born in the country, not Native American. Xenophobia is fear or hatred of people seen as foreign, and it can be aimed at citizens as well as immigrants.
Now connect them to Week 2. Prejudice is an attitude, and discrimination is an action. Xenophobia, as a fear or hatred, is an attitude, like prejudice. Nativism becomes discrimination when someone acts on it, as with that shop sign. And it becomes institutional when it's written into a rule that applies to everyone.
Week 12 gave you one more tool, the perpetual-foreigner stereotype. It's the belief that some Americans, whatever their birthplace or citizenship, are always from somewhere else. You can hear it in E5's line: she names her town, and they ask again.
These are tools for reading a record, not labels to pin on people.
Pause and try this. The muttering customer and the shop sign: which one is an attitude, and which one is discrimination?
Ask whether anything was done.
Here's the answer. The muttering customer shows xenophobia, an attitude, because nothing was done. The shop sign is nativism acted on, a hiring rule that shuts people out, so it's discrimination.
6. Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African experiences
Think about a family holiday meal with dishes from two places. The grandparents came from one country, the cousins from another, and the family prays in more than one way. Sum that family up in one word, and you lose most of it.
Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African communities are like that, many times over. These communities include people whose families came from many countries, beginning in large numbers in the late nineteenth century. They're Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and of other faiths. So the federal category isn't a religion and isn't one country. It's a region of origin.
Here's the history of the box. Under the 1997 standards, the White category included people with origins in "the Middle East, or North Africa". The 2024 revision made Middle Eastern or North African its own minimum category. That's 27 years of being counted within White.
Picture a grandmother with roots in North Africa. On a form that followed the 1997 standards, she checked White, because the form told her that box included her. On a form that follows the 2024 standards, she can check Middle Eastern or North African. She didn't change. The boxes did.
Pause and try this. Someone says people from the Middle East and North Africa weren't counted before 2024. Is that right?
Think about where they were counted.
Here's the answer. Not quite. They were counted, inside the White category, under the 1997 standards. In 2024 they gained their own category.
7. Counting the federal categories
Imagine a family that answers the census in different decades. In one decade the parents check one box each. Years later, their grown daughter checks two. Later the family meets a single question with a line that says select all that apply. Their ancestry never changed. What the form let them say did.
The federal categories come from the Office of Management and Budget, in Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, first issued in 1977 and revised in 1997 and in 2024.
Let's count. In 1977, there were 4 race categories, and an ethnicity category for Hispanic origin. In 1997, "Asian or Pacific Islander" became two categories, so 4 plus 1 makes 5 minimum race categories, with 2 ethnicity categories beside them. And from the 2000 census on, you could select one or more races. In 2024, one combined question lists 7 minimum categories: the 5 race categories, plus Hispanic or Latino, plus Middle Eastern or North African. Five plus one plus one is 7.
Now listen to the issuing body's own words. OMB's 1997 notice says the categories "represent a social-political construct designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based."
Pause and try this. If the categories changed in 1977, 1997, and 2024, can a census box be a biological fact?
Think about what changes and what doesn't.
Here's the answer. No. A biological fact wouldn't be redrawn by an office three times. The issuing body says in its own words that the categories are a social-political construct for collecting data, not a scientific one.
Closing
Let me pull it together. For 162 years, from 1790 to 1952, race decided who could become a citizen. The 1924 quotas covered every nationality, and Asia was excluded on top of them. The 1952 law ended the racial bar but kept the quotas until 1965. E3 and E5 came through two different doors, and both are still asked where they're from. The 1986 law did two things: legal status and employer penalties. Xenophobia is a fear, nativism puts the native-born first, and acting on either is discrimination. Middle Eastern and North African communities were counted within White until 2024. And the federal boxes went from 4, to 5 and 2, to 7.
Here's the whole week in one sentence. A citizenship rule or a census box is a decision made by an issuing body in its time, not a fact of nature.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. And next week, in Intersections: Gender, Class, Language, Religion, and Multiracial Identity, you'll ask what happens when a person belongs to more than one category at once.
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