The Apparitional Citizen: The Impermanency of Legal Status and Access to Citizenship

Abstract

This thesis navigates the concept of U.S. citizenship, and analyzes how access to U.S. citizenship has been denied to different sections of the population based on race, country of origin, and ethnicity. Citizenship is investigated as a point of exclusion, instability, and legal ambiguity, in contrast with the conception of citizenship as a permanent and stable concept. Using case studies from court cases on the state and federal level, executive orders, and legislation developed by Congress, the legal and policymaking history of the United States reveals its propensity to associate whiteness as a parameter for achieving citizenship. These three areas of legislation and policy reveal how whiteness is intrinsically linked to access to citizenship in the United States. Additionally, these case studies demonstrate how through changing immigration laws and policies ranging from border enforcement to denaturalization, citizenship renders itself flexible, and subject to the coercion of the U.S. federal government. As the racial component of citizenship related legislation and policy is fundamental to my research, the experiences of Europeans, Asians, African Americans, Mexicans, and Indigenous peoples are referenced throughout my work to portray their different relationships with access to U.S. citizenship and political membership. My argument positions birthright citizenship as a last defense against any government that seeks to take away one of the most essential attributes of the United States’s Constitution– the application of the 14th Amendment for all native-born children, regardless of their parents’ legal status or racial identity. The 14th Amendment has never been easily accepted, and since its conception in 1868, it has been the subject of countless proposals to restrict its scope of power. Nonetheless, the legal tradition of the United States has upheld the 14th Amendment as applicable to all children born on U.S. soil, even the children of unlawful or undocumented immigrants. Given the severity of race’s influence on immigration law in the past, the existing administration is not immune to the influence of racist ideology; in fact, they often are responsible for its entrance into the American imagination. As a result, birthright citizenship protects the current and future populations by ensuring that no government or individual can undermine the legacy and legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution, prioritizing the interests of the vulnerable over the dominant, but temporary, voices in power.