INTRODUCTION  

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CITIZENSHIP

On a foggy day in January 1913, Ethel Coope Mackenzie left her home in the fashionable Nob Hill neighborhood of San Francisco to exercise her newly won right to vote. Although the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was still seven years away, California had recently joined the handful of states allowing women to vote—thanks in part to Mackenzie, who had given her “heart and soul” to the suffrage movement. Heiress to the celebrated Ben Lomond vineyard in Santa Cruz, Mackenzie was well known in San Francisco’s elite social circles. The press adored her, describing her as “possessed of beauty and charm of manner that have won her much admiration” and running flattering photos of her and her dashing husband. Although the papers failed to mention it, she also had a will of steel and a media savvy gained from years on the front line of the women’s suffrage movement. Mackenzie had reason to suspect that her fight for the right to vote was not over, so she made sure that members of the press corps came with her to the San Francisco Registrar’s Office that January day to record what happened next.¹

As Mackenzie had feared, the registrar informed her that she had lost her right to vote before she ever had a chance to use it. Four years earlier, she had married the celebrated Scottish tenor Gordon Mackenzie, an event reported at length in the San Francisco papers hungry for every detail (right down to her choice to do “without the conventional veil,” as the San Francisco Call noted with a whiff of disapproval). As the registrar explained, under a federal law enacted in 1907, her marriage to a noncitizen meant she had not only forfeited the right to vote that she had fought so hard to obtain; she had lost her status as a US citizen.²

Mackenzie was outraged. “I have done nothing criminal unless it be a crime to marry a foreigner,” she declared, and she challenged the law all the way up to the US Supreme Court. As she explained at the time, she fought not only for herself but also for the thousands of other American women who lost their citizenship—and some their right to vote—solely because they had married a foreigner. But a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against her. Although claiming to “sympathize” with her “earnest . . . desire to retain” her citizenship, the nine justices were firm, explaining that it is an “ancient principle of our jurisprudence” to “merge” the identity of husband and wife and to “give dominance to the husband.” The “marriage of an American woman with a foreigner has consequences,” they declared. “Therefore, as long as the relation lasts, it is made tantamount to expatriation.”³

Just a few years earlier, twenty-eight-year-old Haw Moy had returned to the United States after a visit to her extended family in the Guangdong province in China. Upon arriving by boat at the port of San Francisco in October 1908, she produced documents proving she had been born in the United States and was allowed to enter as a returning citizen. But ten months later, for reasons that remain unclear, the commissioner of immigration issued a warrant for her deportation. She was “forcibly dragged from her house” and detained in a cramped, two-story wooden shed at the Pacific Mail Steamship Company dock in San Francisco where all immigrants were processed on their way into the country.⁴

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Bureau of Immigration regularly revoked the citizenship of Americans of Asian descent. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” But the Bureau of Immigration would have none of it. Referring to these Americans as merely “technical” citizens, it adopted practices and policies designed to prevent them from entering or remaining in the United States. Openly flouting the US Constitution’s birthright citizenship guarantee, the commissioner general of immigration declared in his 1907 annual report that any native-born American of Chinese descent who “remained in China until after reaching his majority had in effect expatriated himself . . . and was not, therefore, entitled to be regarded as an American citizen.” Even after being forced to abandon this policy, the Bureau of Immigration continued to apply higher standards of proof of citizenship to this group. The “testimony of persons of that race is almost universally unreliable,” the commissioner general complained, demanding additional documentation or the testimony of white witnesses before a claim of birthright citizenship would be credited.⁵

Moy could not meet those standards. After spending more than two years in detention as she appealed her case to unsympathetic courts, she was deported to China.

Wilfredo Garza was born in Matamoros, Mexico, a bustling border town a stone’s throw across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. In 1979, when he was eight years old, he left his Mexican mother to be with his father, a US citizen who lived in Brownsville. By the age of sixteen, Garza was working full-time doing odd jobs—picking tomatoes, gathering eggs, roofing houses, whatever work he could find that would earn him a few dollars. But he was repeatedly caught by immigration officials, who would send him back to Mexico upon learning he had no immigration papers. Garza would wait a few days and then wade back across the Rio Grande at night. Once, when he was eighteen, US immigration officials pulled him down from a border fence as he tried to scale it, and the fall broke his arm. Undeterred, he managed to cross back later that same day.⁶

In 2005, Garza was caught again, only this time he was charged with illegal reentry into the United States—a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. And yet that proved to be his lucky day. Because he had been charged with a serious crime, Garza was constitutionally entitled to a lawyer, who had good news. As the son of an American father who had lived a sufficient number of years in the United States, Garza had been born a US citizen.⁷

But it took some doing to prove it. Garza, a slight man with a tattoo of a devil on one hand and an angel on the other, lived in fear. “I don’t go out in the street very much,” he said as he awaited the government’s determination of his status. Those fears were justified. Garza was picked up by immigration officials yet again. Even though he insisted he was a US citizen, he was jailed for two months and deported once again to Mexico. “There is nothing to protect someone claiming to be a U.S. citizen if they are unable to substantiate it,” explained a spokesman for US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Finally, thanks in part to his lawyer’s efforts, Garza received written confirmation from the US government that he was, and always had been, a citizen of the United States—papers that his lawyer warned him to carry with him at all times. He celebrated by cooking chicken fajitas for family and friends. “I can go anywhere now,” he said.⁸

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox, Virginia, to formalize the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, effectively putting an end to the Civil War. Less clear was what would happen to the white residents of the seceding states, who were arguably no longer Americans. For the past four years, the military and civilian leaders of those states claimed to have established a new nation they called the “Confederate States of America,” complete with its own president, court, legislature, flag, currency, stamps, and, of course, army. In effect, they had expatriated themselves. As one contemporary observer described it, the rebels “no longer have . . . any right of citizenship . . . and [have] become de facto foreigners.” In 1862, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner declared them “alien enemies” on the floor of the US Senate. The following year, the Supreme Court made it official, concluding that the residents of the seceding states were “enemies” who had “cast off their allegiance” to the United States and so no longer had any claim to constitutional rights.⁹

Shortly after the war ended, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed a general amnesty for residents of the seceding states, allowing them to regain the rights of citizenship and be pardoned for their crimes. But Johnson carved out an exception for thousands of high-ranking Confederate officials such as General Lee, who were required to petition the president directly for a pardon. Lee quickly did so, not only to attain “full restoration of all rights & privileges” of US citizenship but also to save his own life. Lee had been indicted for treason, a crime carrying the death penalty. In the spring of 1865, an article published in numerous newspapers asked, “Does [Lee] feel about his throat, in his dreams, the encircling hemp which he must know his crimes entitle him to?” He did. Painfully aware of his pariah status, Lee wrote to one family member, “I am considered now such a monster, that I hesitate to darken with my shadow the doors of those I love lest I should bring upon them misfortune.”¹⁰

Lee was never tried for treason, and he died in 1870 of natural causes. But President Johnson never granted Lee’s petition for amnesty. Lee’s citizenship rights were not restored during his lifetime; he was barred from holding public office and, until a few months before his death, from voting.

In 1975, long after Lee had morphed from a despised traitor into a venerated hero, Congress proposed a joint resolution to “right a grievous wrong” by posthumously restoring Lee’s citizenship. In the debate leading up to the vote, members of Congress lavished praise on Lee, describing him as a “patriotic citizen” and a man of “great humanity” whom “all Americans would be proud to refer to as their fellow citizen.” No one uttered the words “traitor” or “treason,” and the only reference to slavery came when Congressman Kenneth Hechler of West Virginia erroneously declared that Lee had freed his slaves “long before the War began.” (In fact, Lee did not free his slaves until the end of 1862, after being forced to do so by a court order implementing the terms of his father-in-law’s will.)

In August 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the resolution into law at the Custis-Lee Mansion on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, the Lee family’s former home. “General Lee’s character has been an example to succeeding generations,” President Ford told the nation, “making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.”¹¹

This book is the story of how a nation attempted to unmake itself by stripping undesirable groups and individuals of their citizenship over the course of two centuries. Ethel Mackenzie, Haw Moy, Wilfredo Garza, and Robert E. Lee appear to have little in common, but they represent the broad array of Americans who lost their citizenship. Although General Lee lost his citizenship first, his story is recounted last because his more recent posthumous redemption illustrates the complicated relationship between citizenship stripping and the ever-shifting perception of who is worthy of being called an American.

The United States has regularly revoked the citizenship of native-born and naturalized citizens alike. Sometimes the goal has been to deprive these individuals and groups of their civil and political rights; other times, to expel them from the United States altogether. At its core, citizenship stripping embodies the view that society can cast out its unwanted and use that process to redefine itself and all those allowed to remain. Historically, citizenship stripping has been primarily reserved for those who appeared “un-American” in some way to government officials—be it their dress, manners, race, accent, marriage partner, religion, traditions, or even their choice of reading material. Mackenzie, Moy, Garza, and Lee were all victims of a policy that reversed the democratic norm: in a country in which the people are supposed to choose their government, the government instead chose the people.

Marital expatriation was the penalty imposed on American women such as suffragist Ethel Mackenzie for seeking a spouse beyond the stock of American men, “polluting” the United States with the children of foreigners. Congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and President Ulysses S. Grant’s daughter were a few prominent examples of the many thousands of native-born American women who lost their citizenship as a result of their choice of spouse.

Women who married noncitizens were just one subset of Americans deprived of their citizenship—a group that included the anarchist Emma Goldman; an unknown number of Americans of Chinese descent; 5,589 Japanese Americans forced into camps during World War II; soldiers who fought for foreign armies or deserted during wartime; hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans during the mass “repatriations” of the mid-twentieth century; and thousands of naturalized citizens whose actions suggested to the US government that they lacked the requisite “attachment” to the United States.

Citizenship stripping is a practice more commonly associated with totalitarian regimes than with a democratic government such as that of the United States. The Soviet Union stripped millions of their citizenship under Joseph Stalin’s leadership. During the apartheid era, South Africa revoked the citizenship of the black population, amounting to 70 percent of the residents of that country. Over the four years in which the collaborationist Vichy government controlled France, fifteen thousand French men, women, and children—the vast majority Jews—lost their citizenship. But the US experience proves that, left unchecked, a liberal democracy can also give in to the impulse to expel those whom it finds undesirable. For over a century, Congress enacted laws enabling citizenship stripping that the executive branch enthusiastically implemented and the courts upheld. Indeed, the United States often led the way. In the 1930s, prominent Nazi lawyers praised the United States’ race-based citizenship laws and practices, some of which served as a model for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Germany’s Jews of their citizenship.¹²

The consequences of expatriation were sometimes fatal. Native-born American Kazumaro “Buddy” Uno had been visiting Japan when World War II began. He was conscripted into the Japanese Army—an event that automatically revoked his US citizenship under federal law, and eventually led to his capture and then detention in an American-run prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines. While he was incarcerated, his older brother—a US citizen in military intelligence who by coincidence was also stationed in the Philippines—went to visit him, and at first didn’t recognize the “enemy alien” with whom he had spent his childhood in Oakland, California. Uno was desperately ill and weighed less than one hundred pounds. His health shattered, he died not long after the war.¹³

For tens of thousands of others, the loss of US citizenship meant the loss of civil and political rights: the right to vote, to own property, to go to court, to hold public office, to work in certain professions, to criticize the government without fear of reprisal, to be reunited with family, and, in at least one state, to own a dog—a privilege that Pennsylvania once reserved to US citizens alone. For naturalized citizens in particular, the government’s citizenship-stripping campaigns forced them to live in fear, chilling any inclination to speak out against the government or the norms of mainstream America. Even decades after becoming citizens the government could decide that their words, actions, or beliefs suggested that their oath of allegiance to the United States had been a lie, serving as the basis for denaturalization and expulsion.¹⁴

For many of the expatriated, the result was permanent exile from the country they had considered their home. After political activist Emma Goldman was stripped of her citizenship, she was deported with 248 others in 1919. The group was marched en masse at dawn onto a boat that set sail for the Soviet Union, accompanied by fifty-eight armed crewmembers to ensure they reached their destination.¹⁵ Goldman spent the rest of her life living in the Soviet Union and Europe, unable to return to the United States. “I am . . . a woman without a country,” she wrote in a 1933 essay, because “to have a country implies, first of all, the possession of a certain guarantee of security, the assurance of having some spot you can call your own and that no one can alienate from you.”¹⁶

To be sure, citizenship alone is no guarantee of equal access to political and civil rights. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, guaranteed birthright citizenship to all born in the United States, and yet African Americans were denied most of the essential political and social rights of citizenship for much of the century that followed. These Americans were barred from voting, holding office, serving as jurors, testifying in court, traveling freely among the states, using public accommodations, and attending integrated schools. Even today, when de jure discrimination on the basis of race is prohibited, citizens of color often find it difficult to exercise their rights to full membership in the community. State laws disenfranchising felons, heightened voter ID requirements, patterns of policing, and discrimination in employment—to name just a few common practices—can all play a role in eroding the rights and privileges that come with US citizenship.

Nor do US citizens have a monopoly on access to US constitutional rights. The Bill of Rights protects “people” and “persons,” not “citizens.” The government violates the US Constitution when its officials search a home without a warrant, use excessive force, and prohibit freedom of speech, religion, or association, regardless of whether the target is a US citizen, green card holder, or undocumented immigrant.¹⁷

Nonetheless, citizenship matters, and never more so than today. The fight for equality for the newly freed slaves began with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, even if it did not end there. That same provision has protected the rights of many others occupying a precarious position in the United States. Throughout US history, citizenship has been an important marker of the holder’s status, a vital component of personal identity, and a prerequisite for participation in democratic governance. In modern times, citizenship’s significance has only increased as legal status grounded on race, gender, religion, and property ownership has diminished. To be the holder of US citizenship—to possess that dark blue passport embossed with a golden eagle—has never been more valuable, for it comes with the right to enter and remain in the United States, and thus to access many of the other rights, conditions, and opportunities that enable human flourishing.¹⁸

Citizenship stripping runs counter to the popular perception of the United States as an open, tolerant, and multicultural nation of immigrants, welcoming not only newcomers but also new cultures, religions, and beliefs. That perception is rooted in fact. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the start of the twentieth, the United States became the new home for three-fifths of the world’s immigrants, and it continued to take in more immigrants than any other country throughout the twentieth century. Today, the nation still admits a million immigrants each year, and most will be legally eligible to become US citizens within three to five years of gaining that status. Alongside these liberal immigration and citizenship-acquisition policies, the United States has embraced freedom of speech and of religion under the First Amendment, protecting the rights of ethnic, religious, ideological, and racial minorities to live as they prefer.¹⁹

And yet the United States is often at war with that identity, at times embracing exclusionary and intolerant policies ranging from Jim Crow to racially restrictive immigration rules to McCarthyism. Laws governing the acquisition of US citizenship have long reflected these same contradictions. Even more so, the laws and practices revoking US citizenship are overt evidence of a nation struggling with its conflicted identity—snatching back a status that, some conclude, had been given away too lightly. The price paid by those affected is high. The deprivation of political and civil rights, and possibly of family, home, work, and, in Emma Goldman’s words, having “some spot you can call your own,” is devastating. Acquiring US citizenship carries great practical and symbolic value. Losing it is even more meaningful, and comes at an enormous cost.

I began this project with the conviction that citizenship stripping was of legal, historical, and symbolic importance, but I assumed the number of people affected was relatively small.

I was wrong. When adding up the number of people who have lost their citizenship over the last two centuries—either because it was revoked by law or because government officials refused to recognize their status—it easily reaches the millions. And I began to meet those personally affected. There was the archivist in Texas whose Asian grandmother was the first member of the family to gain citizenship, only to lose it after marrying a noncitizen, barring her from returning to the United States. The mother of an adopted child born outside the United States emailed me about the difficult and expensive process of obtaining the documents that would prove her daughter is a US citizen—a status her daughter is automatically entitled to under federal law. A friend and former colleague described how when she was five years old, she was detained overnight with her sister and grandmother when returning from abroad because government officials questioned her family’s citizenship. A woman in Kansas emailed to explain that the State Department had refused to renew her passport, despite having a state-issued birth certificate and having lived in the United States her entire life, because she had been born at home. She only received her new passport after her representative in Congress intervened on her behalf. Friends and colleagues who are naturalized citizens describe the newfound fear that something they say or do will bring them to the attention of government officials, who may then scour their paperwork, searching for an error in the process that could undo their status.

As these stories suggest, citizenship stripping continues to this day. In 2017, the federal government argued before the US Supreme Court that it could denaturalize anyone found to have made even a minor error in a naturalization application—for example, by failing to admit to having driven sixty-five miles per hour in a sixty-mile-per-hour zone. (The government lost.) Even more recently, the Department of Justice announced it was hiring dozens of lawyers to participate in “Operation Janus,” a campaign to investigate seven hundred thousand naturalized Americans to determine whether their citizenship had been granted in error. With increasing frequency, the federal government is questioning the citizenship of Americans living near the US-Mexico border, asserting that their birth certificates may be fraudulent and requiring additional proof of the location of their birth. As Wilfredo Garza’s story illustrates, a surprisingly large number of Americans are mistakenly detained and deported by immigration authorities because they cannot prove their citizenship status. One expert estimates that 1 percent of the population held by immigration officials at any time are actually US citizens, amounting to about three thousand people a year. And President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants—a legally dubious claim that nonetheless undermines the citizenship status of millions of people with an undocumented parent.²⁰ As this book went to press, in August 2020, President Trump questioned the citizenship of Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Senator Harris was born in California to immigrant parents legally present in the United States. Trump echoed a widely circulating but baseless claim that she was an alien ineligible not only to be vice president but also to continue to serve as a US senator. Indeed, under Trump’s view, Senator Harris—as well as the many thousands of others born in the United States under the same circumstances—could be deported at immigration officials’ discretion.²¹

At times, citizenship stripping transcends governmental action. Take, for example, the “birther” movement’s bizarre claim that Barack Obama was not a “natural born” citizen qualified to serve as president of the United States. Even after Obama produced his long-form birth certificate showing that he was born in Hawai’i, a significant number of Americans were not convinced. The New York Times reported that in January 2016, near the end of Obama’s eight years as president, 52 percent of those polled questioned whether Barack Obama had been born in the United States. For these doubters, no amount of evidence could overcome their deep-seated belief that the president of the United States was not a real American.²² As Obama’s experience illustrates, citizenship stripping in all its varied forms sends a powerful message. You are not American, the nation declares when it denies citizenship, and in doing so it defines not just “you,” but also what it means to be an “American.”²³