8 - Conclusion and Coda

Summary

The history of U.S. immigration and citizenship law recounted in this book brings together the histories of immigrants with those of Native Americans, blacks, women, the poor, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans. It does so with a view to sparking a rethinking of U.S. citizenship history, on the one hand, and U.S. immigration history, on the other.

The history of U.S. citizenship has conventionally been recounted as a story of those on the territorial “inside.” From this perspective, subordinated groups on the “inside” – women, the poor, Native Americans, blacks, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans – are viewed as citizens-in-the-making. This has allowed for a relative lack of interest in interrogating the core citizen–alien distinction and in connecting insiders’ histories to those of immigrants. Exploring another side of the same coin, the history of U.S. immigration has conventionally been recounted as a story of those coming from the territorial “outside.” Immigrants’ travails are the quintessential struggles of foreigners: bars to entry, barriers to political and social incorporation, and the threat of expulsion. There is often not enough interest in the fact that those on the territorial “inside” have been subjected to the same travails, which results in a related lack of interest in historicizing the core citizen–alien distinction. Such conventional accounts of U.S. citizenship and immigration history have been transformed by much recent scholarship. But they still hold, not just in prominent works of scholarship, but also in popular understandings.

I have attempted in this book to rework the conventional historiographical traditions of U.S. citizenship history and immigration history by taking seriously the multiple strategies of what I have called “rendering insiders foreign”: formally designating domestic groups as alien; transforming citizens into aliens for performing prohibited acts; subjecting domestic groups to extensive barriers to movement and residence; mingling citizens with immigrants; and otherwise subjecting groups to the classic legal disabilities suffered by aliens. In this book, such strategies of rendering insiders foreign are joined to strategies of absorbing and rejecting outsiders.