PROBLEMS OF CITIZENSHIP RE DRED SCOTT ETC ETC ETC MS ORLECK'S ELUCIDATION

Sunday, June 18, 2017

PROBLEMS OF CITIZENSHIP RE DRED SCOTT ETC ETC ETC MS ORLECK'S ELUCIDATION

By Annelise Orleck, Professor of History, Dartmouth College

Who Deserves To Be Called an American Citizen?

Most textbook histories of the U.S. portray a vibrant participatory democracy with a long tradition of extending citizenship rights broadly across an unusually diverse population. Some of these texts acknowledge that—at the time when the Constitution was being written—only property-owning white men were considered full citizens and that they constituted a relatively small percentage of the total population of the new United States. From that time forward, however, most U.S. history textbooks trace a progressive arc over the next 200 years during which citizenship rights were extended to an ever broader cross-section of Americans. In the 1830s, the vote was extended to all white men, in 1868 to black men, in 1920 to women, in 1972 to eighteen year olds, and so on. In many texts, the progressive expansion of citizenship rights seems almost to have a life of its own, leading inexorably toward a fully egalitarian present day, when all who reside in the U.S. are entitled to the same rights and protections.

There is truth in these arguments. The U.S. has, at various points in its history, led the world in the breadth of its extension of full citizenship rights, and the past 220 years have seen dramatic expansion in the numbers and kinds of people who have access to those rights. But it is not true that expansions of citizenship rights came easily or naturally. There were stark inequities enshrined in U.S. law and custom from the earliest days of the republic that excluded large swaths of the population from enjoying the full rights and protections of citizenship. The Constitution granted enslaved African Americans the status of 3/5 of a person for the purposes of calculating representation in Congress but did not grant them the right to liberty, property or the vote. And the first legal regulations of who could become a U.S. citizen drew sharp restrictions based on race. The 1790 Alien Naturalization Act warned immigrants that non-whites could never be Americans. Only "a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen therof,"

These legal restrictions both drew on and reinforced popular beliefs and prejudices about just who was entitled to call himself an American citizen. (I use the male pronoun intentionally here.) As a result, every expansion of citizenship rights in American history has been the product of fierce and extended political struggle. It took 72 years of sustained political struggle for women to win the right to vote and a century of civil rights activism by African Americans after the end of slavery to overturn Jim Crow segregation laws in the South. Part of reason these movements had to struggle for so long was that they were laboring on two fronts—first to change restrictive laws but also to overcome fierce opposition from many sectors of the American population.

Resistance to expanding the body of those considered full U.S. citizens has been there since the very first debates over the Constitution in 1787. From that day to this, it has been driven by several powerful forces. The first has been prejudice, in particular, race, class, and gender prejudices on the part of those who have written American laws and government policies. Their ranks have, after all, been made up until very recently almost entirely of the first group to have been considered full citizens—propertied white men. Not all of these propertied white male lawmakers have displayed overt prejudice, nor have all of those who did write laws that restricted citizenship rights. But, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has argued, even lawmakers who did not believe that citizenship should be restricted were affected by ideas about gender, race and class in ways that limited their policymaking imaginations. In other words, they simply did not see women, people of color, or the poor when they were handing out the entitlements of citizenship.

So we might call the second major obstacle to expanding citizenship rights race, class, and gender blinders on the political imagination. One of the most important examples of this can be found in the Social Security Act of 1935, which created the modern social safety net that most American citizens take for granted. Its extension of old-age pensions to American citizens was based on a person’s history of paid employment. Those who earned the most and worked most steadily over the longest period of time were granted the highest pensions. These tended to be white men. On the other hand, the fields that employed the vast majority of women of color—agricultural and domestic labor—were not covered at all. The unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of wives was also excluded from coverage, entitling women who did not work outside the home only to a minimal pension. (If they became widowed they could claim their husband’s pension, which many women did.) The Social Security Act also discriminated against those at the bottom of the labor scale—including millions of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and recent immigrants from Europe—who moved from one job to another. They often did not work at the same job long enough to be covered by Social Security. At the time of the law’s passage, one black leader commented that the law had created a “safety net with holes just big enough for most negroes in the U.S. to fall through.” This was equally true for an awful lot of women.

Popular resistance to extensions of citizenship rights in the U.S. has also been driven by the belief of many Americans that rights are a zero sum game. In other words, the more people who are allowed to exercise full citizenship rights, the less valuable those rights are. And so, in every era that has seen a movement to extend rights to a group that has been previously disfranchised, there have been counter-movements among those who already enjoyed those rights arguing that, to extend them to a new group, would somehow erode the value of those rights. This was true in the 1830s when property qualifications for voting were removed. It was true in the early 20th century when momentum to grant the vote to women was building. This argument was most recently heard in the political battle over whether Vermont (and other states) should allow same-sex partners to marry. If same- sex partners were allowed to marry, opponents argued, it would somehow destabilize and diminish the status of heterosexual marriages. This belief that rights are a zero sum game is no more rational than arguments based on prejudice. But, as sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn has shown, it has deep roots in American history.

Another argument against expansion of citizenship rights has been that “natural law” or “religious law” should supersede claims for political rights. Women, it was argued through the early 20th century, should not be given the right to vote because it was seen as “unnatural” and against the intentions of God. One young woman worker on strike during the winter of 1909-10 for higher pay and safer working conditions was arrested and dragged before a judge who, sentencing her to jail time, informed her that she was “on strike against God and Nature.” Similar arguments have been made more recently against extending employment and marriage rights to gay people.

Groups demanding full citizenship rights have often been cast as greedy. African Americans, women, gay people—according to this logic—do not deserve equal rights with other groups because they have not earned full citizenship status. Opponents cast them as whiners asking for “special rights” that would give them unfair advantages over white people, men, or heterosexuals. The two arenas in which this argument has been most commonly made over the past 40 years has been in protests or lawsuits against Affirmative Action policies in hiring and education, and in referenda seeking to overturn or block passage of legal statutes banning discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or sexual orientation.

Against spirited and often violent opposition, organized movements—by women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Americans, and disabled Americans—to extend full citizenship rights have slowly expanded legal and popular understandings of who is an American citizen entitled to full protections and benefits. What follows is a brief history of how citizenship rights have come to be extended to several groups—African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and women—who were denied them for a very long time.

A Brief History of Expansions and Contractions of Citizenship Rights

So what about the narrative of steadily expanding rights? It is true that the number of people who were eligible to vote in the U.S. grew dramatically during the 1820s when property qualifications were lifted. The numbers of voters grew even more dramatically with the arrival of millions of new immigrants during the 19th century. The restrictions enacted in 1790 as to who could become an American citizen were tightened before they were loosened. The Immigration Acts of 1795 and 1798 increased residency requirements from two years to fifteen before an alien could claim citizenship, and gave the president the right to deport aliens who were seen as politically dangerous. But President Thomas Jefferson loosened these restrictions in 1802, reducing the period of necessary residence for white immigrants seeking citizenship to five years—opening up the way for the arrival of 5 million immigrants between 1821 and 1860, mostly from Ireland and Germany. Though many would ultimately return to their home countries, a great many more would become citizens of the U.S., transforming the American population with this first infusion of large numbers of poor, Catholic, and non-English-speaking people.

An even more profound transformation of the ideal and reality of who was an American citizen came in the late 19th century with the arrival of another 11 million immigrants between 1861 and 1890. These people were even more different in culture, religion, and language than the prior wave—including Eastern European Jews, Southern Italian and Polish Catholics, Greeks and Slavs who were members of the Orthodox Church. By the early 20th century, the eleven largest cities in the U.S. boasted populations that were upwards of 2/3 foreign born and children of immigrants. Though there was spirited debate at the time about whether these new immigrants were culturally and genetically inferior to “old- stock Americans,” all of them were considered racially white. And so there was nothing to stop them, after five years, from becoming citizens. Male immigrants could vote and run for office as soon as they were naturalized. For African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and for all women, the path to full citizenship in the U.S. was longer and rockier—continuing well into 20th century.

For African Americans legal slavery clearly marked the most profound denial of their rights as citizens and human beings. Despite bans on slavery in the northern states, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 required that runaway slaves be returned to their masters—clearly asserting that white men’s property rights superseded the God- given right to individual liberty set out by Thomas Jefferson in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. Attempts by African Americans to sue for their freedom in the U.S. courts achieved mixed results in the first half of the 19th century. But the 1857 Dred Scott decision made it the law of the land that—as U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney put it—African Americans born into slavery were not entitled to sue for their freedom because they were not citizens of the United States. They were first and foremost the property of citizens.

It took four years of civil war, 600,000 dead and a million wounded, to finally enshrine in the American Constitution the principle that all who were born in the U.S. were entitled to equal treatment under the law. That principle was laid out in the 14th Amendment. The 15th Amendment guaranteed that the right to vote would not be restricted on the basis of race, color, or condition of previous servitude. (The right to vote and run for office, however, as well as the right to be counted for representation in Congress, was restricted by sex. No matter what their race, women could neither vote nor run for office. This restriction, laid out in so many words in the 15th Amendment, sparked resentment and disappointment on the part of advocates for woman suffrage who had been deeply involved in the movement to abolish slavery. ) Under the 14th and 15th Amendments, persons of African ancestry also won the right to become naturalized citizens. But the guarantees of the 14th and 15th Amendments lasted only until federal troops withdrew from the old Confederacy in 1877.

In the years immediately following Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws were passed throughout the South mandating separation of the races in education, transportation, and medical care. And the right to vote was restricted by literacy tests, poll taxes, and clauses asserting that you could only vote if your grandfather could, effectively denying the vote to all former slaves. Federal courts ruled that these restrictions, not based on race, were in keeping with the 15th Amendment. And in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of schools and public facilities was legal as long as the separate facilities were equal. Although grandfather clauses were struck down in 1915, Plessy remained the law of the land until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that separate is “inherently unequal.” African Americans’ right to vote and to protection from employment or housing discrimination were not restored until Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act after a decade of mass civil rights activism—the largest popular protest movement in American history.

Though enacted primarily to protect the voting rights of African Americans, the Voting Rights Act has also been used as a tool by Native Americans whose citizenship rights have been denied in a variety of ways over the past 220 years. The major arguments for denying Native citizenship rights were three-fold: 1) that they were members of foreign nations with which the U.S government had made treaties; 2) that they were hostile and uncivilized and thus needed to be controlled; 3) that they were wards of the state without independent rights. The first and second views were combined in the Supreme Court’s Worcester v. Georgia decision in 1832, in which Chief Justice John Marshall argued that Indian tribes were both dependents and foreign sovereigns. Neither of these notions stopped President Andrew Jackson from deferring to the state of Georgia when it decided to “remove” the Cherokee. Fourteen years later, in U.S. v. Rogers, Justice Taney, later the author of the Dred Scott decision, held that Indians were subject to U.S. law but did not have the rights of citizens. In the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act, Congress annulled the status of Indian tribes as sovereign. Their ambiguous and essentially rightless status was affirmed by the Supreme Court—first in 1884 in Elk v. Wilkins, which ruled that Native Americans, although born in the United States, were not wholly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States government and therefore were not protected by the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal treatment under the law. In 1886, in U.S. v. Kagama, Indians were declared to be completely subject to U.S. federal government authority but still not entitled to federal citizenship rights.

In 1887, at the end of two centuries of wars between Euro-American settlers and North American Indians, a majority in Congress voted that Indians should be given rights if they acculturated to white American norms. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 converted all communal tribal lands into individual property allotments. Under this new system, if individual Native Americans renounced their tribal affiliations and their claim to any tribal lands, they could receive 160 acres and full citizenship. According to Dawes, “every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens.”

One of those rights, to private property, was observed for Native Americans only in the breach. Most of those who accepted 160-acre individual parcels under the Dawes Act lost them to swindlers aided by state and territorial governments over the next 20 years. Dawes’ breaking up of tribal holdings reduced reservation lands granted by the federal government to native tribes dramatically. In 1887, the tribes had owned about 138 million acres; by 1900 the total acreage in Indian hands had fallen to 78 million. This policy was not reversed until 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act asserted the importance of perpetuating Indian cultural institutions and permitted surplus lands to be returned to tribal ownership. Suits are ongoing in the 21st century to restore to or compensate tribes for lands lost under the Dawes Act.

In 1924, after a generation of lobbying by Native American groups, President Calvin Coolidge finally signed the Indian Citizenship Act granting all Native Americans born within U.S. borders full citizenship. States routinely ignored this federal guarantee until the 1940 Nationalities Act established a federal minimum standard for Indian rights that states would be obliged to respect. Even so, many states continued to keep Native Americans from voting, using four major arguments. One was the old argument that Indians were under federal guardianship, or were federal "wards," and therefore not independent and competent for voting. The second was that Indians living on reservation lands were residents of their reservation and not of the state (even though the Supreme Court declared all reservation Indians residents of their states in 1881). The third was that Indians did not pay state taxes and, therefore, should not be able to affect revenue decisions. And the fourth was that continued participation in their tribal communities precluded participation in other elections. Idaho, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, among other states, required that Indians relinquish tribal affiliations before they would be allowed to vote. The last legal obstacle was not struck down until 1957, when Utah’s law preventing Native voting was repealed.

Into the 21st century, Native Americans remain the group most likely to encounter obstacles to their voting rights. Recently tightened voter identification requirements discriminate against elderly reservation-dwellers who often do not possess any forms of ID recognized by the federal or state governments. In the 2004 elections numerous examples were reported of poll watchers challenging the registration status of Indian voters. Polls are few and far between on reservations, in some cases as much as 60 miles away from smaller towns. Finally, though Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees language assistance to qualified voters whose first language is not English, there has been little attempt to provide that assistance for Indian-language speakers at polling places.

For Asian immigrants to the U.S., the struggle for citizenship rights was as long and hard. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) banned Chinese immigration to this country. The Geary Act (1892) continued that ban and required that Chinese residents of the U.S., no matter how long they’d lived here, carry government permits whenever they left the house. It also excluded them from testifying in court and denied them the right to bail if arrested. It is worth noting that these laws denied due process rights stemming from English common law. Neither black nor white, Asians continued to be excluded from the right to naturalize by the 1790 Alien Naturalization Act. And they were excluded from the right to vote because they could not become citizens.

Without the vote, people of Asian origins in the U.S. could exert little political influence and continued to suffer legislated denials of rights through the middle of the 20th century. The 1913 California Alien Land Law prevented those “ineligible for citizenship” (Chinese and Japanese) from owning land. The 1924 Oriental Exclusion Act prohibited immigration from all of Asia. This included foreign-born wives and children of American citizens of Chinese ancestry.

In the middle of the 20th century, Japanese immigrants and citizens of Japanese origin experienced the largest wholesale denial of the rights of a single group since slavery: Executive Order 9066, authorizing federal troops to round up and detain them indefinitely. For almost four years, from 1941 to 1945, 116,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens were incarcerated in prison camps without trial or evidence of wrongdoing. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who refused the order to be deported from his home, was arrested and took his case to the Supreme Court, charging that the law violated his constitutional rights. The Court ruled in 1944 that concerns of national security superseded individual rights and that the order to deport Japanese Americans was based on security concerns, not racism. The lands and property of these Japanese Americans were confiscated without compensation, effectively robbing them of the central position in California agriculture they had pioneered. What those lands would have been worth now is incalculable.

Exclusions on Asian immigration to the U.S. only began to be lifted in 1943, when the War Brides Act allowed soldiers to bring home to the U.S., with full citizenship rights, foreign nationals whom they had married while stationed overseas. The doors were not open fully to Asian immigration until the landmark immigration reform bill of 1965 passed Congress. Since 1921, in an attempt to stem the tide of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, government policy dictated that the annual quota for every national group from outside the Western hemisphere was based on the number of people of that nationality living in the U.S. in 1890.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act finally replaced those quotas, which favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, with a system that prioritized family reunification and labor needs. With the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and with ongoing competition with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the developing world, the quota system was seen as an embarrassment since it discriminated against all those who did not come from Northern Europe.

The removal of national quotas sparked a demographic revolution in the U.S. 7.3 million immigrants from Asia entered the country between 1971 and 2002, more than twice the number who migrated from Europe during the same period. The only area of the world that sent more people to the U.S. was the one region from which immigration was not shut down in the years between 1921 and 1965—the Western Hemisphere, North and South America. Between 1971 and 2002, approximately 10,300,000 came to the U.S. from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

Among these was the largest national migration to the U.S.—more than 5 million people from Mexico. I want to offer a few thoughts about people of Mexican origin living in the U.S. and their history in relation to citizenship. I can barely begin to do justice to this topic but it is too important to omit entirely.

When the U.S. was ceded 525,000 square miles of northern Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, making up large parts of what are now the states of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, Mexican citizens living in those regions were promised U.S. citizenship. However, full citizenship rights were granted only to about 80,000 former Mexicans in the ceded territories—those who were considered “white.” Though indigenous people and those of mixed blood living in the territories had enjoyed full Mexican citizenship, they were treated as Native Americans under U.S. rule and did not receive full citizenship until 1930. Although the treaty also promised to honor property rights of Mexican citizens who found themselves, after 1848, living within U.S. borders, the reality was far different. When white settlers to the West seeking land challenged Mexican-American property rights in court, the rulings almost invariably favored the newcomers. By the late 19th century, the vast majority of people of Mexican origin living in the western U.S. were landless and reduced to the status of farm laborers.

Though Mexican Americans living in the southwestern U.S. were not subject to the same systematic Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation as were African Americans in the southeast, they were frequently subjected to locally enforced segregation of neighborhoods, schools, and churches, to a form of family-based farm labor that amounted to peonage, and to periodic wholesale deportation efforts by federal and state authorities. During the Great Depression attempts to encourage people to return to Mexico were augmented by roundups and forcible deportations of upwards of 1 million Mexican Americans, more than half of whom were U.S. citizens. It was not until 1947 that the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregating children of Mexican and Latin American descent in southwestern public school systems, and not until 1954, in Hernandez v. Texas, that the Supreme Court declared that Mexicans—and all other racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.—were fully covered by the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal treatment under the law.

Finally, no survey of the history of citizenship in the U.S. is complete without at least a sketch of the evolution of the rights of fully half the population—women. In 1848, when the first national gathering of women’s rights advocates was convened in Seneca Falls, New York, female citizens of the U.S. did not have the right to own property, take out a loan, sue for divorce, claim custody of their children, or seek legal protection from physical assault by their husbands. And, of course, they did not have the right to vote. A married woman had no legal identity apart from her husband; she could not sue or be sued or sign a contract. Over the next 150 years, sustained protest, lobbying, and legislative campaigns earned women all of these rights.

The best known of the women’s rights campaigns was the woman suffrage campaign. American women did not earn the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920, following a 72-year campaign that won local victories in the states beginning in 1870 but no national right until the ratification of the 19th Amendment 50 years later. African-American women in the Jim Crow South continued to be denied that right until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

In many parts of the U.S. a woman could own no property in her own right well into the 19th century. Until married, her property belonged to her father. Once married it belonged to her husband. Only a widow had any legal claim to property, and this was only 1/3 of her deceased husband’s estate. Beginning in 1848 with the New York State Married Women’s Property Act—which was heavily lobbied for by some of the same women who had organized the Seneca Falls convention—and continuing through the late 19th century, most states passed laws strengthening a woman’s right to control her own property. This trend gained momentum after the Civil War when states sought to prevent creditors from bankrupting families in which the husbands had been absent for four years while serving in the military. So laws passed in the aftermath of the Civil War sought to create equity within marriage when it came to property holdings. Many states continued to place restrictions on women’s ability to take out loans, sign mortgages, or get insurance in their own names into the 1970s. These final restrictions on women’s commercial and property rights were lifted only in the past forty years.

Women’s rights to bodily integrity were won only slowly after the mid-19th century court decisions acquitting husbands for beating their wives if they did not substantially hurt them. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, women had little legal recourse unless they were seriously injured. In 1867 a North Carolina man was acquitted of assault because the stick he beat his wife with was smaller than his thumb. In 1874 the state supreme court ruled that a husband had no right to chastise his wife, but “if no permanent injury has been inflicted…it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze and leave the parties to forget and forgive.” That was the prevailing legal view of domestic violence within marriage into the 1980s, when a grassroots movement to support victims of domestic violence began to change American law and police practice. As late as 1996, seven states continued to exempt men from prosecution for raping their wives.

There have been signal victories but they have been eroded. In 1994, after four years of hearings filled with frightening personal and expert testimony documenting the pervasive nature of violence against women, its impact on individual citizens, its links to job and income loss, and the failure of state courts and local police departments to protect women, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The “Civil Rights Remedy” of VAWA enabled victims of gender-based violence to sue their assailants in state or federal court for compensatory or punitive damages, injunctive relief, and attorneys' fees.

By 1996, there were 1,200 shelters for battered women in the U.S., many of them receiving funds through the Violence Against Women Act. Battered women’s defense was an accepted though controversial defense for women who attacked their assaulters. The sexual history of a rape victim could no longer be admitted as evidence against her during the trial of her attacker. And many police departments have hired specially trained officers to deal with cases of violence against women. Still, expansions of rights are often followed by contractions. And in 2000, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Remedy of VAWA, ruling that a woman’s civil rights are not violated by sexual or domestic violence.

Finally, campaigns against employment discrimination on the basis of sex achieved their greatest gains between 1964 and 2000. Section 7A of the 1964 Civil Rights Act put the power of the federal government in opposition to employment discrimination on the basis of sex for the first time. When President Lyndon Johnson created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to evaluate cases of employment discrimination, he did not expect the flood of complaints that followed documenting discrimination on the basis of sex. The 1978 Pregnancy Non-Discrimination Act—a law supported by both conservative women activists and liberal feminists—banned the widespread practice of failing to hire, promote, or retain women who planned to or did become pregnant while on the job.

During the 1980s and ‘90s a series of Supreme Court decisions affirmed a woman’s right to be free of sexual harassment on the job. In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986) the Court decided that sexual harassment was a form of employment discrimination that could be the basis for a valid claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In 2007 alone the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and related state agencies received 12,510 new charges of sexual harassment on the job.

Notably, the first bill President Barack Obama signed into law in January 2009 reflects the continued jockeying back and forth between Congress and the Supreme Court over issues of expanding rights—in this case regarding women. Pay discrimination on the basis of sex was one of the forms of employment discrimination outlawed under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was named for Lily Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire for pay discrimination beginning in the 1980s and then had her case make its way to the Supreme Court. In 2006, the Court made it harder for many workers to sue their employers for pay discrimination by limiting the time they had to bring a case. Congress passed the Ledbetter Act in 2007, but President Bush vetoed the bill. In 2008, it passed the bill again, putting it on a brand new president’s desk in January 2009.

The brief histories sketched above do not purport to be comprehensive in any way, but try to give a sense of the complexity and political passion generated on both sides by campaigns to extend citizenship rights.