The Law and You: A little history on immigration & citizenship laws - Plattsburgh Press Republican
Every day we see photos of thousands of people from other countries trying to get into the United States. They come to the Texas border, and wait and wait, hoping. They beg to be able to live here, to change their lives. Very few are allowed in.
A look at the history of citizenship and immigration laws shows that for many years immigration was encouraged. The US Constitution does not define “citizenship.” The first law about citizenship was not passed until the 1790 Naturalization Act, a federal statute granting citizenship to “free white” people (men) born here, children of American fathers, and white people naturalized after living here for two years, who were of “good character,” and swore "an oath of loyalty to the Constitution.”
A huge change was made by the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed by Congress in 1868. This was one of the “Reconstruction Amendments” enacted after the Civil War. Section One is often referred to as “The Citizenship Clause,” because it granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people. It also clearly stated that no state could interfere with a person’s citizenship rights, establishing the US Constitution as above state law. It adopted the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and reads:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
This wrote into the Constitution that everyone born in the US was a citizen; it was not conditioned on race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other factor. This followed an old legal principle called “birthright citizenship,” which is still the law in America. Being “naturalized” simply means a non-citizen becoming a citizen of this country.
From the first colonists until the late 1800’s, there were no limitations on the nationality of people entering the country. The first restrictive immigration law was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. While the transcontinental railroad was being built from 1863-69, Chinese men were actively recruited to work the extremely difficult 700 miles through the Rocky Mountains and other extreme terrain from Sacramento to Promontory, Utah.
Once the railroad was completed, the Chinese workers were viewed as unwanted competition, and efforts to bar them from this country resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law began our practice of establishing prohibitions and quotas based upon nationality.
The North Country had an interesting role in the efforts to bar Chinese people. The first passenger railroad across Canada was completed in 1886. Then the Malone & St. Lawrence Railroad was created to run north from Malone to the border, and another railroad went south through the Adirondacks.
Thousands of men sailed from China to Vancouver, British Columbia, then traveled east on the Canadian Pacific Railway. If their destination was New York City, they crossed the border at Malone. They were arrested for illegally entering the U.S. and detained in the Franklin County Jail awaiting hearings before a U.S. Commissioner.
The Franklin County Jail was soon overcrowded; the jails in Clinton, Essex, and St. Lawrence also over-flowed with Chinese prisoners. By 1903, Franklin County remodeled a barn to hold the Chinese prisoners, reporting that there were “more than 200 Chinamen in the jail and 300 or 400 in the detention house.” The federal government paid the county $3 per week to board each Chinese inmate, though the actual cost was said to be under $1.
When the US Commissioner hearings were held, typically a Chinese man came from New York City and testified that the inmate was his son, who was born in the U.S. This was evidence that their entry into the country was legal, and the prisoners were set free. There were years of newspaper articles and litigation over constitutional and statutory issues until law and policy changes ended the mass entries through Malone.
— Penny Clute was Clinton County district attorney from 1989 through 2001, then Plattsburgh City Court judge until her retirement in January 2012.
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Resources
US Citizenship & Immigration Service — https://www.uscis.gov/forms/explore-my-options/become-a-us-citizen-through-naturalization
A 2020 exhibit about the Chinese laborers who built the western portion of the U.S.the transcontinental railroad: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/18/forgotten-by-society-how-chinese-migrants-built-the-transcontinental-railroad
“The Influx of Chinamen,” by Penelope Clute, Franklin Historical Review, Vol. 49, p. 21, 2014
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