Amanda Frost - You Are Not American

To Richard,
and to all Americans
denied their rightful citizenship,
along with those who fought on
their behalf to get it back.

O n 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 votethanks 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 Franciscos 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 womens 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 Registrars Office that January day to record what happened next.

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.

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 citizenshipand some their right to votesolely 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.

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.

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 Constitutions 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.

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 stones 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 jobspicking 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.

In 2005, Garza was caught again, only this time he was charged with illegal reentry into the United Statesa 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.

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 dont go out in the street very much, he said as he awaited the governments 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 lawyers efforts, Garza received written confirmation from the US government that he was, and always had been, a citizen of the United Statespapers 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.

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant met in the parlor of Wilmer McLeans house in Appomattox, Virginia, to formalize the surrender of Lees 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