“We are a country of immigrants” has become a phrase woven into our social and political vernacular; a faultless image of the United States’ acceptance of all individuals regardless of race or origin and a suggestion that the U.S. provides a grave sense of belonging and safety for immigrants, so much so that they can achieve, access and exercise the benefits of juridical citizenship. Yet beneath this myth, what is revealed is a history of a nation that is fearful of change and built on the systematic exclusions of racialized groups to preserve the falsity of racial hierarchies and white supremacy.

The debate to end birthright citizenship is rooted in a timeless history of U.S. policies, laws and gross tactics that clearly contest America’s supposed hospitality towards immigrants and instead exposes a repetitive cycle of racial scripts used to advance explicit agendas of white superiority over several racialized groups. The Founding Fathers did provide a clear-cut definition of citizenship. It was preserved for white men, limited to white women, and nonexistent for black individuals and other folks of color.

In her text “How Race is Made in America,” Natalia Molina defines racial scripts as “practices, customs, policies and laws that are directed at one group and are readily available and hence easily applied to other groups” demonstrating how racialized are minorities are linked across time and space. Citizenship is only one example.

Under Section 1 of the 1790 Naturalization Act, the United States directly equates citizenship with whiteness, as the only individuals who were considered legal citizens at the time were limited to “free white person(s).” It should be clarified that one of the nation’s Founding Fathers, John Adams, served on the First United States Congress which passed the 1790 Naturalization Act under the presidency of none other than another Founding Father, George Washington. For Wesley Shirola to say “the Founders never explicitly spelled out what citizenship meant” completely denies their role in defining and instituting the United States’ first understanding of citizenship.

Under the 1790 Act, what constituted whiteness in the political sense was vague, especially after the cession of Mexican land in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo when U.S. legislation categorized Mexicans as “white and free.” Socially and culturally, however, whiteness was defined as not simply white in color but as a label that afforded individuals greater rights at the expense of others.

While the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo legally categorized Mexicans as white and free, white supremacists were reluctant in allowing Mexicans social and political belonging in the U.S. and relied heavily on the same racial scripts and eugenic mentality that justified colonialism, imperialism and slavery, to now ostracize Mexicans to no longer being white enough to obtain citizenship.

In 1870, the U.S. implemented a new naturalization act that reasserted a racist hierarchical structure by clarifying that Mexicans were no longer white but mestizos or members of a “red-race” whose lineage traces back to Indians. What is more important to recognize in these policy changes, is the consistent power of the United States’ racial scripts to redefine citizenship in ways that exclude groups seen as Other, outsiders, foreigners. And it is critical to understand that this legislation was not limited to Mexicans and other Latinxs.

In Ozawa v. the United States, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese student at the University of California, Berkeley, lived in the U.S. for 28 years before the Supreme Court later denied him naturalization based on an arbitrary color-test that determined Ozawa’s skin color was not white enough, making him ineligible for citizenship.

In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), officials denied Wong reentry to the States after he had taken a trip to China. Wong was born in San Francisco. The officials referred to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, after hiring Chinese laborers to complete the construction of the transcontinental railroad, suspended Chinese immigration to the U.S. and deemed those residing in the States as ineligible for naturalization.

In the late 1800s, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization strengthened its exclusion of Chinese populations and tightened its control of the U.S.-Mexico border. Victor Metcalf, who served as secretary of commerce and labor and the supervisor to the bureau, was known as a “pro-labor, anti-Chinese” politician. In his role, Metcalf decided to restrict the rights of Chinese Americans who were born in the U.S. but had grown up in China, stating that they should no longer have the right to claim birthright citizenship. Shortly following Metcalf’s policies, the Supreme Court ruled in the United States v. Ju Toy (1905) that all Chinese individuals, including those who were U.S. citizens, could not appeal the bureau’s decisions.

What these examples show us then, is that the changing racial demographics in the U.S., historically and today, is seen as a threat to a nation that has consistently worked to preserve white supremacy and disenfranchise racialized minorities. Racial scripts remain just a present within contemporary America as they did in the past. Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship and “birth tourism” is not only part and parcel of his immigration agenda but extends from a long history of terms like “anchor babies.”

In his article “Making Citizens ‘Illegal,’” Leo Chavez, an Anthropology professor at the University of California, Irvine, writes, “pundits and politicians have used the media to construct a discourse on anchor babies that justifies exclusionary public policies and attempts to redefine the meaning of citizenship, especially the repeal of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants.”

What Chavez, and several other media scholars, point to is the underlying anxiety around who is and is not considered a citizen and its racial linkages to populations of undocumented immigrants. The debate to end birthright citizenship is a narrative of exclusion, in line with an understanding of the U.S. as a gatekeeping nation with historical legacies of exclusionary policies aimed at populations deemed undesirable.

I applaud Shirola’s attempt, but to say “Undocumented immigrants traveling to the U.S. solely to give birth is not enlightened — it is malfeasance. But thousands of individuals every year will continue taking advantage of our laws until we actually come to our senses and change them,” is not enlightened — it is ignorant to an understanding of U.S. history that considers realities beyond those of white individuals.

Ending birthright citizenship is a tactic to define who is deserving and undeserving of living in the U.S., and as history shows, those deemed undeserving have long since been racialized and minoritized groups. Dig a little deeper into how U.S. laws have worked, and you’ll soon find examples such as the ones cited above, that reveal how the U.S. has time and again, taken advantage of groups deemed foreign or Other.

While I could continue with a grocery list of examples of U.S. policies that have redefined citizenship as a way of preserving white racial purity, I am grateful for the scholars in Ethnic Studies who have spent lifetimes uncovering this knowledge. What it takes is a willingness to engage with realities other than your own to soon realize that what’s really been misinterpreted about citizenship is how the workings of racial scripts have historically subjugated racialized groups from rights and belonging in the U.S.

Anabel Mendoza is a Medill fourth-year student. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.