You Are Not an American: Citizenship from Dred Scott to the Dreamers

• Jurisdiction: California,United States,Federal
• Author: Reviewed by Marc D. Alexander
• Citation: Vol. 36 No. 2
• Publication year: 2023

YOU ARE NOT AN AMERICAN: CITIZENSHIP FROM DRED SCOTT TO THE DREAMERS

BY AMANDA FROST

Reviewed by Marc D. Alexander^*

When I was five years old, my mother, stepfather, and I traveled to Tijuana for a day trip. My mother, who had been stateless when she arrived in the United States some years earlier, was not carrying documentation of her legal status that day at the border. The American border guard told us not to worry, and to see him when we returned to cross back to California. We followed his guidance. When we returned, he feigned ignorance and stopped us. My stepfather, a frugal man, refused to bribe the guard. As a result, we spent several hours being interrogated at the crossing. During that time, I became increasingly anxious about my mother's future. Reading Amanda Frost's book, You Are Not An American, revived my long-suppressed memory.

You Are Not An American is a legal, political, and social history of citizenship stripping and the abasement of citizenship rights affecting disfavored groups and individuals. From the title of Amanda Frost's book, a reader might believe this is a national story, an American story. It is. However, given California's port cities and border with Mexico, it is also inevitably a California story.

Readers will be familiar with aspects of California history taught in our school textbooks, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring Chinese laborers from entering the U.S., and banning Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens. Immigration authorities viewed birthright citizenship as an unacceptable loophole to the Exclusion Act. When Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, traveled to China and returned to the U.S., the government chose him for a test case. The government argued in the Supreme Court that Ark's parents were "subject to the jurisdiction of the Emperor of China." The government lost its test case. The case holds that a child born in the U.S. to Chinese-citizen parents who are lawful permanent residents of the U.S. is a citizen under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) 169 U.S. 649.)

Californians should also be familiar with the internment under the War Relocation Act of tens of thousands of first, second, and third generation persons of Japanese descent at Manzanar and Tule Lake, and also in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arkansas. The majority of those interned were Nisei, or second generation American-born birthright

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citizens. Attorney General of California from 1939 to January 1943, Earl Warren later wrote in his memoirs that he had "since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens." Believing that the country had reacted too impulsively without evidence of disloyalty, Warren was conscience-stricken.

Californians will, however, be surprised by the case of Ethel Cope...