For Purposes of Immigration, What is a White Person?

President Trump has strongly hinted—without expressly saying so— that immigration should be limited to white persons.  Recall his statement about “shithole” countries and preference for Nordic immigrants.

The Supreme Court faced this question— what is a white person?— at least three times in the early 1900s.

In U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), the Court ruled that an already naturalized Hindu citizen could have his citizenship revoked by an executive order.

How so? In 1917, Congress passed a law, called the Naturalization Act, that limited citizenship to “free white persons and to aliens of african nativity and to persons of African descent.” The latter group was included due to post-Civil War constitutional amendments and statutes that conferred citizenship to  blacks.

At that time, ethonologists had a broad definition of Caucasian. It was not a “PC” idea. As the Court recognized, scientists based this on evidence of inter-marriage between whites and Asians.

The Court disregarded this evidence. Instead, it offered this analysis of race:

It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them to-day; and it is not impossible, if that common ancestor could be materialized in the flesh, we should discover that he was himself sufficiently differentiated from both of his descendants to preclude his racial classification with either.

The Court had to make one more contortion because the plaintiff was a high-caste Hindu, meaning he was a free man in his birthplace of Punjab. How did this fact square with the idea that Constitutional framers extended naturalized citizenship to “any alien being a free white person”?

The Court said:

We are unable to agree with the District Court, or with other lower federal courts, in the conclusion that a native Hindu is eligible for naturalization under section 2169. The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person’ it was these immigrants—bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh—and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them. It was the descendants of these, and other immigrants of like origin, who constituted the white population of the country when section 2169, re-enacting the naturalization test of 1790, was adopted, and, there is no reason to doubt, with like intent and meaning.

The Court finished up by saying:

It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. 

On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation (emphasis added).