Timeline

1790: The Naturalization Act

In 1790, President George Washington delivered the first-ever State of the Union address, highlighting some of the foremost issues that faced the newborn nation. Among them, he quoted the need for a “uniform rule of naturalization” for foreigners who were to be “admitted to the rights of citizens”, clearly defining this “uniform rule” as an “object of great importance” from Article III of the recently ratified United States Constitution. There was no mention of race, color, ethnic background, or any specified qualifications dictating who can receive citizenship status in either his entire statement or the words that he quoted.

The Constitution grants Congress the ability to establish a “uniform rule” as described by Washington, and so they did. Almost three months after Washington’s address came the first piece of legislation that defined the citizenship process for foreigners to the United States: the Naturalization Act of 1790. The purpose of this law was, as its name suggests, to establish guidelines to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Notably, the Act limited citizenship on racial grounds: only people belonging to the class of the “free white person” were eligible for naturalization. What it meant to be “white”, although seemingly clear in today’s language, would become a major detail of contention, inspiring more significant and direct actions by the government in its admittance and acceptance of South Asian immigrants.

Early South Asians in America

Image: Three Indian lascars aboard the RMS Viceroy of India, National Maritime Museum

Among the first batches of foreigners entering the country, for which the Act was passed in order to regulate and process, were some of the earliest South Asians to the Americas. For instance, a Bengali Muslim by the name of Sick Keesar, believed to be an anglicization of the name Sheikh Kesar, came to the United States as a lascar, or sailor, from British India. He became known for the petition of redress he filed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, headed by Benjamin Franklin. No one can say for certain whether early South Asian Americans like Keesar directly influenced the passing of the Act, but they most definitely played a role.

1870: Expanded—But Not for All

The most notable revision of the Act came in 1870, where the wording for the racial eligibility criteria was slightly modified to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent". This change wasn’t drastic by any means, but the ambiguity of the term “white” led to a flurry of cases at the appellate level by “aliens” from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and India to come to American soil and petition the United States government to claim whiteness for themselves. In 1870, the population of documented Indian-origin residents was 586, with this number more than tripling to 1,707 residents by the 1880s. Many of these immigrants argued they were white purely by their physical skin color and ancestral connections. A hyper fixation over this specific criterion of color led to far-fetched and “ethnologically based” theories about the nature of one’s race. Opposition to these cases cited the necessity for decisions to be rooted in social grounding rather than science, and called for the  “common understanding” of the  “average man on the street” to determine what being “white” meant.

The Story of Anandibai Jyothi

Image: A congratulatory letter from Queen Victoria noting Joshi’s achievement, South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) 

 South Asian immigrants only began to be admitted as naturalized citizens at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite this, a considerable number of South Asian immigrants continued to find their way to the United States. The prospect of the “American Dream” became widely known to the world, with many coming in search of labor, whether in factories or on farms. Others came in search of new market prospects. Beginning around the 1880s, Muslim peddlers from areas surrounding Calcutta came to the United States to sell “Oriental goods,” including cotton and silk, perfumes, and rugs. Many of these peddlers attracted middle-class American consumers interested in buying such goods. There were also immigrants, often wealthier and of high-caste, who came to the United States for the express purpose of education and career advancement. One such example was Anandibai Joshee, a Brahmin Marathi woman from Bombay who was renowned as the first Indian woman to receive a degree in medicine in the United States. Joshee expressed her interest in studying medicine in a letter that ended up in the hands of a Presbyterian minister stationed in India, and later in those of a New Jersey woman named Theodocia Carpenter, who sponsored her stay.

New York’s Early South Asian Americans

By 1900, just over 2000 South Asian “Indians” were documented residents of the United States, although there might’ve been more. 408 of these initial South Asian Americans resided in New York, laying the foundation for the diverse New York South Asian population present today in areas like Queens. However, citizenship and the full realization of the “American Dream” were unobtainable to many of these South Asian immigrants. These early South Asian Americans defined the foundational steps into an era of significant change in immigration and naturalization policies throughout the 20th century, particularly involving South Asian immigrants. Ultimately, it is their initial strides that exist as the pillars of the modern South Asian American identity and status in the United States.

The "Hindoo" Invasion

Image: A newspaper feature describing an “invasion by Hindus and Mohammedans”, meant to describe Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim immigrants from India (SAADA)

The sudden uptick in South Asian immigrants within the United States coincided with broader resentment toward Asian immigrants as a whole. The nativist movement of this century saw immigrants from India in a similar light to those from China and, to a lesser extent, Japan: a group of people who look different than WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) with an unfamiliar culture who worked back-breaking jobs for menial pay. Such immigrants were believed to be spreading immorality and disease and taking away jobs that should be reserved for White Americans. Numerous anti-Indian riots across the country manifested from these sentiments, with nativists coining South Asian immigration to the United States as a “Hindoo invasion”.

A Century of Challenges

The century was also defined by numerous challenges by South Asians to the existing ambiguous racial legal standards to naturalization. Among the first South Asians to succeed in this battle was a man named Bhicaji Balsara, a Parsi Zoroastrian from Bombay who fought and won a battle in court over his status as a “free white person”. Balsara arrived in the United States as early as 1900 as a cotton buyer for the Tata group and settled in New York. He petitioned for citizenship in 1906 and was heard before the District Court in the Southern District of New York. Objections to Balsara’s admittance as a citizen lay largely upon the “free white persons” standard in the Naturalization Act of 1870, but Balsara argued that his “color is white and his complexion dark”. His argument rested on his Parsi ancestry as an indication that he belonged to an “Aryan” race, with Parsis hailing originally from Iran. In the Circuit Court’s ruling, however, there were serious concerns raised over accepting “white persons” as a broader category, including Aryan, Caucasian, and Indo-European groups, which, at the time, were seen as distinct from categories of White people in the United States and Europe. To do so, the Court stated, "will bring in not only the Parsees… which is perhaps the purest Aryan type, but also Afghans, Hindus, Arabs and Berbers”.

At the same time, the Court identified Balsara’s “high character” and “exceptional intelligence”, stating that a higher court must examine this issue. At this time, the Department of Justice released a 145-page brief explaining why Parsis wouldn’t be considered as “free white persons”. The brief cited multiple first-hand accounts of Western travellers in Persia and India describing the inhabitants as “swarthy of complexion”, and argued broadly that the Naturalization Act’s racial standard was intended to only include Europeans and people of European descent. The Circuit Court of Appeals eventually heard Balsara’s case in 1910 and ultimately disagreed with the argument laid out in this brief. Justice Wald explained that Parsis were not to be mixed up with other Indians. He hints that “Hindus” were the “swarthy” population, whereas Parsis can be considered as white, stating that Parsis constituted a community “as distinct from the Hindus as are the English who dwell in India”.

The Court ultimately sided with Balsara, stating that the “white person” was merely a nod to the white race as a whole, which included Parsis. The implications of this case were profound in the saga of South Asian naturalization in this century. The Court’s decision left the myriad other communities in South Asia - Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and Jews - in a legal gray area. Were they to be accepted only if they demonstrate ancestry from a “white race”? What was even more confusing was that the decision over the status of Parsis was not definite. Twenty years after the Balsara decision, the same New York Circuit Court rejected the petition of another Parsi man from Bombay, Rustom Dadabhoy Wadia, who came to the United States in 1923 and lived in the Lower East Side of New York City with his American wife, Gladys Voorhees. In their ruling, the Court insisted that the “common understanding” of “white person” be applied in such cases as Wadia’s, which seemed to backtrack on what they had established prior.

Bhagat Singh Thind v. United States

Image: Bhagat Singh Thind in a US Army Uniform (SAADA) 

By far the most noteworthy case to come out of the South Asian legal struggle for citizenship was Bhagat Singh Thind v. United States, as it established a clear precedent that dominated race relations in the naturalization process until the mid to late 20th century. Bhagat Singh Thind was born in 1892 in Punjab, India, then a part of the British Raj. In 1913, he immigrated to the United States, settling in Seattle to pursue graduate studies. Thind was one of approximately 7,000 Indian men, many of them Punjabi Sikhs, who came to the Pacific Northwest around that time seeking economic and educational opportunities while fleeing unrest and British colonial repression in India.

While studying religion and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Thind worked summers at lumber mills in Oregon. He became involved with the Ghadar Party, an Indian independence movement organizing immigrants in North America to overthrow British colonial rule in India. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, Thind enlisted in the U.S. Army, becoming the first turbaned Sikh soldier in the American military. During his military service, Thind applied for U.S. citizenship. His petition was initially approved but quickly overturned after opposition from the Bureau of Naturalization.

In 1920, Thind applied again for citizenship in Oregon. The judge granted it based on arguments that Indians could be considered "Caucasian" and thus "white," as well as in recognition of Thind's military service. However, the Bureau of Naturalization appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court at the time had reviewed cases in the past involving scrutiny over racial categories, but the overarching legacy of the Thind case came with how the highest court in the United States can define a race in a particular way, and how that can affect the lives of millions of immigrants in America. The two questions that faced the court were as follows: “Is a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India, a white person within the meaning of § 2169, Revised Statutes [referring to the revised Naturalization Act]?” and “Does the Act of February 5, 1917 (39 Stat. 875, § 3) disqualify from naturalization as citizens those Hindus now barred by that act who had lawfully entered the United States prior to the passage of said act?".

Thind extended the argument from his appeal in Oregon–he considered himself a “free white person” and was thus eligible for citizenship. One of the most important precedents this argument, and overall this case, was based upon was the Ozawa case just months prior, which established that a “white person” referred to anyone of the Caucasian race as commonly understood. A “common understanding” of who belongs to what race opens up the debate to numerous interpretations of what understandings are correct and incorrect, and this was where Thind’s argument hinged. He described himself, a full-blooded Hindu from Punjab, as a “Caucasian”: "The applicant contends that the words 'white persons' are synonymous with the words 'Caucasian race, and that the Hindus are included therein." Here, the Court makes an interesting point around statutory language, highlighting the term “Caucasian” apart from the term “white person”. They recognized that with regard to this case, the two terms largely meant one and the same due to the “common understanding” of both terms, but also argued that the terms are used interchangeably with “legislative intent”, and that to look at it ethnologically, it is a “substitution of one perplexity for another”.

The Court delves further into ethnology and scientific arguments, but the focus on language here is particularly important and transformative for modern Court understandings of race. The Court shies away from tackling the scientific heart of Thind’s argument, rejecting any anthropological definitions of a “high-class Hindu” being a member of the “Caucasian” or “Aryan” race.

Instead, the Court’s understanding of Thind’s argument is solely based on language alone and the Ozawa “common understanding” of language. The Court seemingly confused itself, with Justice Sutherland noting that the term "Caucasian" was "a conventional word of much flexibility", but at the same time, their decision enforced strict racial barriers. Moreover, the Court's emphasis on “common understanding” reflected broader societal attitudes towards race at the time. In aligning their interpretation with popular perceptions, the Court sanctioned and reinforced existing racial hierarchies. This approach demonstrated how legal interpretations of race both shaped and were shaped by broader social attitudes.