Race, Nation, and Refuge by Doug Coulson

Author:Doug Coulson [Coulson, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Constitutional, Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies
ISBN: 9781438466613
Google: 5nY5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2017-01-01T04:11:49+00:00

JUDICIAL CASES AFTER THE CHINESE EXCLUSION REPEAL ACT

Given the central role that Chinese exclusion played in the continued existence of the racial eligibility provisions of the naturalization act after the Civil War, the judiciary believed the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act cast doubt on congressional intent regarding the viability of the racial eligibility provisions of the nationality act, including the interpretation of the phrase free white person in the act. In a racial eligibility case decided the year after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, for example, Judge Paul McCormick of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, who had presided in Pandit, questioned the continuing authority of Thind in a case regarding the racial eligibility for naturalization of a “native and citizen of Palestine … of the Arabian race”:

To interpret the words “white persons” as found in the existing statute applicable to this petition in the manner stated by the Supreme Court in the Thind decision would, in my opinion, render ineffectual provisions now present in the law relating to certain Asiatics and to descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, and would also tend to introduce confusing and contradictory interpretations of the statute under construction. Such results should be avoided if possible.

We think that the amendments to applicable law subsequent to the Thind decision evince a Congressional intent to depart from the meaning attributed to the term “white persons” by the framers of the original statute in 1790.65

Many concluded that the authority of Thind and other racial eligibility cases was undermined by the legislative changes to racial eligibility for naturalization during the war to such an extent that the basis for denying almost any application on the basis of race was uncertain.

The same month as the legislative debates regarding the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Service also referred to changing attitudes toward race in an article denouncing a federal district court’s decision that had denied the racial eligibility of an Arab for naturalization based on the conclusion that Arabs were “part of the Mohammedan world and … a wide gulf separates their culture from that of the predominately Christian peoples of Europe.”66 In its October 1943 Monthly Review, the Immigration and Naturalization Service devoted an entire article to “The Eligibility of Arabs to Naturalization” in which the service denounced the Michigan court’s decision, surveyed contrary decisions holding Arabs to be “free white persons,” noted that the longstanding administrative policy of the United States had been to not object to Arab racial eligibility for naturalization, and concluded by warning that the recent decision to the contrary was deplored “because it comes at a time when the evil results of race discrimination are so disastrously apparent.”67 Similarly, commentators such as Charles Gordon wrote of the widespread discontent that arose with the racial eligibility provisions of the nationality act during the war.68

In an April 1944 judicial opinion in Ex Parte Mohriez, Judge Charles Wyzanski of the United States District Court for the District

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