‘You Are Not American’ confronts US citizenship policies

The son of Chinese immigrants, Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in the early 1870s – a United States citizen by default. The trouble was convincing others of this fact.

At the age of 21, Wong was denied reentry to the U.S. after visiting family in China, on the grounds that he wasn’t an actual citizen. Little more than a decade after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which sought to limit immigration from that country, he had the full weight of the American government working against him. It took years of legal appeals and a ruling from the Supreme Court to confirm the status that had been granted to him at birth.

Wong is one of millions of rightful U.S. citizens denied citizenship over the nation’s history, and a key figure profiled in Amanda Frost’s new book “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.”

Frost’s history is a sobering chronicle of the U.S. government’s attempts – both successful and unsuccessful – to expatriate its citizens, and in so doing, define itself by exclusion. And she demonstrates that those efforts have mirrored the country’s contemporaneous racial, political, and social anxieties.

“At its core, citizenship stripping embodies the view that society can cast out its unwanted and use that process to redefine itself and all those allowed to remain,” writes Frost.

As Frost discusses, the practice exposes contradictions inherent in America’s founding. A nation cannot proclaim that all are equal – “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” as the Declaration of Independence states – while still practicing slavery, disenfranchising women voters, and limiting immigrants of a particular race, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. This paradox shadows each chapter and reminds readers of the book’s timeliness.

Frost provides plenty of historical context, detailing cases from the Dred Scott decision – in which the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans could not claim U.S. citizenship – to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the mass deportation of Mexican-Americans during the 1950s.

Inherent to most of these stories is disagreement over the definition of citizenship itself, which was partly caused by the ambiguity of founding documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Until the 14th Amendment, birthright citizenship wasn’t constitutionally protected. Even after that amendment was passed, it wasn’t always respected.

Frost points out that centuries of debate over the root of citizenship – whether it stems from blood or birth, class or creed – has often produced stunning hypocrisy. During the Reconstruction era, former Confederates who fought against the United States obtained rights of citizenship withheld from Black Americans. In World War II, Japanese Americans faced blanket internment while members of the German American Bund, an American Nazi group, roamed free.

At just under 200 pages, Frost’s compendium threads history, debate, and lively detail into the stories of individual Americans who fought to verify their citizenship or exercise their full rights.

At times, Frost’s writing can sound like a textbook. Despite this occasional didactic tone, the book is an excellent primer on the importance of creating robust institutions that can check the formation of racist policies. It’s also an elegy to Americans who fought to protect their citizenship and in so doing secure that of others.   

“You are not American, the nation declares when it denies citizenship,” writes Frost, “and in doing so it defines not just ‘you,’ but also what it means to be an ‘American.’”