CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Naturalization is a process that is typically celebrated as the end point on the path to U.S. citizenship. Immigrants choose to attach themselves to our nation, which extends to them its rights, freedoms and opportunities.
A new book looks at naturalization from a different angle, considering how assumptions about race, sexuality and Indigeneity have historically been part of the question of citizenship. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of English and of gender and women’s studies Siobhan Somerville is the author of “ Naturalization: A Queer Genealogy of U.S. Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality .”
“I’m trying to tell a story about naturalization that is unfamiliar to most people,” Somerville said. “People tend to think about naturalization as a feel-good story, especially in times when questions about immigration are very fraught.”
But it’s often been a more complicated story, she said.
“Naturalization has historically played a key role in enacting and sustaining these contradictions between, on the one hand, liberal ideals of rights and freedom, and, on the other hand, settler colonialism, imperialism and slavery,” she wrote.
Somerville examined laws, court decisions, legislative debates and how federal policies were interpreted by the government, as well as literary texts, journalistic accounts and archival sources. She said her “queer genealogy” refers to a method of questioning the norms of thinking that are taken for granted and revealing how they are embedded in laws and policies.
The first federal naturalization law, passed in 1790, restricted eligibility to “free white persons.” While piecemeal exceptions were made over the years, that requirement remained in the law until 1952, Somerville said.
“It’s important to acknowledge that citizenship has been explicitly racialized for most of U.S. history,” she said.
Somerville’s book emphasizes that naturalization has played a key role in settler colonialism, which differs from other forms of colonialism in that, rather than being concerned primarily with extracting resources, the focus of the colonial power is on building a permanent population of settlers and taking land from Indigenous inhabitants. In the book, Somerville examined the naturalization process not only for immigrants, but also for people who weren’t immigrants — formerly enslaved people, American Indians and those living in U.S. territories.
Following the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 collectively naturalized people “of every race and color” born in the U.S., including formerly enslaved people but excluding American Indians. The Dawes Act of 1887 individually naturalized some American Indians but also required that they give up their tribal identities and authorized appropriation of tribal lands. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 collectively naturalized American Indians and granted them birthright citizenship. Some people living in U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico, acquired U.S. citizenship collectively through Congressional legislation. There is a “significant history of collective naturalization, in which entire populations have been transformed into U.S. citizens without any expressed desire or action on their part,” Somerville wrote.
The practice raises contradictions with classic liberalism, and it also “doesn’t sift and select potential citizens with the same level of surveillance as individual forms of naturalization. Collective naturalization casts a wide net and, in some cases, has created new U.S. citizens from populations who would not have been eligible for (or who would not have sought) naturalization on an individual basis,” she wrote.
Somerville also examined the ways in which reproduction was part of settler colonialism. The first naturalization act explicitly discussed the citizenship status of the new citizen’s future children.
The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act removed the whiteness language from naturalization requirements, so race was no longer the main criteria, and it added language concerning adultery and homosexuality. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1967 decision in Boutilier v. INS, said that Congress could exclude homosexuals wanting to immigrate to the U.S. “The Boutilier case makes clear that the federal government wanted to privilege heterosexual couples and reproductive families,” Somerville said.
A 1965 law made family reunification a key part of the criteria for immigration and naturalization. Somerville called the naturalization policies “heterosettler colonialism,” describing them as policies “which explicitly privileged heterosexual reproduction and reinforced, rather than replaced, the racist logic that had anchored U.S. immigration and naturalization policy from its beginnings.”
Somerville ends her book with a discussion of American Samoa and two recent court cases centering on birthright citizenship and collective naturalization. People born in American Samoa, a U.S. territory, are U.S. nationals but not automatically U.S. citizens. Some American Samoans have resisted collective naturalization out of concern for its potential legal impact on the current system of communally held Indigenous lands, she said.
The sacrifices made by immigrants who become citizens and their love for the U.S. often move us. But it is important to recognize that naturalization is an aspect of settler colonialism that the nation has not yet fully reckoned with, Somerville said.
Somerville said she didn’t expect, when she began work on the book, that its discussion of the history of restrictions on U.S. citizenship would be so relevant now.
“In the last few years alone, we have seen an alarming new set of policies and practices regarding immigration and citizenship, which has made many people — especially people historically excluded because of race, Indigeneity, gender and sexuality — vulnerable to violence, as well as harsh penalties like deportation and denaturalization. Understanding the longer history of laws on U.S. citizenship and white settler colonialism is crucial as we navigate this moment,” she said.
Editor’s note : To contact Siobhan Somerville, email sbs@illinois.edu .