Disaggregating Citizenship

KUNAL M. PARKER

Robert Steinfeld suggests that my article might be read in two entirely distinct ways—as a narrative of centralization, about which he is mildly enthusiastic, and as a narrative of citizenship, about which he is distinctly unenthusiastic.1 In my view, Steinfeld's understanding of citizenship, an understanding sharply at odds with my own, drives most of the criticisms he levels against the narrative of citizenship presented in the article.	1
Steinfeld offers two principal criticisms with respect to the narrative of citizenship. First, he argues that the emerging relationship between citizenship and territory that I identify—as a result of which citizenship came to function as a routinized marker of the individual's right to enter, and remain within, territory—long predated the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, which is the point at which a centralized legal-bureaucratic authority regulating immigration first emerged in Massachusetts. In support of this argument, Steinfeld points to the existence of laws in various colonies that were aimed at preventing the landing of indigent passengers, at restricting the entry of Catholic, Irish, and German immigrants on the ground that they were "strangers," and at taxing Irish servants "to defray the Public Charge [and] to prevent the Importing too great a number of Irish Papists . . ." (648). He also relies upon the considerable political ferment in the early republic around the question of aliens—as reflected in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts—to argue that the introduction in 1794 of citizenship as a prerequisite to the acquisition of a settlement should be seen not as a desire on the part of late eighteenth-century Massachusetts towns to prevent propertyless aliens from acquiring settlements in towns, as I suggest, but as a "conscious post–Revolutionary Massachusetts policy aimed at protecting the Commonwealth from the undue influence of aliens" (652).	2
In the article, I was principally interested in tracing, as I put it in the article itself, "the heavily contested process through which citizenship came to function— through the propagation of hegemonic state discourses and the creation of state legal-bureaucratic structures—as a barrier to the individual's rights to enter, and remain within, territory." In other words, I was interested in identifying the emergence of state discourses and institutions that routinized, standardized, and normalized the relationship between citizenship and territory in ways that are identifiably the forerunners of the system under which noncitizens suffer today. I was not attempting to trace the earliest historical instantiation of the relationship between citizenship and territory. Nor was I making an even more preposterous argument—that the fear, dislike, and hatred of outsiders were first acted upon in the early nineteenth century.	3
At the same time, I attempted to contribute to the historiography of U.S. citizenship in two distinct ways. First, I sought to shift the focus from a history of citizenship imagined as membership (which is ultimately a liberal narrative of inclusion) to a history of citizenship imagined as a refusal of the right to be physically present within the territory that the state calls its own (which is in fact the way citizenship has operated, and continues to operate, against millions of noncitizens both outside and inside the territory of the United States). Second, I sought to force apart these two very different senses of citizenship—citizenship imagined in terms of the right to membership and citizenship imagined in terms of the right to be present—in order to rethink modern U.S. citizenship. Because the first point has been sufficiently developed in the article, I concentrate here on the second.	4
Most scholars—and here I would include Steinfeld—tend to confuse citizenship as a right to membership and citizenship as a right to presence. They focus exclusively on the history of citizenship as a right to membership—these days, particularly on its inflection by class, race, and gender—and simply assume that the history of citizenship as a right to presence followed closely on its heels. As a result, they tend to overemphasize the significance of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century nativist politics in accounting for the logic of immigration restriction (citizenship as a right to presence), when in fact such nativist politics were often aimed at restricting the political influence of aliens (citizenship as a right to membership). This overemphasis on the role of nativist politics in producing immigration restriction tends to produce some liberal comfort about the "reasonableness" of the current immigration system. After all, nativism is something safely relegated to the archive, something that we no longer display without embarrassment.	5
However, the world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was one in which citizenship as a right to membership and citizenship as a right to presence were both widely unavailable and distinct. Although they might qualify as "citizens" within the terms of the formal legal distinction between "citizen" and "alien," vast segments of the population—indigent white males, women, and racial minorities—lacked both the right to membership and the right to presence. Furthermore, there was no reason to think that one kind of citizenship (citizenship as the right to membership) translated automatically into another kind of citizenship (citizenship as the right to presence).	6
This distinction between citizenship as the right to membership and citizenship as the right to presence is especially striking when one contrasts nativist discourses, on the one hand, and official immigration discourses, on the other hand. Claiming that European immigrants lacked the requisite abilities—intellectual, moral, or racial—responsibly to exercise the right to vote, nativists directed their most vociferous efforts toward restricting immigrants' ability to vote. Until the Civil War, it was quite common for nativists to express their resentment of immigrants through calls for extensions of the five-year naturalization period after which immigrants who elected to naturalize could vote. Steinfeld himself cites the "sweeping debate about alienage and the terms of naturalization" of the 1790s as evidence of "how deeply these issues exercised Americans . . . " (648–49).	7
By contrast, in legislative discourses on immigration in antebellum Massachusetts, there is a striking absence of straightforward nativist sentiment until the mid-1850s when the Know-Nothing Party came to power, by which point the instantiation of the relationship between citizenship and territory in both state discourses and institutions had already taken place. Instead, during the 1830s, 1840s, and early 1850s, Massachusetts legislators focused on the management of the state pauper expense—an expense strategically blamed on immigrants as noncitizens (and thus represented as a problem of citizenship) but clearly recognized at the same time as the result of the various "dishonest" practices of town poor relief officials and the settlement law itself. Hence, it is the logic of settlement, and not a species of nativist politics, that gave rise to the antebellum discourses and institutions instantiating the relationship between citizenship and territory.	8
By tracing the shift from a discourse of settlement to a discourse of citizenship in antebellum Massachusetts, I attempted to show how citizenship as a denial of immigrants' right to physical presence slowly absorbed the logic of settlement. This took place even as citizenship as an affirmation of the right to physical presence was, particularly as a result of developments after the Civil War, progressively extended to those who fell on the "citizen" side of the "citizen"/"alien" divide. However, the larger point here is that the historical record permits us to approach citizenship in a disaggregated way, as a category that enfolds various histories within itself, each of which may be disentangled from the others. Thus, there is no reason to assume, apart from the fact that historians have so assumed, that the history of citizenship as a right to membership necessarily determines the history of citizenship as a right to presence. Instead, one might imagine the former as possessing one history, the latter as possessing another. In the case of antebellum Massachusetts, this latter history is demonstrably the history of settlement.	9
This exposition of my approach to questions of citizenship both marks my distance from Steinfeld's approach to questions of citizenship and hints at my responses to his individual criticisms. In a turn of phrase that perhaps unwittingly reveals how he understands citizenship, Steinfeld characterizes my narrative of citizenship as different from the more common story of "the unfolding of national identity" (646), as if the "unfolding of national identity" can do all the "work" of explaining the operation of citizenship in every context. Following this line of thought, he places considerable emphasis on the ferment surrounding aliens in the late 1790s, which he himself recognizes was about controlling aliens' political influence, to explain why Massachusetts legislators made citizenship a prerequisite to the acquisition of a settlement. But why we should assume that the debates of the 1790s surrounding aliens' right to participate in the political sphere—debates that might well have been remote to the Massachusetts town poor relief officials who were primarily interested in pushing for a harsher settlement law—necessarily translated into the introduction of citizenship into the 1794 settlement law? The connection between citizenship and property—something that would undoubtedly be of far greater concern to town poor relief officials—suggests a more plausible reason.2	10
Steinfeld cites eighteenth-century statutes in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and other colonies that sought to restrict the entry of Catholic, Irish, and German immigrants as evidence that Massachusetts did nothing new in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. This once again reveals how scholars tend to overemphasize the role of nativism in producing immigration restriction. As precursors of the contemporary immigration regime, antebellum immigration discourses and institutions—precisely because they were dealing with an immigration that was for the first time shaped by the forces of industrial capitalism—were not an unmediated product of nativism. As such, they cannot easily be likened to scattered eighteenth-century statutes motivated by the hatred of foreigners. More important, antebellum immigration discourses and institutions for the first time routinized, standardized, and normalized the relationship between citizenship and territory into an indelible permanent feature of the legal landscape. Eighteenth-century immigration discourses and institutions did not. Proof of this lies in the fact that, as late as 1820, Massachusetts required shipmasters to provide bonds for all individuals without settlement, not all individuals without citizenship.	11
Steinfeld's attempt to locate the emergence of modern immigration restriction before the mid-nineteenth century is especially misplaced when he discusses statutes in colonial Massachusetts. The examples he offers of statutes passed in 1701, 1723, 1725, and 1757 that were aimed at preventing a landing of "poor, vicious and infirm" persons in fact prove my point that that relationship between citizenship and territory was first routinized in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. To take just one example, the 1722–23 statute that Steinfeld cites required shipmasters to provide town poor relief officials the names of, and bonds in respect of, all passengers "which are not settled inhabitants of this province" (emphasis added); it then goes on to provide that all such passengers would be deemed inhabitants of the towns in which they were landed.3 Thus, contrary to what Steinfeld suggests, citizenship/subjecthood appears not to have been a prerequisite to the acquisition of territorial rights in early eighteenth-century Massachusetts. This may have something to do with the fact that there was very little non-English migration into New England in the eighteenth century. But the point still holds that early eighteenth-century Massachusetts statutes did not single out aliens as they did in the nineteenth century.	12
This brings me to Steinfeld's second major criticism of my narrative of citizenship, namely that the steps that Massachusetts took to manage immigrant pauperism in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were not true precursors of the federal immigration order because (a) Massachusetts's efforts represented only a "weak form of territorialization [that was] a far cry from the modern regime of immigration, which took its final form during the 1920s" (650) and (b) Massachusetts's attempts to remove paupers from its territory applied, within the logic of the settlement law, to out-of-state citizens and aliens alike. This argument in turn leads him to question my representation of citizenship as a gesture of refusal.	13
It is undoubtedly true that antebellum Massachusetts's immigration regime represented a "weak form of territorialization" vis-à-vis the immigration regime of the 1920s, or the immigration regime of today. There were reasons for that, some of them having to do with unresolved constitutional questions about the correct locus of the immigration power, others having to do with the power, resources, and scope of the mid-nineteenth century state. However, none of this erases the significance of the state discourses, laws, and institutions that had routinized a relationship between citizenship and territory by the 1850s. That these state discourses, laws, and institutions were eventually effortlessly absorbed by the federal immigration order is itself evidence that antebellum state legal-bureaucratic structures were significant precursors of the twentieth-century immigration order.	14
I now turn to Steinfeld's argument that my representation of citizenship as refusal—and my identification of the antebellum period as the birth of the modern immigration order—is fatally marred by the fact that Massachusetts continued to remove out-of-state citizens from its territory into the 1850s. As stated in the article, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Commonwealth sought, at the level of discourse and practice, to forge a relationship between citizenship and territory that worked against aliens even though settlement laws formally applied to aliens and out-of-state citizens alike. This fact goes to the principal object of the article, which is that of revealing why citizenship had to be enforced as a marker of territorial rights through the emergence of central legal-bureaucratic institutions. Precisely because citizenship meant little in positive terms as a marker of territorial rights and claims upon the community, but was activated by the Commonwealth in negative terms to manage the state pauper/immigrant pauper problem, state-level discourses of citizenship were repeatedly defeated by the "cheating" practices of town poor relief officials. Centralization was needed in order for the Commonwealth to deploy citizenship effectively against immigrants. This underscores the lack of internalization of the ideology of citizenship by the larger population of Massachusetts. In other words, from my perspective, the narrative of centralization and the narrative of citizenship—narratives that Steinfeld carefully separates out—are inextricably intertwined.	15
Steinfeld states: "If we say that citizenship is a gesture of refusal, it must be to establish that in some respects at least citizenship gives something that alienage does not" (651). I disagree. Why might citizenship not be deployed against aliens strategically and selectively, without any corresponding effort to enrich citizenship for those who fall on the "citizen" side of the "citizen"/"alien" divide? On my reading, the historical record contests the formal logic of Steinfeld's statement.	16
Notes 1 Robert J. Steinfeld, "Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation," Law and History Review 19 (2001): 645–53 2 Incidentally, in this regard, I fully accept Steinfeld's observation that Massachusetts's decision in the late eighteenth century to retain the alien property disability might have been a deliberate decision, and not, as I suggest in the article, a vestige of English tradition. However, to my mind, that still leaves open the question of why citizenship entered the settlement laws. 3 An Act in Addition to the Act directing the Admission of Town Inhabitants, Made and Pass[e]d in the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of King William the Third, sec. 3, The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, to which are Prefixed the Charters of the Province (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1869–1922), 2:244.

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