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Book Review
| Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 254. $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-19-516345-2).
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| In the poignantly written Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, Hiroshi Motomura argues that those engaged in the making, interpretation, or critique of U.S. immigration law and policy would do well to reconceive of what the U.S. owes to lawfully admitted permanent residents as a matter of "immigration as transition" rather than the now pervasive "immigration as contract" or "immigration as affiliation." Under "immigration as contract," the receiving political community owes the non-citizen only whatever was stated upon her arrival; under "immigration as affiliation," a non-citizen's rights expand over time as she develops familial and economic ties. In contrast to both "immigration as contract" and "immigration as affiliation," only "immigration as transition," in Motomura's view, "treats new immigrants as if they will become citizens ... and recognizes the line between us and them as a permeable border that many lawful immigrants will cross in the natural course of time" (202). Practically, "immigration as transition" requires for Motomura that new lawful immigrants be allowed to vote, to receive public assistance, and to sponsor relatives for immigration. The only exception to the equivalence between "Americans in waiting" and those already American citizens would be the stipulation that "Americans in waiting" could be deported for serious crimes while citizens could not. When they become eligible, these "Americans in waiting" must naturalize or necessarily lose the special rights of newcomers, Motomura argues. |
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Some readers may take issue with Motomura for reserving the mantle of "Americans in waiting" for recently admitted legal permanent residents without much analysis of either the increasingly economic calculus by which the U.S. government anoints legal permanent residents in the first place, or the possibility that certain groups of non-permanent resident aliens may have equally compelling claims for recognition. Setting aside for the time being this question of the scope of Motomura's proposal, what is most intriguing about the book is Motomura's characterization of "immigration as transition" as currently "lost," or occluded, but nonetheless already immanent in the history of U.S. law. He identifies as the concrete marker of "immigration as transition" the declaration of intent to become a citizen that was a prerequisite for naturalization between 1795 and 1952. In 1795, as Congress increased the residency period for U.S. citizenship from two to five years, it also required that every applicant file "first papers" declaring his or her intent to become a U.S. citizen at least three years prior to naturalization. In 1952, these "first papers" became optional. |
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Motomura notes that the "first papers" likely initially "served an administrative function by allowing an early review of eligibility [for naturalization] in the form of an examination under oath before a court clerk" (115). But he also suggests that what began primarily as a matter of administration took on crucial normative significance during the nineteenth century—a significance that the Supreme Court ultimately used to illiberal ends in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874). To support its holding that female U.S. citizens need not be allowed to vote despite the then recently passed Fourteenth Amendment, the Court in Minor noted that citizenship was, as a matter of fact, neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for voting, as non-citizen white males of foreign birth who had filed "first papers" were then widely voting in U.S. states. |
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As "first papers" and "intending citizenship" made possible the privileging of foreign born white men over native born white women in Minor, a long history of racial discrimination in naturalization also taints the "lost story" of "Americans in waiting," as Motomura himself recognizes. Naturalization and thus "intending citizenship" were both restricted to whites from 1790 to 1870, and to whites and blacks from 1870 to the 1940s. This tension, between the at once liberal and illiberal possibilities of what one may be tempted to term "immigration as transition, but likely only for some," pervades not only the book's historical narrative, but also haunts Motomura's prescriptions for contemporary U.S. law. This is the case especially as his prescriptions rely heavily on a distinction between those admitted for permanent residency and those admitted under other kinds of arrangements, many of them more resolutely contractual in spirit. |
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Despite this perhaps inevitable tension however, Motomura's work elegantly reveals a crucial lesson of the history of citizenship in the U.S., namely that the relationship between juridical citizenship status and political participation is an entirely conventional one, borne out of the positive law of a given period rather than any essential truths about political communities. Though not primarily a work of archival research, Hiroshi Motomura's Americans in Waiting is one of those all too rare books that has something to offer historians as well as political theorists and legal scholars. The work successfully engages the past of U.S. law not only to illuminate the contingency of its present, but also at the same time to render already possible its more generous future. |
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| Hamsa M. Murthy
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| University of California Berkeley |
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