Recent ICE and Border Patrol raids in the Chicago area—raids that swept up U.S. citizens and people with valid legal residence alongside the undocumented—have reopened old and unsettling questions about citizenship and belonging in the United States. In these operations, federal agents plainly relied on racial profiling: people of color were stopped and questioned, compelled to produce “identity” papers in ways that white residents were not.
This use of “whiteness” as a marker of who counts as a real American is not new. It is woven deeply into our national history. When my grandparents emigrated from the Italian Mezzogiorno—southern and central Italy, Sicily and Sardinia—at the turn of the 20th century, they were not considered fully white.
From the late 19th through the early 20th centuries, many Anglo-Americans viewed Italians as racially distinct, sometimes labeling them “Mediterranean” or even “African” according to the racial pseudo-science of the era. Southern Italians were routinely portrayed as criminal, unassimilable or biologically inferior. In 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans after being acquitted of a false murder charge—one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.
Before Italians arrived in large numbers, Germans and Irish immigrants were also viewed as not quite white. Even Benjamin Franklin complained that German immigrants were “swarthy” and incapable of adapting to the values of the English settlers. Whiteness, it seems, has long been a moving target—extended grudgingly and only over time.
The idea that whiteness is a prerequisite for being a “real” American did not appear all at once. It developed gradually through law, court decisions, and political culture.
The very first U.S. citizenship law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, limited naturalization to “free white persons.” Citizenship itself was explicitly racialized. Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, free Black Americans, Asians, and many others were excluded.
Throughout the 19th century, whiteness became bound to full participation in civil and political life. Indian Removal policies cast Native peoples as outside American civilization. Slavery, and later the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), declared that Black Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Manifest Destiny framed white settlement as both natural and divinely sanctioned. Whiteness became not merely a legal category, but a cultural definition of national identity.
Reconstruction briefly challenged this framework. The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship, formerly enslaved people voted and held office, and the definition of Americanness widened—if only temporarily. A fierce backlash followed. Courts and bureaucracies developed ways to strip citizenship from those deemed not white enough. Once denaturalized, these individuals were reclassified as “aliens” and made deportable.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries hardened racial boundaries. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred an entire racial group from immigration. In Ozawa v. United States (1922), a Japanese immigrant was denied citizenship because he was not “Caucasian.” In United States v. Thind (1923), an Indian immigrant was denied citizenship because, although anthropologically Caucasian, he was not white “in the common understanding.”
The Immigration Restriction League (IRL), founded in Boston in 1894 by three wealthy Harvard graduates, used the language of public welfare to rouse the general public against the newer immigrant groups—Italians, Jews, Slavs, Greeks and others— whom they judged to be inherently less assimilable, more prone to poverty or criminality, and a threat to what they considered the nation’s Anglo-Saxon character.
The IRL portrayed itself as rational, data-driven, and focused on preserving the “quality” of American society. They used the language of public welfare, but their proposals were grounded in pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies and social Darwinist theories fashionable in elitist circles. The IRL successfully lobbied for eugenics-based immigration laws in the United States, including the Immigration Act of 1917 and the Immigration Act of 1924.
The Immigration Act of 1924 codified racial hierarchy by favoring northern Europeans as the most desirable—and most American—stock.
During the Great Depression, Secretary of Labor William N. Doak, serving under President Herbert Hoover, intensified deportation and removal efforts in order to keep American jobs for “real” Americans. Enforcement disproportionately targeted Italian and Eastern European immigrants, including many Jews, often labeled as political radicals. People were stopped and searched based on appearance, language and neighborhood, not simply legal status.
And yes—U.S. citizens were expelled or stripped of citizenship because they were not considered white or fully American.
At the same time, the federal government carried out mass removals of people of Mexican descent who were born in the United States and/or invited in as workers. Between one and two million were expelled; historians estimate that between 30% – 60% were U.S. citizens, many of them children. These removals were frequently conducted without hearings or due process. This episode stands as one of the clearest cases in which American citizens were effectively deported because they were not considered “real” Americans.
Today’s immigration crackdowns follow a well-worn path. They echo a long history in which Americanness has been measured not by law, character, and behavior, but by race. I long for the day when we Americans can confront our history honestly—so that we can finally build a future in which citizenship is not policed by skin color, accent, or ancestry, but grounded in justice, respect for the dignity of the individual, and a person’s contribution to our society.
2025 © nicholas.patricca@gmail.com
Nick Patricca is professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago; member of Pen International, San Miguel Center, MX; member of TOSOS Theatre Ensemble, New York City.