officials had presided over the hearing, and because it had been conducted in a language she did not understand.
The US Supreme Court decided that the hearing the Board of Special Inquiry had given her was sufficient and ordered Yamataya deported. However, in doing so, the Court ruled that the government could not deport a noncitizen without affording them procedural due process protections, including the right to a hearing. In so doing, the Court clarified that individuals have a right to a hearing even if they enter the country unlawfully and do not establish long-term residence.
Yamataya v. Fisher established the concept of due process for noncitizens, and the decision opened the door for noncitizens to appeal procedural irregularities in their deportation hearings. While this did not help Yamataya, her refusal to accept the questionable actions of men regarding her body and autonomy helped establish a baseline for granting due process to millions of people. Even though deportation is primarily enacted as a punishment, immigrants facing removal are subjected to similar administrative law procedures, which are quite limited in nature. Immigration courts are kangaroo courts, because they are under the purview of the politically motivated Department of Justice, therefore the autonomy and authority of the so-called “immigration judges” is quite questionable.
Yamataya was likely a survivor of sexual violence, at a time when the United States did not have laws that could qualify her for immigration status as a victim of violence. The government’s lack of concern about her likely exposure to sexual violence parallels the current lack of concern for Central American women seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border. If caught by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, migrant women are often deported to Mexico’s violent border towns in the middle of the night.29 Rape along the US-Mexico border is so common that it is reluctantly accepted as a potential part of the price for admission to America, and many migrant women take birth control pills before making the dangerous journey north.30
The “likely to become a public charge” grounds under which Yamataya was deported continues to shape federal and state immigration policy. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, eliminated access for lawful permanent residents to many social welfare benefits, such as Medicare, Medicaid, Supplemental Social Security Income, and food stamps.31 Some of the harsh provisions were later removed after protests from advocates, but confusion about access to benefits is so widespread in immigrant communities, that contrary to popular perception, most forgo receiving any form of assistance. In this manner, poverty is still used as a device to marginalize, if not outright exclude people who are perceived unfit for citizenship.
Bhagat Singh Thind and Takao Ozawa
Even though the Fourteenth Amendment made citizens of all persons born in the United States, Congress still limited citizenship acquired through naturalization to white persons and, through an amendment, added those with African origins.32 In 1917, Congress specifically banned all Asian persons from immigrating to the United States. Asian Americans were caught in limbo and condemned to second-class status, even those here legally.
Since the process of naturalization at that time was a judicial function, it was up to individual judges to decide who was a white person, or a person of African nativity or African descent. This led to an interesting patchwork of court decisions whereby Iranians and Armenians were able to win naturalization, but Asian Indians and Japanese individuals were deemed to be non-white.33 Since Asians were excluded until the 1940s, courts heard many cases involving their naturalization. In nearly all of these cases, the applicants claimed whiteness.
One of these seminal cases involved a Japanese immigrant. Takao Ozawa was born in Japan but moved to the United States in 1894, when he was nineteen years old, and grew up in California. He graduated from Berkeley High School, studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and then moved to Hawai‘i. He sought naturalization in 1914 and fought his way up to the Supreme Court. In a brief that he wrote to the Court, Ozawa disavowed any connection with Japanese churches, schools, or organizations.34 He described how he had been educated in the United States. He claimed to speak mostly English and told the court that his children did not speak Japanese at home.
“In name, I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.”
—Takao Ozawa
Ozawa essentially distanced himself from anything having to do with Japan and aimed to present himself higher on the racial pecking order based on his literal and metaphorical whiteness. He conflated being white with being American. Neither the Hawai‘i District Court nor the US Supreme Court agreed with him.35 The United States contended that the proper distinction wasn’t based on nativity or skin color, but that “white” was equivalent to European, and none of Ozawa’s ancestors had been European.
The Ozawa decision served as precedent until Congress removed barriers for Japanese naturalization in 1952. By the time Ozawa died in 1936, he had made Hawai‘i his home, although the United States had failed to consider him as one of its own.
Another major case involved Bhagat Singh Thind (1892–1967), who was born in Punjab, India and came to the United States in 1913. A wave of immigrants came from India at the turn of the century, and by 1910 there were between five and ten thousand Asian Indians in the United States. At the time, anthropologists generally regarded Asian Indians as Caucasian, not Mongolian. In 1918, Thind was actually granted citizenship, only for the document to be voided by the Immigration and Naturalization Service four days later. He served in World War I for the United States, and was honorably discharged, after which he once again applied for United States citizenship while residing in Washington State.
Once again, in 1920, Thind received citizenship, which the government appealed once more, despite his military service to the country. In 1923, the US Supreme Court heard his case. In contrast to Ozawa, Bhagat Singh Thind claimed that as an Asian Indian, he was Caucasian, and therefore white, particularly because of his high caste.As a matter of fact, Aryans had previously colonized India, so Thind based his claim on this history.
The Supreme Court disagreed with him, and ruled that Asian Indians were not eligible for US citizenship. (Even though Thind was Sikh, not Hindu, the courts used the term ‘Hindoo’ to describe all Asian Indians regardless of religion.)36 Unfortunately, more than sixty-five Asian Indians were denaturalized in the wake of Thind’s case, including A. K. Mozumdar, who had been the first Asian Indian to become naturalized as a white person in 1913.37
After the decision, Thind moved to New York, where he again applied for citizenship after Congress passed a law in 1935 that allowed US veterans to become naturalized. After three attempts, Thind finally gained citizenship in 1936 without a challenge from the government.
Thind went on to complete his doctorate degree in the United States, wrote riveting books on Sikh philosophy, and delivered lectures on metaphysics. He campaigned actively for the independence of India from Britain and helped Indian students in any way he could.
Thind and Ozawa tried to prove they were white. They tried to show they had assimilated and that they were deserving of American citizenship. The courts, engaged in trying to legally define the legal construction of race, failed Thind, Ozawa, and many others. Perhaps they would have had more success if they had challenged race-based naturalization laws as being per se inconsistent with the United States Constitution. But we will truly never know.
As history rolled on, undocumented immigrants would try to show that they deserved citizenship because they were Americans in every sense but their papers. They would also fail for at least two decades.
Kajiro Oyama
“I was aware that my rights were being violated but if that’s what the president wanted us to do—then we must evacuate. It was my intention to prove my loyalty and looked forward to joining
