Act relating to expatriation of citizens and their protection abroad; citizenship of women by marriage; citizenship of children born abroad of citizen fathers[1]
This act was an attempt by Congress to resolve issues related to the status of citizenship, including those Americans living outside the United States, married women, and children born outside the country to American citizens. A particular concern during the last half of the nineteenth century was that of dual citizenship. During this period, several countries had established laws which gave their nationality to alien wives of male citizens. Did this then grant dual citizenship to American women married to men from these countries?[5]
A prominent case involving the daughter of President Ulysses S. Grant attempted to resolve this issue. In 1874, Nellie Grant married Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris, an Englishman, in a White House ceremony. Following the wedding, the couple left the country to reside in Great Britain. British law stated that an alien woman became a British subject when she married a citizen of Great Britain. Did this give her citizenship in both countries? It was decided that the Act of 1868 determined that, by establishing residency outside the country, she had relinquished her American citizenship. This did not address the question of those women who maintained U.S. residency during their marriage. When Nellie Grant Sartoris returned to the United States at the end of her marriage, State Department practice at the time held that, by returning, she automatically regained her citizenship. Despite this, in 1896, she petitioned Congress to reinstate her American nationality. In a Special Act of 1898, she regained an unconditional resumption of her citizenship.[6]
The recommendations of U.S. Minister to the Netherlands David Jayne Hill(pictured) and his State Department colleagues formed the basis for Section 2 of the Expatriation Act of 1907.
The Act of 1907 contained seven sections, the last regarding rules of evidence for matters in the act, and the other six relating to citizenship and passports.[1][7]
Alien's passports
Section 1 provided for the issuance of non-renewable alien's passports of six months' validity to non-citizens who had lived in the United States for three years and had made a declaration of intention to become U.S. citizens. This provision was repealed by the Act of June 4, 1920 (41Stat.751, An Act Making appropriations for the Diplomatic and Consular Service for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921).[8]
Americans residing abroad
Section 2 contained three grounds for loss of United States citizenship: naturalization in a foreign state, taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign state, or specifically for a naturalized citizen residing for two years in one's foreign state of origin or five years in any other foreign state; it also provided that citizenship could be lost only in peacetime.[1] It was repealed by Section 504 of the Nationality Act of 1940; however, a saving clause in the 1940 Act provided that nothing in that Act would affect the status of those who had already lost citizenship prior to its passage.[4][9]
In addition to the provisions which actually ended up in the Act, the commission had also recommended that persons wishing to re-acquire US citizenship "be required to comply with the laws applicable to the naturalization of aliens". However, this was not adopted by Congress.[12] Another difference between the law and the previous practice of the State Department was that any oath to a foreign state became grounds for loss of US citizenship even if no foreign nationality was acquired by that oath.[13] Congress and the State Department were in agreement that loss of citizenship in wartime should not be permitted; this had been a long-standing principle in US law going all the way back to Talbot v. Janson in 1795, and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had stated in the 1870s that permitting loss of citizenship in wartime "would be to afford a cover to desertion and treasonable aid to the public enemy."[14]
Married women
Section 3 provided for loss of citizenship by American women who married aliens.[1] The Act states that an American woman who marries an alien would lose her citizenship and take on her husband’s nationality. In actuality, whether or not she could do this was dependent on the laws of the country to which her husband belonged. If there was no similar law granting derivative citizenship to a married woman, she would then become stateless.[15][16]
As a result of her loss of citizenship, she forfeited her constitutional rights and could be subject to deportation and denial of reentry to the United States. Her opportunities for employment would be restricted — for example ineligible for any kind of government work and, in some states, for teaching in a public school. During WWI, any woman married to a German national was required to register as an “enemy alien,” and was subject to having property confiscated by the U.S. government through the Office of Alien Property Custodian.[17][18]
The act also gave conditions under which a woman could regain her American citizenship. While still married to an alien, under the terms of section 4 of this act, she could become a naturalized citizen only if her husband applied for, was accepted, and completed this naturalization. After the marriage was terminated, by annulment, divorce, or death, there were three ways for her to repatriate. If she had resided in the United States during her marriage, by remaining in this country, she would automatically regain citizenship. Those women who lived abroad during the marriage could return to the U.S. and establish residency, for automatic repatriation. If she chose to remain outside the country, she had to register as an American citizen at an American consul, within one year of the end of the marriage.[19][15]
An act of Congress in 1855 had granted automatic citizenship to alien wives of men who were American citizens, native born or naturalized. This act had not addressed the status of these women following the termination of their marriage. Section 4 of the Act of 1907 provided for the retention of citizenship in these cases. Those women who had resided in the United States would retain citizenship, if they continued to live in the country and did not renounce their American citizenship. Those women residing abroad at the end of their marriage, were required to register as an American citizen at a US consulate, within one year, in order to retain their citizenship.[7]
Petition of naturalization for Harriot Stanton Blatch submitted in 1911 in order to regain her American citizenship.
It was not until American born wives of aliens attempted to register to vote, in those states that had granted the vote to women prior to 1919, that the implications of these two sections of the Act were fully understood. Among leading suffragists this act affected were Harriot Stanton Blatch, Inez Milholland, and Crystal Eastman. These three women, all born in the United States and fighting for the right of American women to gain the vote, had married men who were not American citizens and, as a result of the Act of 1907, had lost their American citizenship.[20] Harriot Stanton Blatch attempted to regain her citizenship by filing a petition of naturalization in 1911. However, her husband was still living and had not applied for citizenship himself, so she was ineligible for reinstatement. Following his death, in 1915, she was repatriated following the terms of this act.
In 1917, Jeannette Rankin, Montana representative, introduced a bill to amend Section 3 of the 1907 Act. However, with the outbreak of WWI, the focus on American wives of alien husbands turned toward questions concerning their patriotic loyalty and the bill was not passed.[21]
Following the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth amendment, significant protests by members of the women's suffrage movement began, focused on the reversal of both the acts of 1855 and 1907, which established derivative citizenship for married women. They campaigned for independent naturalization which would require alien women to be qualified to naturalize and take an oath of allegiance to the United States.[21][22] Two years after women gained the franchise, they were repealed by the Cable Act of 1922.[7][23] However, the Cable Act itself continued to provide for the loss of citizenship by American women who married "aliens ineligible to citizenship," namely Asians.[24] Besides excluding those women married to Asians, this exception also applied to men who had deserted the U.S. military, those who had left the country to avoid the draft, and any who had withdrawn their Declaration of Intent to Naturalize, in order to avoid the military service.[15] The Cable Act was amended in 1930, 1931, and 1934.[16]
In 2013, Daniel Swalm, the grandson of a Minnesota woman who had lost U.S. citizenship under Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 for marrying a Swedish immigrant and died without regaining her citizenship, began lobbying Congress to posthumously restore citizenship to women like his grandmother.[25] He contacted his senator Al Franken, who in 2014 sponsored a resolution (S.Res.402) expressing regret for the passage of the 1907 Act.[26][27] The resolution passed the Senate on May 14, 2014.[28]
Children born abroad
Section 5 provided that child born abroad to alien parents could acquire U.S. citizenship upon the naturalization of their parents during their minority, once the minor child him or herself began to reside permanently in the U.S. Section 6 provided that children born abroad to U.S. citizen parents would be required to swear an oath of allegiance before a U.S. consul upon reaching the age of majority if they wished to retain U.S. citizenship.[7] Both sections were repealed by Section 504 of the Nationality Act of 1940.[4]
Case law
The Supreme Court first considered the Expatriation Act of 1907 in the 1915 case MacKenzie v. Hare. The plaintiff, a suffragist named Ethel MacKenzie, was living in California, which since 1911 had extended the franchise to women. However, she had been denied voter registration by the respondent in his capacity as a Commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Election on the grounds of her marriage to a Scottish man.[29] MacKenzie contended that the Expatriation Act of 1907 "if intended to apply to her, is beyond the authority of Congress", as neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor any other part of the Constitution gave Congress the power to "denationalize a citizen without his concurrence". However, Justice Joseph McKenna, writing the majority opinion, stated that while "[i]t may be conceded that a change of citizenship cannot be arbitrarily imposed, that is, imposed without the concurrence of the citizen", but "[t]he law in controversy does not have that feature. It deals with a condition voluntarily entered into, with notice of the consequences." Justice James Clark McReynolds, in a concurring opinion, stated that the case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.[30]
In 1950, the Supreme Court ruled on Savorgnan v. United States. The Expatriation Act of 1907 had been repealed for nearly a decade by that point, but the case concerned a woman who married an Italian man on December 26, 1940 (after the passage of the Nationality Act of 1940, but before its effective date) and then applied for naturalization as an Italian citizen, all while still living in the United States. She later lived in Italy from 1941 to 1945, after the 1940 Act had taken effect. Justice Harold Hitz Burton, writing the majority opinion, reversed the District Court and found that the petitioner had indeed lost U.S. citizenship. His ruling, though it relied primarily on the Nationality Act of 1940, also made reference to the Expatriation Act of 1907. He rejected the petitioner's contention that Section 2 of the Act only resulted in loss of U.S. citizenship when the act of naturalization occurred on foreign soil, and held that it was irrelevant under the Act whether or not the petitioner had intended to renounce her U.S. citizenship by applying for the Italian one. However, he declined to rule on the Government's contention that the petitioner would have lost U.S. citizenship even if she had not taken up residence abroad, writing that "it is not necessary to determine here whether the petitioner's residence and naturalization are to be tested under the saving clause or under the rest of the Act of 1940".[9]
↑ Tsiang 1942, p.107. US law has not always been consistent on this point; the Enrollment Act of 1865 provided for loss of citizenship during the Civil War.
1 2 3 Roche, John P. (1950). "The Loss of American Nationality. The Development of Statutory Expatriation". University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 99 (1): 25–71. doi:10.2307/3309397. JSTOR3309397.
United States nationality law details the conditions in which a person holds United States nationality. In the United States, nationality is typically obtained through provisions in the U.S. Constitution, various laws, and international agreements. Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. While domestic documents often use citizenship and nationality interchangeably, nationality refers to the legal means in which a person obtains a national identity and formal membership in a nation and citizenship refers to the relationship held by nationals who are also citizens.
The Cable Act of 1922 was a United States federal law that partially reversed the Expatriation Act of 1907. (It is also known as the Married Women's Citizenship Act or the Women's Citizenship Act). In theory the law was designed to grant women their own national identity; however, in practice, as it still retained vestiges of coverture, tying a woman's legal identity to her husband's, it had to be amended multiple times before it granted women citizenship in their own right.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free Africans, Pacific Islanders, and non-White Asians. This eliminated ambiguity on how to treat newcomers, given that free black people had been allowed citizenship at the state level in many states. In reading the Naturalization Act, the courts also associated whiteness with Christianity and thus excluded Muslim immigrants from citizenship until the decision Ex Parte Mohriez recognized citizenship for a Saudi Muslim man in 1944.
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim's right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.
The history of Canadian nationality law dates back over three centuries, and has evolved considerably over that time.
Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed Congress's right to revoke United States citizenship as a result of a citizen's voluntary performance of specified actions, even in the absence of any intent or desire on the person's part to lose citizenship. Specifically, the Supreme Court upheld an act of Congress which provided for revocation of citizenship as a consequence of voting in a foreign election.
The War Brides Act was enacted to allow alien spouses, natural children, and adopted children of members of the United States Armed Forces, "if admissible," to enter the U.S. as non-quota immigrants after World War II. More than 100,000 entered the United States under this Act and its extensions and amendments until it expired in December 1948. The War Brides Act was a part of new approach to immigration law that focused on family reunification over racial exclusion. There were still racial limits that existed particularly against Asian populations, and Chinese spouses were the only Asian nationality that qualified to be brought to the United States under the act. Additionally, the War Brides Act was well supported and easily passed because family members of servicemen were the recipients, but there were concerns over marital fraud which caused some tensions.
United States citizenship can be acquired by birthright in two situations: by virtue of the person's birth within United States territory or because one or both of their parents was a U.S. citizen at the time of the person's birth. Birthright citizenship contrasts with citizenship acquired in other ways, for example by naturalization.
Philippine nationality law details the conditions by which a person is a national of the Philippines. The two primary pieces of legislation governing these requirements are the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines and the 1939 Revised Naturalization Law.
Renunciation of citizenship is the voluntary loss of citizenship. It is the opposite of naturalization, whereby a person voluntarily obtains citizenship. It is distinct from denaturalization, where citizenship is revoked by the state.
The Citizenship Clause is the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was adopted on July 9, 1868, which states:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean region in which inhabitants were Spanish nationals from 1508 until the Spanish–American War in 1898, from which point they derived their nationality from United States law. Nationality is the legal means by which inhabitants acquire formal membership in a nation without regard to its governance type. In addition to being United States nationals, persons are citizens of the United States and citizens of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico within the context of United States Citizenship. Miriam J. Ramirez de Ferrer v. Juan Mari Brás. Citizenship, the rights and obligations that each owes the other, once one has become a member of a nation. Though the Constitution of the United States recognizes both national and state citizenship as a means of accessing rights, Puerto Rico's history as a territory has created both confusion over the status of its nationals and citizens and controversy because of distinctions between jurisdictions of the United States. These differences have created what political scientist Charles R. Venator-Santiago has called "separate and unequal" statuses.
Citizenship of the United States is a legal status that entails Americans with specific rights, duties, protections, and benefits in the United States. It serves as a foundation of fundamental rights derived from and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, such as freedom of expression, due process, the rights to vote, live and work in the United States, and to receive federal assistance.
Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that a child born in the United States to naturalized parents on U.S. soil is a natural born citizen and that the child's natural born citizenship is not lost if the child is taken to and raised in the country of the parents' origin, provided that upon attaining the age of majority, the child elects to retain U.S. citizenship "and to return to the United States to assume its duties."
Martin v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts was an 1805 legal case decided by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, presided over by Francis Dana. It was influential in setting a legal precedent that US married women did not have separate formal political citizenship from their husbands.
The Expatriation Act of 1868 was an act of the 40th United States Congress that declared, as part of the United States nationality law, that the right of expatriation is "a natural and inherent right of all people" and "that any declaration, instruction, opinion, order, or decision of any officers of this government which restricts, impairs, or questions the right of expatriation, is hereby declared inconsistent with the fundamental principles of this government".
The Nationality Act of 1940 revised numerous provisions of law relating to American citizenship and naturalization. It was enacted by the 76th Congress of the United States and signed into law on October 14, 1940, a year after World War II had begun in Europe, but before the U.S. entered the war.
The Renunciation Act of 1944 was an act of the 78th Congress regarding the renunciation of United States citizenship. Prior to the law's passage, it was not possible to lose U.S. citizenship while in U.S. territory except by conviction for treason; the Renunciation Act allowed people physically present in the U.S. to renounce citizenship when the country was in a state of war by making an application to the Attorney General. The intention of the 1944 Act was to encourage Japanese American internees to renounce citizenship so that they could be deported to Japan.
Under United States federal law, a U.S. citizen or national may voluntarily and intentionally give up that status and become an alien with respect to the United States. Relinquishment is distinct from denaturalization, which in U.S. law refers solely to cancellation of illegally procured naturalization.
The United States Virgin Islands are a group of around 90 islands, islets, and cays in the Caribbean region in which inhabitants were claimed by Spain in 1493. No permanent settlements occurred in the Spanish period and the islands were colonized by Denmark in 1671. The inhabitants remained Danish nationals until 1917. From that date, islanders have derived their nationality from the United States. Nationality is the legal means in which inhabitants acquire formal membership in a nation without regard to its governance type. In addition to being United States' nationals, Virgin Islanders are both citizens of the United States and [local] citizens of the Virgin Islands. Citizenship is the relationship between the government and the governed, the rights and obligations that each owes the other, once one has become a member of a nation.
References
Tsiang, I-Mien (1942). The question of expatriation in America prior to 1907. Johns Hopkins Press. OCLC719352.
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