Naturalization Act Restricts Citizenship to Free White Persons Creating Racial Caste System

Congress passes and President George Washington signs the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103), the first federal law establishing uniform rules for granting United States citizenship through naturalization. The Act limits naturalization eligibility to “free white person(s)… of good character,” explicitly excluding Black people, Indigenous people, indentured servants, and all non-white immigrants from pathways to citizenship. In practice, only white male property owners can naturalize and acquire citizenship status, while women, nonwhite persons, and indentured servants cannot. This creates the legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” that persists for 162 years, profoundly shaping American society by establishing a racialized citizenship caste system embedded in federal law from the republic’s inception.

The racial restriction eliminates ambiguity about citizenship access, given that free Black people had been allowed state-level citizenship in many states under the Articles of Confederation. Although Congress in 1790 likely intends primarily to exclude people of African ancestry and Indigenous peoples (since few other people of color reside in the nation), courts in subsequent years readily apply the law to exclude Asian immigrants, Muslim immigrants (classified as non-white Asians), and other non-European populations. The restriction produces profound consequences: non-white immigrants face limitations on property ownership, representation in courts, public employment, and voting rights. Courts associate whiteness with Christianity and Judaism, sometimes excluding Muslim immigrants from citizenship until Ex Parte Mohriez recognizes citizenship for a Saudi Muslim man in 1944.

The Naturalization Act represents institutional racism embedded into federal law at the founding, establishing white supremacy as explicit national policy that shapes immigration, citizenship, and civil rights for over a century and a half. The racial restriction remains in effect with only minor modifications until 1952—in 1870 Congress extends eligibility to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” during Reconstruction, and after 1940 extends it piecemeal to specific groups (“descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere,” “Filipino persons,” “Chinese persons,” “persons of races indigenous to India”). In 1922, a unanimous Supreme Court recognizes the 1790 Act’s foundational nature, calling the racial restriction “a rule in force from the beginning of the Government, a part of our history as well as our law, welded into the structure of our national polity by a century of legislative and administrative acts and judicial decisions.” The Act helps explain why as late as 1960 more than 99 percent of Americans are white or Black, and resolves questions about the Framers’ racial attitudes—whether or not they support slavery, a majority unambiguously conceive of the United States as a white country, embedding structural racism that persists long after the restriction’s 1952 repeal.