Citizenship Eligibility Quotes
At the time immigrants had to live in America 14 years before they were eligible for citizenship. The President urged a reduction in that waiting period which is what was done. This was one of the earliest statements of America as a haven to the oppressed of the world. Note that despite occasional squabbles over land use and theft, the general assessment of the President and the public was that the Indians although not as civilized had welcomed the whites with “hospitality.” The next years would produce the conflict for land and begin the massive usurpation of Indian land that would characterize American policy and practice until the latter half of the 20th century, buy which time there was little Indian land left.
This was an effort to keep Asian immigrants—who were ineligible for citizenship under the racist Federal laws though the 1930s from competing with American farmers. Many of the Western states also had laws or Constitutions prohibiting Asians to not only own land but also forbidding them from even having long tern leases on land. The Japanese in California were so successful that in the 1920s that state passed a version of Asian land ownership prohibition. The Supreme Court at the time actually ruled that this kind of discrimination was legal. A French alien could own land but not a Japanese. The loophole however was that many Japanese short term tenant farmers who had saved enough money to buy land, had children who were born in the United State and hence where citizens. The land was purchased by the citizen children. California however went so far as to make it illegal for a Japanese person to be a guardian of his minor children if the children were born in the United States, but that law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
