Date decided 1923 | ||
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Full case name United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind Citations 261 U.S. 204 (more)
43 S. Ct. 338; 67 L. Ed. 616; 1923 U.S. LEXIS 2544 Prior history Certificate from the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Majority Sutherland, joined by unanimous Ruling court Supreme Court of the United States Similar Ozawa v United States, United States v Wong Ki, Yick Wo v Hopkins, People v Hall, Oyama v California | ||
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously decided that Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as a "high caste Hindu, of full Indian blood," was racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship in the United States. In 1919, Thind filed a petition for naturalization under the Naturalization Act of 1906 which allowed only "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent" to become United States citizens by naturalization.
Contents
After his petition was granted, Government attorneys initiated a proceeding to cancel Thind’s naturalization and a trial followed in which the Government presented evidence of Thind’s political activities as a founding member of the Ghadr Party, a violent Indian independence movement headquartered in San Francisco. Thind did not challenge the constitutionality of the racial restrictions. Instead, he attempted to have "high-caste Hindus" classified as "free white persons" within the meaning of the naturalization act based on the fact that both northern Indians and most Europeans are Indo-European peoples.
The court rejected this argument, holding that while Hindi-speaking high-caste Indians were indeed akin to white European peoples, they had intermarried too freely with the non-white pre-Indo-European populace of India, hence their present skin color. Because of the uncertainty this caused for scientific classification, the court decided to use a "common sense" definition of Caucasian that did not allow for the scientific arguments Thind made and did not classify Indians as white.
Argument
Thind argued that his people, the Aryans, were the conquerors of the indigenous people of India. Highlighting that his people were a "conquering people" was done to characterize Thind as being white.
Thind argued that Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to the Aryan part of India in the same way that Aryan languages are indigenous to Europe. Highlighting the linguistic ties between Indo-Aryan speakers and Europeans, as most European languages including English are similar to Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, was done to characterize Thind as being a white person.
Since the Ozawa v. United States court case had just decided that the meaning of white people for the purposes of the Court were people who were members of the Caucasian race, Thind argued that he was a white person by arguing that he was a member of the Caucasian race. Thind argued using "a number of anthropological texts" that people in Punjab and other Northwestern Indian states belonged to the "Aryan race", and Thind cited scientific authorities such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as classifying Aryans as belonging to the Caucasian race. Thind argued that, although some racial mixing did indeed occur between the Indian castes, the caste system had largely succeeded in India at preventing race-mixing. Thind argued that by being a "high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood" he was a "Caucasian" according to the anthropological definitions of his day.
Thind's lawyers argued that Thind had a revulsion to marrying an Indian woman of the "lower races" when they said, "The high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint." Thind's lawyers argued that Thind had a revulsion to marrying a woman of the Mongoloid race, because they felt that expressing "disdain for inferiors" would characterize Thind as being white. Also, this would characterize Thind as being someone who would be sympathetic to the existing anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.
Verdict
Associate Justice George Sutherland said that authorities on the subject of race were in disagreement over which people were included in the scientific definition of the Caucasian race, so Sutherland instead chose to rely on the common understanding of race rather than the scientific understanding of race. Sutherland found that, while Thind may claim to have "purity of Aryan blood" due to being "born in Village Taragarh Talawa near Jandiala Guru, Amritsar, Punjab" and having "high caste" status, he was not Caucasian in the "common understanding", so he could not be included in the "statutory category as white persons". The Court reiterated its holding in [Ozawa v. United States], explaining that the words "free white person" in the naturalization act were "synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood," pointing out that the statutory language was to be interpreted as "words of common speech and not of scientific origin, . . . written in the common speech, for common understanding, by unscientific men." Justice Sutherland wrote in his summary:
Ironically, the 1910 Encyclopædia Britannica entry on "Hinduism" that Justice Sutherland cites as his sole source for this history actually contradicts his conclusion about the Aryan invaders of Thind’s birthplace in the Punjab and explicitly refers to the Aryan invaders of India as part of "the white race."
The Court nonetheless also concluded that "the term 'Aryan' has to do with linguistic, and not at all with physical, characteristics, and it would seem reasonably clear that mere resemblance in language, indicating a common linguistic root buried in remotely ancient soil, is altogether inadequate to prove common racial origin."
The Court argued that the exclusion of non-whites was based on the idea of racial difference rather than the idea that one race is superior or inferior to another race. The Court argued that the racial difference between Indians and whites was so great that the "great body of our people" would reject assimilation with Indians.
In conclusion, the Court also noted that "Congress, by the Act of February 5, 1917, 39 Stat. 874, c. 29, § 3, has now excluded from admission into this country all natives of Asia within designated limits of latitude and longitude, including the whole of India," suggesting its intention that natives of India also be excluded from eligibility for naturalized citizenship.
Background
Not only were new applicants from India denied the privilege of naturalization, but the new racial classification suggested that the retroactive revocation of naturalization certificates granted to Asian Indians, of which there were many, might be supported by the Court's decision, a point that some courts upheld when United States attorneys petitioned to cancel the naturalization certificates previously granted to many Asian Indians. Some of the consequences of revoked naturalized status are illustrated by the example of some Asian Indian land owners living in California who found themselves under the jurisdiction of the California Alien Land Law of 1913. Specifically, Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb was very active in revoking Indian land purchases; in a bid to strengthen the Asiatic Exclusion League, he promised to prevent Indians from buying or leasing land. Under intense pressure, and with Immigration Act of 1917 preventing fresh immigration to strengthen the fledgling Indian-American community, many Indians left the United States, leaving only half their original American population, 2,405, by 1940.
Aftermath
As a result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision finding that no person of Indian origin could become a naturalized American, the first person from the Indian subcontinent to become an American citizen, A.K. Mozumdar, had his citizenship revoked. A decision on his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that revocation.
Thind petitioned for naturalization a third time in 1935 after Congress passed the Nye-Lea Act, which made World War I veterans eligible for naturalization regardless of race, and based on his status as a veteran of the United States military during World War I he was finally granted United States citizenship nearly two decades after he first petitioned for naturalization. Numerous instances also exist of naïve clerks, or clerks acting in protest, granting citizenship to Asian Indian and other Asian immigrants in defiance of the Supreme Court.
As public support for Asian Indians grew throughout World War II, and as India's independence came closer to reality, Indians argued for an end to their legislative discrimination. The repeal of Chinese exclusion laws in 1943 and the granting of naturalization privileges to Chinese encouraged Asian Indians to hope for similar gains. Hurdling over many members of Congress and the American Federation of Labor, which vehemently opposed removing legislative measures barricading Indian immigration and naturalization, the Asian Indian community finally succeeded in gaining support among several prominent congressmen, as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The support culminated in the signing into law by President Truman on July 2, 1946, of the Luce-Celler Act. This Act reversed the Thind decision by explicitly extending racial eligibility for naturalization to natives of India, and set a token quota for their immigration at 100 per year.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which phased out the national origins quota system first instituted in 1921. In 1965–1970, 27,859 Indian immigrants entered the United States. Immigration from India in 1965–1993 was 558,980.