United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind
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| United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind | |||||||||||||
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| Argued January 11 – 12, 1923 Decided February 19, 1923 |
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| Chief Justice: William Howard Taft Associate Justices: Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler |
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| Majority by: Sutherland Joined by: unanimous |
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that Bhagat Singh Thind, who was a Sikh man native of India, settled in Oregon, could not be a naturalized citizen of the United States, despite the fact that anthropologists had defined members of the Indian subcontinent as being members of the Caucasian race. The ruling followed a decision in Takao Ozawa v. United States, where the same court had ruled that a light-skinned native of Japan could not counted as "white", because "white" meant "Caucasian". In Bhagat Singh Thind, the court seemed to contradict itself, ruling that Thind was not a "white person" as used in "common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man." Using the "understanding of the common man" argument, it was therefore decided that Congress never intended for Indians to be able to naturalize.
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[edit] The bench
[edit] Opinion
- Written by: Associate Justice George Sutherland
Sutherland found that while Indians were indeed anthropologically Caucasian, the framers of the Constitution could never have intended letting Bhagat Singh Thind enter the country and be naturalized. Sutherland commented "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences", leveraging the common man's understanding of Caucasian, meaning white, and hence Thind could not be eligible for citizenship since he looked distinctively different from this common man notion. Rather than create a new classification, Sutherland found Indians to be Asian, subjecting them to preexisting anti-Asian laws passed nationally and in California under the heavy lobbying of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
[edit] Effects of the decision
Not only were Indians denied the ability to naturalize, their new classification as Asian rather than white allowed retroactively stripping previously naturalized Indians of their American citizenship since zealous prosecutors argued Indian Americans had gained citizenship illegally, a claim often upheld. Moreover, without citizenship, Indian land owners fell under the net of the California Alien Land Law, and other racist laws spearheaded by growing hatred against Asian immigrants. Specifically, Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb was very active in revoking Indian land purchases and in a bid to further strengthen the AEL, he promised to prevent Indians from buying or leasing land. Under intense pressures, and with The Barred Zone Act of 1917 preventing fresh immigration to strengthen the fledgling Indian American community, most Indians left the United States, leaving only half their population, 2,405, by 1940.
Ironically, and suggestive of the poor coordination within the legal system of the early 20th century, Thind applied for and received U.S. citizenship through the state of New York a few years after his original U.S. citizenship was revoked by the U.S. Supreme Court. Numerous other instances exist of naive clerks, or clerks acting in protest, who granted citizenship in defiance of the Supreme Court. Enthusiastic anti-Indian sentiments seemed fairly absent in New England.
As public support for 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 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 Indian community 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, insofar as allowing naturalization to Indians, 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. Between 1965 and 1970, 27,859 Indian immigrants entered the United States and between 1965 and 1993, immigration from India totaled 558,980. [1]
