In what part of the US Constitution are the white Americans identified as the essential majority for the country? This is a country that was founded through immigration, unlike China or India, so turning around and crying about becoming a minority just as you are enjoying the benefits of your ancestors migrating seems hypocritical.
Appealing to the history of immigration in the country doesn't diminish the GP's point as the US has discriminated against the origins and identities of immigrants since its founding.
>The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 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, slaves, free black people and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in a number of states. [1]
Race based citizenship remained the law until United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) [2] where the Supreme Court interpreted the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause of the 14th Amendment to meant that anyone physically born in the country was automatically granted citizenship. Race-neutral naturalization wasn't enacted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 [3] and racial discrimination and national original based immigration (not permanent residency as should be obvious) controls weren't banned until the Hart–Celler Act in 1965 [4].
I’m confused by this … doesn’t “national origin discrimination” make sense in an immigration context. It’s reasonable to treat people from Canada different from people from, say, Litchtenstein.
What the 1952 law says is that you can't ban people from immigrating because of what country they come from. It doesn't ban the creation caps on the number of people immigrating from a specific countries, which the law also enacted. The 1965 Act repealed country based quotas and replaced them with hemisphere based quotas, which were then themselves repealed and replaced with country based quotas again in the Immigration Act of 1990, which created the modern Diversity Immigrant Visas (as well the modern employment based visas).
