Imperial Legacies in Italian and American Citizenship Policy
By Cassandra Clifford
Since the beginning of his presidential campaign and throughout his presidency, former U.S. President Donald Trump made immigration a major issue, and even threatened to abolish U.S. birthright citizenship via executive order in 2019, which he framed as a major driver of immigration. Across the Atlantic Ocean, similar right-wing populist rhetoric has coincided with the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment. In Italy, the European country with one of the most restrictive jus sanguinis citizenship policies, the last year has reignited the perpetual debate over citizenship.
Examining the history of the United States and Italy reveals how, despite their very different ways of defining who is a citizen, both forms of citizenship are deeply informed by the imperial pasts of both countries.
Jus sanguinis and the connotations of “Italian blood”
Currently, Italian citizenship is determined by jus sanguinis, right of blood. The law extends citizenship to those whose parents or descendants are/were citizens.
When Italy was unified in the 19th century, jus sanguinis citizenship laws were common across Europe. At a time of mass European emigration, mostly to the Americas, jus sanguinis also accounted for “citizens outside of the kingdom,” those who had family ties to the Italian peninsula.
Under laws which allowed for transmission of citizenship via familial ties, it was nearly impossible for second-, third-, etc.-generation emigrants to lose their Italian nationality without formal renunciation (so long as their nationality was passed down by male ancestors). When Italy began its colonization of East Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these laws made it possible for Italian fathers to pass their nationality to their mixed-race children.
The beginnings of racist citizenship and nationality policies became evident in the 1909 Civil Code for the Eritrean Colony, which declared that a child of unknown parents could gain Italian citizenship if their “physical features” suggested the presence of Italian blood. During the Fascist period, laws prohibiting the cohabitation of white Italian colonizers with Black inhabitants of East Africa were enacted, as well as laws prohibiting white Italian fathers from recognizing mixed-race children.
Many Afro-Italian children, after the end of Italy’s formal empire, received Italian assimilationist educations through Italian Apostolic schools, where they learned Italian language, Italian history, and Italian culture. Despite this connection to Italy, Afro-Italians who migrated to Italy often found their familiarity with Italy to be unrecognized: even those with “Italian blood,” the purported requisite for inclusion in the Italian nation, were seen as outside the nation.
When Italian citizenship law was reformed in 1992, it didn’t make it easier for people born in Italy to become Italian if they were born to immigrant parents. Presently, second-generation immigrants can’t apply for Italian citizenship until they are 18, at which point they have a year to apply for citizenship. Under Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the hard-right Lega Party, the wait time for processing citizenship applications was doubled from two to four years. (This law was recently rolled back, but only slightly, to a three-year wait time.) In the meantime, these italiani senza cittadinanza (Italians without citizenship) have to continuously apply for residence permits, issued conditionally on maintenance of a certain income.
As a result of the restrictive laws surrounding citizenship, an estimated one million people--disproportionately people of color--are not recognized as Italians and are consequently disenfranchised.
Jus soli and the exclusion of U.S.-born citizens
American citizenship, by contrast, is extended by birthright: those born within the United States are automatically citizens. Despite how egalitarian this form of citizenship may sound, especially when compared to jus sanguinis, the history of jus soli in the United States proves that nations with jus soli foundations for citizenship can still have a form of citizenship steeped in imperialism.
As a legacy of common law, jus soli has always been the backbone of citizenship law in the U.S. By the 20th century, the Fourteenth Amendment, which made no reference to race, ethnicity, or “blood,” granted all persons born in the United States citizenship. The landmark 1898 case, U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, upheld that children of immigrants were citizens upon birth in the U.S., regardless of the race, ethnicity, and/or citizenship status of their parents. For children born in the U.S., this decision seemed to erode the potential equivalence between being American and being white.
At the same time, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Wong Kim Ark case did not erase the influence of imperialism from citizenship law, exemplified by the case of Mexican Americans. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1848 agreement which ended the Mexican-American War, Mexicans living in lands newly-annexed by the United States were obligated to choose whether they would remain Mexican citizens or become U.S. citizens. About 100,000 Mexicans became “legally white” in choosing to become U.S. citizens. White Americans were the relative newcomers to this land, but Mexicans would soon be framed as the “foreigners” by the media and targeted in racially motivated violence. Does this story sound familiar to you?
By the 1930s, some Mexican Americans and their ancestors had lived in the U.S. Southwest since before it became part of the U.S.; some had settled in the land more recently, during the Mexican Revolution; others remained seasonal or even daily-commuting workers. Citizenship Mexican Americans had by virtue of jus soli did not ensure they were viewed as equal citizens by their white counterparts.
Case in point, Mexican Americans who were wholly and indisputably American citizens by jus soli were “repatriated” to Mexico during the Great Depression. In programs supported by President Hoover, approximately 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported from the U.S., around 46% of deportees in the 1930s. Some Mexican Americans sent “back” had never been in Mexico before; some didn’t even speak Spanish. If and when they wanted to return to the U.S., the burden of proving their citizenship status was placed entirely on the individual. Government officials often took away documents which may have facilitated re-entry to the U.S. in transit. Like in the case of Afro-Italians, Mexican Americans who met the purported requisites for inclusion in the American nation were seen as being outside of the nation.
Conclusions
As the case of the United States suggests, the racial boundaries of the nation do not change, nor are the legacies of imperialism, colonialism erased by just changing the law, because the nation is not just a contemporary legal identity. It’s a powerful social identity with its own deep history, too.
It’s absurd to maintain that certain people are not members of the nation when those people are not different from the accepted members of the nation, save for the country in which their parents were born. Regardless of their citizenship status, these second-generation immigrants are Italians, just as Mexican Americans sent to Mexico almost a century ago were Americans.