escape such a condition.” The legacy of the diminished condition of U.S. “nationals” and citizens with limited Constitutional rights under the Insular Cases framework lives on today, in the sense that their plight is virtually invisible in national politics. President Trump, for example, has contributed multiple public statements suggesting that he is unaware of the fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens (albeit with diminished rights, including limited representation and franchise).48 This is not an auspicious starting point for resolving the vexed situation of second-class status and exploitation affecting more than four million people living in U.S. territories today.49 U.S. laws developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were an “experimentation in diminished citizenship rights” that significantly influenced race-based nationality and immigration laws beyond U.S. borders, including the development of the Nazis’ Nuremburg Race Laws.50 Champions of a nativist vision have returned to the White House in the Trump era.51 It would be too simplistic to draw broad conclusions from this historical insight and its seeming resonance in America today.52 Yet the impetus for this report is to question whether current safeguards go far enough in countering threats to equality in access to and enjoyment of U.S. citizenship, given that nativist turn in public mood and prevailing political agendas. A major conclusion drawn here is that the answer to this question is no. Ideology and Citizenship Alongside the National Origins Act of 1924, the Naturalization Act of 1906 also barred certain categories of would-be citizens from naturalization, based on their political opinions or beliefs, including conscientious objectors and pacifists.53 The 1940 Nationality Act expanded the government’s powers to denaturalize American citizens, covering a range of “subversive” behaviors that could trigger denaturalization. During the 1940s, the Justice Department sought increased powers to investigate the supposed “foreign allegiance” of naturalized Americans even after naturalization, and launched an operation to “study…cases of disloyalty among naturalized citizens.”54 Japanese Americans incarcerated at a “relocation center” were given the “option” to renounce their American nationality through another amendment to the Nationality Act.55 Ultimately, the renunciation requests were challenged on the ground that they were issued in a context of intense coercion. In his opinion in Abo v. Clark, Judge Louis E. Goodman observed: [It was] shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined without authority and then, while so under duress and restraint, for his Government to accept from him a surrender of his constitutional heritage.56 Attorney General Francis Biddle instituted a denaturalization program “as a way of looking tough and winning Roosevelt’s confidence,” that targeted German Americans and Japanese 24 UNMAKING AMERICANS