Shifting Borders of Belonging 27 example, although the 1947 Citizenship Act provided that British subjects born in Canada prior to 1947 were Canadian citizens, First Nations and Inuit were not considered British subjects and therefore were not considered citizens. Furthermore, colonial governments created differential statuses for Indigenous peoples. In Canada, the Indian Act8 created a system of reserves and registered Indigenous persons and defined how the Canadian government would treat certain Indigenous persons. A similar story played out in the United States and Australia where Native Americans and Aborigines were excluded from citizenship for much of these states’ early history.9 Indigenous peoples’ experience thus shows how the law has constructed persons as not citizens or produced their citizenship in ways that differ from their legal traditions or entitlements. Ethnic and Racial Minorities States have also enacted measures to restrict access to citizenship to racialized persons or persons with a particular ethnicity. In the United States and Canada, for example, Asian people were subject to open hostility and discrimination that led to the enactment of legislation to prevent them from coming to North America. In the United States, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prevented Chinese immigration to the United States.10 Canada followed the Americans by first issuing a report by the Canadian Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration that stated Asians were “unfit for full citizenship . . . obnoxious to a free community and dangerous to the state.”11 Following this report, the Canadian Parliament voted to increase the Chinese head tax to $500, an entrance fee meant to deter the migration of Chinese people to Canada. Furthermore, during the Second World War, Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps all over North America. The experience of ethnic and racial minorities, also explored in Chapter 6 in the context of migration, highlights how the law can be used to actively discriminate against certain groups and prevent them from becoming citizens. Women Women, who typically make up more than half of any state’s population, have historically been treated differently when it comes to the ability to acquire or lose 8 Indian Act, Revised Statutes of Canada, 1985, c I-5. Note that with the passage of the US Indian Citizenship Act, June 2, 1924, Indigenous peoples, whether or not they wanted to become US citizens, were forced to become so. 10 An Act to Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to the Chinese, May 6, 1882. 11 Privy Council Office of Canada and the Canadian Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration into British Columbia, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration (Ottawa: S. E. Dawson, 1902), http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9 .824969/publication.html. 9 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press