104 K. Collins sometimes functioned to create political communities that draw from different ethnic and religious groups, as in the case of German Jews whose membership in the German polity was secured by the country’s ius sanguinis laws prior to the Nazi era. I want to elaborate and underscore the importance of this point with an additional example from United States history: During seventy years of Chinese exclusionary laws, ius sanguinis citizenship provided one of the very few routes to entry, and to American citizenship, for ethnic Chinese individuals born outside the U.S. For precisely that reason, exclusionists sought to limit or repeal the ius sanguinis statute, which recognised the foreign-born children of American fathers as citizens.1 If one expands the historical frame to include parent-child immigration preferences and derivative naturalisation, the story becomes even more complex. By 1965, the race-based exclusions and national-origins quotas had been abolished, and previously excluded Asian families began immigrating to the U.S. in unprecedented numbers.2 They were able to do so by relying on the generous family-based preferences in American immigration and nationality laws, which facilitated entry, settlement, and – especially significant to this discussion – derivative naturalisation for children.3 Even a cursory review of the historical record thus counsels a cautionary assessment of the contention that ius sanguinis citizenship’s tainted past justifies its abolition. First, calls to end ius sanguinis citizenship have their own ugly history. Second, although one cannot gainsay that, in certain circumstances, ius sanguinis citizenship has been used to maintain ethnic homogeneity, the notion that parents and children do and should share the same political affiliation has also facilitated racial, ethnic, and religious diversification of some political communities. Rather than abolish ius sanguinis citizenship wholesale, we should be alert to the ways that it can operate as a tool 1 2 3 For a discussion of these laws and efforts to restrict the recognition of ethnic Chinese individuals under the ius sanguinis citizenship statute, see Collins, K.A. (2014), ‘Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship and the Legal Construction of Family, Race, and Nation’, Yale Law Journal 123 (7) 2134– 2235 (at 2170–2182). Starting in 1934, the ius sanguinis statute also allowed American mothers to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children. See id. at 2157. See Reimers, D. (1983), ‘An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States’, Journal of American Ethnic History 9 (3): 23–24; Ong Hing, B. (1999), Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850–1900. Stanford: SUP, 81–120. See, for example, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 66 Stat. 163, 245, § 323.