Anthony’s trial for illegal voting the same year. The post-Civil War amendments were understood to guarantee federal citizenship and nothing more, and women’s suffrage was deemed “a privilege of state citizenship.”30 A century and a half later, Isabel Wilkerson would write a comprehensive account of the 1915-1970 mass internal migration of black Americans from the South to Northern cities, in part to flee Jim Crow. “The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such. Their every step was controlled by the meticulous laws of Jim Crow, a nineteenth-century minstrel figure that would become shorthand for the violently enforced codes of the Southern caste system.” 31 Wilkerson and other historians have shown how Jim Crow laws and race-based nationality and immigration legislation in the United States during this period mirrored (and compelled) a turn in other Western countries toward legislating the ideology of white supremacy. “Nursing the wounds of defeat and seeking a scapegoat, much like Germany in the years leading up to Nazism, [whites in the South] began to undo the opportunities accorded to freed slaves during Reconstruction and to refine the language of white supremacy.”32 The U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the Jim Crow “separate but equal” strategy, providing constitutional approval of a form of black citizenship effectively stripped of all civil rights that left black Southerners acutely vulnerable to widespread violence and extrajudicial killings. The Plessy ruling came just two years before Wong Kim Ark confirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all children born on U.S. soil. Acquisition of U.S. citizenship may have “open[ed] up across racial lines” under Wong Kim Ark, and it remains open today, but that opening happened just as lawmakers all over the country and in the capital experimented with race-based segregation and border control measures.33 Nativism in U.S. Colonialism, Naturalization, and Immigration Laws From 1790 until 1952, notwithstanding the Constitution’s professed ideals, the United States maintained an overtly race-based naturalization regime.34 As one scholar summarized, “A contradictory series of fifty-two court cases from 1878 to 1952 gradually defined who was not white, even though the cases never positively defined who was white.”35 The Immigration Act of 1882 excluded for the first time particular racial groups from immigrating to the United States: “In making a distinction based on race and nationality, the act augured a significant new era in federal legislation and American attitudes toward immigrants.”36 Among others, the law banned members of the Chinese “race” from entry into the United States. The 1882 Act also barred Chinese immigrants to the U.S. from naturalizing, although under Wong Kim Ark their native-born children were recognized as citizens. With the hardening of restrictions, widespread racist sentiment in the American West, and a new law barring an entire racially defined group from lawful presence in the country, for the first time the U.S. government confronted the now familiar task of the modern administrative state: distinguishing between citizens, lawful residents, and “illegal aliens.”37 22 UNMAKING AMERICANS