This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

中文翻译：

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土著行为、移民行为：进步时代的公民身份、归化和公民身份的表现

本文揭示了移民限制法和联邦印第安人政策与有组织的美国化在 20 世纪初为想象中的、令人向往的“新美国人”立法时的共谋，当时复兴的民族主义威胁要限制不受欢迎的移民，因为它还试图同化土著人民融入大量的美国主义。虽然移民在美国国家的想象中被认为是欲望美国，美洲印第安人不是想要的进入政治成员资格——尽管原住民土地是需要的，随后定居者通过写入联邦印第安法律的剥夺战略采取。本文认为，印度人——作为一个想象的类别来解读，与人们的生活几乎没有联系本国的人——在入籍的法律史上占有反常的地位，最终于 1924 年通过《印度公民法》，同时种族主义的移民限制配额也通过 1924 年的约翰逊限制了新移民进入美国——里德移民法。对于土著人来说，美国化和公民身份的强加是殖民主义的延伸，在另一种公民身份之上增加了一种公民身份——家庭依赖、被监护人或美国公民。对于来自南欧和东欧的新移民，由于经济和文化限制而被迫迁移到美国，与他们的盎格鲁-撒克逊或北欧定居者的前辈相比，美国化意味着放弃对其他主权国家的政治效忠，获得英语和公民教育。