March 26, 1790 – US Congress Passes Naturalization Act, 1st Defining Eligibility for Citizenship by Naturalization

On this day the US Congress set out the first uniform rules for granting US citizenship by naturalization. The law (1 Stat. 103) limited naturalization to “free White person(s) … of good character,” thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free black people and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in a number of states.

There were a number of subsequent changes to this act, including one as early as 1795 (1 Stat. 414), extending the residency requirement from two to five years.

Other early revisions included calling for recorded entry of all aliens into the US (1802), automatically granting citizenship to alien wives of US citizens (1855), and opening up the naturalization process to persons of African descent (1870).

As the Pew Research Center reports, starting in 1875 “a series of restrictions on immigration were enacted. They included bans on criminals, people with contagious diseases, polygamists, anarchists, beggars and importers of prostitutes. Other restrictions targeted the rising number of Asian immigrants, first limiting migration from China and later banning immigration from most Asian countries.”

A background history of the US naturalization process on the library site of Virginia Commonwealth University notes:

On June 27, 1906, Congress passed an act (34 Stat. 596) that expanded the existing Immigration Bureau to the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization and put it in charge of ‘all matters concerning the naturalization of aliens.’ Although the new Bureau was part of the Department of Labor and Commerce initially, and part of the Department of Labor from 1913 to 1940, most of its operations were directed by the Department of Justice, and, in 1940, the Bureau was made part of the Justice Department. Under the act of 1906, every petition for naturalization became a case for examination by Bureau officials.

This act also established the basic procedure for naturalization during the period 1906-52.”

You can read the text of the 1790 legislation here.

You can read more about the history of immigration laws including current developments at the Pew site here.