You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers

This session is co-sponsored by the Wilson Center's Rule of Law Initiative.

We think of our citizenship as immutable—as much a part of our identity as our height or eye color.  But law professor Amanda Frost reveals that the US government has regularly revoked citizenship to suppress dissent and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American.”  Women who married noncitizens, persecuted racial groups, labor leaders, and political activists were all stripped of their citizenship, and sometimes deported, by a government who denied their membership in “We the People.”  Drawing on the narratives of those who lost their citizenship and fought to get it back, Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day. 

Amanda Frost is the Bronfman Distinguished Professor Law and Government at American University, where she writes and teaches in the fields of constitutional, immigration, and citizenship law. Her recent publications include The Supreme Court Has to Choose Between Trump and the Nation’s the Founders for The New Republic (Nov. 27, 2020), The Fragility of American Citizenship for The Atlantic (Oct. 9, 2019), and The New War on Naturalized Citizens for The American Prospect (Oct. 15, 2019). She is a regular columnist for SCOTUSblog, the leading blog covering the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.