Takao Ozawa And Bhagat Singh Thind

Since 1790, the United States started to granted limited naturalization to immigrants of free white persons through the Naturalization Act of 1790 and established racial qualification to national citizenships. Immigrants regardless of who they were need to prove that they were of white race. This lead to the moment when defining who was white was through either scientific method or common knowledge. Into the early 19th and late 20th century, there were numerous of terms to include whiteness and non-racial qualification for immigration to the United States. As immigrants try to show how they were white, there were court cases, Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), which …show more content…

For instance, Judge Sutherland said in the opinion of the court that Takao Ozawa was “well qualified by character and education” because Ozawa was graduated from an American university, educated his children in American schools, attended American churches, and preserved the use of English at home. Therefore, Ozawa was considered fit and perfect. However, because of rule based on the scientific method and the idea of Caucasian that ruled out how Ozawa was not white, the issue of skin is therefore not accurate. For instance, the naturalization ruled out that Whites and Blacks were granted the right for naturalization, but no others. Even though Ozawa already said previously that Japanese resemble those of their European counterparts, it’s still not strong enough to argue that Japanese people were considered White and Caucasian. However, in the case of Thind, the Supreme Court considered science to be a wrong notion. Even though Justice Sutherland said that there were in fact a resemblance in language, indicating that in some distant past, there were belong to the same common