From the late 1800s, Asian American immigrants began facing increasing levels of hostility, discrimination, and even exclusion from the United States. To protect their communities, Asian Americans found ways to resist and fight back. Legal challenges were particularly important for Asian Americans fighting for their rights because many of the obstacles they faced were created by the law and rooted in discrimination. Asian immigrants were excluded from citizenship and barred from political participation. The landmark court cases — Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), and its parallel case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) — had and continue to have important consequences on questions of citizenship, race, and equality.

The Supreme Court’s decisions in these cases had serious ramifications for not only Asian immigrants, but all Americans, citizen or otherwise. In 1886, a Chinese-born laundry owner named Lee Yick sued the San Francisco board of supervisors for refusing to grant laundry licenses to any Chinese person.¹ Over 200 Chinese people had applied for laundry licenses, and every Chinese application was denied. The Supreme Court found that all people in the United States were entitled to equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of citizenship. As a result, San Francisco’s denial of laundry licenses along racial lines was ruled unconstitutional.

Asian Americans used this court victory to pave the way for future court challenges, using the U.S. Constitution as their guide. Wong Kim Ark is the flagship case on birthright citizenship, proving that U.S. citizenship should be granted not on the basis of bloodline, but on the basis of territory. In 1895, in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S. government refused to allow Wong Kim Ark back into America after he visited China.² Wong, however, had been born in the United States. He sued for his rights, claiming that he was a U.S. citizen because of his birth, and brought the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to those born in the United States, regardless of their race or their parents’ national origin. Because of the Wong Kim Ark decision, children born in the U.S. to Asian immigrants — indeed all immigrants — could become citizens even though their parents could not. This monumental case paved the way for a more diverse America and American citizenry.

Finally, the question of citizenship was visited again in the cases Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Together, these cases illustrate how the social constructs of race and whiteness were manipulated to deny naturalization rights to Asian immigrants.

When the U.S. government attempted to limit citizenship only to whites, Asian Americans quickly moved to prove that they themselves were “white” in one way or another. Takao Ozawa was a Japanese American who had lived in the United States for twenty years. He attempted to argue that “whiteness” was a matter of skin color; because his skin was just as pale as white Americans, he should be treated as white and granted citizenship. The Supreme Court unanimously denied him, saying explicitly that whiteness only extended to “the Caucasian race.”³.

However, they changed their own reasoning only three months later so that they could deny an Indian man citizenship. Bhagat Singh Thind was an Indian man from the northern region of Punjab who had moved to the U.S. as a young man and joined the U.S. Army in WWI. He argued that he should be eligible for naturalization and citizenship because he was of the Caucasian race, as the Ozawa decision specified. However, the Court found that even though he was Caucasian, he was not white: Whiteness must “be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.”⁴ The Supreme Court demonstrated that they were more concerned about safeguarding white citizenship than maintaining their own line of reasoning. The Thind decision had serious consequences for Indian Americans, especially for those who were previously considered citizens and were now stripped of their property and denaturalized. One tragic example discussed in the film was Vaishno das Bagai, whose citizenship and store were taken away after the Thind decision, leading him to commit suicide.