Racialized and xenophobic disinformation reinforces an anti-Black and anti-immigrant vision of America where powerful actors intentionally promulgate false information that becomes the norm defining who belongs in this country. Historically, these norms have been codified into U.S. citizenship and naturalization laws privileging assimilation and defining who has the right to reside in America. During political campaigns, the pervasive use of disinformation is so normalized that people dismiss anti-immigrant rhetoric as political theatre instead of language that is part and parcel of a racially stratified society. The use of disinformation to influence mainstream societal norms is not new. For example, in the 1870s and 1880s, rising anti-Chinese sentiment led to laws excluding Chinese nationals from naturalizing to become citizens and laws preventing them from immigrating to the United States.
At the intersection of anti-Black racism and immigration status, disinformation is a tactic that reinforces tiered personhood. Onyx Impact, a research think tank studying how Black communities engage with information, states, “Widespread racist propaganda has historically been used to: depict Black people as less than [human], deepen false narratives about the Black community, and foster hate, extremism, and bigotry.” Systemic racism is rooted in U.S. immigration and naturalization laws. In 2016, former President Donald Trump’s campaign strategy included racist rhetoric such as “referring to Mexican immigrants as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists.’” During his presidency, he crudely referred to Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole” countries from which the United States should limit migration, issued three versions of the “Muslim ban,” and put in place a policy of separating Central American parents and children.
This Essay examines anti-Black and anti-immigrant disinformation through the lens of critical race theory and the social construction of race. By analyzing U.S. naturalization laws and related court cases limiting naturalization to white persons, this Essay argues that disinformation has historically functioned as a form of knowledge production that becomes normalized within U.S. citizenship and naturalization laws. The law plays a powerful role in shaping society because the law reflects and reinforces the values, beliefs and power dynamics of the people who create and enforce the law. Critical race theorists argue that the law is not objective in that it adopts social norms about what is normal and acceptable in society. Social norms are turned into laws that define the parameters of membership and belonging and the privileges afforded to those who belong. Racialized and xenophobic disinformation, when adopted as legislation and upheld by courts, becomes law that is perceived as neutral and constructs the parameters of what it means to belong in America. Left unchecked, disinformation will continue to reinforce and legitimize white supremacy, which is counter to the ethos in the United States that we are a nation of immigrants.
Disinformation and Hate Crimes
Disinformation is false content that is intentionally disseminated with intent to harm, whereas misinformation is false content that is unintentionally or unknowingly disseminated. For example, continuing to intentionally disseminate information that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets, after the Chief of Police debunked these allegations as false, is a form of disinformation. In contrast, unknowingly reposting incorrect statistics on a social media feed about the number of immigrants coming into the United States at the Southern border is a form of misinformation.
Disinformation dehumanizes. Historically, dehumanization has been a precursor to violence against people who become perceived as the other. Present day disinformation rhetoric is strikingly similar to that of the 1880s against Chinese immigrants:
- U.S. Presidential Debate One, June 27, 2024: Referencing immigrants, former President Donald Trump suggested,“[t]hey’re taking Black jobs now and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people.”
- In Frederick Keller’s cartoon the March 1878 San Francisco Illustrated Wasp: “In one cartoon for example, called Uncle Sam’s Farm in Danger, he shows a large swarm of insects with human faces besieging a farm. In the middle of it, Uncle Sam is swatting them with a sign. The artist provides some context for his ‘invasion.’ The caption under the title reads ‘Seventy millions of people are starving in the northern provinces of China. All who can do so are making preparations to come to the United States. Look out for the grasshoppers, Uncle Sam.”
- U.S. Presidential Debate Two, September 10, 2024: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
- New York Times Article, August 1, 1883: “Do the Chinese eat rats? This has always been a mooted question. Geographies contain the assertion they do, and an old wood-cut of a Chinaman peddling rodents, strung by the tails to a rack which he carried over his shoulders, is a standard illustration of the common school atlases of 10 years ago. . . . The statement made by Dr. Charles Kaemmerer is that a Chinamen living at No. 5 Mott Street have killed and cooked rats and cats in the yard, and have disposed of the offal by throwing it into the yard of No. 199 Worth-street. . . . Wong Chin Foo, the editor of the Chinese-American, yesterday offered a reward of $500 for anyone who could prove that a Chinaman ate rates of cats.”
During the 1870s and 1880s, anti-Chinese animus resulted in lynchings, boycotts and mass deportations of Chinese nationals. “The [previously] tolerant attitude changed in 1869 when the Los Angeles News and The Los Angeles Star began running editorials condemning Chinese immigration and attacking the Chinese as inferior and immoral.” In 1871, at least seventeen Chinese nationals were lynched, and one shot, in Los Angeles, California, which became known as the Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some leaders engaged in anti-Chinese rhetoric, labeling COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” Researchers have “directly correlated” the increase in rhetoric to violent and racist incidents against Asian Americans. Present day disinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio resulted in 30 bomb threats against municipal buildings, elementary schools and hospitals.
Throughout American history, disinformation has been deployed by the law in two ways. First, through legislation that adopts and perpetuates racial stereotypes, and second by judicial opinions that reinforce those stereotypes.
Disinformation Embedded in U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Laws
The Naturalization Act of 1790, for instance, limited the ability to become a U.S. citizen to free white persons, which was granted in practice only to white male property owners. During the mid-1800s, journalists infantilized Black people, portraying them as docile and unintelligent. In 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court relied upon the Naturalization Act of 1790 in ruling that Dred Scott, a formerly enslaved person living in the North, was not a U.S. citizen. Chief Justice Taney, authoring the opinion for the Court, found that the United States Constitution conferred upon Congress the right to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. Pursuant to this power, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790. In examining the Act, the Court stated “the language of the law above quoted, shows that citizenship at that time was perfectly understood to be confined to the white race; and that they alone constituted the sovereignty in the Government.”
Chief Justice Taney relied upon the 1790 statute to provide the rationale for why Black people were not citizens. In the opinion, he employed racist rhetoric emphasizing that Black people were of “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations” and “treated as an ordinary article of merchandise.” The Court articulated that the construction of Black people as noncitizens was based upon common knowledge:
This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
In this case, Chief Justice Taney infamously stated that formerly enslaved Black persons were not U.S. citizens and that the Black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Historians cite Chief Justice Taney’s rhetoric as an exemplar of language “dismiss[ing] the humanness of those of African descent” and “permitt[ing] the image of African Americans to be reduced to caricatures in popular culture.”
During this period, Frederick Douglass, in an 1854 speech, keenly defined the racialized rhetoric that promulgated racialized stereotypes of Black people. He stated, “the European face is drawn in harmony with the highest ideas of beauty, dignity and intellect. Features regular and brow after the Websterian mold. The negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted, lips exaggerated, forehead depressed — and the whole expression of the countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of negro imbecility and degradation.”
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted birthright citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people. Shortly after the ratification of the Fourteenth amendment, Congress amended the Naturalization Act of 1790 to include “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” With the 1870 amendment, Black people could naturalize. This amendment followed centuries of their categorization as property rather than as persons with rights. As such, this amendment represented an incremental step towards correcting the racial exclusion embedded in the original Naturalization Act of 1790.
But even as the 1870 law made some progress, it was itself embedded with stereotypes. During the 1870 congressional debates about the amendments to the naturalization statute, Congress considered whether people of Asian descent should be excluded from being able to naturalize. The naturalization statute provided “[t]hat any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen.” Congress debated eliminating the word white before “free white person.” In considering the amendment, Senator Morton stated:
This amendment involves the whole Chinese problem. . . . The country has just awakened to the question and to the enormous magnitude of the question, involving a possible immigration of many millions, involving another civilization, involving labor problems that no intellect can solve without study and without time. Are you now prepared to settle the Chinese problem, thus in advance inviting that immigration?
The only conclusion that can be drawn from these debates is that the senators left in the word white “for the sole purpose of excluding the Chinese from the right of naturalization.” The consideration of this amendment occurred at the height of the anti-Chinese immigration animus and just before the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, when disinformation about people of Chinese descent was rampant. Historian Joseph R. Hayden states,
Writers started expressing more disgust and less wonder at Chinese culture, and they began peddling sensationalist stories guaranteed to shock: One Albany, New York, editor reported with horror that the Chinese murdered young girls in order to ‘drink certain fluids from their murdered bodies’ for medicinal purposes. It was believed that ‘grains of rice steeped in a freshly cut gall bladder’ was a powerful antidote for many diseases.
The animus was rooted in hostility against Chinese laborers who became successful entrepreneurs after migrating to the U.S. to work in gold mines, agriculture, factory work, and constructing railways in the West. In the West, whites occupied the majority of skilled labor positions, with great upward mobility out of unskilled jobs. Other workers — Indians, Black people and people of Mexican and Asian descent — did not have the same upward mobility. The Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest states, “[w]hen white workingmen formed into unions in the American West, they often were organizing not only against capital but also against the non-white worker who, in a variety of ways, was perceived as a threat to whites’ economic security.” At this time, disinformation created the animus against Chinese workers and undoubtably impacted Congress intentional exclusion of Asians from inclusion in the 1870 amendments to the naturalization statute. Citizenship remained limited to those who were white or “aliens of African nativity” and “persons of African descent.”
The evolution of U.S. naturalization law — from the 1790 statute where only free white males could naturalize, through the Dred Scott decision, to Congress’s exclusion people of Asian descent in the 1870 naturalization amendments — reveals a pattern in which disinformation influenced legislative action. The above examples of disinformation are rooted in racial prejudices and stereotypes, that become accepted as common knowledge and eventually calcified in statutes. Once the statutes are enacted, courts’ statutory interpretations rely on discerning Congressional intent, which itself has been born out of disinformation. As a result, as demonstrated in the naturalization cases below, disinformation continues to exert its influence and is reflected in judicial interpretations determining who is entitled to become a U.S. citizen.
The Prerequisite Cases: Judicial Reinforcement of the 1790 Naturalization Law
After the amendment of the naturalization statute, during the 1900s, the Supreme Court and federal courts considered multiple naturalization cases where noncitizens argued they were white and therefore not foreclosed from naturalizing to become U.S. citizens. Scholar Ian Haney Lopez calls the cases the prerequisite cases. In deciding these naturalization cases, like the Court’s rationale in Dred Scott, the Court relied upon the opinion and common knowledge of the white ruling class in 1790. In the Supreme Court case Ozawa v. United States, the Court posited that “the federal and state courts, in an almost unbroken line, have held that the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race,” (emphasis added). There were approximately fifty-two cases between 1878 and 1952 in which non-citizens applied for naturalization, arguing that they should be declared white by law.
In 1878, in In re Ah Yup, the California Circuit Court considered for the first time a Chinese national’s application for naturalization. In this case, the court considered whether “a person of the Mongolian race [was] a ‘white person’ within the meaning of the statute” and whether the naturalization provisions “exclude all but white persons and persons of African nativity or African descent.” Notably, this case relied upon the statute’s legislative history, asking whether removing white from the naturalization statute would result in the exacerbation of what was framed as “the Chinese problem” during the congressional debate. The court found that Congress was opposed the removal of the word white:
It was opposed on the sole ground that the effect would be to authorize the admission of Chinese to citizenship. Every senator, who spoke upon the subject, assumed that they were then excluded by the term ‘white person,’ and that the amendment would admit them, and the amendment was advocated on the one hand, and opposed on the other, upon that single idea.
In re Ah Yup is an example of how a court deferred to congressional statements in the legislative history defining whiteness and holding that a Chinese national could not naturalize.
In Ex parte Shahid, the court engaged in similar reasoning in determining whether a Syrian national could naturalize. The applicant argued that he should be considered white because he was Christian. The court gave white the meaning:
as would naturally have been given to it when used in the first naturalization act of 1790. Under such interpretation it would mean by the term ‘free white persons’ all persons belonging to the European races, then commonly counted as white, and their descendants. It would not mean a ‘Caucasian’ race; a term generally employed only after the date of the statute and in a most loose and indefinite way. (Emphasis added).
In short, the court construed white from what was “practically []known to common usage in 1790.” The court conceded that their definition “may not, ethnologically or physiologically speaking, be a very clear and logical construction” and that “[t]he law as enacted by Congress gives no place for the consideration of intellectual or moral qualifications or past achievements in a nation or people.” This not only exemplifies the application of the common knowledge standard in defining whiteness, it also highlights that as late as 1913, courts continued to rely upon Congressional intent from 1790.
In the 1922 case Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court considered whether a Japanese national was eligible for citizenship under the U.S. naturalization laws. Ozawa’s argument was based in part on his skin color — that his skin was just as pale as white Americans. Even though the Court conceded that Ozawa had lived in the U.S. for twenty years, was a student in the University of California, educated his children in American schools, attended church and spoke English, his naturalization application was denied. Rejecting the Ozawa’s arguments, the Court found that “[t]he intention was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the [founding] fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so classified.” (Emphasis added).
Conclusion
The common knowledge approach in naturalization cases demonstrates how race is an ideology — not a fixed biological characteristic. The naturalization cases exemplify how the concept of whiteness held in 1790 continues to be broadly accepted and emotionally defended to legitimize anti-Black and xenophobic laws that exclude certain races and nationalities from becoming citizens.
Racial restrictions on citizenship were not eliminated entirely until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Consideration of the Supreme Court and Congress’s first iterations of race-based exclusions limiting the recognition and rights of noncitizens is key to understanding how disinformation can impact who is perceived as a having the right to reside in the U.S. today. The first immigration and naturalization laws demarcate a Black-white binary highlighting how race was socially constructed. “Whiteness was transformed into a material concept imbued with rights and privileges, such as the franchise, for those who conformed to its definition.” The effects and purposes of the disinformation that led to these early iterations of the naturalization laws continue to this day.
The persistent effects and purposes of disinformation can be seen powerfully in the recent stories about Haitians in Ohio eating pets. That disinformation serves two purposes: (1) to engage stock narratives informed by anti-Black racism and xenophobia to dehumanize Haitians as unworthy members of the polity; and (2) to sow divisions within the Black community by painting immigrants as taking resources from Black American people — ultimately undermining Black political power. “Ethnic wedge issues are rhetorical tools intended to splinter the support of a key opponent by employing narratives of ethnically motivated discrimination, victimization, or exclusion, and promising remedial action.” The ways in which Haitian immigrants are framed can ultimately lead to the same outcomes as the impact of the anti-Chinese animus on Congress’s decision to prohibit Chinese nationals from naturalizing in 1870 and ban Chinese nationals from entering the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The intersection of race, immigration, and disinformation reveals the deeply embedded ways in which American society constructs and maintains hierarchies of belonging. Disinformation, particularly when linked to anti-Black and anti-immigrant rhetoric, plays a powerful role in reinforcing structural racism within both public discourse and the legal system. Historical and contemporary narratives, often based on disinformation, shape perceptions of who is deemed worthy of citizenship as well as the right to reside in the United States. Disinformation also solidifies racial boundaries that exclude and marginalize along racial lines.
By codifying these biased narratives into law, the United States has historically legitimized racialized categories of belonging, which are now perceived as fixed and natural despite their constructed origins. The legal system, far from being neutral, has perpetuated these inequalities, as seen in Dred Scott and the prerequisite naturalization cases. The persistence of these racial constructs in legal, political, and social frameworks demonstrates how disinformation becomes not just a tool of political rhetoric but a foundation for the continued marginalization of Black and immigrant communities. Addressing the enduring impact of disinformation on the racial stratification of American society requires us to continuously examine the information on which the narratives are produced, circulated, and adopted into law. Without confronting disinformation, efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable society will continue to evade us. The challenge lies in dismantling the falsehoods that continue to fuel structural racism and redefining what it means to belong in a truly multiracial, representative democracy.
* Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute with NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The views expressed in this Essay are solely my own and do not represent the opinions or positions of Legal Defense Fund.
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