University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations Elspeth M. Wilson University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Wilson, Elspeth M., "The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2921. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2921 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2921 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Reproduction Of Citizenship: How The U.s. Government Shaped Citizenship During The 20th Century By Regulating Fertility, Procreation, And Birth Across Generations Abstract Who qualifies, with full status, as an American citizen? Like all modern nation-states, the United States erects and maintains various types of legal and geographic boundaries to demarcate citizens from noncitizens. The literature in political science tends to focus on the ways in which immigration law structures citizenship over time, but this is only half the story. As this dissertation demonstrates, governments also regulate the birth of citizens from one generation to the next. The concept of a ‘civic lineage regime’ is introduced as the domestic counterpart to the ‘immigration regime,’ when it comes to structuring civic membership in the United States (and other nations). To bring visibility to this deeply constitutive yet largely unexamined dimension of American political development, the project engages in a close analysis of U.S.