Various tweaks to the Naturalization Act would be made over the following decades, but the most notable revision came in 1870, where the wording for the racial eligibility criteria was modified to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent." This change was not drastic by any means, but the ambiguity of the term “white” led to a flurry of cases at the appellate level by “aliens” from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, and India. The legal ambiguity over what "whiteness" actually meant allowed immigrants from many countries, including those from South Asia, to come to America and petition the United States government to claim whiteness for themselves.
In 1870, the population of documented residents of Indian origin was 586, with this number more than tripling to 1,707 by the 1880s. Many of these immigrants argued they were white purely by their physical skin color — favoring lighter-skinned and upper-caste individuals — and ancestral connections. A hyperfixation over this specific criterion of color led to far-fetched and “ethnologically based” theories about the nature of one’s race. Opposition to these cases cited the necessity for decisions to be rooted in social grounding rather than science, and called for the “common understanding” of the “average man on the street” to determine what being “white” meant.
Caste and Whiteness
Caste often framed why, and in what manner, South Asian migrants came to the United States. Caste is an internal system of oppression and stratification in the subcontinent, and whose tendrils exist today in all of the places the South Asian diaspora lives today (Yengde, 2025). Caste shaped structures like indenture and the Coolie Trade, which impacted which laborers were on British ships coming to the UK and US. Beginning around the 1880s, Muslim ship workers would jump ship from British ships in the New York harbor, and found jobs as peddlers selling “Oriental goods,” including cotton and silk, perfumes, and rugs, to middle-class American consumers. Many of these laborers were of different caste backgrounds. Some believed their caste status would be washed away by the “Kala pani,” or black waters that took them away from the subcontinent. Others found ways to maintain caste status even in the West (Bahudar, year).
There were also immigrants, often upper caste, who came to the United States for the express purpose of education and career advancement. One such example was Anandibai Joshi, a Brahmin Marathi woman from Bombay who was the first Indian woman to receive a degree in medicine in the United States. Joshi expressed her interest in studying medicine in a letter that ended up in the hands of a Presbyterian minister stationed in India. The letter was reprinted in a Presbyterian magazine and was there read by a New Jersey woman named Theodocia Carpenter, who wrote to Joshi and ultimately sponsored her stay in Philadelphia. She was admitted into the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania at the age of 19 and graduated at 21, much to the admiration of advocates of women's education who had followed her journey. Though Joshi tragically died at the young age of 22 after contracting a persistent case of tuberculosis in the United States, she is regarded as a proto-feminist icon for her efforts to break both racist and sexist barriers in higher education.
You can read about more examples of South Asian immigration to the United States to participate in higher education in fellow LHP Youth Researcher Ravi's exhibit, found here.