Inconsistencies in the Court (Ozawa v. Thind)

Despite Asian Americans' demonstrated acculturation and integration in during the early 1900s, steadfast domestic isolationist attitudes set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to deny Asian American citizenship because they were not "white." In 1922, the Ozawa court denied the applicant's petition for citizenship, stating,

the appellant, in the case now under consideration . . . is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side. A large number of the federal and state courts have so decided and we find no reported case definitely to the contrary. These decisions are sustained by numerous scientific authorities, which we do not deem it necessary to review. We think these decisions are right and so hold.

However, just a year later, in 1923, the Thind Court appears to have contradicted its dependency on "science," in holding that Bhagat Singh Thind was ineligible for citizenship.  The Court reasoned that, although he would have been categorized as Aryan or Caucasian as an Indian, according to the prevailing racial science of the time, that was not sufficient to establish his whiteness. The Court held, contradictory to Ozawa that, "the question for determination is not, therefore, whether, by the speculative processes of ethnological reasoning, we may present a probability to the scientific mind that they have the same origin, but whether we can satisfy the common understanding that they are now the same or sufficiently the same to justify the interpreters of a statute–written in the words of common speech, for common understanding, by unscientific men–in classifying them together in the statutory category as white persons.”