Making Wisconsin: The past and present of citizenship

President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship is before the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

What it means to be a citizen has changed throughout U.S. and Wisconsin history — either broadening or constricting the rights of different groups.

For WUWM’s series, Making Wisconsin: Our Immigration History, we’re taking a long view on how citizenship has evolved over time in our state. Our guide is Sergio González, author of Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin and a Marquette University assistant professor of history.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Maria Peralta-Arellano: Going back to the 1600s, that's when a lot of people and a lot of movements start coming into the state. You've called this era the Wild West. Can you explain what you meant by that, and how that has to do with how we're classifying citizenship?

Sergio González: If we think about the arrival of European colonists, going back into the 17th century, specifically in the 18th century, they had different ways of understanding how they belong to their nation, which may have been France or the United Kingdom, or how they exist in a relationship to other people who already lived here.

We think here about indigenous populations who have called Wisconsin home for much longer than Wisconsin has actually been a state. People who arrived here, who were French or British, define themselves not along questions of citizenship, but of subject-hood. In other words, they belonged to to the crown ... Their relationship to their home country was not defined so much in terms of voting and pieces of paper like a passport, but in terms of dominion and how the crown defined who belonged to those places.

In the 1840s and 1850s you see some of these new states that are popping up that have a very different relationship to citizenship, because during this period of 19th century, states actually defined the parameters of citizenship. The federal government played a pretty minimal role in that process.

What did statehood mean at this time, and how did that change our ideas of citizenship?

Before 1848 when Wisconsin becomes a state, Wisconsin is a territory, and politicians and business leaders here in the territory want to push Wisconsin to become a state. And there's, of course, a numerical threshold you have to hit [to become a state.]

In 1836 there were about 11,000 people who live in Wisconsin, which is much too small. And so they had to invite people into this region so they could hit that threshold, so that they could become an actual state.

Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

One of the things they do is they invite German immigrants into this region, beginning into the late 1830s and really into the early 1840s.

So Article Three, which defines suffrage in the state of Wisconsin, in other words, who's allowed to vote? The Wisconsin Constitution said any male person aged 21 years or older who had lived in the state for a year would be allowed to vote in the election. That included, "the white persons of foreign birth, who shall have declared their intention to become citizens within the next year."

You didn't actually have to be a citizen to vote here. That was passed in 1848, and Wisconsin had that law on the books until 1908.

When did we start really developing those modern institutions and processes we see today that handle immigration and handle citizenship?

One of the ways in which the state of Wisconsin tried to entice people to come to this region and really bring them into the state was through actual government institutions. So in 1852 the Wisconsin State Legislature actually creates the Wisconsin Office of Immigration. They create an immigration officer whose responsibility is to go to New York City and wait at the wharfs, passing out literature, publicizing the state of Wisconsin and how wonderful the opportunities are here.

That office exists in different formats throughout the 19th century. Sometimes it's defunded, and then it comes back, and we can see the way in which that funding happens depending on waves of nativism that are sweeping across the country.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. Congress passes a series of laws — the first sets of exclusionary laws — which mean to basically shut the border to Chinese immigrants who are arriving. And then the early 20th century, the federal Congress begins to introduce a series of laws that really begin to tighten who is allowed to come to the country under what circumstances, what type of education a person has, what access to money they might have, what their relationship to work might be.

The 14th Amendment gave way to birthright citizenship, specifically for formerly enslaved people in 1867. How did this shift the idea of who is American?

The 14th Amendment is this effort by Congress to finally address this issue of Black citizenship in the nation. The 14th Amendment begins that process of dismantling the institution of slavery, but also building up this concept of federal citizenship, which is to say that a person who was born in the United States is granted with citizenship, no questions asked. That, however, doesn't really define what citizenship is. It just says who a citizen is.

Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical society

The history of everything since the establishment of the 14th Amendment has been a question of how Americans have grappled with the what citizenship actually entails, and who actually has access to all of those different pieces, whether it's questions of who can own property, who can vote, who can have a passport.

The Bracero program in the 1940s brings in temporary workers from Mexico to fill labor shortages during war times. We also had migrant workers, many of them were Tejano, how did that play into the conversation of citizenship, and then also the program itself?

In the 1940s the United States has entered into World War II. It's in dire need of workers, and so the United States looks down to Mexico, as well as a series of other Latin American Caribbean nations, to help it do the work of filling its farms and its factories.

Many of them work in places like California and Texas, but Wisconsin also becomes home to Braceros, to these Mexican farm workers in the 1940s and 1950s. I think the important thing to note is that these people are brought up for only one reason: that is to work. And so when they sign these contracts, they are being brought up as what is often referred to as "guest workers."

These workers, when they arrive in the United States, they have this really tenuous stance in the country, because the contracts that they've signed [are] supposed to afford them rights as laborers, but it affords them no rights as citizens. These are kind of situations that are ripe for exploitation, and that's what happens to these Mexican farm workers.

Government & Politics

Latinos in Wisconsin: A history of othering

Joy Powers

Although Latino people have lived in Wisconsin nearly as long as it’s been a state, historian Sergio Gonzalez says Latino communities are often seen as being perpetual outsiders. We explore how this perception has impacted views on immigration and the evolution of Wisconsin communities.

Listen • 12:49

These guest worker programs, which have existed in our country and continue to exist in this country today, are very complicated labor programs. But they also speak to the questions of citizenship. What does it mean to only exist in this country as a worker and never have a pathway to citizenship — to never have a pathway to full inclusion of political belonging in this country?

Is there any place in history where we can kind of see similar thoughts and feelings towards citizenship that we're seeing now?

I think Mark Twain is famous for having said that history doesn't repeat itself, it just rhymes. We can see parallels, but it never lays on so perfectly.

I think historians have kind of pointed to the 1920s as an era that seems starkly familiar today. A period of of rising nativism, where Americans, at least voting Americans, have become quite anxious about what they believe to be the changing demographics of the nation, and they feel that the the United States has a responsibility to respond to that.

What that has led to, at least in the last presidential election, has been the invitation of a very specific executive power that believes it has the right to continue to constrain the boundaries of citizenship and boundaries of belonging in the United States. And of course, we're seeing that play out every single day here in 2025, which is to say that people who perhaps could have taken it for granted that they had protections in this country, legal protections, no longer feel safe.

I think the important thing to know then, is that citizenship, which we might take for granted as kind of this ironclad thing, has never existed as a finite political or legal structure. It's something that we as a society get to decide how it shifts, and that can be both something that can be constraining, in other words, that we can think about a smaller group of people who can be included in citizenship. But it also means that we can have the imagination to think about a world in which the concept of citizenship is broader, that more people can see themselves within the boundaries of belonging in our nation.

A lot of people also point to the fact that there's also tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty. What is the difference, and how are we factoring that now into our conversation of citizenship and who belongs?

Wisconsin is home to a series of Native tribes that have politically recognized sovereign rights in this nation, which means that they have their own form of citizenship within the nation, but they're also citizens of the United States. It's a relatively new concept that has taken a long time to be figured out, and it has come at the expense, of course, of Native tribes' ability to live in the place that they wanted to live.

I always emphasize when I talk about the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that the question of citizenship is often, we think of it as something that people are striving for, but it can be also something that's imposed.

When Congress passes the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 they're imposing a sense of citizenship on a group of people that have a very complicated relationship to citizenship.

What are the pros and cons of someone who is newly being factored into citizenship?

I think citizenship offers you protection. And we see this today, in 2025 when legal permanent residents or visa holders who are not citizens, realize that that's a very important distinction. The fact that the state can enact certain legal procedures and enact violence against you because you're not a citizen. So I think one of the most important things is that it protects you from the federal government.

But I think just to think of citizenship as kind of this black-and-white space of whether or not you're protected, rips apart some of those other aspects of what it means to belong in a place like the United States. Which is to say that there are plenty of people who want citizenship because it allows them to claim a sense of belonging in this nation.

If you were to go to a naturalization ceremony in Milwaukee or across this country, you would see people who have gone through quite a process, people who have left their home country and who have made the conscious decision to become American citizens. And that brings with it a lot of weight, a lot of pressures, perhaps the abandonment of something — but also the creation of something new. The reality, of course, is that people have always had varied relationships to citizenship.

President Trump has proposed the end of birthright citizenship. What was your reaction to that?

As a historian, it wasn't surprising, because there has been a movement among a very small set of jurists, but most importantly, people who are not themselves lawyers. And this has been bubbling now for decades, of individuals who have tried to redefine what the 14th Amendment actually means and jurisprudence that has existed now for a century, which is to say that, this is supposed to be settled law.

What I think has been surprising has been the fact that the Supreme Court has not quickly shut that conversation down and it's an active conversation right now.

I am hopeful that this is kind of a red line that will not be crossed, but on the other hand, so much is changing on the ground that it's hard to say what will actually stand in 2025.

I believe that if birthright citizenship is stripped, there's going to be a lot that has to be rethought in this country. It's not just a question of who gets to belong and who gets to be a citizen, but it's questions of who is going to be expelled from the nation and what is the relationship to these people who overnight lose their access to citizenship. What is that going to look like?

I think it's a black box that most Americans would prefer not to grapple with, but we will see if it's something we have to deal with.