The same instrument allowed Congress to establish
a uniform rule of naturalisation in making United States citizens out
of foreign immigrants; but the right of declaring who should be citizens
of the States, having been assumed by the State constitutions, was
left to them individually. State and national citizenship were thus
separate from the beginning. For these reasons it could happen, as
pointed out in the Dred Scott decision many years later, that a State
could make an alien into a citizen of the State, entitled to all its
rights and privileges, but he might still be an alien in the United
States and deprived of national citizenship.
The first Congress recognised its constitutional obligation to provide
a uniform law for national citizenship by allowing an alien who had
resided two years within its jurisdiction and one year within any State
to take an oath before any court of common-law record to support the
Constitution and thereby become a citizen. Five years later, Congress
feared that the warring powers of Europe would send undesirable aliens
to the United States. "Coming from a quarter of the world so full of
disorder and corruption," said a speaker in the House, "they might
contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character.
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