Renunciation

Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura

This chapter recounts how President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law (PL) 405 on July 1, 1944, which amended the Nationality Act of 1940 to allow U.S. citizens living in the United States to renounce their citizenship during wartime. Although not stated explicitly, the law was aimed at dissident Nisei. As Manzanar Project Director Ralph Merritt remarked of the statute, “This is the first time in the history of a civilized nation that a government has permitted a citizen, during a state of war, to renounce his citizenship.” Officials had several motives for favoring such a law. Some sought to have renunciants exchanged for U.S. citizens detained in Japan. Indeed, the chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, Samuel Dickstein, suggested that the law's provisions be publicized in the camps, to be followed by notices “calling for volunteers to go to Japan in trade for Americans.”

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-376
Author(s):  
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson

In December 1977, a tiny group of U.S. glove makers—most of whom were African American and Latina women—launched a petition before the U.S. International Trade Commission calling for protection from rising imports. Their target was China. Represented by the Work Glove Manufacturers Association, their petition called for quotas on a particular kind of glove entering the United States from China: cotton work gloves. This was a watershed moment. For the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, U.S. workers singled out Chinese goods in pursuit of import relief. Because they were such a small group taking on a country as large as China, their supporters championed the cause as one of David versus Goliath. Yet the case has been forgotten, partly because the glove workers lost. Here I uncover their story, bringing the history of 1970s deindustrialization in the United States into conversation with U.S.-China rapprochement, one of the most significant political transformations of the Cold War. The case, and indeed the loss itself, reveals the tensions between the interests of U.S. workers, corporations, and diplomats. Yet the case does not provide a simple narrative of U.S. workers’ interests being suppressed by diplomats and policymakers nurturing globalized trade ties. Instead, it also underscored the conflicting interests within the U.S. labor movement at a time when manufacturing companies were moving their production jobs to East Asia.


1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Creagan

The movement of Mexican laborers across the international boundary into the southwestern United States has been occurring since the establishment of a boundary in that area. It is a natural movement of worker toward the source of work. Interests of the governments involved have caused checks to be placed upon this movement of workers. Public Law 78 represented one of the recent attempts of the United States government, through co-operation with the Mexican government, to regulate the movement of migrant workers.In this article I will briefly trace the history of PL 78. The impact of this law upon Mexico and its relevance for United States relations with that country are of importance.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Coates

In 1917 Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act to prevent trade with Germany and the Central Powers. It was a wartime law designed for wartime conditions but one that, over the course of the following century, took on a secret, surprising life of its own. Eventually it became the basis for a project of worldwide economic sanctions applied by the United States at the discretion of the president during times of both war and peace. This article traces the history of the law in order to explore how the expansion of American power in the twentieth century required a transformation of the American state and the extensive use of executive powers justified by repeated declarations of national emergency.


2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
LESLIE BETHELL

AbstractThis essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.


2019 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman

This chapter discusses the history of American commercial law covering the admiralty and general commerce, sale of goods, bankruptcy and insolvency, and contract. American commercial law was deeply and persistently in debt to England. Theoretically, even national sovereignty was no barrier. The laws of admiralty, marine insurance, commercial paper, and sale of goods were not, supposedly, parochial law, English law; they were part of an international body of rules. The law of sales of goods developed greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many, if not most, of the leading cases were English and were adopted in the United States fairly rapidly. Two strains of law—contract and the law merchant—each with a somewhat different emphasis, were more or less godparents of the law of sales.


1996 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-404
Author(s):  
Laura S. Jensen

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called “entitlements.” From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the “health security” proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an “end to welfare as we know it.” Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that “welfare” reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.


1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 802-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Morton Moore

On April 13 President Ford signed a bill unilaterally to extend the fisheries jurisdiction of the United States from the present 12-mile limit to 200 miles onto the high seas (and even thousands of miles at sea with regard to salmon) effective March 1, 1977. Barring a sudden breakthrough in the law of the sea negotiations, as of March 1, 1977 the Coast Guard may begin arresting vessels on the high seas pursuant to this act in violation of the treaty obligations of the United States. This action again exposes the inadequacy of the present foreign policy process for taking an international legal perspective into account. It may also prove the greatest mistake in the history of U.S. oceans policy.


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