workingclasshistory:

On this day, 19 February 1923, the US supreme court decided unanimously to bar South Asians from becoming US citizens and to denaturalise those who had already done so.
Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh South Asian man, who had fought in the US army was trying to gain US citizenship. Citizenship at the time only permitted for white people or people of African descent.
In 1922, a US resident originally from Japan, Takao Ozawa, had applied for citizenship, arguing that his skin was the same colour as white people. However, the supreme court ruled that skin colour was not sufficient to be deemed “white” and that to be white you needed to be a member of “the Caucasian race”.
So Thind in his case argued that according to the racial “science” of the day, as a South Asian (or “Hindu” as he was referred to by officials at the time), he was of Aryan and Caucasian descent. The supreme court ruled that while he may technically be “Caucasian”, that was not what the framers of citizenship laws intended by the term. They affirmed that the term “white” referred to words of “common speech and not of scientific origin”, and solely referred to white people of European descent.
The Sacramento Bee newspaper lauded the decision as “most welcome” and declared that “There must be no more leasing or sale of land to such immigrants from India.” The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in the wake of the decision South Asians would be forbidden from farming or owning land in California. The Chronicle also claimed: “We already have in this country all the race problems we can handle. We want no more and will not have them… We want no immigrants which recognise caste.”
People of South Asian descent did not regain the right to become US citizens until 1946. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1925273247657816/?type=3