Magruder's American Government: 9. Citizenship and Civil Rights

An American citizen is one who owes allegiance to the United States and is entitled to both its protection and the privileges of its laws.

Naturalization is the legal process by which a person can become a citizen of another country at some time after birth.

An alien is a citizen of a foreign state who lives in this country.

Expatriation is the legal process by which a loss of citizenship occurs.

Aliens may be subject to deportation, a legal process by which aliens are legally required to leave the country.

The term heterogeneous is a compound of two Greek words: hetero, meaning “other or different,” and genos, meaning “race, family, or kind.” Something that is heterogeneous is composed of dissimilar parts, made up of elements that are unrelated to or unlike one another—in short, something composed of a mix of ingredients.

Immigrants—those aliens legally admitted as permanent residents—have arrived in near-record numbers every year since the mid-1960s.

Nearly a quarter of them live on or near reservations, which are public lands set aside by the government for use by Native American tribes.

A refugee is one who seeks protection (refuge) from war, persecution, or some other danger.

Assimilation is the process by which people of one culture merge into and become part of another.

Government must have the power to classify, to draw distinctions between persons and groups. Otherwise, it could not possibly regulate human behavior. That is to say, government must be able to discriminate—and it does.

The Supreme Court most often decides equal protection cases by applying a standard known as the rational basis test. This test asks: Does the classification in question bear a reasonable relationship to the achievement of some proper governmental purpose?

In these instances, the Court has said that a law must meet a higher standard than the rational basis test: the strict scrutiny test. A State must be able to show that some “compelling governmental interest” justifies the distinctions it has drawn between classes of people.

Beginning in the late 1800s, nearly half the States—including some outside the South—passed racial segregation laws. Used in this context, segregation refers to the separation of one group from another on the basis of race.

State legislatures passed laws, and school boards worked to block integration—the process of desegregation, of bringing a previously segregated group into the mainstream of society.

By the fall of 1970, school systems characterized by de jure segregation—segregation authorized by law—had been abolished.

De facto segregation is segregation that exists in fact, even if no law requires it.

That approach requires that most employers take positive steps (affirmative action) to remedy the effects of past discriminations.

The share of a group necessary to satisfy a particular affirmative action requirement—say, the number of females in a company’s workforce or the number of African Americans in a school’s student body—is often called a quota.

Critics argue that affirmative action programs amount to reverse discrimination, or discrimination against the majority group.