Journal of American Ethnic History Summer 2010 Volume 29, Number 4 45
Adapted from Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, by Marc
Stein. Copyright © 2010 by The University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission
of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu
All the Immigrants Are Straight,
All the Homosexuals Are Citizens,
But Some of Us Are Queer Aliens: Genealogies
of Legal Strategy in Boutilier v. INS
1
MARC STEIN
UNTIL RECENTLY, THE FIELDS of U.S. immigration history and
U.S. queer history seemed content to ignore each other.
2
Canonical works
of immigration history such as Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted and John
Bodnar’s The Transplanted had nothing to say about gender and sexual “de-
viants” and did not interrogate the gender and sexual hierarchies institution-
alized in immigration policies and practices. Groundbreaking works of gay
and lesbian history, including John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics and Martin
Duberman’s Stonewall, identified particular individuals as immigrants but
did not regard immigration as a key aspect of the history of homosexuality.
3
More recently, scholarship by Margot Canaday, Eithne Luibhéid, Susana
Peña, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Nayan Shah, Siobhan Somerville, Jen-
nifer Ting, Daniel Tsang, William Turner, Eric Wat, Judy Wu, and others
has created a productive dialogue between immigration history and queer
history. Some of this work focuses on immigrants classified as gender and
sexual deviants; some addresses immigration discourses and practices that
constituted and regulated gender and sexuality; and some attempts to queer
immigration history by deconstructing immigrant heteronormativity and
homonormativity.
4
This essay brings immigration history and queer history together with
a focus on Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, a 1967
U.S. Supreme Court decision. Boutilier upheld a provision of the 1952
Immigration and Nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and depor-
tation of aliens “afflicted with psychopathic personality” at time of entry.
In 1965 Congress amended the legislation to provide for the exclusion and
deportation of aliens with “sexual deviations,” but Boutilier concerned the
earlier “psychopathic personality” provision, which the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) interpreted to apply to aliens classifiable as