Justice George Sutherland on the people to whom American citizenship belongs:

"The words of familiar speech which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of men whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person’ it was these immigrants—bone of their bone and and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind."