Melinda C. Miller

As part of growing anti-immigrant sentiment during the early twentieth century, the United States enacted a series of laws designed to restrict immigration. Under the Expatriation Act of 1907, U.S.-born women who married non-citizen men automatically lost their American citizenship, while U.S.-born men faced no such penalty and could confer citizenship upon their foreign-born wives. This paper considers how gender-specific citizenship penalties affected marriage choices. I first document that U.S.-born women became less likely to marry non-citizen men following the Act’s implementation using the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses.  To identify the role of citizenship more precisely, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation generated by World War I–era enemy alien registration laws. Beginning in November 1917, German men were required to register as enemy aliens, and, in April 1918, registration was extended to German women. Because of the Expatriation Act, U.S.-born women who married German men were also subject to enemy alien registration. Using the exact marriage dates available in a newly digitized dataset of marriage records from Cuyahoga County, Ohio, I show that marriages between U.S.-born women and German men declined when registration requirements were extended to women, but not when they applied only to men. These findings demonstrate that marriage decisions were responsive to gendered citizenship penalties and highlight how immigration policy can shape family formation.