Վարդան Մատթէոսեան2026-06-172026-06-172022Մատթէոսեան, Վ., «Հալաճեան դատը (1909). Հայոց քաղաքացիութեան դէմ առաջին իրաւական մարտահրաւէրը Միացեալ Նահանգներու մէջ», «Հայկազեան հայագիտական հանդէս», 2022, 42/1, Պէյրութ, էջ 131-168https://haigrepository.haigazian.edu.lb/handle/123456789/1453Nativism was on the rise in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and became the driving force of a wide conversation and a series of legislative measures on immigration, citizenship, ethnic identity class and discrimination, based on the dominant discourse of race. The reform to the Citizenship Act in 1870 gave the right of citizenship to free aliens of white and African descent. The concept of “white” became the crux of the problem: who would be the immigrants rightfully granted citizenship? After the Chinese Exclusion Art (1882), attempts were made to restrict the “new immigration” of the 1890s, which brought millions of “off-white” immigrants from southeastern and eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, including Armenians. Those immigrants were considered “races most alien to the body of the self American people” (Henry Cabot Lodge), lacking the spirit of enterprise and self-government. The paper discusses the discourse of the nativist and anti-immigration current with regards to the Armenians until World War I. Their Social and moral features, their degree of whiteness, and their ability to integrate within the American society were thoroughly questioned. In 1909 the American government disputed their whiteness for the first time in the courts, claiming that Armenians did not have the right to become U.S. citizens, but the swift ruling of the Boston Circuit Court in the Halladjian et al. case dispelled that challenge.