text: Under the terms of the 1924 act, also known as the Asian Exclusion Act, Asians were not allowed to enter the country and were excluded from naturalization. It stated that an American-born woman whose nationality was lost because of marriage, regardless of whether that marriage had terminated, was ineligible for naturalization and was considered to have been "born in the country of which [they were] a citizen or subject". The Supreme Court ruling of 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, retroactively removed the nationality of Asian men, automatically revoking their wives' nationality. If a U.S. woman married to a man of Asian descent left the country, she could not be readmitted to the United States. Husbands could petition for an exception allowing their foreign-born wives to lawfully immigrate, but wives were unable to petition for their husbands. Immediately after passage of the 1924 Act, the Department of Labor Secretary, James Davis, recommended extending its provisions to immigrants from Mexico and other countries in the Americas. Every year from 1926 to 1930, Congress considered bills evaluating imposing quotas for immigration from the other nations in the western hemisphere. In June 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act granted Native Americans, unilaterally, nationality in the United States.
  In 1933, the United States delegation to the Pan-American Union's Montevideo conference, Alexander W. Weddell and Joshua Butler Wright signed the Inter-American Convention on the Nationality of Women, which became effective in 1934, legally reserving limitations for domestic legislative review. The Equal Nationality Act of 1934 was the first statute that allowed derivative nationality for children born abroad to pass from their mother. Their nationality was dependent on whether the mother had resided in the United States before the child was born. As the law was not retroactive, children born before 1934 were typically prevented from deriving citizenship from their mother. The statute also provided preferential naturalization for any foreign spouse married to a U.S. national. It stated that eligible foreigners, who met all other requirements of naturalization, could naturalize under reduced requirements forgoing a declaration of intent and needing only three years of continuous residency within the United States, Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico.