At America's Gates
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At America's Gates

Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

Erika Lee

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At America's Gates

Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

Erika Lee

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About This Book

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

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PART I
CLOSING THE GATES

The twin metaphors of “gates” and “gatekeepers” have commonly been used to describe American efforts to control immigration. By the end of the twentieth century, the metaphor had become embedded in academic and public discourses on immigration, reflecting a renewed restrictionist ideology and mood. A wide range of scholars and journalists have written about “guarding the gate,” the “clamor at the gates,” “the gatekeepers,” the “guarded gate,” “closing the gate,” etc.1 Perhaps the best-known and most recent use of the term “gate” is the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Operation Gatekeeper, a militarized campaign initiated in 1994 to restrict the illegal entry of Mexican immigrants into the United States near San Diego, California.2 Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, new calls to establish tighter gatekeeping measures have also received much media attention and broad public support. Although journalists, policy makers, and academics use the gatekeeping metaphor widely, there has been little serious inquiry into how the United States first came to define itself as a gatekeeping nation or what that definition has actually meant for both immigrants and the nation. While much has been written explaining how changing patterns of American nativism have led to the restriction and exclusion of immigrants, we know very little about the consequences of immigration laws themselves. Several questions remain: What effects do immigration policies have at America’s gates and within the nation itself? How is gatekeeping related to domestic race relations, racial identities, and state-building? How have immigrants responded and resisted? What are the legacies of American gatekeeping policies for contemporary immigration and immigration law? This section defines American gatekeeping, places its origins in the debates over Chinese immigration in the American West during the late nineteenth century, and suggests it be used as a paradigm to reconsider American immigration history.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed at the federal level in 1882, but it was in the distinct regional context of 1870s California that politicians and anti-Chinese activists began to talk about closing America’s gates for the first time.3 Explicit in the arguments for Chinese exclusion were several elements that would become the foundation of American gatekeeping ideology: racializing Chinese immigrants as permanently alien and even inferior on the basis of their race, class, culture, and gender relations; controlling them through limitations on economic and geographic mobility and prohibitions on naturalization; and protecting the nation by using the power of the state to exclude and restrict new immigrants and track and deport foreigners already in the United States.
Making and enforcing U.S. immigration policy have always involved several overlapping concerns, goals, and variables.4 Immigrants have been excluded and restricted on the basis of their race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, moral standing, health, and political affiliation, among other factors. Some of these justifications for exclusion and restriction were more important during certain historical periods than others. But they often intersected with each other, working separately and in concert to regulate not only foreign immigration and immigrant communities but also domestic race, class, and gender relations. Immigrant laborers who were considered a threat to American white working men were summarily excluded on the basis of class. Restriction laws targeting immigrants suspected of immoral behavior or those “likely to become public charges” affected female immigrants disproportionately.5 Efforts to exclude immigrant groups on the basis of their alleged menace to U.S. public health constituted what Alan Kraut has called “medicalized nativism,” and the diseases considered most dangerous were explicitly tied to racialized assumptions about specific immigrant groups.6 Homosexuals were denied entry beginning in 1917 under clauses in general immigration laws related to morality and the barring of “constitutional psychopathic inferiors.”7
Race was thus not the only factor shaping immigration law, but it was the most important one. Even today, domestic race relations and fears that certain immigrants (especially immigrants of color) are not as assimilable or desirable as others have reinforced the role of race in immigration policies. In turn, immigration laws have shaped the very meanings of race and racial identities. Federal immigration laws became the means to achieve restrictionists’ goals and reflected and reinforced the existing racial hierarchy in the country, leaving America’s gates open to some and closed to others.8 Understanding the racialized origins of American gatekeeping provides a powerful counternarrative to the popular “immigrant paradigm” that celebrates the United States as a “nation of immigrants” and views immigration as a fulfillment of the “promise of American democracy.” As many critics have pointed out, this popular conception of the nation ignores the very real power of institutionalized racism in excluding immigrants and people of color from full and equal participation in American society, economy, and polity. Explicitly barred from the country, Asian immigrants do not fit easily into the immigrant paradigm and offer a different narrative highlighting the limits of American democracy.9 Viewing immigration history within a gatekeeping framework shifts our attention from traditional issues such as assimilation or cultural retention to the consequences of restriction, exclusion, and deportation for both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.
Reconceiving the United States as a gatekeeping nation thus offers an especially suitable framework for Asian and Latino immigrants, two groups that not only have been among the largest immigrant populations in the twentieth century but also have caused the most debate and inspired new regulations.10 European immigrants were, in general, protected from the harsher exclusion and deportation laws that targeted Asians and Mexicans, but they were not entirely free from the impact of gatekeeping laws.11 As nativism increased in the 1920s, southern and eastern European immigrants came to be racialized as threats to the nation, often along the same lines as Asians. And once the gates of immigration law were built, the bureaucratic machinery established to admit, examine, deny, deport, and naturalize immigrants was applied to all groups.
Gatekeeping, through the legislation it entailed, also served as an important impetus to American state-building at the end of the nineteenth century, a force that both political and immigration historians have largely ignored.12 In the United States, the great migrations of Asians, Europeans, and Mexicans from the 1880s to 1924 coincided with and helped instigate an expansion of the modern administrative state. They inspired the establishment of a state bureaucracy to enforce laws and to protect the nation’s geographic borders as well as its internal borders of citizenship. Gatekeeping was also inextricably tied to the expansion of U.S. imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time that the United States began to assert its national sovereignty by closing its gates to unwanted foreigners, it was also expanding its influence abroad through military and economic force, and it extended some of its immigration laws to its new territories.13
Closing America’s gates to various “alien invasions” was additionally instrumental in articulating a definition of American national identity and belonging at the turn of the twentieth century.14 Americans learned to define “Americanness” by excluding and containing foreignness. Through the admission and exclusion of foreigners, the United States both asserted its sovereignty and reinforced its identity as a nation.
Immigration patterns and immigrant communities were profoundly changed by the new laws and the ways in which they were enforced. The ideology and administrative processes of gatekeeping dehumanized and criminalized immigrants, defining them as “unassimilable aliens,” “unwelcome invasions,” “undesirables,” “diseased,” “illegal.” But gatekeeping is not only a form of state action. It is a result of interactions between immigrants and the state. Even those groups who were most affected by immigration restriction played active roles in challenging, negotiating, and shaping the new gatekeeping nation. In both their overt challenges and their everyday acts of resistance, immigrants defied their exclusion from the United States by moving around the barriers designed to exclude them while simultaneously staking their own claims to America.
In this section, Chapter 1 locates the roots of American gatekeeping in the debates, racialized discourses, and regulations surrounding Chinese immigration and exclusion. Chapter 2 focuses on the federal immigration officials charged with interpreting and enforcing the exclusion laws, demonstrating how they shaped the development of the U.S. immigration service locally and nationally.

CHAPTER ONE
THE CHINESE ARE COMING. HOW CAN WE STOP THEM?

Chinese Exclusion and the Origins of American Gatekeeping
In 1876, H. N. Clement, a San Francisco lawyer, stood before a California State Senate Committee and sounded the alarm: “The Chinese are upon us. How can we get rid of them? The Chinese are coming. How can we stop them?”1 Panicked cries such as these and portrayals of Chinese immigration as an evil, “unarmed invasion” had been shared by several witnesses before the committee, which was charged with investigating the “social, moral, and political effects” of Chinese immigration. Testimony like Clement’s was designed to reach a broad audience, and the committee hearings themselves were part of a calculated political attempt to bring the question of Chinese immigration to a national audience.2 Many Californians had long felt beleaguered by the influx of Chinese immigrants into the state and now believed that it was time that the federal government took action. As the committee’s “Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration” stated, the people of California had “but one disposition upon this grave subject 
 and that is an open and pronounced demand upon the Federal Government for relief.”3
At the time of the committee hearings, the United States was just beginning to exert federal control over immigration. Its first efforts had begun one year earlier in response to the California lobby to exclude Asian contract labor and women (mostly Chinese) suspected of entering the country for “lewd or immoral purposes.” The resulting Page Law, passed in 1875, represented the country’s first—albeit limited—regulation of immigration on the federal level and served as an important step toward general Chinese exclusion.4 The U.S. Congress eventually heeded the call of Californians and other westerners to protect them from the so-called Chinese invasion with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Historians have often noted that the Chinese Exclusion Act marks a “watershed” in U.S. history. Not only was it the country’s first significant restrictive immigration law; it was also the first to restrict a group of immigrants based on their race, nationality, and class. As Roger Daniels has written, the Chinese Exclusion Act was “the hinge upon which the legal history of immigration turned.”5 This observation has become the standard interpretation of the anti-Chinese movement, but until recently, most accounts of Chinese exclusion have focused more on the anti-Chinese movement preceding the Chinese Exclusion Act rather than on the six decades of the exclusion era itself.6 Moreover, there has been little attempt to explain the larger impact and legacies of Chinese exclusion. For example, how did the effort to exclude Chinese influence the restriction and exclusion of other immigrant groups? How did the racialization of Chinese as excludable aliens contribute to and intersect with the racialization of other Asian, southern and eastern European, and Mexican immigrants? What precedents did the Chinese Exclusion Act set for the admission, documentation, surveillance, and deportation of both new arrivals and immigrant communities within the United States?
When the Page Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act serve as the beginning rather than the end of the narrative, we are forced to focus more fully on the enormous significance of Chinese exclusion. It becomes clear that its importance as a “watershed” goes beyond its status as one of the first immigration policies to be passed in the United States. Certainly, the Page Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act provided the legal architecture for twentieth-century American immigration policy.7 Chinese exclusion, however, also introduced gatekeeping ideology, politics, law, and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States’ identity as a nation of immigrants. It legalized the restriction, exclusion, and deportation of immigrants considered to be threats to the United States. It established Chinese immigrants—categorized by their race, class, and gender relations as the ultimate example of the dangerous, degraded alien—as the yardsticks by which to measure the desirability (and “whiteness”)...

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