The Sun Never Sets
eBook - ePub

The Sun Never Sets

South Asian Migrants in an Age of U. S. Power

Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, Manu Vimalassery

Share book
  1. 392 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Sun Never Sets

South Asian Migrants in an Age of U. S. Power

Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, Manu Vimalassery

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

The Sun Never Sets collects the work of a generation of scholars who are enacting a shift in the orientation of the field of South Asian American studies. By focusing upon the lives, work, and activism of specific, often unacknowledged, migrant populations, the contributors present a more comprehensive vision of the South Asian presence in the United States. Tracking the changes in global power that have influenced the paths and experiences of migrants, from expatriate Indian maritime workers at the turn of the century, to Indian nurses during the Cold War, to post-9/11 detainees and deportees caught in the crossfire of the "War on Terror," these essays reveal how the South Asian diaspora has been shaped by the contours of U.S. imperialism. Driven by a shared sense of responsibility among the contributing scholars to alter the profile of South Asian migrants in the American public imagination, they address the key issues that impact these migrants in the U.S., on the subcontinent, and in circuits of the transnational economy. Taken together, these essays provide tools with which to understand the contemporary political and economic conjuncture and the place of South Asian migrants within it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Sun Never Sets an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Sun Never Sets by Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, Manu Vimalassery in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9780814739396
PART I

Overlapping Empires

1

Intimate Dependency, Race, and Trans-Imperial Migration

NAYAN SHAH
In 1907, seventeen-year-old Jawala Singh left his bride to the care of his father and uncle’s joint household and traveled by rail with his cousin Punu Singh from his village in Punjab to Calcutta.1 In Calcutta, Jawala and Punu booked passage and set sail for Hong Kong, sidestepping U.S. consular agents, who discouraged Punjabi laborers from journeying to the United States, and British colonial officials, who regulated the emigration of indentured laborers. After living at the Hong Kong gurudwara for several weeks and working at the docks and warehouses, they bought tickets for a ship bound for Honolulu and San Francisco. However, Hong Kong–based “quarantine authorities,” directed by U.S. public health officers and hired by the steamship company, separated the two cousins and removed Jawala Singh with a diagnosis of trachoma. Relying on local remedies, Jawala Singh treated his eyes, and they cleared up. However, his medical record now dashed his chances for purchasing direct passage on North American–bound ships.2
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. and British governments coordinated and consolidated such systems to control and police the mobility of workers and travelers. They created globally extensive infrastructures of exit and entry regulations, documentation requirements, and inspection sites and practices, and they regulated private passenger steamship companies to monitor and manage human mobility. Racial suspicion was at the heart of their regulatory scrutiny and guided both the policing of smuggling operations and the judgments of health inspectors and shipping agents. Like many South Asian and Asian migrants in the early twentieth century who migrated to find work outside their homes and send remittances to their families, Jawala Singh confronted, navigated, and resisted these racialized imperial and nation-state obstacles. Singh journeyed on a circuitous route through Manila, Panama, and Mexico and eventually lived, prospered, and died in New Mexico. Every step of the way, Singh and other migrants encountered a global system set up and maintained by both American and British imperial powers that sought to constrain and redirect their mobility and their access to work.
This chapter examines how South Asian migrants confronted and evaded obstacles that the U.S. and British empire-states set up across multiple jurisdictions in the Pacific and Central America. South Asian migrants mobilized flexible forms of citizenship and identity to navigate state barriers and harnessed social, kinship, and institutional networks and forms of intimate dependency to enable their mobility and survival. Both Canada and the United States instituted policies toward Asian immigrants to deter permanence and stability, including laws and procedures that excluded women. This process intensified Asian migrants’ kinship ties and made their networks more globally extensive. At the same time, the exclusion and absence of women among South Asian immigrants reinforced the precariousness of male solo migrants.
As representatives of a society that promoted individualism, bureaucrats expressed wariness of communal alliances; immigration officers scrutinized and sought to disrupt the very interdependent ties of kinship, the social and institutional networks, that enabled migrant men to survive in British and American imperial locations along the Pacific Rim and in Mexico and the United States. However, the political economy of migration, race, and gender in this case created an environment along the Mexican-American borderlands that fostered new forms of alliance—specifically, interracial marriages, business partnerships, and family networks. While the policies of the British and U.S. empires nationalized and racialized immigrant outcomes, they also defined and circumscribed legitimate forms of kinship and alliance by denigrating and criminalizing those social ties that did not fit into a model of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family. However, mixed-racial and mixed-status families confounded and complicated the U.S. federal government’s attempts to restrict South Asians’ claim to legitimate residence in the United States and buffeted remigration and deportation cases in the middle of the twentieth century.

Migration Geography and Regulations

The journeys that Jawala Singh and other Punjabi migrants took out of Calcutta both followed and departed from those of the more than 30 million migrants who left colonial India from 1834 to 1930. More than 90 percent of South Asian migrants traveled across the Bay of Bengal to work in plantations in British imperial possessions, including 4 million who went to Malay and the Straights Settlements, 8 million to Sri Lanka, and 15 million to Burma. Most of these migrants were Tamil, Bengali, and Bihari male laborers and families whose passage and recruitment were “assisted” by debts and obligations to regional merchants who coordinated their placement with British plantation owners. Another 2 million migrated in similar fashion to British possessions in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Punjabi migrants composed a part of the approximately 2 million merchants, travelers, and soldiers who journeyed throughout Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, following opportunities and networks in Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, Singapore, and Manila. A much smaller number, approximately 80,000, of these ambitious Punjabi, Sindhi, and Afghani merchants, former soldiers, and laborers filtered beyond the coastal Southeast Asia orbit to migrate for opportunities in Canada, Australia, Hawaii, the United States, Mexico, Panama, and Argentina. It was the migration of these “free” emigrants that ignited immigration controversies in Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the United States.3
The British imperial concerns for nefarious schemes to dupe South Asians into indentureship contracts and transport them to the Caribbean plantations resulted in the 1883 Emigration Act, which required government oversight over labor contracts beyond “Ceylon and the Straights Settlements.” Since the overwhelming majority of “assisted” emigrants journeyed within that orbit, the regulations also exempted merchants, travelers, soldiers, and military personnel recruited for service in China and Africa and thereby facilitated the migration of “free” service workers, laborers, and merchants.4 British imperial efforts for the managed containment of indentured workers were matched by the United States’ 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law, which expressly forbade any company or individual from bringing foreigners into the United States under contract to perform labor, except for domestic servants, artists, and lecturers. The specter of contract laborers haunted U.S. concerns about the dangers of racialized labor from India and China, as well as unskilled laborers from Eastern and Southern Europe.5
When confronted with several thousand South Asian male laborers migrating to West Coast ports in the period of 1905 to 1912, the U.S. and Canadian governments responded by marshaling health inspections to identify and deport those suffering from a “loathsome contagious disease” and summarily exclude and deport anyone else who inspectors predicted was liable to become destitute. Medical and public charge exclusions were established in 1891 and strengthened in subsequent years. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the United States expanded its exclusion regime beyond its own borders, imposing public health inspection routines in ports across the globe and punishing shipping companies that allowed suspect passengers to travel to North America. With the intensification of medical exclusion procedures in sending ports like Hong Kong and Shanghai and receiving ports like Seattle and San Francisco, South Asian migrants diverted their travels to U.S. imperial locations such as Manila and the Panama Canal Zone, where after six months residence, they could make their way to the mainland United States with less scrutiny. In 1913, when this remigration loophole from U.S. territories was closed, migrants increasingly used clandestine passageways through the Panama Canal Zone, Central America, and Mexico to enter the United States.6
The racial scrutiny of migration took a more formal turn in 1917, when the United States restricted the immigration of all laborers from Asia by creating a geographic “barred zone” that converted restrictions on Chinese and Japanese laborers to the broader region. Two years earlier, in 1915, the British government in India had imposed a similarly restrictive regulation under the Defence of India Passport Act that made it a criminal offense to embark on a journey from any port in British India without a passport.
Under mounting pressure from white settler populations across the British Empire, the British government in India had closely followed the attempts made by the Chinese government in 1888 and the Japanese government in 1895 to mandate passports as a defense against the discriminatory and humiliating exclusions on their emigrants to North America.7 As race became increasingly central in the development of British immigration and residency regulations in the white settler dominions of Australia, Canada, and South Africa, British regulations administered in Britain’s colonial ports of Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore combined with U.S. regulations administered in its colonial territories of Hawaii and the Philippines to constrain the mobility of South Asian and Chinese laborers and create the framework for their policing and exclusion.
Government officials in the United States, Canada, and Britain communicated frequently, sharing information, suspicions, and bureaucratic policies and strategies on how to interpret the value or danger of Asian migrants. They traded their assessments of migrant capabilities, theories about geographic and racial predispositions to disease and disability, the likelihood of becoming destitute, and the dangers of migrants’ political and cultural habits to Anglo-American civilization and democracy. The “intimate encounter” filtered a specific assessment of both racial groups and individuals.8 Immigration inspectors and politicians in Canada and the United States feared that an Asian migrant would become a vagrant and public charge and so focused their scrutiny on the “private” network of support that would buoy the individual’s needs so that he would not drain resources from the public. The bureaucratic procedures of immigrant entry had contradictory effects. They demanded to see immigrants as “autonomous” and “independent” individuals, but they also assumed that an immigrants’ web of dependence through a network of kin, friends, co-villagers, coreligionists, and compatriots would be necessary to sustain the migrants in a hostile environment.
State power and sovereignty came into being over the regulation of human mobility. States simultaneously regulated individual identity through passports, permits, and visas, and channeled human mobility through defined gateways, transportation systems, and territorial boundaries. Through extraterritorial surveillance, travel and identity documentation, and investigation systems, states consolidated their authority and reinforced the necessity of reciprocal if uneven relationships between clearly bounded nation-states. As historian Adam McKeown has argued, the world of passports, visas, and permits does not record a “preexisting reality” but creates “stable, documentable identities for individuals and divide[s] those individuals across an international system of nation states.”9 U.S. immigration historians have explained how a nationalizing agenda proliferated exclusionary racialization and divided people into either citizens or aliens. They have also charted how individuals labeled as “aliens” caught within the system are stripped of constitutional protections by the plenary powers of the nation-state.10 By subjecting individuals to standardized inspection practices that measured the physical body—including the face, fingerprints, and bodily fluids and wastes—immigration inspectors had a new field of data with which to interpret and predict the bodily fitness and capacity of immigrants, as well as a racial topography upon which to map individual capacity and destiny.

Manila Transit

When denied passage to the United States from Hong Kong, Jawala Singh worked as a night watchman for several months and then embarked to Manila to work as a peddler and laborer.11 Labor demands grew in the Philippines as the United States vanquished Philippine rebels and imposed rule over the archipelago and as U.S. and British capital investment invigorated sugar plantations and global trade. Former South Asian police officers and soldiers stationed in Shanghai and Hong Kong and merchants and laborers in Singapore and Penang migrated to Manila at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Drawn by reports of higher pay rates and opportunity, some men worked for short periods as night watchmen or peddled clothing and goods on the streets of Manila. U.S. Customs officials administered entry and residency permits. Parsee, Bengali, and Sikh merchants established thriving businesses supplying clothing, tools, and plumbing supplies. The growing Sikh population supported a gurudwara in Manila following the establishment of similar temples in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Penang. Many South Asian watchmen and guards complained of oppressive heat, lack of reliable work, and limited business opportunities. At the same time, steamship companies, eager to bolster eastbound passenger traffic, launched recruitment campaigns promising lucrative, high-wage employment a short distance from the gateway ports of Honolulu, Seattle, and San Francisco. South Asian merchants helped prospective passengers such as Jawala Singh secure the loans necessary to pay their passage.12
After a six-month stay in the Philippines, South Asian migrants could obtain a certificate of residence status in the Philippines and could thereby bypass vigorous physical examinations in Seattle and San Francisco. The Unite...

Table of contents