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Chapter 2 Regulation and exclusion

Anti-Chinese agitation

The path to regulation and exclusion began in the extraordinary melting pot that was California, newly admitted to the United States after it was seized from Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846–48). Isolated though it was from the major transatlantic shipping lanes and without rail links to the eastern seaboard until 1868, at the time of the 1840s Gold Rush California had nonetheless attracted thousands of Americans and Europeans, Chinese, and South American immigrants, whose numbers added to the small populations of Native Americans and original Spanish and Mexican settlers.

The Chinese provided valued labor in the gold mines, on farms that provisioned the miners, and ultimately in the construction of the railroad line that would connect the West and East coasts. But in the 1870s, as California settled into a post-boom economy and confronted a severe economic depression, white workers felt their living standards were threatened by the low wages acceptable to many Chinese. A movement, inspired by a combination of economic insecurity, racial hostility, and political opportunism, took form to end Chinese immigration and force the Chinese to re-emigrate. While anti-Chinese politics had some eastern support, its epicenter would long reside in California. Its principal spokesman was Irish-born

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EBSCO : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/1/2018 3:31 PM via MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIV AN: 365577 ; Gerber, David A..; American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction Account: s4672406.main.ehost

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Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingmen’s Party, under whose leadership the party did well in local and state elections. A powerful orator, Kearney ended every address with his signature message: “And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!”

Political representatives of the white working class, commonly themselves the product of some recent immigration like Kearney, would be prominent in developing arguments against immigration in the service of defending the welfare of the ordinary American. Not all were demagogues, to be sure, for arguments that a continual inrush of cheap labor might have a downward effect on wage scales were plausible. But when fused with hatred for the Other , the ugly

3. Alongside Mexicans, Irish, Americans, and others, Chinese laborers were a signifi cant part of the workforce that constructed and maintained the fi rst railroads of the American Far West.

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face of class politics was racist. Evidence of such racism lay most evidently in the fact that neither Kearney nor the California labor unions advocated a class-based movement founded on the organization of all workers, whatever their nativity or race.

4. The cartoonist seeks to capture the irony of an immigrant, dressed in typical Irish peasant garb and speaking with an Irish brogue, ordering a Chinese immigrant to leave the United States in the name of two famous American statesmen, George Washington and Daniel Webster.

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Throughout California, the anti-Chinese movement often engaged in violence and terror. The Chinese were an isolated, relatively small population. China lacked a government strong enough for effective diplomatic protests against such outrages. It was easy to gang up on the Chinese and convenient during election campaigns for opportunistic politicians to champion the racist white majority. But there were limits to Kearney’s infl uence. He was not successful in convincing workers outside California that the Chinese were a real threat to them. In California itself union leaders eventually concluded that Kearney’s agenda was too narrow to benefi t their white constituents, and they resented his power. But Kearney did succeed in impressing Washington politicians with the infl uence he had attained by fusing race and immigration. The call for banning the Chinese gained widespread support, including among other racial minorities. African American newspapers, for example, denounced Chinese immigration as a threat to the precarious economic status of black workers. Congress responded, giving California’s white population what the most vocal and violent within it desired: an end to most Chinese immigration; hence, the prospect the Chinese would eventually disappear. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was periodically renewed until made permanent in 1904. The law was not repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943, when China and the United States were allies in the struggle against Japan, and Chinese exclusion, an effective point in Japanese propaganda, had become a national embarrassment.

Chinese exclusion and subsequent efforts began the evolution of American immigration law and policy, as the historian Mae Ngai observes, into an engine “for massive racial engineering” that sought to use state power to defi ne the demographic and cultural character of the nation. A force accelerating the process was the particular nature of Chinese exclusion, as Congress crafted it. The law did not bar all Chinese immigration, only Chinese laborers. Merchants, students, the immediate family of American-born Chinese citizens, and Chinese American citizens returning from abroad were not barred.

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The problem for enforcement was sorting out those barred from those eligible for admission. The effort was often carried out with a ham-fi sted brutality or cold formality, especially at the Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco harbor, where the large majority of Chinese arrivals was processed. The presumption of government immigration agents was that all Chinese seeking entrance were lying about their status. To their minds, women arriving at Angel Island were not the wives or daughters of legal residents they claimed to be, but prostitutes imported to work in the brothels catering to whites and the large Chinese bachelor population. The elaborate documentation and close interrogation stood in sharp contrast to the perfunctory questioning of most Europeans seeking entrance.

5. Angel Island interrogations were considerably more formal than those brief encounters between European immigrants and inspectors at Ellis Island. Asian immigrants usually faced one or more inspectors and a stenographer. A government interpreter translated. Questions and answers were typed out and placed in the fi le of applicants seeking admission.

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Chinese sought to evade the law by claiming false family relationships through legally resident sponsors, or they attempted to enter the country illegally by crossing its northern or southern land-borders at a time when they were largely unpatrolled. Chinese American citizens occasionally challenged the operations of the law in court and won some notable victories. One way or another, within a decade of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the government was facing a well-publicized challenge, and it was often unsuccessful in the contest. The number of Chinese testing the law was never signifi cant enough to be a true threat to state power, as opposed to an annoyance, but sensationalistic press coverage created panic in the general public, and federal offi cials and enforcement offi cers felt their authority was compromised and reacted aggressively.

The growth of national government activity and power

Frustrated efforts to enforce Chinese exclusion joined other sources of immigration-related anxiety: growing racial consciousness among the white majority based on contemporary science and popular attitudes; increasing concern, with a resurgence of mass European immigration, about the need for more effective regulation of immigration, borders, and citizenship processes; imperial conquest; and large numbers of mobile, U.S.-bound non-white people from Asia, the Pacifi c, and the Caribbean. Immigration policy moved from openness to gatekeeping, though the precise application of policies continued to depend on the origin of the immigrants.

The 1891 Immigration Act was an unambiguous statement of centralized power. It formally assigned responsibility for the assessment of people seeking entrance to the national government. Congress established the offi ce of Superintendent of Immigration within the Treasury Department to oversee all immigration inspection, including new medical and intelligence

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Creating the Immigration Department, 1891

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testing, such as took place at Angel Island and Ellis Island. A bureaucracy, large for its time, took shape around processing at entrance ports and, under the jurisdiction of the Customs Service, enforcing border security along the northern and southern borders, where energies were devoted principally to rooting out small numbers of illegal Chinese entrants and the shadowy criminal enterprises that smuggled them across the Canadian and Mexican borders.

On the heels of the Chinese precedent, racially inspired proscriptions increased. Additional discriminatory responses to Asian immigration led ultimately to the exclusion of half the world’s population. In 1907, during a decade in which the Japanese immigrant population tripled in the mainland United States from 24,000 to 72,000, quotas, rather than a policy of exclusion, would be applied to Japanese laborers in response to protests, especially in California. Japanese were considered less a threat to wage scales than to the monopoly of white people on prime agricultural land, for they were successful in acquiring a foothold in fruit and vegetable farming. But like the Chinese, they were deemed inassimilable. Having just won a war against Russia, however, Japan was an emerging world power, so rather than unilateral action, as had been the case with the Chinese, a quota system was negotiated between President Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese government. Under the terms of the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement, Japanese immigration to the American mainland fell in the next decade by a third. (The recently annexed U.S. possession of Hawaii, which desperately needed Japanese sugar plantation labor, was excluded from the agreement.) Immigrants from Korea, then under Japanese control, were also limited.

Prompted by the ongoing controversy over Japanese landholding, in 1913, California and eight other western states as well as Florida took action against all landholding by aliens ineligible for citizenship. The Supreme Court declared such laws constitutional.

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The restriction of Japanese

Aliens owning land

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Because many Japanese immigrants had children born in the United States, they circumvented the law by registering their property in the names of their children. The frustrated efforts at piecemeal proscription of Asian immigration and citizenship ended in 1917, when Congress passed legislation declaring all of Asia, exclusive of the Philippines, a U.S. possession after the Spanish-American War, “the barred Asiatic zone,” from which immigration must cease completely.

In this racialized climate of opinion and state action, confrontations about who was white inevitably arose when those barred from citizenship under the 1795 Naturalization Law contested their status. In the late nineteenth century, lower courts and state legislatures actually were confused about which groups fi t into the category of “white persons eligible for citizenship.” The federal courts sorted the matter out, though hardly on consistent intellectual grounds. Judges never resolved whether the recorded history of the evolution of peoples, or contemporary racial science, with its increasingly elaborate categories of classifi cation of peoples, or popular prejudices would govern the crucial question of who was white. They did rule that Japanese, South Asians, Burmese, Malaysians, Thais, and Koreans were not white, while Syrians and Armenians, whom the United States Census in 1910 had actually classifi ed as “Asiatics,” were white. The birthright citizenship of the American-born children of aliens ineligible for citizenship was nonetheless affi rmed.

Federal courts also addressed the racial status of Mexicans, who originally became part of the American nation after the annexation of southwestern territory conquered in the Mexican- American War. Later the numbers of Mexicans tripled between 1910 and 1920 to 652,000 residents, as a consequence of political instability and economic modernization in Mexico. After northern Mexico was annexed into the United States in the early 1850s, Mexicans were made citizens, and thus implicitly declared white persons. By a consensual fi ction, Mexican lineage was declared

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Barring Asians

Courts deciding who is “white”

Racial status of Mexicans

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European, via Spain, and the Indian ancestry of Mexicans laid aside. This had served the purpose of securing the citizenship status, and hence loyalty, of numerous large landowners, especially in California. Some were Spanish in origin, but many were Mexican or descendents of Mexican and American intermarriages. A federal district court in 1897 affi rmed the citizenship, and hence the whiteness, of Mexicans for purposes of citizenship.

On the popular level, however, Mexican whiteness was contested. The new immigrants were widely seen as uneducated, dirty, diseased, criminal, and lazy. Political agitation to drop them from the citizenship list failed, but in the 1920s the federal government worked to impede their entrance by increasing a head tax on Mexicans entering the country and by denying visas on the grounds that they were inassimilable and would become dependent on public assistance. During the Great Depression, large numbers of Mexicans, citizens and aliens alike, were encouraged, often to the point of coercion and with the active cooperation of diplomatic offi cials of the Mexican government in western cities, to leave the country. The same program of massive deportations and repatriations also befell Filipinos, who worked extensively in West Coast agriculture and canneries. Another group subject to strong racist pressures, their entrance into the country had been secured, in contrast to other Asian groups, when their homeland became an American possession. (They too, however, were barred from citizenship.) During World War II, the policy toward Mexicans was reversed, because of the shortage of agricultural labor and cannery workers. A bilateral agreement with Mexico established the Bracero (Spanish: day-laborer or fi eld hand) program, which facilitated the recruitment of cheap agricultural labor through temporary work permits.

Legislators, judges, and immigration offi cials increasingly sorted out peoples by their presumed suitability to be Americans, as opposed to their desire to work. In consequence, Congress and the

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Women and Immigration based on marriage

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courts were faced with an endless array of challenges in the name of consistency. A particularly pressing issue was the relationships among citizens and aliens linked by marriage, which introduced the complexities of gender to those mounting in the name of race. Originally, American legislation on naturalization did not limit eligibility for citizenship by sex, but gradually the courts determined that a women’s status was to be defi ned by that of the males to whom she was related. In 1855 Congress formally adopted the principle of derivative citizenship, which held that a woman’s status was dependent on that of her husband or father. A woman who was not a citizen acquired citizenship when marrying an American citizen. The reverse of that situation, the status of a female citizen who married an alien ineligible for citizenship on the basis of race, was addressed in 1907, when Congress decided that she lost her citizenship when she married. Legally these women were no longer allowed to re-naturalize unless their husbands were naturalized fi rst (as by an act of Congress targeted at an individual), furthering the link between a woman’s status and her husband’s. The loss of citizenship to such women led to much injustice and inconvenience, and caused bitter protests.

After the ratifi cation of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution enfranchising women and, in effect, creating a political status for them independent of men, the Cable Act of 1922 and a series of amendments to it in the ensuing decade were passed to address the situation. Thereafter, marriage by a woman who was an American citizen at birth to an alien no longer carried with it the loss of citizenship. For women acquiring their citizenship through marriage or by act of Congress, as was the case for women in Hawaii, Puerto Rico (an American possession since the Spanish-American War), and the Philippines, marriage or remarriage to an alien ineligible for citizenship continued to carry the penalty of denaturalization.

Such elaborate efforts to expand state power to classify people by gender, race and nationality stood in sharp contrast to most

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Americans’ desire for a small, relatively weak central government. The situation suggests the seriousness with which the electorate regarded immigration. However racist, arbitrary, and unjust, these efforts nonetheless touched a relatively small number of voluntary immigrants and their wives and children.

The massive wave of turn-of-the-century European immigration

On the East Coast, European immigrants continued to enter the country in enormous numbers. After the severe economic depression of the 1890s, the tide of immigrants reached unprecedented proportions. Between 1871 and 1900, 11.7 million immigrants arrived; between 1901 and 1920 alone 14.5 million did. The points of origin were changing dramatically. While in the nineteenth century, western and northern Europeans predominated, now southern, central, and eastern Europeans did. The former never stopped arriving, but the latter overwhelmed their numbers.

This change carried tremendous signifi cance for Americans wary of unlimited immigration, and demand grew to curb European immigration. Behind this effort lay the transformation in both the popular mind and contemporary science of differences of culture and appearance into inheritable racial dispositions that made assimilation impossible.

The newer European immigrants were different in ways that alarmed many Americans. Many fewer were Protestants than the Germans, Scandinavians, British, Irish, and Dutch immigrants of the past. The majority were Jews, Orthodox of a variety of sorts, and Roman Catholic, whose presence activated long-standing prejudices and suspicions. The physical appearances of eastern European Jews, Slavs, and southern Italians and Greeks suggested a lack of racial kinship with Anglo-Americans, though these differences were no doubt accentuated by the ill-fi tting peasant

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Growing fear of immigrants

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garb and poverty of most newcomers. The prominent sociologist Edward A. Ross spelled out these suspicions about racial difference and inferiority when he noted in 1914 that “the physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims inferiority of type.” In every face, he noted “something wrong. . . . There were so many sugar-loaf heads, moon faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws, and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn [genie] had amused himself by creating human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator.”

Another difference was the new immigrants’ greater traditionalism. Even though they knew enough about the modern world to develop effective strategies for leaving their homelands and resettling thousands of miles away, the eastern, central, and southern Europeans were more anchored in traditional peasant social arrangements than their contemporaries within the continuing fl ow of western Europeans. It was easy to forget that sixty years earlier, the Irish and Germans especially seemed outlandish and had only gradually given evidence of being successfully integrated into American life. The perception of never being likely to assimilate was heightened, too, by the fact that many of the newer immigrants, in contrast to the more family-based, mid-nineteenth century immigration, were single males wishing to make as much money as possible quickly and return to their homelands.

Racialization of these Europeans never approached the ferocity seen in the popular response to such peoples as the Japanese or Chinese. American nativists condemned the backwardness of these European peoples as much on the basis of culture as biology. It was possible for thoughtful people, on the one hand, to urge a curtailing of their entrance as a reform in the name of saving America, and, on the other hand, to be sympathetic to the immigrants’ aspirations and respectful of their work ethic and family orientation.

But there could be no doubt about the consequences of such racialized thinking: sharp quotas on the admission into the

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Restricting immigration - the quota system

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country of a large number of these more recently arrived European peoples that were enacted into law in 1921 and 1924. In expressing preference and disapproval, the intention was to discriminate. Turn-of-the-century newcomers might have been offi cially classifi ed as “white,” but as historians have observed, they were considered in-between people or provisional white people , and by 1920, in the minds of many long-established Americans, there were quite enough of them. Unlike the nativists of the mid-nineteenth century, the new advocates of radical change in immigration law and policy did not have much faith in reforming immigrants, but instead demanded reform of national policy.

The calls for restriction of these Europeans grew after 1890. Emerging at various levels of society, they had multiple sources, three of which stand out. First, the anti-foreignism inspired by mid-nineteenth century anti-Catholicism enjoyed resurgence in 1887 with the organization of the American Protective Association (APA), which gained adherents particularly in the rural and small town South and Middle West. The APA called for state control of Catholic sectarian schools in the belief they were havens of subversion. It claimed 2.5 million members in the mid-1890s, but this number soon declined because of rivalries among its leaders. By the time of its eclipse in the second decade of the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan, which was originally established in the South to impede the political and civic equality of emancipated slaves, was reconfi guring itself as a national, anti-Catholic, antisemitic, and anti-foreign as well as anti–African American organization. It became a major political force throughout the country in the 1920s.

Second, labor union leaders, such as the longtime head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) Samuel Gompers, opposed unrestricted immigration, refl ecting their members’ anxieties about wage scales and the availability of work. Especially those AFL-affi liated craft unions representing skilled workers that were the heart of the labor movement in size, employer recognition,

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Anti-Immigrant Groups

Anti-Immigrant labor unions

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and political power held a restrictionist position. Many in such unions did not believe the newer immigrants could be organized, because of cultural differences and the aspirations of many to return to their homelands. To be sure, most of the immigrants were not skilled workers, and instead worked as factory hands and outdoor laborers in construction or extractive industries such as coal mining. This was the segment of the working class most retarded in its progress toward unionization, largely because of the diffi culties of organizing an easily replaced, mobile work force with a large immigrant cohort. The fact that recent immigrants, often ignorant of the circumstances of their employment, were occasionally used as strikebreakers highlighted for American workers that the newcomers were poor material for organizations based on class solidarity.

Labor’s conclusions at this point in time about limiting immigration actually broadly paralleled the thinking of industrial employers, among whom there was a growing consensus that for the time being the manufacturing economy had a supply of labor suffi cient to its needs. In addition, infl uential industrialists like automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had become more concerned with the stability of their workforce and desirous of encouraging settled habits through Americanization programs and a variety of incentivized job and wage policies. Hence, relative to their past encouragement of high rates of immigration, the period found them more or less indifferent to the debate about immigration restriction.

Third, a respectable, intellectual bourgeois face of immigration control appeared in the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), which was organized in 1894 by a prestigious coalition of northeastern academics, national political leaders, and urban reformers. Alarmed at the growth of social problems and pervasive political corruption in the rapidly growing industrial cities, they blamed such conditions on the unchecked expansion of recent immigrant populations. Their thinking was also infl uenced

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by the emerging science of eugenics, which argued that states should take active steps to protect and improve the human genetic stock within their borders. Eugenicists advanced such measures as immigration control, sterilization of the disabled, and laws against interracial marriage.

The IRL did not publicly engage in defamatory xenophobia. Instead it offered a moderate, patriotic defense of the existing social order and republican social institutions, both of which its members believed to be anchored in Anglo-American culture. The IRL was composed of men of cultural authority and political power, such as the patrician Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Francis Amasa Walker, who had headed the U.S. Census in 1870 and 1880; and A. Lawrence Lowell, the longtime Harvard University president. The IRL’s program was gradually enacted into law over the course of the next quarter century: increase in the head tax on immigrants to pay for expansion of inspection services; an expanded list of excluded classes; a literacy test; and fi nally, the capstone of its goals, numerical limitation.

The quota system

The path to numerical limitation, which was ultimately embodied in the 1921 and 1924 quota laws, began in 1907 with Congressional establishment of the Dillingham Commission. Charged with undertaking a comprehensive fact-fi nding investigation, it surveyed the entire fi eld of contemporary immigration, and included reports on conditions in and movement from a large number of immigrant homelands in Europe and Asia. Consisting of thirty-nine volumes, the fi nal report was issued in 1911. Based partly on the commissioners’ on-site inspection of conditions at emigration ports in Russia, Germany, and southern Italy, the report dispelled long-held notions that European nations were emptying their poor houses and prisons and sending the inhabitants to the United States. It

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contained little explicit criticism of the immigrants, and praised their capacity for work and many sacrifi ces to achieve self-improvement.

But in generalizing about them, the report was nonetheless a peculiar mixture of balanced, objective sociological analysis and racialist pseudo-science. It rejected the notion, for example, that the immigrants’ children were inherently stupid, in spite of widely circulated data about school failure, and it stated instead that both educational diffi culties and tendencies toward juvenile delinquency were rooted in the social environment of city slums and ghettoes. It acknowledged, too, that immigrants were less likely to be criminals than were Americans. While it attributed some responsibility for miserable working conditions in many industries to immigrant workers’ willingness to put up with employer abuses out of a desire to make money quickly and return home, it put more blame on employers than workers.

Both in biological and cultural terms, race pervaded the commissioners’ fi ndings, especially but not exclusively in regard to Asian immigrants. Asians were also praised for their work ethic, but exclusion was endorsed on the grounds of ineradicable differences. It treated European people through racialist frameworks. For example, the commission accepted the widespread notion that southern and northern Italians were of different races, which was said to help to explain the higher social and economic development of the north, among those whom Commissioner Henry Cabot Lodge called “Teutonic Italians.” Nor did the commission necessarily embrace science when it confl icted with popular racialist notions. To study immigrant physiology and intellect, it employed the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, who took the opportunity to test the ideas of pseudo-scientifi c racialists such as the well-known writer and IRL member Madison Grant. Boas’s skeptical conclusions were not consistently employed by the commission in evaluating the possibility of innate differences.

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The commission’s report endorsed limitations on immigration, recommending as its primary means to that end a literacy test, which was approved by Congress in 1917 over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. It also recommended the development of a method for restriction based on numerical formulae. This recommendation, combined with the elaborate classifi cation the commission had done sorting out groups, awaited for a time when both the public and political leadership were ready to endorse more radical solutions. That moment soon presented itself just after World War I. During the war the national government engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to inspire immigrants to enlist in the armed forces and to buy war bonds. But after the armistice, a long-standing variety of cultural, social, economic, and political concerns touching on the consequences of European immigration were then heightened by a panic about the loyalty of ethnic Americans brought about by the war; fears about domestic subversion prompted by the Bolshevik Revolution; a brief but sharp postwar recession; race riots and anti–African American pogroms in major cities; and a police labor strike in a major city, Boston, which briefl y seemed to invite anarchy.

Not all these concerns could be linked directly to immigration, but together they led the public and its political representatives to a deeply apprehensive, conservative mood, and immigration control was one of its principal outlets, especially as immigration from a destitute, politically unstable postwar Europe recommenced. Ethnic organizations and the political representatives of heavily ethnic constituencies, especially in the big cities of the northeast and industrial Midwest, argued for continuing the liberal policy toward Europeans, but proved no match for the pro-limitation consensus building nationally. The title of the 1921 legislation, Emergency Quota Act , mirrors contemporary attitudes. The law maintained the ban on Asians and imposed for three years a quota system that limited European immigration to 3 percent per year for individual groups based on their presence in the population revealed in the 1910 federal census. It limited entrances to

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6. Though questions about the loyalties of immigrants were raised in many local communities during World War I, the national government engaged in a vigorous campaign to enlist their support for the war effort.

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350,000 a year, 45 percent from southern and eastern Europe and 55 percent from northern and western Europe, substituting unlimited entrance with what Mae Ngai calls a “hierarchy of desirability” among the Europeans instead of a complete ban.

When it was soon found that the law was not having the desired effect of limiting numbers, the more radical 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was passed. Beginning in 1927, immigration was to be limited to only 150,000 annually from the entire globe, exclusive of the Western Hemisphere, which was exempted from limitation in order to maintain good bilateral relations with neighbors and, via Canada and the Caribbean, with imperial Great Britain and in anticipation of the need for Mexican agricultural labor in the West and Southwest. Now quotas were to be apportioned on the basis of the 1890 census, before the vast bulk of the southern and eastern Europeans had arrived. Each nationality could make a claim to a proportion of the total based on 2 percent of its population in the United States in 1890. A commission was established to determine the exact numbers for the future, and it mandated a quota system that, while preserving a low absolute number of entrants, was based on the 1920 census, and thus more generous to the newer European groups. The new quotas went into effect in 1929, just as voluntary international population movements would begin a sharp decline because of the worldwide depression of the 1930s, totalitarian regimes in Europe that impeded or banned emigration, and eventually World War II.

Between Chinese exclusion in 1882 and 1930, the United States had evolved from an open immigration regime to a carefully constructed system that controlled and prioritized potential entrants, based largely on racialized conceptions of acceptability. The trend in this half-century may contradict much that Americans want to believe about themselves and have others believe about them, but it hardly made Americans uniquely illiberal. While the United States was banning the entrance of Japanese in 1907, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and

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Canada were doing the same, and the Japanese themselves, fi rmly imbued with their own notions of racial superiority, banned Chinese and Korean immigration. While the United States was developing and imposing its quota system, other nations were evolving their own systems of restriction. With the exception of skilled workers, Canada would drop all immigration except that originating in France and the United Kingdom, homelands of its original European population groups. Argentina established a system of preferences based on Germany and Switzerland, while Brazil did so based on Italy, Portugal, and Spain. When Brazil had diffi culties attracting Europeans, its government resorted to the recruitment of Japanese, and attempted to reconcile a need for labor and an embrace of racialist science by classifying them under a newly created category, “whites of Asia.” Australia implemented a fi rmly “white Australia” policy, with preferences for immigrants from the United States and United Kingdom.

Behind the actions of these countries was the desire for greater racial homogeneity, which was widely understood to be the key to cultural homogeneity and national progress. Through eugenics, race increasingly became the basis of a program for improving a population and protecting its gene pool against invasion by those deemed inferior, while encouraging the reproduction and prosperity of those deemed worthy to be in the majority. When fused to a nationalistic foreign policy by the German fascist and Japanese imperial regimes, eugenics would become a basis for ruthless war making and genocide against those peoples and nations deemed inferior. Yet eugenics presented a powerful enough vision of the path to the human future that bitter adversaries, such as Japan and the United States, might nonetheless share at some fundamental level an understanding of how humanity might progress.

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