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The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924 Author(s): Erika Lee Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring, 2002), pp. 36-62 Published by: on behalf of the University of Illinois Press Immigration & Ethnic History

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The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American

Gatekeeping, 1882-1924

ERIKA LEE

IN 1876, H. N. CLEMENT, a San Francisco lawyer, stood before a

California State Senate Committee and sounded the alarm: "The Chi

nese are upon us. How can we get rid of them? The Chinese are com

ing. How can we stop them?"1 Clement's panicked cries and portrayals of Chinese immigration as an evil, "unarmed invasion" were shared by several witnesses before the committee which was charged with investi

gating the "social, moral, and political effects" of Chinese immigration.2

Testimony like Clement's was designed to reach a broad audience, and

the committee hearings themselves were part of a calculated political

attempt to nationalize the question of Chinese immigration.3 Their ef

forts proved successful when the United States Congress passed the

Chinese Exclusion Act on 6 May 1882. This law prohibited the immi

gration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and barred all

Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship. Demonstrating the class

bias in the law, merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats were exempt from exclusion.4

Historians have often noted that the Chinese Exclusion Act marks a

"watershed" in United States 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 and class, and it thus helped to

shape twentieth-century United States race-based immigration policy.5 This observation has become the standard interpretation of the anti

Chinese movement, but until recently, most accounts of Chinese exclu

sion have focused more on the anti-Chinese movement preceding the

Chinese Exclusion Act rather than on the almost six decades of the

exclusion era itself.6 Moreover, only a few scholars have begun to fully

explore the meanings of this watershed and its consequences for other

immigrant groups and American immigration law in general.7 Numerous

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Lee 37

questions remain: 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 and intersect

with the racialization of other Asian, southern and eastern European, and Mexican immigrants? How did the Chinese Exclusion Act itself set

significant precedents for the admission, deportation, documentation, and surveillance of both new arrivals and immigrant communities within

the United States? What becomes clear is that the real significance of Chinese exclusion

as a "watershed" is thus much greater than its importance as one of the

first immigration laws and its significance for legal doctrine. Certainly, the Page Law (which excluded Asian contract labor and women sus

pected of being prostitutes) and the Chinese Exclusion Act provided the

legal architecture structuring and influencing twentieth-century Ameri

can immigration policy.8 It is my argument, however, that Chinese ex

clusion also introduced a "gatekeeping" ideology, politics, law, and cul

ture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed and thought about race, immigration, and the United States' identity as a nation of

immigration. It legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport "undesirable" and excludable immigrants. It established Chi

nese immigrants?categorized by their race, class, and gender relations

as the ultimate category of undesirable immigrants?as the models by which to measure the desirability (and "whiteness") of other immigrant

groups. Lastly, the Chinese exclusion laws not only provided an ex

ample of how to contain other threatening, excludable, and undesirable

foreigners, it also set in motion the government procedures and the

bureaucratic machinery required to regulate and control both foreigners

arriving to and foreigners and citizens residing in the United States.

Precursors to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, United States passports, "green cards," illegal immigration and deporta tion policies can all be traced back to the Chinese Exclusion Act itself.

In the end, Chinese exclusion transformed not only the Chinese immi

grant and Chinese American community; it forever changed America's

relationship to immigration in general.

CHINESE EXCLUSION AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN GATEKEEPING

The metaphor of "gates" and "gatekeepers" to describe the United

States government's efforts to control immigration became inscribed in

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38 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

national conversations about immigration during the twentieth century. A wide range of scholars and journalists have recently written about

"guarding the gate," the "clamor at the gates," "the gatekeepers," the

"guarded gate," "closing the gate," etc.9 Perhaps the best known and

most recent use of the term is the United States Immigration and Natu

ralization Service's Operation Gatekeeper, a militarized effort initiated

in 1994 to restrict the illegal entry of Mexican immigrants into the

United States near San Diego, California.10 Although journalists,

policymakers, and academics use the gatekeeping metaphor widely, there

has been little serious inquiry into how the United States has come to

define itself as a gatekeeping nation or what that has actually meant for

both immigrants and the nation in the past and present.

Defining and historicizing America's gatekeeping tradition clearly

begins with Chinese immigration in the American West during the late

nineteenth century. While Andrew Gyory has persuasively argued that

the adoption of the anti-Chinese movement by national partisan politi cians led to the actual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, it

was in California in the 1870s that politicians and anti-Chinese activists

first began to talk about "closing America's gates" for the first time.11

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, threatening, and

inferior on the basis of their race, culture, labor, and aberrant gender

relations; containing the danger they represented by limiting economic

and geographical mobility as well as barring them from naturalized

citizenship through local, state, and federal laws and action; and lastly,

protecting the nation from both further immigrant incursions and dan

gerous immigrants already in the United States by using the power of

the state to legalize the modes and processes of exclusion, restriction,

surveillance, and deportation.12

Through the exclusion movement, both regional and national politi cians effectively claimed the right to speak for the rest of the country and to assert American national sovereignty in the name of Chinese

exclusion. They argued that it was nothing less than the duty and the

sovereign right of Californians and Americans to do so for the good of

the country. H. N. Clement, the San Francisco lawyer who testified at

the 1876 hearings, explicitly combined the themes of racial difference, the closed gate/closed door metaphor, and national sovereignty to ar

ticulate this philosophy. "Have we any right to close our doors against one nation and open them to another?" he asked. "Has the Caucasian

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Lee 39

race any better right to occupy this country than the Mongolian?" His

answers to the above questions were an emphatic "Yes." Citing contem

porary treatises on international law, Clement argued that the greatest fundamental right of every nation was self-preservation, and the Chi

nese immigration question was nothing less than a battle for America's

survival and future. "A nation has a right to do everything that can

secure it from threatening danger and to keep at a distance whatever is

capable of causing its ruin," he continued. We have a great right to say to the half-civilized subject from Asia, "You shall not come at all."13

The federal case supporting Chinese exclusion only reinforced the con

nection between immigration restriction and the sovereign rights of na

tions. In 1889, the United States Supreme Court described Chinese im

migrants as "vast hordes of people crowding in upon us" and as "a

different race ... dangerous to [America's] peace and security."14 The

nation's highest court thus affirmed the right of the federal government to exclude Chinese, and by doing so, it also established the legal and

constitutional foundation for federal immigration restriction and exclu

sion based on national sovereignty.

Building gates and making and enforcing United States immigration

policy has always involved several overlapping concerns, goals, and

variables.15 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 justifica tions for exclusion and restriction were more important during certain

historical periods than others. But they often intersected and overlapped with each other, working separately and in concert with each other to

regulate not only foreign immigration, but also domestic race, class, and

gender relations within the United States. In turn, gatekeeping became a

primary means of exerting social control over immigrant communities

and protecting the American nation at large. Immigrant laborers who

were considered a threat to American white working men were sum

marily excluded on the basis of class. General restriction laws?espe

cially those targeting immigrants suspected of immoral behavior or "likely to become public charges"?affected female immigrants disproportion

ately. Immigrant disease and sexuality were monitored, contained, and

excluded through immigration policy as well. Efforts to exclude immi

grant groups on the basis of their alleged health menace to the United

States constituted what Alan Kraut has called "medicalized nativism," and the diseases considered most dangerous were explicitly tied to

racialized assumptions about specific immigrant groups.16 Homosexuals

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40 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

were denied entry beginning in 1917 under clauses in general immigra tion laws related to morality and the barring of "constitutional psycho

pathic inferiors."17 Race consistently played a crucial role in distin

guishing between "desirable," "undesirable," and "excludable" immi

grants. In doing so, gatekeeping helped to establish a framework for

understanding race and racial categories and reflected, reinforced, and

reproduced the existing racial hierarchy in the country.18 Thus, America's

gates have historically been open only to some, while they have re

mained closed to others.

Understanding the racialized origins of American gatekeeping pro vides a powerful counter-narrative to the popular "immigrant paradigm,"

which celebrates the United States as a "nation of immigrants" and

views immigration as a fulfillment of the "promise of American democ

racy." As many critics have pointed out, this popular conception of the

nation ignores the very real power of institutionalized racism in exclud

ing immigrants and other people of color from full and equal participa tion in the American society, economy, and polity. Explicitly barred

from the country, Asian immigrants do not fit easily into the immigrant

paradigm mold, and instead, offer a different narrative highlighting the

limits of American democracy.19 Instead of considering some of the

traditional questions of immigration history such as assimilation or cul

tural retention, a gatekeeping framework shifts our attention to under

standing the meanings and consequences of immigration restriction, exclu

sion, and deportation for both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

Reconceptualizing the United States as a "gatekeeping nation" thus

provides an especially suitable framework for Asian and Mexican immi

grants, two groups which have not only been among the largest immi

grant populations in the West in the twentieth century, but have also

caused the most debate and inspired new regulation.20 It does not, how

ever, necessarily exclude European or other immigrants nor does it func

tion only in periods of intense nativism. The restrictionist ideology first

established with Asian immigrants came to be extended to other immi

grant groups, including southern and eastern Europeans, as they became

racialized as threats to the nation. In the West, whiteness functioned in a

way that deflected much of the racialized anti-immigrant sentiment away from southern and eastern European immigrants, and nationally, their

whiteness protected them from the more harsh exclusionary and depor tation laws that targeted Asians and Mexicans in the pre-World War II

period.21 Nevertheless, once built, the "gates" of immigration law and

the bureaucratic machinery and procedures established to admit, examine,

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Lee 41

deny, deport, and naturalize immigrants have become extended to all

immigrant groups in the twentieth century.

Gatekeeping and the new immigration legislation it entailed also served

as an important?though often ignored?impetus to American state

building at the end of the nineteenth century.22 In the United States, the

great migrations of Asian, Europeans, and Mexicans from the 1880s to

1924 coincided with and helped instigate an expansion of the modern

administrative state. The regulation, inspection, restriction, exclusion, and deportation of immigrants required the establishment of a state ap

paratus and bureaucracy to enforce the immigration laws and to exercise

the state's control over its geographical borders as well as its internal

borders of citizenship and national membership. Immigrants, immigra tion patterns, and immigrant communities were profoundly affected 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," "un

welcome invasions," "undesirables," "diseased," "illegal." But even those

groups who were most affected played active roles in challenging, nego

tiating, and shaping the new gatekeeping nation through their interaction

with immigration officials and the state. Related to the growth and cen

tralization of the administrative state, gatekeeping was also inextricably tied to the expansion of United States 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 foreign

ers, it was also expanding its influence abroad through military and

economic force, and extended some of its immigration laws to its new

territories. For example, following the annexation of Hawaii in 1898

and the end of the Spanish-American war, the Chinese Exclusion laws

were extended to both Hawaii and the Philippines.23

Lastly, the construction and closing of America's gates to various

"alien invasions" was instrumental in the formation of the nation itself

and in articulating a definition of American national identity and

belonging.24 Americans learned to define American-ness, by excluding,

controlling, and containing foreign-ness. Likewise, through the admis^

sion and exclusion of foreigners, the United States both asserted its

sovereignty and reinforced its identity as a nation. Gatekeeping, a prod uct and result of Chinese exclusion, had?and continues to have?pro found influence on immigrant groups, twentieth-century immigration

patterns, immigration control, and American national identity.

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42 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

THE EXAMPLE OF CHINESE EXCLUSION: RACE AND RACIALIZATION

One of the most significant consequences of Chinese exclusion was

that by establishing a gatekeeping ideology, politics, and administration, it provided a powerful framework, model, and set of tools to be used to

understand and further racialize other threatening, excludable, and unde

sirable aliens. Soon after the Chinese were excluded, calls to restrict or

exclude other immigrants followed quickly, and the rhetoric and strat

egy of these later campaigns drew important lessons from the anti-Chinese

movement. For example, the class-based arguments and restrictions in

the Chinese Exclusion Act were echoed in later campaigns to bar con

tract laborers of any race. As Gwendolyn Mink has shown, southern and

eastern European immigrants?like Chinese?were denounced as "coo

lies, serfs, and slaves."25 The Democratic party made the connections

explicit and blended the old anti-Chinese rhetoric into a more general ized racial nativism in its 1884 campaign handbook. Recalling the great success of Chinese exclusion, the Democrats pointed to a new danger:

If it became necessary to protect the American workingmen on the Pacific

slope from the disastrous and debasing competition of Coolie labor, the same argument now applies with equal force and pertinency to the impor tation of pauper labor from southern Europe.26

Such connections and arguments were significant. In 1885, the Foran Act prohibited the immigration of all contract laborers.27

The gender-based exclusions of the 1875 Page Act were also dupli cated in later government attempts to screen out immigrants, especially

women, who were perceived to be immoral or guilty of sexual mis

deeds. The exclusion of Chinese prostitutes led to a more general exclu

sion of all prostitutes in the 1903 Immigration Act.28 Signifying a larger concern that independent female migration was a moral problem, other

immigration laws restricted the entry of immigrants who were "likely to

become public charges" or who had committed a "crime involving moral

turpitude."29 As Donna Gabbaccia has pointed out, such general exclu

sion laws were theoretically "gender-neutral." In practice, however, "any

unaccompanied woman of any age, marital status, or background might be questioned" as a potential public charge. Clauses in the 1891 Immi

gration Act excluded women on moral grounds. Sexual misdeeds such

as adultery, fornication, and illegitimate pregnancy were all grounds for

exclusion. Lastly, echoes of the "unwelcome invasion" of Chinese and

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Lee 43

Japanese immigration were heard in nativist rhetoric focusing on the

high birthrates of southern and eastern European immigrant families.

Immigrant fecundity, it was claimed, would cause the "race suicide" of

the Anglo-American race.30

Race clearly intersected with such class and gender-based arguments and continued to play perhaps the largest role in defining and categoriz

ing which immigrant groups to admit or exclude. The arguments and

lessons of Chinese exclusion were resurrected over and over again dur

ing the nativist debates over the "new" immigrants from Asia, Mexico, and southern and eastern Europe, further refining and consolidating the

racialization of these groups. In many ways, Chinese immigrants? racialized as the ultimate undesirable alien?became the model by which

to measure the desirability of these new immigrants. David Roediger and James Barrett have suggested that the racialization of certain immi

grant groups, and especially the racial vocabulary which described Ital

ians as "guinea" and Slavic immigrants as "hunky" were racialized in

relation to African Americans in the realms of labor and citizenship.31

However, I suggest that in terms of immigration restriction, the new

immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Mexico, and other parts of Asia were more closely racialized along the Chinese immigrant model,

especially in the Pacific Coast states. There, immigration and whiteness

were defined most clearly in opposition to Asian-ness or "yellowness."32 The persistent use of the metaphor of the closed gate combined with the

rhetoric of "unwelcome invasions" most clearly reveals the difference.

African Americans, originally brought into the nation as slaves could

never really be "sent back" despite their alleged inferiority and threat to

the nation. Segregation and Jim Crow legislation was mostly aimed at

keeping African Americans "in their place." Chinese, who were racialized

in ways that positioned them as polar opposites to "Americans" also

clearly did not belong in the United States and were themselves often

compared to blacks. But unlike African Americans, they could be kept at bay through immigration restriction. Thus, immigration laws served as the gates that had to be closed against the immigrant invasion; an

argument made in relation to southern and eastern European and Mexi

can immigrants, but never applied to African Americans.

As early twentieth-century nativist literature and organization records

illustrate, the language of Chinese restriction and exclusion was quickly refashioned to apply to succeeding groups of immigrants. These connec

tions?though clear to contemporary intellectuals, politicians, and nativ

ists?have not been made forcefully enough by immigration historians.

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44 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

Reflecting the intellectual segregation within immigration history, many have separated the study of European immigrants from Asians and

Latinos, citing "different" experiences and problems.33 John Higham, the leading authority of American nativism claimed that the anti-Asian

movements were "historically tangential" to the main currents of Ameri

can nativism. Edith Abbott, who authored one of the first comprehen sive studies of immigration, argued that "the study of European immi

gration should not be complicated for the student by confusing it with

the very different problems of Chinese and Japanese immigration." Carl

Wittke, considered a founder of the field, devoted much attention to

Asians in his important survey of American immigration history, but

argued that their history was "a brief and strange interlude in the general account of the great migrations to America."34 As many have pointed

out, continued intellectual segregation within immigration history is a

fruitless endeavor.35 In the case of exclusion, restriction, and immigra tion law, it is now clear that anti-Asian nativism was not only directly

connected, but was in fact the dominant model for American nativist

ideology and politics in the early twentieth century.

Following the exclusion of Chinese, Americans on the West Coast

became increasingly alarmed with new immigration from Asia, particu

larly from Japan, Korea, and India. Californians portrayed the new im

migration as yet another "Oriental invasion," and San Francisco news

papers urged readers to "step to the front once more and battle to hold

the Pacific Coast for the white race."36 Like the Chinese before them, these new Asian immigrants were also considered to be threats due to

their race and their labor. The Japanese were especially feared, because

of their great success in agriculture and their tendency to settle and start

families in the United States (as compared to the Chinese who were

mostly sojourners). The political and cultural ideology that came to be

used in the anti-Japanese movement immediately connected the new

Japanese threat with the old Chinese one. Headlines in San Francisco

newspapers talked of "Another phase in the Immigration from Asia"

and warned that the "Japanese [were] Taking the Place of the Chinese."

Moreover, similar charges of being unassimilable and exploitable cheap labor were made against the Japanese. And because the Japanese were

supposedly even more "tricky and unscrupulous" as well as more "ag

gressive and warlike" than the Chinese, they were considered even "more

objectionable."37 Political leaders made the connections explicit. Denis

Kearney, the charismatic leader of the Workingmen's party which spear headed the anti-Chinese movement in San Francisco during the 1870s,

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Lee 45

found the Chinese and Japanese "problems" to be synonymous to each

other. A Sacramento reporter recorded Kearney in 1892 berating the

"foreign Shylocks [who] are rushing another breed of Asiatic slaves to

fill up the gap made vacant by the Chinese who are shut out by our

laws ... Japs ... are being brought here now in countless numbers to

demoralize and discourage our domestic labor market." Kearney mus

ingly ended his speech with "The Japs Must Go!"?a highly original revision of his "the Chinese Must Go!" rallying cry from the 1870s.38 In

1901, James D. Phelan, mayor of San Francisco spearheaded the Chi

nese Exclusion Convention of 1901 and centered it around the theme

"For Home, Country, and Civilization." Later, in 1920 he ran for the

United States Senate under the slogan, "Stop the Silent Invasion" (of

Japanese).39 The small population of Asian Indian immigrants also felt the wrath

of nativists, who regarded them as the "most objectionable of all Orien

tals" in the United States.40 In 1905, the San Francisco-based Japanese Korean Exclusion League renamed itself the Asiatic Exclusion League

in an attempt to meet the new threat. Newspapers complained of "Hindu

Hordes" coming to the United States. Indians were "dirty, diseased," "the worst type of immigrant... not fit to become a citizen.

.. and

entirely foreign to the people of the United States." Their employment

by "moneyed capitalists" as expendable cheap labor and India's large

population "teeming with millions upon millions of emaciated sickly Hindus existing on starvation wages" also hearkened back to the charges of a cheap labor invasion made against Chinese and Japanese immi

grants.41

Likewise, the racialized definitions of Mexican immigrants also re

ferred back to Chinese immigration. Long classified as racial inferiors, Mexican immigrants often served as replacement agricultural laborers

following the exclusion of Asian immigrants.42 Although their immigra tion was largely protected by agricultural and industrial employers through the 1920s, Mexican immigrants were long-standing targets of racial

nativism, and many of the arguments directed towards Mexicans echoed

earlier charges lobbied at the Chinese. Because the legal, political, and

cultural understanding of Chinese immigrants as permanent foreigners had long been established, nativists' direct connections between Chinese

and Mexicans played a crucial role in racializing Mexicans as foreign. As Mae Ngai has shown for the post-1924 period, characterizing Mexi

cans as foreign, rather than the natives of what used to be their former

homeland, "distanced them both from Anglo-Americans culturally and

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46 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

from the Southwest as a region" and made it easier to restrict, deport, and criminalize Mexicans as "illegal."43

Nativists used the Chinese framework to characterize Mexicans as

foreign on the basis of two main arguments: racial inferiority and racial

unassimilability. George P. Clemens, the head of the Los Angeles County

Agricultural Department explained that Asians and Mexicans were ra

cially inferior to whites because they were physically highly suitable for

the degraded agricultural labor in which they were often employed. The

tasks involved were those "which the Oriental and Mexican due to their

crouching and bending habits are fully adapted, while the white is physi

cally unable to adapt himself to them."44 While Chinese were consid

ered to be biologically inferior due to their status as heathens and their

alleged inability to assimilate in an Anglo-American mold, Mexicans

were degraded as an ignorant "hybrid race" of Spanish and Indian ori

gin.45 As Mexican immigration increased, fears of a foreign invasion of

cheap, unassimilable laborers similar to the Chinese one rippled through out the nativist literature. Major Frederick Russell Burnham warned that

"the whole Pacific Coast would have been Asiatic in blood today except for the Exclusion Acts. Our whole Southwest will be racially Mexican

in three generations unless some similar restriction is placed upon them."46

(Burnham, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that the Southwest?

as well as most of the American West?had already been "racially Mexican" long before he himself had migrated west.) V.S. McClatchy, editor of the Sacramento Bee warned that the "wholesale introduction of

Mexican peons" presented California's "most serious problem" in the

1920s.47 Increased Mexican migration to Texas was especially contested, and nativists there explicitly pointed to the example of California and

Chinese immigration to allude to their state's future. "To Mexicanize

Texas or Orientalize California is a crime," raged one nativist.48 Chester

H. Rowell argued that the Mexican invasion was even more detrimental

than the Chinese one, because at least the "Chinese coolie"?"the ideal

human mule"?would not "plague us with his progeny. His wife and

children are in China, and he returns there himself when we no longer need him." Mexicans, he argued, might not be so compliant or easy to

send back.49

The comparisons between Chinese and Mexicans continued. Other

nativists extended the Chinese racial unassimilability argument to Mexi

cans by claiming that they "can no more blend into our race than can the

Chinaman or the Negro."50 Anti-Mexican nativists increasingly issued a

call for restriction by explicitly framing the new Mexican immigration

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Lee 47

problem within the old argument for Chinese exclusion. Railing against the need for cheap Mexican labor, Major Burnham blamed the immigra tion promoters of the 1920s just as Denis Kearney had blamed the

capitalists and their "Chinese pets" during the 1870s. "It is the old

Chinese stuff, an echo of the [18]70s, word for word!" wrote Burnham.

Moreover, Burnham also viewed that immigration laws?and specifi

cally the same types of exclusionary measures used against the Chi

nese?were the only remedy: "Let us refuse cheap labor. Let us restrict

Mexican immigration and go steadily on to prosperity and wealth just as

we did after the Asiatic Exclusion Acts were passed."51 In many nativ

ists' minds, the image of Mexicans merged with that of the biologically

inferior, unassimilable, and threatening Chinese immigrant. At the same time, some of the race and class based theories and

arguments used against Asians and Mexicans were being applied to

certain European immigrant groups as well, especially in the Northeast

ern United States, where most European immigrants first landed and

settled. As John Higham and Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown, a

sense of "absolute difference" which already divided white Americans

from people of color was extended to certain European nationalities.

Because distinctive physical differences between native white Ameri

cans and European immigrants were not readily apparent, racial nativ

ists "manufactured" racial difference. Boston intellectuals like Nathaniel

Shaler, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Francis Walker all promoted an elabo

rate set of racial ideas that marked southern and eastern Europeans as

different and inferior, a threat to the nation. A new nativist group, the

Immigration Restriction League, (IRL) was formed in Boston in 1894.52

In response to the increase in immigration from southern and eastern

Europe, many nativists began to identify and elaborate upon this new

threat. In many ways, they began to make direct connections between

the "new" European immigrants and the established Asian threat. Both

groups were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and their use as cheap labor threatened native-born Anglo-American workingmen. Both Ital

ians and French Canadians were explicitly compared to Chinese immi

grants. Italians were even given the dubious honor of being called the

"Chinese of Europe" and French Canadians were labeled the "Chinese

of the Eastern States." As Donna Gabaccia has argued, Chinese and

Italians "occupied an ambiguous, overlapping and intermediary position in the binary racial schema." Neither black nor white, both were seen as

inbetween?"yellow," "olive," or "swarthy." Their use as cheap labor

also linked the two together. Italians were often called "European coo

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48 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

lies" or "padrone coolies." The large-scale migration of Italians to other

countries also prompted similar versions of invasion rhetoric used against the Chinese. An Australian restrictionist argued in 1891 that the country

was "in danger of the Chinese of Europe flowing into our shores."53

French Canadians were compared to Chinese immigrants due to their

alleged inability to assimilate to Anglo-American norms. An 1881 Mas

sachusetts state agency report charged that French Canadians were the

"Chinese of the Eastern States" because "they care nothing for our

institutions.. .. They do not come to make a home among us, to dwell

with us as citizens.... Their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as

aliens."54 In 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge opined that the Slovak immi

grants?another threatening group?"are not a good acquisition for us

to make, since they appear to have so many items in common with the

Chinese."55 Lothrop Stoddard, another leading nativist, went even fur

ther by arguing that Eastern Europeans were not only "like the Chi

nese;" they were in fact part Asian. Eastern Europe, he explained, was

situated "next door" to Asia, and had already been invaded by "Asiatic

hordes" over the past two thousand years. As a result, the Slavic peoples were mongrels, "all impregnated with Asiatic Mongol and Turki blood."56

Such explicit race and class-based connections to Chinese immigra tion were effective in defining and articulating nativists' problems with

newer immigrants. The old Chinese exclusion rhetoric was one with

which Americans were familiar by the 1910s, and it served as a strong foundation from which to build new nativist arguments on the national

level. The Immigration Restriction League used this tactic masterfully. In a 1908 letter to labor unions, the organization affirmed that Chinese

immigration was the ultimate evil, but warned that the Orient was "only one source of the foreign cheap labor which competes so ruinously with

our own workmen," The IRL charged that the stream of other immi

grants from Europe and Western Asia was "beginning to flow," and

without proper measures to check it, it would "swell, as did the coolie

labor, until it overwhelms one laboring community after another."57

In another letter to politicians, the IRL defined the issues and political

positions even more clearly. The letter asked congressmen and senators

across the country to identify the "classes of persons" who were desired

and not desired in their state. The IRL made this task simple by offering them pre-set lists of groups they themselves deemed "desirable" and

"undesirable." The politicians needed only to check the groups in order

of preference. In the "desired" categories, "Americans, native born"

topped the list. "Persons from northern Europe" came second. British,

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Lee 49

Scandanavians [sic], and Germans were also included. In contrast, Asi

atics, Southern and Eastern Europeans, illiterates, and the generic "for

eign born" were all lumped together in the second list of supposed unwanted and excludable immigrants.58 The IRL could make no clearer

statement: the new threat from Europe and the old threat from Asia were

one.

Due to different regional politics and dynamics of race relations and

definitions of whiteness, divergent opinions about the connections be

tween the old Asian immigration problem and the new European one

existed on the West Coast. On the one hand, the danger posed by the

two groups was explicitly connected and fed off of each other. The

virulent anti-Asian campaigns broadened appeals to preserve "America

for all Americans" and called into question just who was and who was

not a "real American." The San Francisco-based Asiatic Exclusion League

implied that all aliens were dangerous to the country and passed a

resolution that aliens should be disarmed in order to prevent insurrec

tion. Other nativists in California expressed fears of the degraded immi

gration entering the country from both Asia and Europe.59 Homer Lea, for example, the author and leading proponent of the "Yellow Peril"

theory of Japanese domination of America, warned that the growing

immigration from Europe augmented the Japanese danger by "sapping America's racial strength and unity."60 The California branch of the

Junior Order United American Mechanics, a long-lived nativist group, allied themselves with the Asiatic Exclusion League and announced that

southern Europeans were semi-Mongolian.61 On the other hand, demonstrating the importance of regional dynam

ics in the continuing consolidation of the construction of whiteness, some West Coast nativists made very careful distinctions between clos

ing America's gates to Asians while leaving them open to Europeans. In

a continuation of the West's campaign to preserve a "white man's fron

tier," Western nativists tended to privilege whiteness at the expense of

people of color. Significantly, many of the leading nativists were Euro

pean immigrants or first generation American themselves.62 Denis

Kearney, leader of the anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party was an Irish

immigrant. James D. Phelan, leader of the anti-Japanese movement, was

Irish American. In the multi-racial West, the claims to and privileges of

whiteness were important. The best expression of this sentiment oc

curred during the 1901 Chinese Exclusion Convention, an event orga nized to lobby for the permanent exclusion of Chinese immigrants. While

attendees rallied around the convention theme of protecting the Ameri

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50 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

can "home, country, and civilization," keynote speakers strongly de

fended an open-door policy towards all European immigrants. In an

impassioned speech, A. Sbarboro, (an Italian immigrant/Italian Ameri

can himself) president of the Manufacturers' and Producers' Associa

tion, declared that in California:

We want the Englishman, who brings with him capital, industry and

enterprise; the Irish who build and populate our cities; the Frenchmen, with his vivacity and love of liberty; the industrious and thrifty Italians, who cultivate the fruit, olives, and vines?who come with poetry and

music from the classic land of Virgil, the Teutonic race, strong, patient, and frugal; the Swedes, Slavs, and Belgians; we want all good people

from all parts of Europe. To these, Mr. Chairman, we should never close

our doors, for although when the European immigrant lands at Castle

Garden he may be uncouth and with little money, yet soon by his thrift

and industry he improves his condition; he becomes a worthy citizen and

the children who bless him mingle with the children of those who came

before him, and when the country calls they are always ready and willing to defend the flag to follow the stars and stripes throughout the world.63

Sbarboro, by explicitly including Italians and Slavs, indeed, all immi

grants from all parts of Europe, with the older stock of immigrants from

France, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium, made clear that the difference

to be made was not among European nationalities, but between Euro

pean and, in this case, Asian immigrants. Membership in the white race

was tantamount. The southern and eastern European might arrive at the

nation's ports as poor and "uncouth," but they were assimilable, he

explained. The environment of the United States would "improve his

condition" and make him a "worthy citizen." Lest doubts still remained

among his audience, Sbarboro refined his assimilation argument to point to the second generation. He explained that the European immigrant's children would mingle with native-born American children and in learn

ing the true ideals of American citizenship, they would become such

patriots, that they would defend their beloved homeland throughout the

world. The belief that second-generation Chinese would do the same

was unimaginable. These distinctions were important. The debates about immigration

from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico were clearly con

nected to earlier debates concerning Chinese immigration, and an in

creasing number of politicians, policy makers, and Americans across the

country disregarded Sbarbaro's pleas to keep America's doors open to

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Lee 51

"all good people from all parts of Europe" and supported restrictions on

immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Sbarboro's

attempts to differentiate European immigrants from Asians pointed to

significant distinctions in the ways in which European, Asian, and Mexi

can immigrants were racially constructed and regulated by immigration law. First, southern and eastern European immigrants came in much

greater numbers than did the Chinese, and their whiteness secured them

the right of naturalized citizenship, while Asians were consistently de

nied naturalization by law and in the courts.64 This claim and privilege of whiteness gave European immigrants more access to and opportuni ties of full participation in the larger American polity, economy, and

society. Although they were eventually greatly restricted, they were

never excluded like Asians. For example, as Mae Ngai has shown, the

1924 Immigration Act applied the invented category of "national ori

gins" to Europeans?a classification that presumed a shared whiteness

with white Americans and which separated them from non-Europeans. The Act thus established the "legal foundations

... for European immi

grants [to] becom[e] Americans." Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Asian Indian immigrants were codified as "aliens ineligible to citi

zenship."65 Mexican immigration differed from both southern and eastern Euro

pean and Asian immigration on a range of issues. First was Mexico's

proximity to the United States and the relatively porous United States

Mexico border which facilitated migration to and from the United States.

As historians have shown, Mexican immigrants were treated differently, even considered "safe" from mainstream nativism due to their status as

long-term residents and their propensity to be "birds of passage," return

ing home after the agricultural season ended, and thus, not settling in the

United States permanently.66 Mexico's own contentious history with the

United States and the "legacy of conquest" also colored United States

Mexican relations, racialized Mexicans as inferiors, and structured Mexi

can immigrant and Mexican American life within the United States in

ways that contrasted sharply with other immigrant groups. In the post 1924 period, Mexicans would be categorized as "illegal," an all-encom

passing racial category which not only negated any claim of belonging in a conquered homeland, but also extended to both Mexican immi

grants and Mexican Americans.67

These significant differences functioned to shape both immigration

regulation and immigrant life in distinct ways for these groups. Still, the

rhetoric and tools of gatekeeping, first established by Chinese exclusion,

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52 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

were instrumental in defining the issues for all groups and set important

precedents for twentieth-century immigration. Race, gender, and class

based arguments were used to categorize Asian, southern and eastern

European, and Mexican immigrants as inferior, undesirable, and even

dangerous to the United States. Each group held its own unique position within the hierarchy of race and immigration, but all eventually became

subjected to an immigration ideology and law designed to limit their

entry into the United States.

By the early twentieth century, the call to "close the gates" was not

only sounded in relation to Chinese immigration, but to immigration in

general. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, poet and former editor of the Atlantic

Monthly reacted to the new immigrants from southern and eastern Eu

rope arriving in Boston in 1892 by publishing "The Unguarded Gates," a poem demonizing the new arrivals as a "wild motley throng

... accents

of menace alien to our air."68 Just as H. N. Clement had suggested

"closing the doors" against Chinese immigration in 1876, Madison Grant, the well-known nativist and leader of the Immigration Restriction League called for "closing the flood gates" against the "new immigration" from

southern and eastern Europe in 1914.69 At the same time, Frank Julian

Warne, another nativist leader, warned that unregulated immigration from Europe was akin to "throwing open wide our gates to all the races

of the world."70

The solution, all agreed, lay in immigration policy, and a succession

of federal laws were passed to increase the control and regulation of

threatening and inferior immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1917 re

quired a literacy test for all adult immigrants, tightened restrictions on

suspected radicals, and as a concession to politicians on the West Coast, denied entry to aliens living within a newly-erected geographical area

called the "Asiatic Barred Zone." With this zone in place, the United

States effectively excluded all immigrants from India, Burma, Siam, the

Malay States, Arabia, Afghanistan, part of Russia, and most of the

Polynesian Islands.71 The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts drastically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and perfected the exclusion of all Asians, except for Filipinos.72 Although Filipino and

Mexican immigration remained exempt from the 1924 Act, Filipinos were excluded in 1934.73 Both Filipinos and Mexicans faced massive

deportation and repatriation programs during the Great Depression. By the 1930s, the cycle that had begun with Chinese exclusion was made

complete.74

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Lee 53

THE EXAMPLE OF CHINESE EXCLUSION: IMMIGRATION REGULATION

The concepts of race and immigration that developed out of Chinese

exclusion provided the ideological structure to which other immigrant

groups were compared and racialized. The passage of the Chinese Ex

clusion Act also ushered in drastic changes in immigration regulation itself and set the foundation for twentieth-century policies designed not

only for the inspection and processing of newly-arriving immigrants, but also for the control of potentially dangerous immigrants already in

the country. Written into the act itself were five major changes in immi

gration regulation. All would become standard means of inspecting,

processing, admitting, tracking, punishing, and deporting immigrants in

the United States. First, the Exclusion Act laid the foundation for the

establishment of the country's first federal immigrant inspectors. While

the Bureau of Immigration was not established until 1894 and did not

gain jurisdiction over the Chinese exclusion laws until 1903, the inspec tors for Chinese immigrants (under the auspices of the United States

Customs Service) were the first to be authorized to act as immigration officials on behalf of the federal government.75 Prior to the passage of

the 1875 Page Law and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, there was

neither a trained force of government officials and interpreters nor the

bureaucratic machinery with which to enforce the new law. As George

Anthony Peffer has illustrated, enforcement of the Page Law first estab

lished the role of the United States collector of customs as examiner of

Chinese female passengers and their documents, thereby establishing an

important?though often overlooked?prototype for immigration legis lation and inspection.76 Sections four and eight of the Chinese Exclusion

Act extended the duties of these officials to include the examination of

all arriving Chinese. Inspectors were also required to examine and clear

Chinese laborers departing the United States as well.77

Second, the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion laws set in motion

the federal government's first attempts to identify and record the move

ments, occupations, and financial relationships of immigrants, returning

residents, and native-born citizens. Because of the complexity of the

laws and immigration officials' suspicions that Chinese were attempting to enter the country under fraudulent pretenses, the government's en

forcement practices involved an elaborate tracking system of registra tion documents, certificates of identity, and voluminous interviews of

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54 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

individuals and their families.78 Section four of the Exclusion Act estab

lished "certificates of registration" for departing laborers. Such certifi

cates were to contain the name, age, occupation, last place of residence,

personal description, and facts of identification of the Chinese laborer.

This information was also recorded in specific registry-books to be kept in the customs-house. The certificate entitled the holder to "return and

re-enter the United States upon producing and the delivering the [docu

ment] to the collector of customs." The laborer's return certificate is the

first reentry document issued to an immigrant group by the federal

government, and it served as an equivalent passport facilitating re-entry into the country. Chinese remained the only immigrant group required to hold such re-entry permits (or passports) until 1924, when the new

Immigration Act of that year issued?but did not require?reentry per mits for other aliens.79

As other scholars have pointed out, the documentary requirements established for Chinese women emigrating under the Page Law and

exempt class Chinese (merchants, teachers, diplomats, students, travel

ers) applying for admission under the exclusion laws also set in motion

an "early version ofthat system of 'remote control' involving passports and visas" in which United States consular officials in China and Hong

Kong verified the admissibility of immigrants prior to their departure for the United States. While the original Exclusion Act of 1882 placed this responsibility in the hands of Chinese government officials alone, an 1884 amendment gave United States diplomatic officers the task of

verifying the facts so that the so-called "section six certificates" re

quired of exempt class Chinese could be considered "prima facie evi

dence of right of re-entry."80

Eventually, in an effort to crack down on illegal entry and residence, the Chinese Exclusion laws were amended to require all Chinese resi

dents already in the country to possess "certificates of residence" and

"certificates of identity" that served as proof of their legal entry and

lawful right to remain in the country. These precursors to documents

now commonly known as "green cards," were first outlined in the 1892

Geary Act and 1893 McCreary Amendment, which required Chinese

laborers to register with the federal government. The resulting certifi

cates of residence contained the name, age, local residence and occupa tion of the applicant (or "Chinaman" as the act noted), as well as a

photograph. Any Chinese laborer found within the jurisdiction of the

United States without a certificate of residence was to be "deemed and

adjudged to be unlawfully in the United States," and vulnerable to arrest

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Lee 55

and deportation.81 The Bureau of Immigration used its administrative

authority to demand a similar "certificate of identity" for all exempt class Chinese merchants, teachers, travelers, students, and others begin

ning in 1909. While the Bureau believed that such certificates would

serve as "indubitable proof of legal entry" and thus, protection for legal

immigrants and residents, it also subjected all non-laborer Chinese?

who were supposed to be exempt from the exclusion laws?to the same

system of registration and surveillance governing Chinese laborers. Ap

parently, the plan was an extension of an existing system of registration used for Chinese Americans entering the mainland from Hawaii.82 Other

immigrants were not required to hold similar documents proving their

lawful residence until 1928 when "immigrant identification cards" were

first issued to new immigrants arriving for permanent residence. These

were eventually replaced by the "alien registration receipt cards" (i.e.,

"green cards") after 1940.83

The issuance and institutionalization of such documentary require ments verifying Chinese immigrants' rights to enter, re-enter, and re

main in the country codified a highly organized system of control and

surveillance over the Chinese in America. Much of the rationalization

behind such documentary requirements stemmed from the prejudiced belief that it was, as California Congressman Thomas Geary explained,

"impossible to identify [one] Chinaman [from another.]"84 Although it

was an unprecedented form of immigration regulation and surveillance

at the time, this method of processing and tracking immigrants eventu

ally became central to America's control of immigrants and immigration in the twentieth century.

In addition to establishing a system of registering and tracking immi

grants, the Chinese Exclusion Act set another precedent by defining

illegal immigration as a criminal offense. It declared that any person who secured certificates of identity fraudulently or through imperson ation was to be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, fined $1000, and

imprisoned for up to five years. Any persons who knowingly aided and

abetted the landing of "any Chinese person not lawfully entitled to enter

the United States" could also be charged with a misdemeanor, fined, and

imprisoned for up to one year.85

Defining and punishing illegal immigration directly led to the estab

lishment of the country's first modern deportation laws as well, and one

of the final sections of the Act declared that "any Chinese person found

unlawfully within the United States shall be caused to be removed there

from to the country from whence he came."86 These initial forays into

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56 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

federal regulation of immigration would be even further codified and

institutionalized seven years later in the Immigration Act of 1891.87

CONCLUSION

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 fundamentally transformed both immigration to the United States and the country's

relationship to immigration. It was the first of many restriction and

exclusion laws, but its significance goes far beyond the legal realm.

Chinese exclusion helped re-define the very ways in which Americans

saw and defined race in relation to other immigrant groups and trans

formed America's relationship to immigration in general. The end result

was a nation that embraced the notion of guarding America's gates

against "undesirable" foreigners in order to protect Americans.

Gatekeeping became a national reality and was extended to other immi

grant groups throughout the early twentieth century. Both the rhetoric

and the tools used in the battle over Chinese exclusion were repeated in

later debates over immigration. In many ways, Chinese immigrants be

came the models by which others were measured. Nativists repeatedly

pointed to ways in which the new Asians, Mexicans, and Europeans were "just like" the Chinese. They also argued that similar restrictions

should be established. By 1924, the cycle begun with Chinese exclusion

was complete, and gatekeeping had changed from being the exception to

the rule. Immigration inspectors and inspections, passport and other

documentary requirements, the surveillance and criminalization of im

migration and the deportation of immigrants found to be in the country

illegally all became standard operating procedures in the United States.

Nativists no longer needed to ask "how can we stop immigrants?" They had found the answer in Chinese exclusion.

NOTES

Numerous people have read earlier versions of this article, and I have benefited

greatly from their comments: David Roediger, George Anthony Peffer, Paul Spickard, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Jigna Desai, Pat McNamara, Liping Wang, Claire Fox, and

Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and the anonymous reader from the Journal. Michael

LeMay provided early guidance. 1. California State Senate, Special Committee on Chinese Immigration, Chinese

Immigration: It's Social, Moral, and Political Effect (Sacramento, 1878), p. 275.

2. San Francisco Alta California, 6 April 1876, as cited in Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), p. 78.

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Lee 57

3. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, p. 78; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875

1920 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), p. 73. 4. Act of May 6, 1882 (22 Stat. 58). 5. Roger Daniels, "No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Histori

ography of Asian American Immigration," Journal of American Ethnic History, 17, 1 (Fall 1997): 4; Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, pp. 1, 258-9.

6. Recent exceptions are Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immi

grants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995); Sucheng Chan, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1994); Sucheng Chan and K. Scott Wong, eds. Claiming

America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era (Phila delphia, 1998); Mae Ngai, "Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration During the Cold War Years," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 1 (Fall 1998): 3-35.

7. Lucy Salyer has demonstrated how Chinese exclusion shaped the doctrine and administration of modem immigration law. Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, pp. xvi-xvii.

8. On the Page Law, see George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Urbana, 111., 1999).

9. For example, see Michael C. LeMay, Gatekeepers: Comparative Immigra tion Policy (New York, 1989); Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch

Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820 (New York, 1987); Nathan Glazer, Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Fran

cisco, 1985); Norman L. and Naomi Flink Zucker. The Guarded Gate: The Reality of American Refugee Policy (New York, 1987); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate.

10. Richard Rayner, "Illegal? Yes. Threat? No," New York Times Magazine, 1

January 1996; Daniel B. Wood, "Controlling Illegal Immigration?But at a Price," Christian Science Monitor, 4 October 1999; "Fifth Year of Operation Gatekeeper Stirs Debate" Siskind's Immigration Bulletin, (October 1999), available from http://

wwxv.visalaw.com/99oct/21oct99.html.

11. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate, pp. 1-2.

12. On the anti-Chinese movement, see in general, Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese

Immigration (New York, 1909); Neil Gotanda, "Exclusion and Inclusion: Immigra tion and American Orientalism," in Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Glo

balization, ed. Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 129-132; Gyory, Clos

ing the Gate, Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Phila delphia, 1999), pp. 51-64; Karen J. Leong, "A Distant and Antagonistic Race:" Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869-1878," in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Laura

McCall, Matthew Basso, Dee Garceau (New York, 2000), pp. 131-148; Charles McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in

Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Mink, Old Labor and New

Immigrants', Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here; Salyer, Laws Harsh as

Tigers', Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Move

ment in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1971); K. Scott Wong, "Immigration and Race: The Politics and Rhetoric of Exclusion," in Many Americas: Critical Per

spectives on Race, Racism, and Ethnicity, ed. Gregory Campbell (Dubuque, IA,

1998), pp. 231-244. 13. California State Senate, Special Committee on Chinese Immigration, Chi

nese Immigration, pp. 276-7, emphasis original. 14. Chan Chae Ping v. United States (130 US 581, 1889). In 1893, the Court

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58 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

also ruled that Congress had the right to exclude and deport unwanted aliens in 1893 in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (149 US 698,1893).

15. Erika Lee, "Immigrants and Immigration Law: A State of the Field Assess ment," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999): 85-114; Elliott Barkan and Michael LeMay, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues

(Westport, Conn., 1999), p. xxii.

16. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace"

(Baltimore, 1994), p. 3. 17. Immigration Act of 1917 (39 Stat. 874). My thanks to Margot Canaday for

this citation.

18. Immigration policy directly shaped American "racial formation," what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have explained as the "socio-historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed."

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s (1986; New York, 1994), p. 55. For a study on immigration policy and racial formation in the post-1924 period, see Mae Ngai. "The Architec ture of Race in American Immigration Law," Journal of American History, 86,1 (June 1999): 67-92; and Mae Ngai. "Illegal Aliens and Alien Citizens: United States Immigration Policy and Racial Formation, 1924-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Colum bia University, 1998). On critical race theory and the law, see Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J., 2000), p. 17; Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago, 1998).

19. Donna Gabaccia, "Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Im

migrant Paradigm of United States History," Journal of American History, 86, 3

(1999): 1115-1134; George J. Sanchez, "Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Im

migration Studies," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999): 66-84; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,

N.C., 1996), p. ix.

20. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1993). See also Jose David Saldivar, Border

Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 96-7; Ali Behdad, "INS and Outs: Producing Delinquency at the Border," Aztlan, 23, 1

(Spring, 1998): 103-113; Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992 (Austin, Tex., 1996).

21. Mae Ngai, "The Architecture of Race," pp. 67-92.

22. I use Michael Omi and Howard Winant's definition of the state as being composed of institutions, the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which

support and justify them, and the social relations in which they are imbedded. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 83. See

also, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York, 2000), p. 1; David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical

Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 31; Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers, pp. 48-9; Anistide Zolberg, "The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885-1925" in Migration History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Jan and Leo Lucassen (Bern, 1999), pp. 291-316; and

Aristide Zolberg, "Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy," in The Hand book to International Migration: The American Experience, ed. C. Hirschman et al.

(New York, 1999), pp. 71-93. 23. Act of July 7, 1898: Annexation of Hawaiian Islands (31 Stat. 141) and Act

of April 30, 1900: Regarding the Territory of Hawaii (31 Stat. 161); Act of April 29, 1902: Chinese Immigration Prohibited (32 Stat. 176). On imperialism and im

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Lee 59

migration in general, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000), pp. 26-38.

24. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, p. ix; David Thelen, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspective on United States History," Journal of American History,

86, 3 (1999): 966. 25. Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 2d sess. (February 13, 1885), p. 1634; as

cited in Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, p. 109. 26. Democratic National Committee, The Political Reformation of 1884: A Demo

cratic Campaign Handbook (1884); as cited in Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants, p. 107.

27. Act of February 26, 1885 (also known as the Alien Contract Labor Law and the Foran Act) (23 Stat. 332).

28. Act of March 3, 1903 (32 Stat. 1222). 29. The 1882 Regulation of Immigration Act (Act of August 3, 1882; 22 Stat.

214) also excluded lunatics, convicts, and idiots. The 1891 Immigration Act added

polygamists and "persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious dis

ease." (Act of March 3, 1891; 26 Stat. 1084). 30. Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant

Life in the US, 1820-1990 (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), p. 37. 31. James Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality

and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class," Journal of American Ethnic History, 16, 3 (1997): 8-9.

32. Recent studies on racial formation in the West illustrate the importance of

moving beyond the white and black binary. See Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif.,

1997); Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Su

premacy in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); Chris Friday, "In DueTime: Narra tives of Race and Place in the Western United States," in Race, Ethnicity, and

Nationality in the United States: Toward the Twenty-First Century, ed., Paul Wong (Boulder, Colo., 1999), pp. 102-152.

33. As David Roediger and James Barrett have pointed out, part of the problem in immigration history has been a lack of attention to race (as opposed to ethnicity)

within the field. "Typical" immigration history, they write, has largely been "the

story of newcomers becoming American, of their holding out against becoming American or, at best, of their changing America in the process of discovering new identities." Worse, they argue, is the misguided conflation of race with ethnicity. Stark differences between the racialized status of African Americans, Latinos, Ameri can Indians, and Asian Americans and European immigrants, they explain, meant

that "the latter eventually became ethnic." James Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples," pp. 4-6.

34 John Higham, Preface to the Second Edition and Afterword, Strangers in the

Land (New York, 1978). Higham implied that he was wrong in this interpretation, but offered no substantive corrective. See also Edith Abbot, Historical Aspects of the Immigration Problem; Select Documents (Chicago, 1926), p. ix; Carl Wittke,

We Who Built America; The Saga of the Immigrant (New York, 1939), p. 458.

Many of these oversights were first pointed out by Roger Daniels in "Westerners

from the East: Oriental Immigrants Reappraised," Pacific Historical Review, 35

(1966) and "No Lamps Were Lit for Them," pp. 3-18. 35. Donna Gabaccia. "Is Everywhere Nowhere?" pp. 1115-1135; George

Sanchez, "Race, Nation, and Culture," pp. 66-84.

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60 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

36. "Shut the Gates to the Hindu Invasion," San Francisco Examiner, 16 June

1910; "The Watchdog States," San Francisco Post, 24 May 1910. 37. San Francisco Bulletin, 4 May 1891, as cited in Roger Daniels, Asian

America, p. 111. "Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League," July, 1911 (Allied Printing, San Francisco, 1911).

38. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in

California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), p. 20. 39. Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans?an Interpretive History (Boston, 1991),

p. 44.

40. "Advance Guard of Hindu Horde Has Arrived," San Francisco Examiner, 1

August 1910, as cited in Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, p. 127. 41. San Francisco Daily News, 20 September 1910. 42. George Sanchez writes that "Mexicans rapidly replaced the Japanese

as a

major component of the agricultural labor force." George Sanchez, Becoming Mexi

can American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945

(New York, 1993), p. 19. 43. Mae Ngai, "The Architecture of Race," p. 91.

44. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression:

Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (Tuscon, Ariz., 1974), p. 10. 45. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in

Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), p. 54. 46. Frederick Russell Burnham, "The Howl for Cheap Mexican Labor," in The

Alien in Our Midst or Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage, ed. Madison Grant and Charles Stewart Davison (New York, 1930), p. 48. See also Neil Foley, White Scourge, p. 51.

47. V. S. McClatchy, "Oriental Immigration"; Neil Foley, White Scourge, pp. 195, 197.

48. Foley, The White Scourge, p. 55. 49. Chester H. Rowell, "Why Make Mexico an Exception?" Survey, 1 May

1931; and idem, "Chinese and Japanese Immigrants," Annals of the American Acad

emy, 34 (September, 1909): 4; as cited in Foley, The White Scourge, p. 53. 50. Frederick Russell Burnham, "The Howl for Cheap Mexican Labor," p. 45. 51. Ibid., p. 48 52. John Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 132-3.

53. Donna Gabaccia, "The Yellow Peril' and the 'Chinese of Europe,'" pp. 177-9.

54. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor (Boston, 1881), pp. 469-70. My thanks to Florence Mae Waldron for this citation.

55. Lodge was quoting the U.S. Consul in Budapest. Henry Cabot Lodge, "The Restriction of Immigration," North American Review, 152 (1891): 30-32, 35; Mat thew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, pp. 76-7.

56. Lothrop Stoddard, "The Permanent Menace from Europe," in The Alien in

Our Midst, ed. Grant and Davison, pp. 227-8.

57. J.H. Patten, Asst. Secretary, Immigration Restriction League, Letter to Unions, 15 October 1908, Scrapbooks, Immigration Restriction League Collection, 1894

1912, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

58. J.H. Patten, Asst. Secretary, Immigration Restriction League to Congress men and Senators, n.d., ibid.

59. Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings, Feb. 1908, pp. 19, 71, and Decem

ber, 1908, pp. 17, 19; John Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 166.

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Lee 61

60. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York, 1909), pp. 124-8; John

Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 172.

61. Congressional Record, 61 Cong., 1 Sess., 9174; Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings, (February, 1908), pp. 55, 57; John Higham, Strangers in the Land, p.

174.

62. As David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown, Irish and southern and eastern European immigrants commonly constructed and

asserted their "whiteness" by allying themselves (and sometimes leading) racist

campaigns against African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian and Mexican

immigrants. See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, White ness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cam bridge, Mass., 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995).

63. San Francisco Call, 22 November 1901. 64. Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New

York 1996). 65. Ngai, "The Architecture of Race," p. 70.

66. Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1891-1931

(Tucson, Ariz., 1980), p. 22; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p.

20; Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression, pp. 30-32.

67. Ngai, "The Architecture of Race," p. 91.

68. Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New En

gland Tradition (Chicago, 1956), pp. 82-88; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, p. 181.

69. Madison Grant, The Alien in Our Midst, p. 23. 70. Frank Julian Warne, The Immigrant Invasion (New York, 1913), p. 295. 71. Immigration Act of 1917, (39 Stat. 874). 72. The Quota Act of 1921 (42 Stat. 5, section 2); Immigration Act of 1924, (43

Stat. 153). See generally, John Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 308-24. 73. Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952, (New York,

1957), p. 60; H. Brett Melendy, "The Filipinos in the United States," in Norris

Hundley, ed., The Asian-American: The Historical Experience, ed. Norris Hundley

(Santa Barbara, Calif. 1976), pp. 115-6, 119-25. 74. One recent estimate places the number of Mexicans, including American

bom children who were returned to Mexico at one million. See Francisco E.

Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1995), p. 122.

75. The Bureau of Immigration was established under the Act of August 18, 1894 (28 Stat. 390). In 1900, Congress transferred the administration of the exclu sion laws to the commissioner-general of immigration, but the everyday enforce

ment of the law still remained with the immigration officials in the Customs Ser vice. In 1903, all Chinese immigration matters were placed under the control of the

Bureau of Immigration and its parent department, the newly created Department of

Commerce and Labor. "An act to establish the Department of Commerce and

Labor," (32 Stat. L., 825). 76. The Page Law was also enforced by U.S. Consuls in Hong Kong. Act of

March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 477) George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here, pp. 58-9; Wen-hsien Chen, "Chinese Immigration Under Both Ex

clusion and Immigration Laws," (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1940), p. 91.

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62 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2002

77. Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58). 78. See, for example, the Chinese Arrival Files, Port of San Francisco, RG 85,

Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Pacific

Region, San Bruno, CA.

79. Act of May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 (43 Stat. 153); e-mail communication with Marian Smith, Historian, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization

Service, 24 October 2000. 80. Section 4, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58); Act of July 5, 1884 (23 Stat.

115); Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 183-5; George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here', John Torpey, The Invention of the Pass

port, pp. 97-9.

81. Section 7, Act of May 5, 1892, "Geary Act," (27 Stat. 25) and Section 2, Act of November 3, 1893, "McCreary Amendment," (28 Stat. 7).

82. United States, Department of Commerce, Annual Report of the Commis sioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1903 (1903), 156 dina Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1909 (1909), 131.

83. The use of "immigrant identification cards" was first begun under U.S.

Consular regulations on July 1, 1928. The "alien registration receipt cards,"

com

monly known as "green cards" were the product of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 and the corresponding INS Alien Registration Program. Act of June 28, 1940

(54 Stat. 670); e-mail communication with Marian Smith, Historian, U.S. Immigra tion and Naturalization Service, 26 October 2000; Marian Smith, "Why Isn't the

Green Card Green?" http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/history/articles/ Green.htm.

84. Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, pp. 209-33; John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, p. 100.

85. Sections 7 and 11, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58). This second clause added to existing terms of punishment first established by the Page Law for any persons caught "importing" either Asian contract laborers or prostitutes. Act of

March 3, 1875 (18 Stat. 477). 86. Section 12, Act of May 6, 1882, (22 Stat. 58). 87. This law established the Office of Superintendent of Immigration, outlined

the specific duties of "inspection officers," established a medical examination of all

incoming immigrants, and laid out rules for border inspection along the Canadian and Mexican borders. The criminal charges and deportation regulations concerning

illegal immigrants affirmed those first laid out in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Act of March 3, 1891. In 1894, the Bureau of Immigration was established by the Act of

August 18, 1894 (28 Stat. 390).

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