The Chinese exclusion example: Race, immigration, and American gatekeeping, 1882-1924

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 36-62

  Lee, Erika ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0346116697     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (98)

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
3. as cited in Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), p. 78
4. Act of May 6, 1882 (22 Stat. 58)
5. Roger Daniels, "No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Historiography of Asian American Immigration," Journal of American Ethnic History, 17, 1 (Fall 1997): 4
6. Recent exceptions are Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995)
7. Sucheng Chan, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1994)
8. Sucheng Chan and K. Scott Wong, eds. Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia, 1998)
9. Mae Ngai, "Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration During the Cold War Years," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 1 (Fall 1998): 3-35
10. For example, see Michael C. LeMay, Gatekeepers: Comparative Immigration Policy (New York, 1989)
11. Michael C. LeMay, From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820 (New York, 1987)
12. Nathan Glazer, Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Francisco, 1985)
13. Norman L. and Naomi Flink Zucker. The Guarded Gate: The Reality of American Refugee Policy (New York, 1987)
14. Richard Rayner, "Illegal? Yes. Threat? No," New York Times Magazine, 7 January 1996
15. Daniel B. Wood, "Controlling Illegal Immigration - But at a Price," Christian Science Monitor, 4 October 1999
16. "Fifth Year of Operation Gatekeeper Stirs Debate" Siskind's Immigration Bulletin, (October 1999), available from http:// www.visalaw.com/99oct/21oct99.html
17. On the anti-Chinese movement, see in general, Mary R. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York, 1909)
18. Neil Gotanda, "Exclusion and Inclusion: Immigration and American Orientalism," in Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization, ed. Evelyn Hu-DeHart (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 129-132
19. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 51-64
20. 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
21. Charles McClain, Jr., In Search of Equality: Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, Calif., 1994)
22. Alexander Saxton, Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1971)
23. K. Scott Wong, "Immigration and Race: The Politics and Rhetoric of Exclusion," in Many Americas: Critical Perspectives on Race, Racism, and Ethnicity, ed. Gregory Campbell (Dubuque, IA, 1998), pp. 231-244
24. Chan Chae Ping v. United States (130 US 581, 1889)
25. In 1893, the Court 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)
26. Erika Lee, "Immigrants and Immigration Law: A State of the Field Assessment," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999): 85-114
27. Elliott Barkan and Michael LeMay, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues (Westport, Conn., 1999), p. xxii
28. Immigration Act of 1917 (39 Stat. 874). My thanks to Margot Canaday for this citation
29. Immigration policy directly shaped American "racial formation," what Michael Orni 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
30. For a study on immigration policy and racial formation in the post-1924 period, see Mae Ngai. "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law," Journal of American History, 86,1 (June 1999): 67-92
31. and Mae Ngai. "Illegal Aliens and Alien Citizens: United States Immigration Policy and Racial Formation, 1924-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998)
32. On critical race theory and the law, see Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J., 2000), p. 17
33. Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago, 1998)
34. Donna Gabaccia, "Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History," Journal of American History, 86, 3 (1999): 1115-1134
35. George J. Sanchez, "Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18, 4 (Summer, 1999): 66-84
36. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C., 1996), p. ix
37. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1993)
38. See also Jose David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 96-7
39. Ali Behdad, "INS and Outs: Producing Delinquency at the Border," Aztlan, 23, 1 (Spring, 1998): 103-113
40. Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992 (Austin, Tex., 1996)
41. See also, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York, 2000), p. 1
42. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif., 1999), p. 31
43. 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
44. and Aristide Zolberg, "Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy," in The Handbook to International Migration: The American Experience, ed. C. Hirschman et al. (New York, 1999), pp. 71-93
45. David Thelen, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspective on United States History," Journal of American History, 86, 3 (1999): 966
46. Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 2d sess. (February 13, 1885), p. 1634
47. Democratic National Committee, The Political Reformation of 1884: A Democratic Campaign Handbook (1884)
48. Act of February 26, 1885 (also known as the Alien Contract Labor Law and the Foran Act) (23 Stat. 332)
49. Act of March 3, 1903 (32 Stat. 1222)
50. 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 disease." (Act of March 3, 1891; 26 Stat. 1084)
51. Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the US, 1820-1990 (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), p. 37
52. 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
53. Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, Calif., 1994)
54. Chris Friday, "In DueTime: Narratives 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
55. John Higham, Preface to the Second Edition and Afterword, Strangers in the Land (New York, 1978)
56. 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
57. Carl Wittke, We Who Built America; The Saga of the Immigrant (New York, 1939), p. 458
58. 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
59. "Shut the Gates to the Hindu Invasion," San Francisco Examiner, 16 June 1910
60. "The Watchdog States," San Francisco Post, 24 May 1910
61. San Francisco Bulletin, 4 May 1891
62. as cited in Roger Daniels, Asian America, p. 111. "Proceedings of the Asiatic Exclusion League," July, 1911 (Allied Printing, San Francisco, 1911)
63. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), p. 20
64. Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans - an Interpretive History (Boston, 1991), p. 44
65. San Francisco Daily News, 20 September 1910
66. Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939 (Tuscon, Ariz., 1974), p. 10
67. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), p. 54
68. 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
69. V. S. McClatchy, "Oriental Immigration"
70. Chester H. Rowell, "Why Make Mexico an Exception?" Survey, 1 May 1931
71. Chester H. Rowell, and idem, "Chinese and Japanese Immigrants," Annals of the American Academy, 34 (September, 1909): 4
72. Donna Gabaccia, "The 'Yellow Peril' and the 'Chinese of Europe,'" pp. 177-9
73. 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
74. Lodge was quoting the U.S. Consul in Budapest. Henry Cabot Lodge, "The Restriction of Immigration," North American Review, 152 (1891): 30-32, 35
75. Lothrop Stoddard, "The Permanent Menace from Europe," in The Alien in Our Midst, ed. Grant and Davison, pp. 227-8
76. 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
77. J.H. Patten, Asst. Secretary, Immigration Restriction League to Congressmen and Senators
78. Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings, Feb. 1908, pp. 19, 71
79. Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance (New York, 1909), pp. 124-128
80. Congressional Record, 61 Cong., 1 Sess., 9174
81. 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)
82. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)
83. San Francisco Call, 22 November 1901
84. Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York 1996)
85. Lawrence Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1891-1931 (Tucson, Ariz., 1980), p. 22
86. George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p. 20
87. Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Chicago, 1956), pp. 82-88
88. Madison Grant, The Alien in Our Midst, p. 23
89. Frank Julian Warne, The Immigrant Invasion (New York, 1913), p. 295
90. Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952, (New York, 1957), p. 60
91. 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
92. One recent estimate places the number of Mexicans, including American-born 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
93. Wen-hsien Chen, "Chinese Immigration Under Both Exclusion and Immigration Laws," (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1940), p. 91
94. 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
95. Act of July 5, 1884 (23 Stat. 115)
96. 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)
97. United States, Department of Commerce, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1903 (1903), 156
98. and Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for Fiscal Year 1909(1909), 131