The "Yellow Peril" and Asian Exclusion in the Americas

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 76, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 537-562

  Lee, Erika ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASIAN IMMIGRANT; IMMIGRANT POPULATION; MIGRATION; NATIONAL SECURITY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; RACISM; SECURITY THREAT; SOCIAL EXCLUSION; SOCIAL HISTORY;

ASIA; EURASIA; NORTH AMERICA; SOUTH AMERICA;

EID: 35648933492     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: 15338584     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2007.76.4.537     Document Type: Article

References (168)

1. Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1994)
2. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, 1962)
3. Neil Gotanda, "Exclusion and Inclusion: Immigration and American Orientalism," in Evelyn Hu-DeHart, ed., Across the Pacfic: Asian Americans and Globalization (Philadelphia, 1999), 129-151
4. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford, Calif., 1993).
5. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998)
6. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971)
7. Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1988)
8. Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003)
9. Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995).
10. Korean and Filipino migrants were the other two primary Asian groups to come to the United States during this period, but their numbers outside of the United States were significantly smaller. Because of the transnational nature of this study, I have chosen to focus on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians immigrants, who were the largest groups of Asians to migrate to and throughout the Americas in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries.
11. Erika Lee, "Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History," Journal of Asian American Studies, 8 (2005), 235-256.
12. Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot have argued that the worldwide efforts to "resolve the labor problem in [the] age of emancipation and migration, industrialization and imperialism" were linked together and contributed to the ascendancy of a "singular, unbroken global entity [of] white world supremacy." Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot, "Atlantic and Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire, and the 'Labor Problem' in the Late Nineteenth Century," Radical History Review, 91 (2005), 42.
13. Linda G. Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-states (Langhorne, Pa., 1994).
14. It is important to remember that African American, Chicano, and Asian American studies have been international and diasporic in their perspectives and politics since their formation. Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, has described the global vision that informed African American historians since the early twentieth century. Inspired by antiracist and anti-imperialist politics, Kelley has written that African American historians insisted on "seeing African American and United States history in global terms [and refused] to allow national boundaries to define their field of vision." Robin D. G. Kelley, "'But a Local Phase of a World Problem': Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950," Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1045, 1047.
15. David Thelen advocated for scholars to study how "people and ideas and institutions and cultures moved above, below, through, and around, as well as within, the nation state." See David Thelen, "Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on U.S. History," Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 968-969.
16. Similarly, Shelley Fisher Fishkin has described scholarship in the field of transnational American Studies as work where "borders both within and outside the nation ... were interrogated and studied, rather than reified and reinforced." Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004," American Quarterly, 57 (2005), 20.
17. Sau-Iing Wong has criticized diasporic studies that celebrate the crossing of borders while ignoring the continuing salience of race and racism produced by nation-states. Sau-Iing Wong, "Denationalism Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads," Amerasia Journal, 21 (Numbers 1 and 2, 1995), 17; 18 Jigna Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York, 2004), 23.
18. As Naoko Shibusawa and I also explain, "critics of globalization point out that globalization promotes only the unhindered flow of capital and products over national borders, not people - especially not the legal migration of predominately nonwhite workers seeking economic opportunities in wealthy capitalist nations." Naoko Shibusawa and Erika Lee, "Guest Editors' Introduction: What is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and Challenges," Journal of Asian American Studies, 8 (2005), fn 1, xv.
19. See also Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York, 1998).
20. Desai, Beyond Bollywood, 16, 25.
21. Nina Glick Schiller has recently redefined "transnational" to refer to "political, economic, social, and cultural processes that extend beyond the borders of a particular state, include actors that are not states, but are shaped by the policies and institutional practices of states." Nina Glick Schiller, "Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S. Immigrant Experience," in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (NewYork, 1999), 96.
22. A total of 245,966 Japanese settled in Latin America; 338,459 settled in North America. Exact figures for countries with the largest Japanese populations are: Brazil, 188,985; Peru, 33,070; Mexico, 14,667; and Argentina, 5,398. "Japanese Immigration to the Americas, Southeast Asia and Oceania, and Asian Continent: Prewar, Wartime, and Postwar," in Akemi Kikumura-Yano, ed., Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas: An Illustrated History of the Nikkei (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2002), 67.
23. A total of 54,474 Chinese settled in Latin America, compared to 112,131 in the United States and Canada and 5,774 in the Caribbean. Exact figures and years are as follows: United States (1940), 77,504; Canada (1941), 34,627; Caribbean (1946), 5,774 (including British Guiana, British Honduras, Antigua, Trinidad, Jamaica); Cuba (1950), 23,000; Per (1950), 12,000; Mexico (1950), 12,000; Panama (1950), 2,700. Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995), 293
24. Lynn Pan, The Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 235,252,262.
25. As Gary Okihiro has reminded us, a singular focus on the "cast-west filaments" of migration blinds us to the "messier" reality that "migrants moved east and west but also north and south." Gary Okihiro, "Turning Japanese Americans," in Kikumura-Yano, ed., Encyclopedia of Japanese Descendants in the Americas, 25. Scholars working on the Atlantic world also warn against reifying the east-west axis as opposed to a north-south one. Jorge Canizares Esguerra, "Some Caveats about the 'Atlantic Paradigm," History Compass, 3 (2005).
26. Similarly, Chong Lee, a San Francisco merchant, established the first Chinese Canadian business in Victoria, B.C., soon thereafter. The business was a franchise of the Kwong Lee Company based in San Francisco. Anthony B. Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver. B.C., 1983), 32, 49.
27. Leo M. D. Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign in Sonora, Mexico, 1900-1931" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1974), 10.
28. By the summer of 1869, China and California provided the bulk of Chinese labor to the American South. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, 200 6), 84, 92.
29. Pan, The Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas, 249.
30. Typescript autobiography, Kihachi Hirakawa Papers, 1897-1940, Special Collections, University of Washington Archives, Seattle, cited in Roger Daniels, "Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American Experiences Compared," Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies 17 (1986), 174.
31. The first South Asians to Canada were ex-soldiers visiting London for the Queen's Jubilee in 1897 who returned home via Canada. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Report of W. L. Mackenzie King: Commissioner Appointed to Enquire into the Methods by which Oriental Labourers Have Been Induced to Come to Canada (Ottawa, 1907), 75.
32. Mackenzie King, Report ... to Enquire into the Methods, 15, 22
33. Howard Sugimoto, Japanese Immigration, the Vancouver Riots, and Canadian Diplomacy (New York, 1978), 13-14
34. H. A. Millis, "East Indian Immigration to British Columbia and the Pacific Coast States," American Economic Review, 1 (1911), 72
35. U.S. Department of Labor Memorandum Regarding Hindu Migration to the United States, n.d. (c. Jan. 1914). "Hindu Immigration," File 52903/110C, Subject Correspondence, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C., [hereafter cited as INS Subject Correspondence, RG 85];
36. New York Times, Nov. 19, 1907, p. 8.
37. Chinese Exclusion Act (Act of May 6, 1882), U.S. Statutes at Large 22: 58, ch. 126.
38. Lee, At America's Gates, 151.
39. Index to the San Francisco Call, 1894-1903; available on microfilm.
40. M. R. Snyder to Commissioner of Immigration, New Orleans, Feb. 2, 1911, File 53161/2, INS Subject Correspondence, RG 85. See also Harry Davis to Commissioner-General of Immigration, Sept. 7, 1909, File 52090/4, and George Baldwin to C ommissioner- General of Immigration, April 6, 1909, File 52090/4, both in ibid.
41. Executive Order 589, March 14, 1907. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 130, n 42. During the ten months ending October 1907, steamships of the Pacific brought 8,125 Japanese, 2,047 "Hindus," and 1,266 Chinese;
42. see Mackenzie King, Report ... to Enquire into the Methods, 15, 22.
43. Sugimoto, Japanese Immigration, 14.
44. The Canadian Parliament passed this order-in-council on January 8, 1908. This law achieved the exclusion of South Asians without explicitly discriminating against British South Asian subjects. Ken Aclachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1991), 81.
45. Another order-in-council raised the amount of money that all immigrants were required to possess at the time of arrival from $25 to $200. This amount was strategically chosen to exclude any South Asian who might "slip through the other legal nets." Jensen, Passage from India, 82.
46. Beginning in 1909-1910, the steamship companies began to bring South Asians directly from Hong Kong to U.S. Pacific ports of entry. In April 1910 the commissioner of immigration at San Francisco reported that "the Hindus are coming here at the rate of 80 to 100 a week." U.S. Department of Labor Memorandum Regarding Hindu Migration to the United States, n.d.
47. This migration was made up of both trans-migrants and new migrants from Japan. Daniel M. Masterson and Sayaka Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Urbana, Ill., 2004), 52.
48. The U.S. and Canadian "Gentlemen's Agreements" with Japan in 1908 are explained in detail later in this essay. The 1924 U.S. Immigration Act reduced the annual admissions of immigrants through a numerical ceiling and national origins quotas established in the 1921 Quota Act. The act also prohibited any further Asian immigration by denying admission to all aliens who were "ineligible for citizenship (i.e., those to whom naturalization was denied). Quota Act of 1921, U.S. Statutes at Large, 42: 5, section 2;
49. Immigration Act of 1924, U.S. Statutes at Large, 43: 153. In 1928 Canada and Japan further revised the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1908 to restrict Japanese immigration to Canada to 150 persons annually.
50. Okihiro, "Turning Japanese Americans," 25. In Brazil, Article 121 of the constitution declared that annual immigration of any foreign group would be limited to 2 percent of the total number of that foreign population already in Brazil. The amendment was clearly aimed at the Japanese. Nobuya Tsuchicla, "The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-1941" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), 291-295.
51. In Peru, the 1936 immigration law prohibited the immigration of "racial groups" and targeted Japanese immigration. It also included a requirement that all businesses employ a work force that was at least 80 percent native-born. The law was passed in part out of fear that Japanese immigration to Peru would increase following the passage of Brazil's restrictive law. See C. Harvey Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, 1873-1973 (Albuquerque, 1975), 38-39, 51,
52. and J. F. Normano and Antonello Gerbi, The Japanese in South America: An Introductory Survey with Special Reference to Peru (New York, 1943), 77, 114-116.
53. Howard Winant has examined the history of a "world racial system" of white supremacy, demonstrating how race was a central driving force in the development of the modern world. Winant has also called this history a "racial longue durée" and a study of the "world-historical dimensions of race." He has argued that "the foundation of modern nation-states, the construction of an international economy, and the articulation of a unified world culture were deeply racialized processes." Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York, 2001), xiv, 2-3, 19, 21, 136-137.
54. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
55. See José David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley, 1997).
56. Winant has written that "what took place in one country both had effects elsewhere and was in turn produced, at least, in part, by occurrences outside national boundaries." Winant, The World Is a Ghetto, 143.
57. Similarly, Henry Yu has argued that "notions of ethnic and cultural difference in the United States have always depended upon transnational connections and comparisons." Henry Yu, "How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: Post-Nationalist American Studies as a History of Race, Migration, and the Commodification of Culture," in John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley, 2000), 224.
58. Winant, The World Is a Ghetto, 142-143.
59. Anti-slavery writers would routinely travel to the British West Indies to study the post-emancipation societies in the Caribbean. For example, William G. Sewall's letters home were reprinted in the New York Times and then collected and published in a best-selling book. As Moon-Ho Jung explains, the United States, "a nation at war over slavery craved news from the Caribbean."
60. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 5, 46, 64.
61. Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1848-1874 (Durham, N.C., 1951), 119-120, 123, 138-139.
62. The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba: The Original English-language Text of 1876 (Baltimore, 1993). See especially p. 26 of the introduction and section 30, pp. 88-90, in the body of the report.
63. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 5.
64. See, generally, Gyory, Closing the Gate,
65. Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy;
66. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, 1999), 104
67. Karen J. Leong, "'A Distant and Antagonistic Race': Constructions of Chinese Manhood in the Exclusionist Debates, 1869-1878," in Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures ofManhood in the American West (New York, 2000), 133
68. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994), 153-182.
69. Lee, "Orientalisms in the Americas," 241-249.
70. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875-1932," Journal of Arizona History (1980), 294
71. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora, Mexico, 1876-1932," Amerasia Journal, 9 (No. 2, 1982), 7-8.
72. José Maria Romero, "Comision de inmigracion; Dictamen del vocal ingeniero Jose Maria Romero: Encargado de estudiar la influencia social y economica de la immigracion asiatica en México" (Mexico City, 1911),
73. cited in Robert Chao Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882-1940" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 269-271.
74. Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign," 196.
75. See, for example, the common racial caricatures of Chinese in José Angel Espinoza, El Ejemplo de Sonora (Mexico City, 1932), 21-24, 36, 168
76. Philip A. Dennis, "The Anti-Chinese Campaigns in Sonora, Mexico," Ethnohistory, 26 (1979), 73.
77. Gerardo R6nique, "Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora's Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico's Postrevolutionary Nationalism," in Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 220-221.
78. Gordon V. Krutz, "Chinese Labor, Economic Development and Social Reaction," Ethnohistory, 18 (1971), 328.
79. Krutz, "Chinese Labor, Economic Development and Social Reaction," 327.
80. See similar examples in Rénique, "Race, Region, and Nation," 220.
81. Guillermo Dowling to José M. Arana, Magdalena, Sonora, Oct. 29, 1917, Papers of José María Arana, 1904-1921, University of Arizona Library Special Collections, "Arizona-Sonora Documents Online," http://content.library.arizona.edu/collections/asdo/ arana/browse.php (accessed April 10, 2007).
82. The Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States prohibited the further immigration of Chinese laborers, allowed only a few select classes of Chinese immigrants to apply for admission, and affirmed the prohibition of naturalized citizenship on all Chinese immigrants. Chinese Exclusion Act, 58, ch. 126. In Australia, the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, which established the "White Australia Policy," followed the desire of the British Empire not to discriminate explicitly on the basis of race, but it still achieved its central goal of greatly restricting Chinese immigration. It did so by barring all immigrants who could not pass a dictation test in any European language. Myra Willard, "The History of the "White Australia" Policy," Royal Australian Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, vol. 8, part 1 (1922), 3-5, 10-13.
83. Canada restricted Chinese immigration by imposing a $50 head tax on all Chinese laborers. The head tax was raised to $100 in 1900 and then to $500 in 1903. An Act to Restrict and Regulate Chinese Immigration into Canada, July 20, 1885, Statutes of Canada (1885), ch. 71: 207-212
84. Patricia Roy, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver, B.C., 1989), 59-63.
85. An Act Respecting and Restricting Chinese Immigration, July 18, 1900, Statutes of Canada (1900), ch. 32: 215-221
86. An Act Respecting and Restricting Chinese Immigration, in ibid. (1903), ch. 8: 105-111.
87. In Mexico, the Immigration Act of 1908 restricted and regulated Chinese immigration while several Mexican municipalities also passed public health regulations, segregation provisions, and bans on interracial marriages to discourage Chinese migration and settlement during the 1910s. Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign," 37-38, 199-200
88. Chao Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 276-277.
89. In 1909 in Peru, Chinese immigration was limited to relatives of Peruvian residents only; it was completely halted in 1934. Ayumi Takenaka, "The Japanese in Peru: History of Immigration, Settlement, and Racialization," Latin American Perspectives, 31 (Number 3, 2004), 87
90. Bernard Wong, "A Comparative Study of the Assimilation of the Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20 (1978), 335-358.
91. The formation of what I call a "White Pacific" began as early as the 1880s, when, as Charles A. Price described, "the young white societies of the Pacific ... had definitely decided that the Chinese were unassimilable, that they were a positive hindrance to the process of nation-building, and that with a few exceptions their immigration should be stopped completely." Charles Archibald Price, The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North American and Australasia 1836-1888 (Canberra, 1974), 275.
92. Margaret Werry has used the term "American Pacific" to describe "the regional or geographical imaginary that brought the Pacific and Asia into coherent visibility for American capital and culture." Margaret Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth': Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific," Theatre Journal, 57 (2005), 359, n 12.
93. On the Seattle Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL), see Jensen, Passage from India, 49. Robert Wynne has reported that Bellingham had 800 members in the local chapter of the AEL. Robert Wynne, "American Labor Leaders and the Vancouver Anti-Oriental Riot," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 57 (1966), 174.
94. On the relationship between the U.S.-based AEL and the Vancouver organization, see Roy, A White Man's Province, 190-192.
95. Asiatic Exclusion League, Proceedings of the First International Convention of the Asiatic Exclusion League of North America, Seattle, Washington, 1908 (San Francisco, 1908), 13
96. Jensen, Passage from India, 66.
97. New York Times, Sept. 14, 1907.
98. Ibid., Sept. 11, 1907
99. Jensen, Passage from India, 67
100. Literary Digest, 35 (Sept. 21, 1907), 393.
101. New York Times, Sept. 14, 1907
102. Howard Sugimoto, "The Vancouver Riots of 1907," in Hilary Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa, eds., East Across the Pacific: Historical & Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration & Assimilation (Santa Barbara, Calif, 1972), 94-95.
103. W. L. Mackenzie King, Losses Sustained by the Japanese Population of Vancouver, BC on the Occasion of the Riots in That City in September, 1907 (Ottawa, 1908), 9
104. Mackenzie King, Losses Sustained by the Chinese Population of Vancouver, B.C. on the Occasion of the Riots in That City in September, 1907 (Ottawa, 1908), 11
105. Sugimoto, "The Vancouver Riots of 1907," 99.
106. Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 81
107. Howard Sugimoto, "The Vancouver Riot of 1907 and Its International Significance," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 64 (Number 4, 1973), 166-168.
108. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1924 (Washington, D.C., 1939), 339-369, as cited in Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 44.
109. "Japan, America, and the Anglo-Saxon World," Spectator (London), July 13, 1907, p. 40.
110. "Oriental Immigration," Outlook, Sept. 21, 1907, p. 99.
111. Theodore Roosevelt to Ambassador Whitelaw Reid, March 30, 1908, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (8 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 6: V. 985.
112. On the ascendant role of the United States in the Pacific, see Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 359.
113. Theodore Roosevelt to Arthur Hamilton Lee, March 7, 1908, in Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 6: 965-966.
114. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders: An Autobiography (New York, 1899), 802,
115. quoted in Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 362
116. R. MacGregor Dawson, William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Political Biography (Toronto, 1958), 152
117. Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 82.
118. Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Jan. 25, 1908, MG26-J13, National Archives of Canada; http://king.collectionscanada.ca/EN/ default.asp (accessed Aug. 11, 2006).
119. Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 83.
120. Werry has explained that it was the tour and the "spectacle it inaugurated" that resonated throughout what she calls the "American Pacific," including the British dominions and white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 364.
121. On the tour in general, see Franklin Matthews, With the Battle Fleet: Cruise of the Sixteen Battleships of the United States Atlantic Fleet from Hampton Roads to the Golden Gate, December, 1907-May, 1908 (New York, 1908)
122. Robert A. Hart, The Great White Fleet: Its Voyage Around the World, 1907-1909 (Boston, 1965)
123. Kenneth Wimmel, Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet: American Sea Power Comes of Age (Washington, D.C., 1998)
124. James R. Reckner, Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet (Annapolis, Md., 1988).
125. There is no direct evidence that the fleet's white color was intentionally meant to be read as a symbol of white supremacy. But the imperialistic mission of the fleet's tour was expressed explicitly by Rear Admiral Charles S. Sperry, who commanded the fleet. In a letter to his wife Edith, he explained that the tour was "establish [ing] a curious sort of protectorate - a new Monroe Doctrine." Charles S. Sperry to Edith Sperry, Sept. 9, 1908, box 5, Charles Stillman Sperry Papers, Library of Congress, as cited in Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 363, especially n. 24.
126. Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 364. Werry has explained that, for these countries, the tour "intersected with an impatient nationalism straining against the ties of colonial fealty" and growing anxieties over Asian immigration, the result of the "same globalizing momentum that had brought Asian migrants to California."
127. Reckner, Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, 78.
128. Samuel Carter III, The Incredible Great White Fleet: America Comes of Age as a World Power (New York, 1971), 97.
129. Werry, "'The Greatest Show on Earth,'" 364.
130. Ibid., 365.
131. Okihiro, "Turning Japanese Americans," 22. Many more of the 20,000 Japanese remaining in Peru would likely have been deported as well, had there been more ships available to transport them.
132. Masterson and Funada-Classen, eds., The Japanese in Latin America, 161.
133. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "From Area Studies to Ethnic Studies: The Study of the Chinese Diaspora in Latin America," in Shirley Hune, ed., Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives (Pullman, Wash., 1991), 9.
134. See also Wally Look Lai's promotion of "an Hemispheric consciousness ... as an intellectual notion," as cited in Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Rojini Srikanth, and Leny Mendoza Strobel, eds., Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Lanham, Md., 1999), xvi.
135. Similarly, Lisa R. Mar advocates including Canada in a larger Asian Pacific North America. Lisa R. Mar, 'Asian Canada: An 'Alternate Asian America?'" from the Asian Pacific American Collective History Project, 2004, available from http://www.apachp.org; accessed April 10, 2007
136. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 9.
137. Henry Yu, "Los Angeles and American Studies in a Pacific World of Migrations," American Quarterly, 56 (2004), 531-543.
138. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the further immigration of Chinese laborers, allowed only a few select classes of Chinese immigrants to apply for admission, and affirmed the prohibition on the naturalized citizenship on all Chinese immigrants. Chinese Exclusion Act (Act of May 6, 1882), U.S. Statutes at Large, 22: 58, ch. 126.
139. Canada restricted Chinese immigration by imposing a $50 head tax on all Chinese laborers. The head tax was raised to $100 in 1900 and to $500 in 1903. An Act to Restrict and Regulate Chinese Immigration into Canada, July 20, 1885, Statutes of Canada (1885), ch. 71: 207-212
140. Patricia Roy, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver, B.C., 1989), 59-63
141. An Act Respecting and Restricting Chinese Immigration, July 18, 1900, Statutes of Canada (1900), ch. 32: 215-221
142. An Act Respecting and Restricting Chinese Immigration, in ibid. (1903), ch. 8: 105-111.
143. This law forbade entry to individuals who had not come by a "continuous journey" from their homelands. Since there was no direct steamship service between India and any Canadian port, the law effectively barred South Asians. The Canadian Parliament passed this order-in-council on January 8, 1908. Ken Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto, 1991), 81.
144. In the Canadian agreement, Japan voluntarily agreed to restrict the number of passports issued to male laborers and domestic servants to an annual maximum of 400. Four classes of people were to be permitted to enter Canada: Returning residents and their wives, children, and parents; emigrants specially engaged by Japanese residents in Canada for personal or domestic service; laborers under specifically worded contracts approved by the Canadian government; and agricultural laborers contracted by Japanese resident agricultural holders in Canada, limited to ten for each hundred acres of land owned. In the American agreement, the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports good for the continental United States to any laborers, skilled or unskilled, but passports would be issued to "laborers who have already been in America and to the parents, wives, and children of laborers already resident there." Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was, 81
145. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1924 (Washington, D.C., 1939), 339-369,
146. as cited in Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, 1962), 44.
147. The law was a first attempt to regulate immigration; it identified a number of prohibited classes and established the Mexican immigration service. Chinese or Asian immigrants were not singled out, but with its list of prohibited contagious diseases and its requirement that ship captains provide a detailed report on each passenger, the law's intention was to control and restrict Chinese immigration; Leo M. D. Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign in Sonora, Mexico, 1900-1931" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1974), 37-38.
148. Robert Chao Romero explains that the law was a failure. Robert Chao Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882-1940" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), 280-281.
149. Out of an estimated 600 to 700 total, 303 Chinese and 5 Japanese were killed. Property damage to Chinese businesses and homes was estimated at $1,000,000. Wilfley and Bassett, Memorandum on the Law and the Facts in the Matter of the Claims of China against Mexico for Losses of Life and Property Suffered by Chinese Subjects at Torreon on May 13, 14, and 15, 1911 (Mexico City, 1911), 4.
150. Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign in Sonora," 199-200.
151. The Immigration Act of 1917 required 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 conceived 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. Immigration Act of 1917, U.S. Statutes at Large, 39: 874.
152. In 1927 Mexico also canceled its treaty with China, which had guaranteed "free and voluntary" movement of people between the two countries. On the 1899 treaty, see Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 51.
153. On the 1927 cancellation, see Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign," 19-200
154. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese in Baja California Norte, 1910-1934," in Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies (San Diego, 1985-1986), 21.
155. Apparently similar to the U.S. 1893 Geary Act, the Sonoran law's intent was to avoid confusion of identification since "one Chinese looked like another." Jacques, "The Anti-Chinese Campaign in Sonora," 174.
156. The 1923 Exclusion Act completely abolished the head tax system and instead prohibited all people of Chinese origin or descent from entering the country. Consular officials, children born in Canada, merchants, and students were exempted. An Act Respecting Chinese Immigration, 1923. Acts of the Parliament of the Dominion of Canada (Ottawa, 1923), ch. 32, section 8. Library and Archives of Canada, http://www.collectionscanada.ca/immigrants/ 021017-150-e.php?uid-021017-nlc011076&uidc-recKey; accessed Jan. 11, 2007.
157. The 1924 Act reduced the annual admissions of immigrants through a numerical ceiling and national origins quotas, as established in the 1921 Quota Act. The act also prohibited any further Asian immigration by denying admission to all aliens who were "ineligible for citizenship" (i.e., those to whom naturalization was denied). Quota Act of 1921, U.S. Statutes at Large, 42: 5, section 2
158. Immigration Act of 1924, U.S. Statutes at Large, 43: 153.
159. The law was intended to regulate foreign immigration and to control Mexican emigration. The registration system, for example, was required for both nationals and foreigners seeking to leave or enter the country. The law also established immigration surveillance offices throughout Mexico and granted greater control to the Public Health Service to reject immigrants. Chao Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 281-282.
160. Canada and Japan further revised the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907 to restrict Japanese immigration to Canada to 150 persons annually.
161. The ban on immigrant laborers was issued on July 14, 1931; the labor law was approved by the Mexican Camara de Diputados (House of Representatives) on July 21, 1931. Beginning in 1931, vigilante groups rounded up Chinese and took them to the U.S.-Mexican border. Following an order by Sonoran Governor Rodolfo Galles (son of President Plutarco Elias Calles) to dispose of their goods and evacuate their businesses, Chinese in Sonora began to close their businesses in August 1931. By September the expulsion of all Chinese residents from Sonora had been accomplished. Chao Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 282-283
162. Charles Cumberland, "The Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution," Hispanic American Historical Review, 40 (1960), 191, 203.
163. Article 121 of the constitution declared that annual immigration of any foreign group would be limited to 2 percent of the total number of that foreign population already in Brazil. The amendment was clearly aimed at the Japanese. Nobuya Tsuchicla, "The Japanese in Brazil, 1908-1941" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), 291-295.
164. The law was passed in part out of fear that Japanese immigration to Peru would increase following the passage of Brazil's restrictive law on June 26, 1936. Historian C. Harvey Gardiner has explained that the law contained several components: A) the annual immigration to the country could not be greater than 16,000, which was approximately two-tenths of 1 percent of Peru's total population; b) immigration by racial groups was prohibited [the law did not specifically mention Japanese, or even Asians, but it clearly targeted Japanese]; c) foreign residents who returned to their native lands and then desired reentry into Peru could do so only within the established quotas; the law extended a previous provision (Law No. 7505) that stipulated that only 20 percent of employees in all businesses and professions could be foreigners. The law and its provisions clearly targeted Japanese, who made up the majority of immigrants then entering Peru and whose success in business and in farming were a source of great resentment. C. Harvey Gardiner, The Japanese and Peru, 1873-1973 (Albuquerque, 1975), 38-39, 51
165. J. F. Normano and Antonello Gerbi, The Japanese in South America: An Introductory Survey with Special Reference to Peru (New York, 1943) 77, 114-116. Review
166. Of these internees, 80 percent were from Peru alone, and they included Peruvian citizens by naturalization or birth. Chile sent 283, Bolivia 130, Paraguay 92, Uruguay 23, and Venezuela 24. Daniel M. Masterson and Sayaka Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Urbana, Ill., 2004) 122
167. Edward N. Barnhart, "Japanese Internees from Peru," Pacific Historical Review, 31 (1962), 171-172
168. Seiichi Higashide, Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps (Settle, 2000).