Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented

Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

Introduction

The introduction argues that the repeal of the U.S. Asian exclusion laws was part of the larger transformation and expansion of U.S. empire during the era of Asian decolonization. A transpacific movement of Asians, Asian Americans, white American elites, and others lobbied U.S. Congress for legislative change between 1943 and 1965. The introduction overviews the book’s five chapters, which cover the laws that together formally repealed Asian exclusion: the 1943 Magnuson Act; the 1946 Luce-Celler Act; the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act; and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act.

Bonded Chinese Servants

Chapter 5 examines Chinese servants who were exempted from the exclusion laws and granted temporary admission as laborers. It argues that immigration officials implemented post-entry controls that were aimed at containment rather than protection. Following the passage of the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act, immigration officials brokered special arrangements that allowed white employers to continue to enter the country with Chinese servants in their employ, so long as they took out surety bonds that indemnified the government against the possibility that their Chinese servants might leave their service and remain in the United States on an unauthorized basis. The temporary admission of Chinese servants and their bonded condition offered an incipient version of a guestworker program. Chinese immigrant servants who lived in the United States legally—as well as birthright American citizens of Chinese descent—were also subject to various requirements by immigration officials that reinforced these workers’ dependency on white employers. The testimony of white employers was a crucial factor in determining whether Chinese servants would be credentialed as authorized residents. This was essential to avoiding deportation but also to being allowed to depart and reenter the United States.

“A Pressing Problem of Interracial Justice”

This chapter describes how international war compelled repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws, which were seen as unacceptable insults to a wartime ally. As the first liberalization of immigration law since 1924, the campaign for repeal showcased long-simmering contradictions between foreign policy agendas, nativist racism, ethnic and religious groups, organized labor, and economic priorities that would channel and distort the long struggle for immigration reform and eventual passage of the Hart–Celler Act of 1965. With her Christian upbringing, American education, and proximity to power in China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek served as a potent symbol of the humanity and assimilability of Chinese as well as the possibility that long-cherished missionary dreams for the transformation of China into a Christian, democratic nation might be realized.

Carson City and Truckee: Anti-Chinese Activities

This chapter examines anti-Chinese activities in two towns: Carson City in Nevada and Truckee in California. Anti-Chinese movements emerged when it became clear to Euro-Americans that the Chinese posed threats to American jobs, economy, culture, and white supremacy. Between 1850 and 1908, a total of 153 violent anti-Chinese actions resulted in 143 deaths and the displacement of 10,525 from their homes and businesses. Anti-Chinese sentiment intensified in the 1870s in preparation for immigration restrictions that led to the enactment of federal Chinese exclusion laws between 1882 and 1892. This chapter discusses attempts to oust the Chinese immigrants from Carson and Truckee, both of which had prosperous Chinatowns with wealthy Chinese merchants who were involved in the lumber trade as contractors for laborers and merchandising. It also considers the role played by the media in anti-Chinese agitation and how the anti-Chinese hostility reduced the Chinese population in Carson and Truckee.

Segregation, Exclusion, and the Chinese Communities in Georgia, 1880s-1940

This chapter examines the impact of various state apparatuses, including exclusion laws, on the little remarked but fascinating Chinese American merchant communities in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia. Federal Chinese Exclusion laws established a highly selective exemption system designed to prevent most Chinese from entering and reentering the United States. The law explicitly barred the first-time entry of laborers but allowed Chinese to come over as merchants, students, government officials, teachers, and U.S.-born citizens. Since most Chinese in Augusta were in the grocery business, they were allowed to travel under the exempted merchant category and their wives and children as merchant dependents. As such, Augusta's Chinese community grew in size and became one of the largest Chinese communities in the South before 1965.

Law, Heresy and Judges under the Thedosian Dinasty

SummaryReligious legislation against heretics was an innovation in the Late Roman Empire and its enforcement involved great difficulties. The provincial governors who, except in the period of the persecution of Christians, had tolerated religious diversity, were to implement exclusion laws against pagans and heretical groups. This paper analyzes the form of interaction between bishops, emperors and judges in the issuing and enforcement of the laws against heretics, as well as casting light on the relevance of episcopal intervention as a method of informing and shaping the imperial will.