Journal of American Ethnic History

Journal of American Ethnic History

Journal of American Ethnic History

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.