protest and clandestine entry— appear as divergent strategies of re sis tance,
enacted on diff er ent scales toward separate ends. In fact these tactics had
much in common. Unauthorized migration, like mass protest, was a form
of collective action, and both relied on sprawling transpacific networks of
people and knowledge. While public demonstrations often fell short of their
designs, the largest protest movement of them all— the continued arrival of
hundreds of thousands of individual Chinese— deeply undercut the law.
Even so, Chinese exclusion and the vio lence that enabled it dramatically
transformed American gatekeeping at the turn of the twentieth century. At
the border, in the empire, and within local communities, law and vio lence
redefined the nation’s racial landscape and the lived experience of Chinese
mi grants. Most scholars have directed their attention to exclusion’s dramatic
impact on the laws and bureaucracy governing Amer ica’s territorial borders.5
But the pro cess of exclusion and expulsion also shaped Amer ica’s imperial
proj ect in the Pacific and refashioned the lives of Chinese mi grants within
the U.S. West.
During the Restriction Period, border control had been confined to dis-
crete points along Amer ica’s Pacific Coast, but during Chinese exclusion, fed-
eral legislation and Supreme Court rulings extended it across the overseas
empire and deep within the domestic interior. As a result, Chinese mi grants
carried their alien status with them always, and federal agents had the legal
power to deploy the border anywhere. It is impossible to comprehend the
changing nature of the border without widening our view to encompass the
Pacific world and narrowing it to see the individual mi grant. The scale of
the U.S. border shifted during this period, and so too should its history.
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
197
Exclusion at the Territorial Border
There is little doubt that the Exclusion Act brought change to Amer ica’s bor-
ders. The 1888 law blocked all legal ave nues for Chinese workers to enter the
United States and eventually produced a functioning bureaucracy in an
effort to preclude illegal ones. It was backed by $50,000 in annual funding,
ten times the yearly appropriation for the Restriction Act, and this appro-
priation doubled in subsequent years. Additionally, it placed “the burden of
proof upon the Chinese applicant,” according to Attorney General William
Miller, making “exclusion the rule and admission the exception.” 6 The
law transformed U.S. immigration control into something we might recog-
nize today, inspiring new systems of centralization, identification, and de-
portation that would lay the foundations for modern border control. Still, it
was not clear that this transformation would be enough to maintain control
of the border, or even a semblance of it. Would this new law stop Chinese
migration and placate the anti- Chinese movement?
In 1890, Congress sent Watson C. Squire, now a U.S. senator representing
the new state of Washington, and two U.S. representatives to find out. The
special commission traveled to where they imagined the far western border
lay: the Pacific states. Visiting Spokane Falls, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, they interviewed customs officials,
police officers, U.S. attorneys, union members, newspapermen, white em-
ployers, and Chinese merchants. After taking 589 pages of testimony, Squire
and the rest of the commission submitted a three- page summary. In it, they
reiterated that Chinese aliens still represented a dire threat to American citi-
zens. Without a continued policy of exclusion, they proclaimed, “the whole
Pacific Coast would be overrun” by the Chinese and “serious labor trou bles
would surely arise.” These conclusions echoed federal reports from a de cade
earlier, but this time the congressmen added two novel findings: that the
new Exclusion Act was working and that the local white population was
pleased with it. “If this law is strictly enforced it will not be many years before
the race will, in all probability, be extinct in this country,” predicted the
commission. Declaring success, the commission simply recommended that
Congress extend the law and “mak[e] the exclusion of coolies permanent.”7
But hundreds of pages of testimony collected by the special commission
belied this simple, optimistic summary. As legitimate ave nues of entry
198 EXCLUSION
narrowed, Chinese mi grants had turned to illegitimate ones, clandes-
tinely crossing Amer i ca’s borders with Canada and Mexico.8 Even though
new funds meant that four “Chinese Inspectors” were now deployed along
the western section of U.S.- Canadian boundary, their assignments were still
unrealistically extensive. Chinese Inspector Fred H. Oliver, for example,
had 150 miles of the U.S.- Canadian border to patrol, a distance so vast he
could only manage, in his first five months in office, to traverse it eight
times. During this lengthy patrol, he encountered fewer than twenty Chi-
nese and estimated that three or four hundred slipped by unnoticed. It
certainly did not help, as his partner T. L. Savage commented, that several
Chinese men had married Native American women, lived on reservations
along the border, and helped smuggle workers across it. The Chinese inspec-
tors requested at least three more men to enforce the law in eastern Wash-
ington, and when pressed by the commission, admitted it would take “a
very large force” to exclude the Chinese altogether.9
In western Washington, federal officials had invested their new funds in
controlling the U.S. border from the outside. One inspector was permanently
deployed in British Columbia to keep a lookout for ships with Chinese pas-
sengers headed for the United States. This new tactic had only limited
success. The inspector usually spotted suspicious ships leaving late at night
and, much to his chagrin, his urgent tele grams went unread while stateside
officials slept. Though the details had yet to be worked out, the remote en-
forcement of U.S. immigration law had profound implications. Endeav-
oring to exclude the Chinese, the United States detached systems of border
control from the nation’s territorial border and sent them abroad.10
Still, customs officials strug gled to implement the law. In the hundreds
of pages of the Squire commission’s testimony on the effects of the Exclu-
sion Act in Washington State, numbers speak the loudest. In all of 1889,
Washington’s thirty customs officers only managed to capture thirty- six
unauthorized mi grants. The officers knew this was only a tiny fraction of
all mi grants who had crossed into the state from Canada. Based on Chinese
arrival and population statistics from their Canadian counter parts, local
officials estimated that six hundred to “several thousand” undocumented
mi grants crossed each year.11 Knowing his department’s limitations, the
collector of customs for Washington requested twenty- four additional Chi-
nese inspectors and declared that a new steamer that w
ould cost $12,000
was an “absolute necessity.”12
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
199
While detection continued to pose insurmountable challenges along the
northern border, deportation practices had become more efficient. The Ex-
clusion Act, and its more generous funding, made it pos si ble to deport Chi-
nese back to China. The previous policy, to return Chinese to “the country
from whence he came,” had proven deeply problematic along the northern
and southern borders. Before the shift in policy, San Diego U.S. Deputy
Marshall A. W. Marsh recalled that he once arrested and deported the same
mi grant five times in twenty- four hours. He wrote that this “farce” continued
until “eventually [the Chinese mi grant] got through.” In 1891, Attorney Gen-
eral Miller affirmed transpacific deportations, declaring that it was legal to
deport Chinese who had arrived via Canada or Mexico directly to China.13
In fact, transpacific deportations began as an ad hoc policy the previous
year to deal with nineteen Chinese men who had been detained in defi nitely
at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington. In May 1890, two and a half
years after they were first incarcerated, six of these nineteen Chinese men
were placed on the steamer Batavia at a total cost of $240. When local of-
ficials reported that the deportation was complete, the Trea sury Department
asked what had happened to the other thirteen Chinese who had been ille-
gally detained. If local officers mailed any explanation, the letter has been
lost, along with any hope of discovering the men’s fate.14 We do know that
the experience of indefinite detention, followed by deportation, would be-
come ubiquitous in twentieth- century U.S. border control.15
When the special commission arrived in San Francisco, the new collector
of customs, Timothy Phelps, boasted of significant changes since implemen-
tation of exclusion. The law had done away with return certificates, closing
the loophole that allowed tens of thousands of Chinese workers to arrive
during the Restriction Period. In addition, new resources meant more man-
power: Phelps had hired additional Chinese inspectors, translators, and an
assistant attorney general to represent the Customs Department in court.
Gone were the days when customs officials tried to distinguish mi grants with
brief descriptions of scars and peculiarities; now Customs required photo-
graphs on all certificates for arriving merchants, students, and diplomats.
Thanks to exclusion, Inspector of Customs S. J. Ruddell bragged, “I would
say it would be nearly impossible for a Chinaman to come into this port
without our knowledge.” There is little doubt this was brash overstatement,
especially given the 189 Chinese who arrived undetected in Captain Rinder’s
steamer a de cade later.16
200 EXCLUSION
Moreover, detection was only the first of many enforcement challenges.
Collector Phelps reported that, since the enactment of exclusion, only
5 percent of the 6,656 Chinese arriving at San Francisco had been deported
to China. Customs officials had attempted to exclude another 20 percent of
arrivals, but their cases were appealed to the courts. The remaining 75 percent
of Chinese arrivals were permitted to land: 26 percent gained admission as
members of exempt categories or as U.S. citizens (whose status came from
being native born or was derived through a citizen father), and 49 percent
were allowed as in- transit passengers bound for neighboring countries. De-
spite officials’ confidence, this statistical snapshot reveals that the law still
contained wide ave nues for unlawful entry. Through transpacific networks,
mi grants and smugglers had developed successful strategies of subterfuge
targeting the exemptions in the law. Chinese mi grants learned how to mas-
querade as exempted students, diplomats, or merchants when standing be-
fore immigration officials, how to make fictive claims of kinship with the
help of carefully orchestrated testimony, and how to find the spatial limits
of U.S. border control.17
U.S. officials had every indication that fraud continued. Inspector Rud-
dell was particularly troubled by the fact that “95% of those who come here
without proper credentials to land” claimed to be natural- born U.S. citizens.
Given that fewer than five thousand Chinese women lived in the United
States in the 1860s and 1870s, inspectors found the number of applicants
claiming birthright citizenship to be highly improbable but hard to counter.
When Chinese inspectors attempted to deport alleged merchants or citizens,
Chinese mi grants filed writs of habeas corpus and often won the right to
appear in court. San Francisco officials asked the commission to amend the
law to deny bail while these cases were adjudicated or, better yet, to deny
judicial review. In the meantime, local officials experimented with both prac-
tices, but these ad hoc mea sures lacked federal backing.18
Officials also found the high rate of in- transit mi grants alarming, because
they suspected that Chinese workers bound for Canada, Mexico, and the
Ca rib bean would later find their way back to the United States. In April 1890,
Chinese Inspector George Pattison received a tip that fifty in- transit Chi-
nese workers bound for Mexico were planning to unlawfully return across
the southern border. Hoping to foil the plot, he boarded their ship and
traveled undercover to Mexico. Pattison observed fifteen Chinese workers
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
201
disembark at Ensenada, less than seventy- five miles south of the border,
and, with the help of an urgent tele gram and a quick response from officials
at San Diego, the Customs Department succeeded in apprehending them.
The remaining Chinese workers stayed aboard until Guaymas, where they
caught a train headed toward the U.S.- Mexico border. Pattison telegraphed
agents in Arizona, who succeeded in capturing some of the undocumented
workers at Nogales, Tombstone, and Tucson. Though the elaborate under-
cover operation was a success, it only made officials anxious that the
southern border would pres ent the next great challenge.19
Earlier in the 1880s, only a few hundred Chinese had chosen to live in
northern Mexico, deterred by limited transportation systems and harsh work
environments. For this reason, the Restriction Act, according to one U.S.
marshal, “was never enforced on the southern border at all.” Exclusion
prompted the first federal patrols of the U.S.- Mexican border and, by 1890,
two Chinese inspectors were assigned to San Diego. They bemoaned an end-
less border that included more than a hundred and fifty roads where “the
Chinamen can cross.” And yet they reported that their efforts were “mea-
surably efficient,” largely due to the fact that there were only “400 or 500
Chinese in the whole of Mexico.” The population was closer to one thousand
Chinese, but would not remain that low for long. As exclusion narrowed the
ave nues into U.S. ports, and head taxes made Canada an expensive alterna-
tive, Mexico became a popu lar back
door to the United States.20
Traveling the length of the Pacific Coast, Senator Squire and the com-
mission found much to admire. In the two years since the Exclusion Period
began, the U.S. customs ser vice had dramatically expanded surveillance
along the northern and southern borders, launched remote control in Canada,
developed new systems of identification, made deportation to China the
norm, and employed additional inspectors, translators, and attorneys. With
these changes, the Exclusion Act significantly slowed documented Chinese
migration.
Under Restriction, the mean annual number of Chinese admitted to the
United States fell by 16 percent. Between 1888 and 1893, when the first Ex-
clusion Act was in effect, mean annual admissions saw a 75 percent decrease
from pre-1882 levels.21 Furthermore, the census recorded a drop in the total
population of Chinese in the United States from a high in of 107,488 in
1890 to 89,863 in 1900 and 71,531 in 1910. Still, these statistics do not fully
202 EXCLUSION
account for unlawful migration across the U.S.- Canadian and U.S.- Mexican
borders. Since these unauthorized mi grants often went undocumented and
uncounted, any assessment of the law’s impact is part conjecture. It is highly
likely that the Exclusion Act slowed Chinese migration, and it is certain that
the law forced the movement underground.22
One strong indication of the per sis tence of unauthorized migration is that
the Chinese population in the United States remained perpetually young.
If Chinese exclusion laws had successfully prevented new Chinese mi-
grants, we would expect to see a graying Chinese population reflected in
the U.S. census. Instead, scholars have found that the Chinese community
continued to be comprised primarily of males of prime working age. It is
likely that Chinese migration to the United States resembled a “revolving
door,” in which older Chinese mi grants returned to China and new unau-
thorized mi grants replenished the U.S. labor pool.23
Still, the semblance of control appeared to be enough to satiate the public
in 1890. Up and down the coast, locals greeted the commission with posi-
tive impressions of U.S. border control. Even the infamous exclusionist
Dennis Kearney agreed that since 1888, “the laws are more rigidly executed,”
The Chinese Must Go Page 29
