“A congress of ignorant school boys could not devise more idiotic legislation,” New York City’s Julia Sand wrote President Chester Alan Arthur regarding the proposed Chinese Exclusion Act. “It is not only behind the age, but behind several ages – not only opposed to the spirit of American institutions but opposed to the spirit of civilization all the world over … It is mean & cowardly—more than that, it is a step back into barbarism.”[1] The daughter of a New York businessman, Sand clearly felt little compunction in criticizing the law, a viewpoint shared to some degree by the president who vetoed the legislation in April of 1882 before Congress overrode his opposition, putting the law into effect.
The Chinese Exclusion Act came on the heels of the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited convicted felons, prostitutes, and Asian contract laborers from entering the U.S. It served as a precursor to the 1882 law which, historian Erika Lee notes, marked the first time U.S. immigration policy targeted a specific ethnic or racial group. It helped to shape immigration law well into the twentieth century justifying the quota system that developed in the 1920s. The Immigration Act of 1917 (sometimes referred to as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act), the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, and the Immigration Act of 1924, deployed race, ethnicity, and class to limit immigration. These laws purposely targeted Asians, Mexicans, and Europeans – particularly Italians, Slavs, Jews, and Catholics, all hailing from Southeastern and Eastern Europe, all, at various moments, the collective boogey men of WASP nightmares. Historian Mai Ngai characterized the 1924 law as the culmination of American xenophobia, “the triumph of Progressive Era nativism and the historical terminus of open immigration from Europe.”[2]
Discrimination against Chinese not only shifted to European counterparts but also fellow Asians, who all encountered bureaucratic racism upon arrival. Nineteenth century immigration law had established Asians in particular as “ineligible for citizenship,” which prevented their naturalization. This fact was harnessed in law to target Asians without doing so explicitly, and the phrase was later used to deny Asian immigrants the ability to purchase land in several Western states, most notably California.
Despite popular depictions that portrayed Asians and Asian immigrants as particularly docile and accommodating, through their own agency, they sought ways around a system that discriminated against them. When Alien Land Laws, whether enshrined in nineteenth century state constitutions or newly passed state legislation of the early twentieth century, prevented Asian immigrants from buying land, they placed such holdings in the name of their children, who attained citizenship through the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause. Even in this, Asian Americans played a critical role: Wong Kim Ark’s 1898 Supreme Court case upheld the amendment’s statute regarding citizenship. Paradoxically, racial animus toward Asians worked to construct a discriminatory immigration infrastructure, yet because of this bureaucratic edifice Asian Americans like Wong Kim Ark also confirmed the constitutional guarantees of citizenship.
One of the most notorious methods by which Asians circumvented immigration law was through “paper sons,” in which immigrants claimed membership in groups exempt from such laws such as merchants or a family relationship with native-born citizens. This ingenuity subverted the institutionalized racism of the nation’s immigration law and became common in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Between 1882 and 1943, approximately 300,000 Chinese gained admission to the U.S. Historians estimate that over 90 percent of the Chinese immigrants arriving in the U.S. during this period did so using false papers.[3] What did this process look like, and how did it unfold? The papers of Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh in the Manuscript Division provide a revealing example of both these sorts of efforts by Chinese immigrants but also the state’s response.
In 1929, attorney Edward C. Day of Helena, Montana, wrote Senator Thomas J. Walsh regarding the plight of Wong Kim. Kim claimed to have a son, Wong Gin Gin Foo, who had been born in Montana, but was then living in Cuba. Kim had long been a worker at the Montana Club, a private male-only Helena social club for elites established in 1885, which both Day and Walsh patronized. Kim appealed to the former about contacting the latter in regard to Gin Gin Foo’s plight.[4] Walsh contacted the Havana consulate to inquire about Gin Foo’s status.[5] Walsh followed up in mid-October and vouched for both Kim and Gin Foo, adding that “the boy’s father is not expected to live very long.”[6] The consulate in Havana was open to meeting with Gin Foo, but cautioned Walsh regarding the “difficulties surrounding Chinese immigration.”[7]
Walsh pulled whatever bureaucratic levers necessary because by mid-March 1930, the State Department issued Gin Foo a passport for travel to the United States. Still, Gin Foo’s initial attempt to book a place on a United Fruit Company (UFC) steamer encountered resistance when a division manager from the UFC wrote Walsh to inform him that Gin Foo spoke neither Spanish nor English despite claiming to have resided in Cuba for nearly a decade. According to the official, Gin Foo “claimed to have been born in the state of Montana but left there in his infancy and has spent practically all of his life in Cuba and China.” Lacking sufficient space, the company denied Gin Foo passage and questioned his citizenship more generally.[8] Walsh again intervened, having Kim contact the company in order to secure an interpreter to help further his case for immigration. Walsh advised the UFC official that the State Department’s issuance of a passport to Gin Foo indicated their faith in his citizenship, and “that favorable action would not have been taken upon his application if there has been any doubt to his citizenship.”[9]
Gin Foo eventually gained passage to New Orleans from Cuba, but he soon found himself detained by immigration authorities in the port city. Authorities doubted Gin Foo’s citizenship claims and argued that the photograph of himself that Gin Foo had presented was that of another man, Dan Hung. Day wrote Walsh asking him again to intervene should an appeal be made “thus enabling you to be in a position to aid us perhaps in thwarting the Immigration officers in giving this applicant a fair hearing.” Day also provided Walsh with a letter written in Chinese by Gin Foo to Kim as well as a translation of the correspondence.[10]
“[T]he immigration [officials] got [sic] mad and say you are not born in the U.S.,” Gin Foo wrote Kim, adding that the authorities argued that the photo of Hung was not him. “You better send a telegram to Washington and fix it for me,” Gin Foo pleaded. “One or two weeks they will send me back to Cuba … It is cold here not much to eat.”[11]
Due to the prevalence of the paper son system, as indicated by the Havana consul, Chinese migration in particular drew the attention of immigration officials who subjected them to intense interrogations that could span two or three days. Day expressed skepticism about the process in his translation of Gin Foo’s letter by typing an aside below it arguing that officials were purposely transposing Hung’s identity on Gin Foo. In general, Day believed officials were trying to “frighten this boy into admitting that he is not native born.” [12]
The interrogation process itself was terrifying, argues historian Erika Lee. Applicants were often asked between 200 and 1,000 questions over the course of two to three days. Even mistakes on minor details could lead to detention and deportation. Angel Island, known as the Ellis Island of the West Coast, especially for Chinese and other Asians, was notorious for such surveillance. Day commented on this in his postscript of Gin Foo’s letter noting that it was “practiced more in San Francisco than anywhere else.”[13] The walls of Angel Island barracks are strewn with over 200 poems by detainees as a testament to the “frustration, anger, resentment, loneliness, and despair” of the immigration process. Of the 95,687 Chinese who sought admittance into the U.S. between 1910 and 1940, nearly 10 percent were turned back. Many appealed decisions and gained entry while about five percent were forced to return to China. Many were detained at Angel Island for weeks.[14]
In addition to his postscript note, Day provided accounts of the interrogation that indicate his own doubts about the process. According to Day, the authorities took Kim’s testimony only to establish “the fact that no white person of the proper age were presented before the Examiner” who Day added, repeatedly lamented the absence of “’old white persons’ who knew the facts.” Kim introduced his neighbor, an older Chinese woman, who attested to Gin Foo’s identity and repudiated the photographs produced by officials.
Day also called into question the interrogation’s general structure. He believed the interpreters provided were “incapable” and that the testimony documented by a typist was incomplete because she “only writes such portions of it as she remembers after the witness has finished a great long answer, [which] does not go very far in giving you a true record, but I supposed the Inspector feels that this is sufficient for the people who come within its range.”[15] Two other men, Dr. Cooney and John G. Haggerty, also affirmed the picture was of Gin Foo. Despite such positive identifications, Day believed the Immigration Inspector “will write a dissertation upon the strangeness of the coincidence that a large number of white persons were not called.”[16]
The final report, submitted on May 13, 1930, recounted Gin Foo’s narrative. According to Gin Foo and Kim, Gin Foo was born in Helena on October 30, 1905, and at two months taken to San Francisco by his father and his mother Wu Shee. He resided there until age six, when his father returned him to Helena. From six to fifteen, Gin Foo wintered in San Francisco and summered in Helena. In 1920, Kim travelled to New York with acquaintances and was smuggled into Cuba where he lived in Havana until receiving a passport in March of 1930. [17]
One big mark against Gin Foo’s application related to documentation. The lack of some sort of written record or otherwise, of his birth, struck officials as implausible. Gin Foo had no birth certificate while the testimony of Ong Shee, the older Chinese woman identified earlier, seemed to confirm that Kim had told her Gin Foo was born in Helena rather than her witnessing or confirming his birth in the city. Though both John G. Haggerty and Doctor Cooney testified by affidavit that they believed Gin Foo to have been born in Helena, they could only offer their word which was based on second hand knowledge. [18]
According to New Orleans immigration officials, several other aspects of Gin Foo and Kim’s story failed to align. When asked about their home in Helena, the two men gave slightly different accounts. As to its size, Kim said the home had four rooms and identified a different address than Gin Foo. Gin Foo remembered it being larger, six rooms, was unable to describe the home’s location in the city, and seemed to know “virtually nothing about either Helena or San Francisco.” His memory of San Francisco’s weather also raised suspicion from authorities. They found his testimony that the two cities enjoyed a similar climate and weather to be unbelievable. They characterized his claim to have resided in both cities as made “ridiculous by his statement that there is ice and snow there in the months of September and October, whereas the Weather Bureau records show that ice and snow have never appeared in San Francisco during those months.”
Due to the family’s financial situation, the officials also doubted Gin Foo’s claims to have travelled so frequently between the cities citing the recent death of Wong Shee as an inmate at a local Helena “institution for the indigent” as evidence. Haggerty’s testimony also suggested discrepancies on this subject. In his affidavit, Haggerty claimed that Gin Foo’s mother, Shee, travelled between the two cities annually between 1905 and 1920, but Kim suggested she had only done so once. [19]
Nor could Kim and Gin Foo agree on his number of siblings, officials reported. “His alleged father testifies that [Gin Foo] had two elder brothers,” and one brother followed Gin Foo to Cuba and later died there. Gin Foo told the examiners he had one older brother living in China.[20]
Due to such discrepancies and the lack of a birth certificate, officials denied Gin Foo’s application an outcome, both he and Day expected following the examination. Based on correspondence between Day and Walsh later in May 1930, Gin Foo appealed the decision but did not prevail. Day conveyed the outcome to Kim writing that though he could not “penetrate his stolidity [he seemed] to be satisfied that the applicant shall return to Havana.” Still, Day carried with him continued doubt about “the identity of this applicant at New Orleans.” While he admitted that the variance in Gin Foo’s description of San Francisco and Helena was “very strange,” and understood the decision, but he also wondered why if Kim had sought to bring someone who was not his son into the country, considering the cost and effort, failed to arrange for better, more consistent testimony between the two men. “But such conjectures are idle and we may treat the case as closed,” Day concluded.[21]
A sadness abounds throughout this history. You can feel it in Sand’s correspondence to Arthur, in the poems adorning Angel Island walls, in Day’s letters, Walsh’s pleading regarding Kim’s health, and Gin Foo’s own translated words. Was Gin Foo who he claimed to be? If Day’s reservations regarding the quality of the translators and the stenographer were correct, it is very possible the examiner’s decision was based on very faulty evidence, but the evidence that was produced certainly was not convincing. If he was, Kim had lost his wife, a son in Cuba, and now, in his final years, would be unable to live them out with his son.
Even if Gin Foo was a paper son, it reveals the foolishness of an immigration policy dictated by race and ethnicity. As a human, Gin Foo’s desire to begin anew in America, even amidst the Great Depression testifies to his ambition and determination, the kind of traits Americans value. There is always a certain dolefulness at the heart of immigration, even the most successful immigrants have had to sacrifice family and home in order to achieve their dreams. As one poem writer at Angel Island wrote: “There are tens of thousands of poems composed on these walls. They are all cries of complaint and sadness. The day I am rid of this prison and attain success, I must remember that this chapter once existed.”[22]
[1] Julia Sand to President Chester A. Arthur Regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chester A. Arthur Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[2] Mai Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Jun., 1999), pp. 67-92.
[3] Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 95.
[4] Edward C. Day to T.J. Walsh, September 13, 1929, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[5] T.J. Walsh to Leo J. Keena, September 21, 1929, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[6] T.J. Walsh to Leo J. Keena, October 17, 1929, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[7] Leo J. Keena to T.J. Walsh, October 23, 1929, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[8] J.P. Du Vinage to T.J. Walsh, March 6, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; T.J. Walsh to J.P. Du Vinage, March 11, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[9] T.J. Walsh to J.P. Du Vinage, March 11, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[10] Edward C. Day to Thomas J. Walsh, April 5, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[11] Wong Gin Foo to Wong Kim (translated) with typed annotations by Edward C. Day, March 31, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[12] Wong Gin Foo to Wong Kim (translated) with typed annotations by Edward C. Day, March 31, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[13] Wong Gin Foo to Wong Kim (translated) with typed annotations by Edward C. Day, March 31, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[14] Lee, The Making of Asian America, 98-99.
[15] Edward C. Day to Thomas J. Walsh, April 14, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[16] Edward C. Day to Charles P. Buck, Jr., April 14, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; L.O. Wining, In Re: Wong Gin Foo #55705/101, May 13, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[17] L.O. Wining, In Re: Wong Gin Foo #55705/101, May 13, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[18] L.O. Wining, In Re: Wong Gin Foo #55705/101, May 13, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[19] L.O. Wining, In Re: Wong Gin Foo #55705/101, May 13, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[20] L.O. Wining, In Re: Wong Gin Foo #55705/101, May 13, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[21] Edward C. Day to Thomas J. Walsh, May 20, 1930, Thomas J. Walsh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[22] Lee, The Making of Asian America, 99-100.