[On Valentine’s
Day, I gave a Fitchburg
State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to
Define America. These histories and stories couldn’t be more important
to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some
of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual
non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American
history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a
crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
On the extension
of the Chinese Exclusion Act that went significantly further.
As I wrote in
this piece, the first for my biweekly Considering
History column for the Saturday
Evening Post, the earliest national immigration laws (such as the 1875 Page
Act and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) were designed not only to limit future
arrivals from particular targeted nations, but also and especially to destroy
existing American families and communities. To quote myself for a moment, “Many
elements of these discriminatory first immigration laws were created precisely
to disrupt both new and existing immigrant American families, and through them
communities deemed less desirable or less ‘American.’” The Chinese Exclusion
Act in particular, with features such as the stripping
of citizenship from all Chinese Americans who had gained it—and with a
follow-up law, the 1888
Scott Act, that made it illegal for nearly all Chinese Americans to leave
the country and then attempt to return—, was overtly intended to make it nearly
impossible for the more than 100,000 current Chinese Americans to remain in the
United States.
The Exclusion
Act was originally created to be in effect for ten years, but it was extended for
another decade by the 1892
Geary Act. Yet the Geary Act did not simply extend the policy of exclusion
and its existing corollaries; it added another, far more insidious and
destructive new policy as well. Section 6 made it “the duty of all Chinese
laborers within the limits of the United States … to apply to the collector of
internal revenue of their respective districts, within one year after the
passage of this act, for a certificate of residence,” and noted that any
laborer who did not do so within one year of the law’s passage would be
determined to be illegally present in the United States and could be deported.
Moreover, in order to secure such a certificate “to the satisfaction of the
court” in cases where their identification was absent or questioned, these
Chinese Americans would require the support of “at least one credible white
witness,” making clear how closely this policy of identification papers was
tied to an overtly white supremacist vision of American identity.
Given the role
that documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards, and driver’s
licenses have come to play in 20th and 21st century
American life, the Geary Act’s creation of the “certificate of residence”
document for Chinese Americans might not seem quite as dramatic as it in fact
was in the late 19th century, when such collective documentation was
largely unheard of and represented a dramatic federal invasion into the lives
and communities of these Chinese Americans. Yet even in later eras when federal
documents became more common, there would of course remain a world of
difference between documents shared by all Americans and ones overtly intended to
identify members of a particular community as distinct from—and really outside—the
rest of the American community. The certificate of residence did just that,
marking these Chinese Americans as fundamentally separate from—and, given that “credible
white witness” line among other factors, clearly lesser than—their fellow
Americans. In a very real way, then, the Geary Act sought to exclude Chinese
Americans more than any of the era’s other discriminatory laws; fortunately, as
with all of my week’s focal moments and exclusionary efforts, it did not
succeed at doing so.
Last
anti-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?
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