The Passport in America: The History of a Document (32 page)

Although the body was considered more reliable than a document, Chinese arrivals could manipulate the bodily evidence deemed “essential” to determining their right to enter the United States. While documents could be passed from hand to hand, the identity read from a body could also be passed from body to body. Race reduced to skin color allowed Chinese laborers to “pass” successfully into the United States, especially outside of San Francisco. In the 1910s and 1920s, government officials uncovered an apparently common strategy of “painting the Chinese black,” either to disguise them as part of steamship crews docking in New Orleans, or to “disguise the Chinamen as negroes after they had arrived in Mobile, Alabama.”
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In 1907 an immigrant inspector reported on Chinese who had used fake Mexican citizenship certificates to enter the United States. He expressed surprise that it was “exceedingly difficult to distinguish these Chinamen from Mexicans.”
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Other Chinese laborers, after being schooled in Mexico on appropriate language and manners, entered successfully under the false status of either U.S. citizens or merchants.
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The ability to manipulate the signs of race and class used
to identify a “Chinaman” indicate that while a faith in visual symbols and markers remained possibly the most effective form of verification, it could not guarantee successful identification, or even consistent identification.
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However, immigration officials considered it less fallible than documents. That is, they trusted the authority of their own perceptions over the authority of unknown officials represented in a document, especially a documented presented by a person who belonged to a racial group they did not trust.

However at the turn of the century, some officials had become frustrated with the system used to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. For many senior officials the problem lay with the acts, which had created laws “as fragmentary, inefficient, and unreasonable as might be possible to suppose.”
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While the discretion of officials continued to be important for restricting Chinese immigration, from the early years of the century an increasing faith in record-keeping practices (if not in documents carried by Chinese) developed. From this period on the actions of officials (in the United States and as previously noted in China) became more closely restricted by a system of standardized forms and cross-referenced files. In the United States the implementation of more coherent rules associated with Chinese exclusion, including record-keeping practices, began to increase in rigor after its administration was moved to the Bureau of Immigration, initially under the Treasury Department in 1903 and then the Department of Labor and Commerce in 1905. Beyond assessing the information in any particular case, immigration officials worked to standardize and routinize the collection, classification, and storage of information.
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Prior to this a file on a Chinese arrival was usually less than five pages and offered little if any attempt to reconcile evidence. Inspectors did not use a standardized set of questions; therefore comparison between “interviews” or files was of little use. The early fragmented nature of the administration of exclusion had left many blanks in the memory of the state, as different ports followed different procedures and each used a unique filing system. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed City Hall and, with it, the birth certificates of many Chinese—an event that allowed Chinese to claim exemption through a birth certificate purportedly lost in the destruction of City Hall.

With limited faith in the reliability of documents already issued, Chinese immigrants were interviewed several times. The search for discrepancies through a comparison of answers from these interviews became critical to the assessment of any claims the prospective immigrants made. The assumptions behind the harsh questioning were twofold. Officers had genuine difficulty
verifying information Chinese offered, and they generally believed most Chinese were attempting to enter illegally. Unlike the use of manifests in the two-minute cross-examination at Ellis Island, the appeal to consistency to verify truth led to the creation of a complex bureaucratic structure. Intensive examinations became particularly critical for evaluating claims of paternity to expose “paper families.” These “families” were produced when, after returning to China, a man exempt from exclusion through U.S. citizenship would sell his status as a “father” to other men, who could then enter the United States as the child of a U.S. citizen. (It is estimated that in 1950 nearly 25% of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. had illegally entered as paper children.) Official questioning focused increasingly on the “son’s” life in China in an attempt to discover inconsistencies with subsequent interviews with, or the files of, other “family” members. By the end of the 1920s, standardized forms, along with an improved indexing system, meant that inspectors were able to efficiently cross-check a “son’s” answers with those provided in any previous interview with other purported family members, even if those interviews had taken place several years earlier and at another immigration office. The Chinese immigration archive was such that in a typical case twelve other files would be pulled for comparison, each containing a single-spaced typed manuscript around thirty pages long, and a multipage explanation of the decision, all prepared in anticipation of subsequent retrieval.
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However, even within an administrative system that relied on documents to verify truth through consistency, officials made extensive use of other techniques to establish the veracity of claims; especially as officials correctly believed that many Chinese arrived in the United States having received considerable coaching on the relationships in their “paper family.” Thus age, often a key fact in establishing paternity claims, was verified by considering facial and/or body hair, teeth, and genitalia. Expertise was sought in the form of opinions from doctors and the occasional use of X-rays to analyze bones. In less scientific ways, an inspector’s visual assessment of physical appearance also continued to be important in these examinations: the analysis of demeanor and appearance to determine if an immigrant was lying, and the attempt to establish family resemblance through comparison with any relatives, either present or represented in photographs in the retrieved files.
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While there is not a clear consensus among historians as to the balance between discretion and bureaucratic control, inspector discretion in the form of reading bodies and personal appearance continued to play some kind of role in the processing of Chinese immigrants.
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This was in response to the very system
of documentation introduced to limit discretion, a product of both the lack of faith in documents issued outside of the administrative reach of the United States and because of the manipulation of documents by Chinese.

Given the underlying distrust in the usefulness of documents to identify individuals, it is perhaps fittingly ironic that the first use of passports to limit immigration to the United States occurred in a context that defined itself, at least rhetorically, through trust. From 1906 to 1908 the United States and Japanese governments exchanged a series of diplomatic notes that came to be known as the “Gentlemen’s Agreement”—an accord in which the Japanese agreed not to issue passports to laborers, in an attempt to prevent them entering the United States. The restriction on passports to the U.S. mainland had been part of a more informal agreement made in 1900, but in this second version the Japanese government promised to enforce it rigorously. The U.S. government facilitated that enforcement through an executive order that prevented noncitizens (Japanese) using neighboring countries or insular possessions (Hawaii) to enter the U.S. mainland.
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The passport restricted immigration within its recognized legal boundaries; that is, as a letter between two states. State Department officials could trust the passport within a mode of diplomatic accommodation. Adopting this agreement between “gentlemen” in place of an exclusion act originated in part in President Roosevelt’s recognition of a public demand to limit Japanese immigration and his belief that the Japanese were racially different, but not racially inferior—the Japanese victory over the Russian navy in 1905 appears to have been an important factor in this judgement.
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However, the immigration officials who had to enforce the new diplomatic arrangement saw a Japanese passport as no more trustworthy than any document issued under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The problem with identification documents for U.S. immigration officials once again stemmed from their lack of trust in the authorities who issued passports under the Gentlemen’s Agreement. While this mistrust was undoubtedly racial, these documents could not even be issued under the veneer of official bureaucratic objectivity that was beginning to be applied to Chinese exclusion documents at this time. As with most states at the turn of the century, the Japanese government lacked a sufficient offshore bureaucracy to adequately police exemptions to the agreement, primarily Japanese laborers who were U.S. residents along with their family members.
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In the
absence of its own representatives, the Japanese government utilized local Japanese associations to determine the socioeconomic status of Japanese in the U.S., to record marriages and births, and, crucially, to ascertain if a man had the right to bring his wife to the United States. The associations introduced an arbitrary figure of $800 in savings as necessary financial support for a wife—the annual income of a railroad worker, a common Japanese occupation, was $677. To fulfill this requirement, assets were pooled into “show money” with the result that, the same $800 could provide travel documents for a number of female relatives.
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Skepticism about the origin of these documents translated into distrust when they were presented to U.S. border officials.

The doubt U.S. border officials felt toward identification documents also included the U.S. passport. A passport was challenged on the grounds of its uncertain legal authority at the U.S. border and the lack of belief that it could accurately identify an individual. This was the source of a dispute between the State Department, which issued passports, and the Department of Commerce and Labor, which had the responsibility of enforcing immigration regulations. The attempts of some Chinese to enter the country as U.S. citizens initiated the first significant debate between the two departments about the U.S. passport. A second case centered on the need for naturalized citizens to identify themselves after the Immigration Bureau introduced a requirement that steamship companies provide a manifest of citizens as well as aliens.

Although Chinese could not be naturalized, the Supreme Court clarified the status of Chinese born in the United States when it recognized Chinese birthright citizenship in 1898.
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Soon after the decision, the State Department began to forward all Chinese applications for passports to the immigration officials in the Treasury Department, in recognition of an assumed expertise in dealing with Chinese. When the newly formed Department of Commerce and Labor took control of Chinese exclusion, it discontinued this practice on the grounds that its Immigration Bureau budget did not contain an appropriation for it, and more significantly, on the belief that immigration officials could legally determine citizenship only in regards to reentry, not evaluate the initial fact of citizenship.
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However, in an effort to maintain authority at the border, immigration officials required that passports issued to Chinese carry a disclaimer that they did not guarantee entry to the United States. This
ended two years later when, in 1905, recently appointed Secretary of State Elihu Root had this “unseemly” notation removed. Root refused to accept that passports issued under his authorization should be “discredited by the officers of another Executive department.”
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