The Passport in America: The History of a Document (37 page)

Wartime practices of administrative surveillance produced an understanding of identity as a problem of information, particularly its collection and circulation. After the war the individuals that officials sought to expose through information changed from German spies to political agitators, specifically Bolsheviks and anarchists, but the public pronouncements of the success of documentary surveillance remained the same. A belief in the rigorous collection of information at the point of application continued to generate the confidence that passport control could capture individual identity and thus keep the United States safe. President Wilson urged the peacetime continuation of the visa system for aliens, arguing that it worked to “exclude practically all persons whose admission to the United States would be dangerous or contrary to the public interest.”
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In 1919 a correspondent for the
New York Times
celebrated the difficulties individuals encountered with U.S. passport and visa requirements (note that “passport” continued to be the catch-all label for state-issued travel documents): “Only a man who has struggled to get a passport on his way back to the United States can sense to the full the trouble which the present wartime regulations make. It is easier for the camel to get through the needle’s eye than it is for the Red to escape the vigilance of our Consuls abroad at the present time.”
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However, in 1920 the chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs told a hearing that it was well known that the visa investigation and interview was “extremely imperfect.” For him this was specifically due to the limits of a U.S. official’s local knowledge when “strangers” arrived in a town and applied for a visa; a more lax peacetime attitude to the compilation of suspect lists also contributed to this situation.
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The continuing use of passports and visas at the U.S. border after the end of the war occurred in a period of transition in both official and public understanding of the consequences and implications of official attempts to document identity. While the need for these documents at the border seemed to be recognized, questions about the system remained: Who exactly should be required to carry these documents? Who should issue them? How should they be issued? One important debate centered on whether passport requirements should continue for both citizens and aliens. At a 1919 House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing, senior State Department official Wilbur Carr made explicit what he considered the impracticalities of partial documentary requirements at the border:

If Americans are not going to have some sort of document to enable them to get onto a steamer, it does not seem clear to me how it is going to be possible to distinguish between the two, because there are many aliens and many Americans who can not be distinguished by any other means, except some kind of proof which they can carry with them.

A member of the committee endorsed this concern with the following question, which highlighted the perceived redundancy of prewar border identification methods: “How do you distinguish whether the man is an American citizen or not, if all he has to do is say ‘I am an American citizen,’ and not produce a passport?” This question remained unanswered, aside from a somewhat ambiguous comment from the committee chair that “of course in all laws of that kind that is merely a matter of proof.”
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Outside of the need for information, officials who wanted to maintain passports understood the border as a place where trust or leaps of faith should not be used as part of identification practices. People could no longer be relied upon to verify the identity that officials needed to establish; that role belonged to documents. In contrast, for those who sought to abolish passports, some individuals could still apparently be trusted, and, similarly, an element of faith remained in the utility of personal appearance in the verification of identity. To eliminate passports only for U.S. citizens indicated a belief that the body could provide the necessary proof of citizenship; that someone akin to the Supreme Court’s “average man” could tell a “true” white man from a nonwhite man and, by implication, a U.S. citizen from an alien. But Carr’s comments, referring as they did to naturalized citizens, emphasized that the conflation of whiteness/
nationality and nonwhiteness/foreignness that grounded this form of verification was being increasingly eroded. Although this presented a problem to which universal identification documents at the border appeared to offer a solution, in 1921, two years after this hearing, Congress dropped the requirement that citizens have passports to leave or enter the United States. Concerns over the extent to which peacetime passport requirements would limit the assumed right of citizens to travel abroad (a problem Carr had acknowledged in his testimony in 1919) and the burgeoning Red Scare provided sufficient rationales to get rid of a universal requirement for passports at the U.S. border but retain it for aliens; in 1920 the requirement for aliens to have a departure permit was also removed.
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The Passport Control Act was revoked as part of a joint congressional resolution that repealed all wartime measures. Although Congress had appropriated money for the continuation of the consular viasing of passports, it was initially thought that without the Passport Control Act there was no longer any authority for the consular visa system. However, the attorney general “clarified” that a provision in the diplomatic and consular appropriation act provided the legal underpinning for the United States to demand visas from aliens.
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The belief that documents could keep specific individuals out of the United States still did not translate into the recognition that to achieve this, official identification on a large-scale had to occur within a system of clearly demarcated administrative authority. This was evident in the system in which visas were issued abroad by representatives of the State Department under criteria distinct from those used by representatives of the Labor Department to assess the right of entry at the U.S. border. The frustrated chief of the Visa Division (created in the State Department in 1919) informed a shocked congressional hearing in early 1921 that although a consul could attempt to exercise discretion and not issue a visa to a leper (excluded under immigration law), if the consul was not emphatic enough, and the leper insisted, the consul would have to grant a visa.
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Or, as the State Department put it to a confused letter writer, a U.S. official abroad could only be of “assistance to an applicant in determining his admissibility” under immigration law.
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State Department officials were clear that the visa system existed for the sole purpose of “shutting out anarchists and Bolsheviks.”
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To assess and possibly refuse an alien under the immigration act would “trespass upon the prerogatives of the Department of Labor.”
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However, an informal system was introduced that sanctioned a small degree of intrusion. Consuls occasionally alerted immigration inspectors to possible grounds for exclusion through a
set of symbols written on a visa that represented categories of exclusion.
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In a similar act of cooperation, immigration inspectors were told that if an individual was admissible under immigration law but arrived without a visa, he or she could not be admitted without State Department approval.
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This problem became even more acute following the introduction of immigration restriction based on nationality in 1921.
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Temporary annual quotas were set at a maximum of 3% of a total nationality present in the United States according to the 1910 census.
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However, the 1921 Immigration Act did not provide for the issuance of a document to verify admission. This became a significant administrative problem because the act departed from the formal guiding principle of individual selection to restrict immigration on a group basis.
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Although immigration had arguably been
enforced
prior to the war through the articulation of individuals to group identities, it had been legally
defined
in terms of assessing individuals based on their ability to be productive citizens. After 1921, while the preexisting criteria relating to disease and morality remained, an individual’s right to entry was initially assessed based on their nationality, bounded by the specific number of nationals allowed under the annual quota; a criterion the informal system of symbols could not assist in ascertaining.

Therefore, the federal government attempted once again to have steamship companies compensate for the limitations of U.S. administration and bureaucracy abroad. Steamship officials continued to “inspect” alien ticket buyers to avoid fines for bringing ineligible immigrants to the United States, and most steamship companies required non-U.S. citizens to have visas. However, the two shipping conferences that ran the trans-Atlantic route did not have a system to administer ticket sales on the basis of nationality, especially when aliens crossing U.S. land borders also contributed to monthly quota numbers.
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Therefore, no centralized bureaucracy existed, officially or unofficially, to coordinate ticket sales with the numbers of immigrants allowed to enter the United States under nationality quotas in any given month—a maximum of 20% of a nation’s annual quota. As a result, quotas were regularly filled soon after the beginning of the month. The commissioner at Ellis Island claimed that it was not unusual for inspectors to admit five thousand immigrants in one day, and consequently fill the monthly quota for eight nations before the month was seventy-two hours old.
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The most powerful symbol of this mismanagement of the border occurred when steamships failed in their “midnight races” to be the first to arrive on the first day of each month. On August 31, 1923, four steamships slightly miscalculated their arrival at New
York, or what a newspaper called the “imaginary line between Fort Wadsworth and Fort Hamilton”; port officials recorded their arrivals at 11:54
P.M
., 11:55
P.M
., 11:57
P.M
., and fifteen seconds before midnight.
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As the ships had failed to arrive on September 1, the immigrants on board were counted against the already-filled August quota. While the Labor Department fined the ships’ owners $200 for each over-quota immigrant on board, the Secretary of Labor ultimately used his discretion to admit those passengers subject to the quota on humanitarian grounds.
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This discretionary treatment was not always applied in less spectacular cases. In 1923–24 aliens who arrived after quotas had been filled comprised 40% of excluded immigrants at Ellis Island, albeit part of the mere 3.3% of alien arrivals who were rejected at the border.
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The writers of the 1924 Immigration Act sought to utilize a more efficient documentary system to rigorously administer the border.
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Section 2(f) of the act gave consuls authority to inspect individuals as potential immigrants. The act required immigrants to have an “immigration visa” issued by consuls prior to their departure to the United States; nonimmigrant aliens had to have their passports visaed per the existing law. The administration of quotas was centralized in each quota country through the principle consular officer, who generally established waiting lists; the reduction of monthly quota maximums to 10% of the annual total further assisted in making the system more efficient.
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Therefore, an official could refuse a visa on the grounds that either the monthly or annual quota had been filled. A successful immigrant visa application form became the visa when an official signed it, stamped it, and attached it to a passport. Immigration inspectors at Ellis Island quickly came to accept this visa as proof of a thorough inspection.
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By the 1930s less than 5% of immigrants who arrived at the port of New York were sent to Ellis Island for inspection. This amounted to a daily average of only three hundred immigrants. These individuals were most frequently sent for further inspection because they were considered potential “public charges,” or because their sponsoring relatives were not at the port; it was less common that their papers were out of order. Ultimately, an annual average of 0.2% of immigrants with visas were refused entry. In the first four years of enforcement, this equaled 2,783 rejected immigrants out of a four-year total of 1,182, 213 arrivals.
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The medical inspection of immigrants by PHS doctors at foreign ports further enhanced the perceived reliability of overseas inspection.
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However, PHS doctors could only report on the health of immigrants, the authority to reject a visa remained exclusively the State Department official’s.