The Passport in America: The History of a Document (38 page)

With the introduction of immigration quotas, U.S. citizenship had become an increasingly valuable identity, and therefore the passport became a sought-after document for gaining admission to the United States. While this resulted in the establishment of large-scale enterprises that produced fraudulent U.S. passports or visas (so-called passport “factories” or “mills”), through the 1920s noncitizens outside of the United States regularly attempted to obtain authentic U.S. passports by using fraudulent supporting documents. Multiple types of fake documents were produced to prove citizenship, such as birth certificates, baptismal certificates, marriage certificates, and naturalization certificates.
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Utilizing another strategy, noncitizens acquired authentic versions of these documents and then used fake local documents to falsely link the real citizenship documents to the applicant. In some cases the person originally issued the document had died; in one case a number of original documents were stolen from a local municipal archive.
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The emergence of fake documents exposed the ease with which a document produced an identity as opposed to merely verifying a preexisting identity. Therefore, while the State Department sought to make its passport a more reliable and secure document, the existence of a culture of suspicion directed at noncitizens meant that when they issued a passport abroad, circumstances pushed officials to rely more on the evidence produced by their observation of individuals and less on locally produced supporting documents. Regardless of the documents offered, officials abroad were encouraged to rigorously question suspicious-looking applicants, particularly first time passport applicants with limited or little English.
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Following the purported success of a system of questioning such applicants in Warsaw, the State Department encouraged using another version of the intensive examinations of applicants and identifying witnesses.
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The State Department also used the authority and value of an official’s face-to-face evaluation to argue against the establishment of review boards in the United States to evaluate appeals, particularly for those applicants rejected abroad after President Herbert Hoover instructed the department to more rigorously enforce the broadly defined “public charge” exclusion clause to limit the arrival of new workers in the early 1930s.
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While the move to verify immigrants and documents abroad did lessen the number of inspections at Ellis Island, it did little to alter the problems associated with using documents to police the land border, where officials not
only had to identify people, but they also needed to stake a claim for the actual existence of a border. The articulation of face-to-face observation with locally generated knowledge played out in the enforcement, as opposed to the issuance, of documents, thus producing a different set of tensions for officials, citizens, and potential immigrants. These tensions manifested themselves in the handling of a distinct group that was not encountered at seaports or consulates and embassies: commuters. Unlike with seaports, which existed as a space of transit, people lived along the land borders and regularly crossed them on their way to work. The requirement to identify the people who crossed the border via nationality affected the movement of workers. In these situations, the enforcement of nationality quotas required documents to make practical and visible the identities demarcated in immigration laws. In 1927 a controversy developed on the Canadian border in response to a strategy employed by some unsuccessful European immigrants. These individuals, who had been unable to move to the United States because of nationality quotas, located themselves in Canada close to the U.S. border, where they obtained commuter permits to work in the United States. To curb this practice, all workers who crossed over daily from Canada were defined as immigrants. As a consequence, native-born Canadians were required to get visas, and foreign-born Canadian citizens were to be counted against the quotas of their country of birth. The Department of Labor, and eventually the Supreme Court, refuted various arguments offered in support of the Canadian commuters, including the argument that the act of immigration had to involve a change in domicile.
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The conflict between commuters and attempts to exert sovereignty at the border was more visible on the Mexican border, where it arose for different reasons and was solved in very different ways. Mexicans had historically been racialized as inferior. In 1917 a typhus panic, combined with the Progressive-inspired public bath movement, led to a system in El Paso and other major border towns in which medical inspectors examined and bathed Mexicans who crossed the border. Regular border crossers were issued a bath certificate that verified that the bearer had been “deloused, bathed, vaccinated,” and all their clothing and baggage had been disinfected at least once a week. Embracing this, groups of “habitual bathers” emerged. They were not converts to “modern” standards of hygiene, but individuals dirtying their hands through a little deception. These “bathers” subjected themselves to multiple daily disinfections to obtain certificates, which they then sold to the “unwashed.”
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The bathing requirement was a manifestation of an ongoing colonial mentality
that saw labor needs along the border with Mexico differently from that with Canada. Following the 1924 Immigration Act, the local movement of Mexican labor was viewed through a new cultural and racial lens. Within the act’s increasingly complex understanding of race and nationality, Mexicans were classified as white, but their whiteness was of a very particular form. Mexican immigration was not restricted by an annual quota, but visibly different from white European immigrants, Mexicans who commuted to work in the United States, or crossed the border as “temporary visitors” became the target of immigration inspection. This created the image of the Mexican as
the
illegal immigrant on the southern border.
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Although in this context Mexicans were identified as members of a racial group they could also be identified as specific individuals through local knowledge and the familiarity of personal recognition. In a 1932 report on the Mexican border, some officers were still criticized for not rigorously checking the authenticity of documents; the face of the bearer regularly continued to trump the document.
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Reading personal appearance was in fact required to correctly identify one eligible group—citizens who entered the United States at entry ports along both the northern and southern borders. Although U.S. citizens were not required to carry passports, most citizens who returned on ships from Europe carried passports to fulfill the laws of other nations. This was not the case along the land borders, so in 1929, in an attempt to avoid confusion, individuals were required to offer proof of U.S. citizenship upon request on return from Canada. While it was reported that this was “rigidly enforced at all customs houses,”
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it appeared to be a much more fluid system than that imposed on noncitizens. This did not prevent it from frustrating many U.S. citizens—especially those citizens taking up the increasingly popular pastime of day excursions in cars. Although passports were the preferred document, birth certificates, naturalization papers, and documents issued by the Board of Education to verify voting rights were also listed as acceptable. Drivers’ licenses were not accepted; as officials repeatedly stressed, noncitizens could get a driver’s license. However, officials were apparently confident noncitizens could not be members of clubs or fraternal societies—membership cards for such groups were reportedly often accepted. The rationale for accepting such documents was made clear by the assistant secretary of labor, who told a newspaper reporter that along the Canadian border “the inspectors, well trained in their work, have ways of sizing up an applicant for admission even when the applicant does not possess what would be regarded
as evidence in court.”
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The breadth of this sizing up was explained in a Senate hearing two years later; a Labor Department official argued his staff was adept at recognizing citizens without passports because “an American’s manner of speech, his appearance and bearing betoken the American citizen.”
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Land borders were not exclusively a place of transit, a fact that made the novelty of attempts at rigorous border enforcement visible in numerous ways. The security concerns of the northern border, articulated through a distinct understanding of whiteness, made issues with identifying the actual border more visible and the racial underpinnings of national security less visible than in debates over the Mexican border. The existence of houses built across the international boundary line—so-called line houses—clearly attested to the historical lack of interest in locating and enforcing that line as an international border. In actualizing the metaphor of the land border as the United States’ “back door,” line houses demonstrated the difficulty of enforcing a border in a space where people lived. A 1928
Saturday Evening Post
article informed readers that in houses that straddled Rock Island (now Stanstead), Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, “families cook their food in Canadian kitchens and eat it in American dining rooms.”
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To counter the domestication of the national border by these houses, a row of brass tacks would be nailed to the building’s exterior so authorities of both countries could see “where the line entered the house and where it passed through the rear.”
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The power to officially inspect these houses depended upon which country the building’s front door opened onto.

In the 1920s stories about line houses became a useful way for newspapers and magazines to show the change in the official attitude of the United States to its international boundaries and with it the peacetime requirement for documents. Boundaries were now officially thought of as borders, understood as places to secure the nation against perceived threats. The trumping of a house’s back door by the United States’ “back door” produced what immigration officials labeled “line bound” individuals. One such individual, Arthur Plante, was a Canadian citizen who was considered a U.S. resident by virtue of the fact that the front door of his line house opened into the United States; the boundary line apparently ran
exactly
along the rear of his house. In the late 1920s Plante traveled into Canada, but without getting the documents he now required to return. As a result, U.S. officials denied him entry when he attempted to return home through the nearest official port of entry. Thus, according to the Associated Press, Plante had spent the four years since that ill-fated trip to Canada, still in Canada. That is, he lived in his
woodshed, which was located in Canada. While the woodshed abutted his house, he could not legally enter the backdoor of his American home.
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As recounted in the AP article, Plante’s life in his woodshed represented an ideal for border enforcement in which all parts of the border could apparently be seen by an immigration official. How else to explain Plante’s situation, except through the presence of a permanent official stationed at his property? Another possible explanation provides a second ideal scenario—life in a woodshed without a guard but with respect for the border turns Plante into a poster child for the respect for the border (albeit with equal institutional encouragement). This and other news stories are difficult to make sense of in hindsight. Nonetheless, they are useful to an analysis of early attempts to identify the border through officials and documents. They speak to the cultural confusion and shock over the policing of a national border between Canada and the United States. In the 1920s the boundary line began to matter in ways it had not previously. The attempt to consistently police this “new” border made the line something that people needed to see—not only immigrants, but also those locals who lived close to it, or even on it. The border had to be introduced and understood as a line that could not be crossed without the permission of the federal government. Therefore, these articles collectively performed a pedagogical role in making clear that the “back door” needed to be thought of as a space of exclusion; the boundary line had in fact become a border, not a mere line marked on the land.
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Another symbol of the new border but one that emphasized the limited role of documents was the establishment of a border patrol. Although prior to the 1920s a small force had patrolled the border their job had been merely to compel people crossing the border to go to ports of entry. However, in the 1920s advocates called for a patrol that could apprehend people seeking to illegally cross the border to avoid quota restrictions. In arguing for such a patrol, an immigration official informed a Congressional hearing that “a port of entry is the last place in the world that an alien seeking to come in… would approach;” instead,