The reading this week revealed the insanity that was the 1924 Exclusion Act. First, the hearings served to show exactly what happened in the citizenship cases that came before courts, and evinced the ludicrous process that individuals utilized to support their adherence to the quota rule. One thing that stood out for me in this source was the presence of the bar graph that delineated the order of “Relative Social Inadequacy of the Several Nativity Groups and Immigrant Races in the United States”. Surprisingly Turkey was a close second to Ireland. How on earth did the “officials” arrive at this data? Turkey and Turkish is in no way close to American customs or the English language. Their alphabet did not change to the Latin alphabet until 1928 when Atatürk was in power.

America’s apparent acceptance of Turkish immigrants over others helps to emphasize the facts presented in the second source, and brings into question the extent to which this “scientific evidence” was indeed valid. The census was flawed in many ways, and was a perfect example of how arbitrary “racial formation” was. For example, the issue of defining “white” still posed a problem to the authorities. When first asked, 87 percent of the population stated that they were of English descent. In this instance, the authorities were relying on self-identification, an issue that rose again with Mexican immigrants, as is detailed later. All of this evidence pointing toward the ineffectiveness of the census and other scientific tools begs the question: “What was the point?” It is amazing that so much time and manpower was utilized to close America’s borders to unwelcome guests.  People were spending time to come up with formulas that decided to which race an individual belonged if he or she had parents of different races. Was that information truly necessary to the functionality of American society?

True, there were economic and social factors that contributed to this turn towards exclusion. In 1924, African Americans had started to migrate to northern cities and were starting to upset the “superior” position of white Americans. If the African- Americans were capable of upsetting this balance, why would anything be any different with other races? However, it is at this point that Americans at the time crossed into hazy territory. True, they were trying to assert their power again, but they were choosing to do so in a completely arbitrary manner. What legitimate reason did they have to suspect that, “Japan was conspiring to take California away from white people”? They had once been a nation of immigrants, what gave them the right to close the gates?

Obviously Americans were on the defensive because they felt that “immigration was retarding the natural birthrate of Americans”, yet they did not execute a resolution of their fear in a logical or reasonable manner. Ngai effectively uses her sources in demonstrating the illogical process by which the individuals in power went about formulating immigration law, yet I would have liked to hear more about the reason for America’s paranoia. She touches on the matter a bit, but her explanation leaves me unsatisfied. I would like to find out more about the American frame of mind at the time of the Exclusion Act of 1924. Though she supplies us with many sources from the time, they are all official sources. She gives us what the courts were deciding at the time. Was every American at the time feeling the same way about immigration? If she had added a couple more sources that elucidated on the common American’s view of the policy more of my questions would have been answered.

In reading “Colored White” by David Roediger, I was immediately reminded of my own family. All four of my grandparents had direct ties to immigration. For my paternal grandmother, her grandparents came from Germany and established a bakery in Chicago. My paternal grandfather had relatives who emigrated from Poland. Both my maternal grandmother and grandfather were descendents of Polish immigrants, as well. All four of them were born and raised in Chicago. I’ve heard stories about their experiences growing up and witnessed my maternal grandparents’ attitudes about immigration and race.

Three stories in particular stick out to me. 1) When my dad’s parents started dating, it was a huge deal in their neighborhood (or so my father tells me). I was really confused about this because it was the late 1940s and they were both white. My dad then said “a marriage between a Polish boy and a German girl was like inter-racial marriage back then.” I didn’t really believe that could be possible, but this article definitely cleared up a lot. 2) My maternal grandmother’s father worked for a railroad in Chicago. In the early 1910s, when he was starting to work, my grandfather would lie about his last name (Sieracki) in order to seem less Polish. I don’t recall the exact name he chose, but I believe it was something German or Irish. Again, reading this article cleared a lot of my confusion about this incident. 3) My maternal grandmother, who was born in the late 1930s, is adamantly opposed to African-Americans. I honestly don’t think she’s ever actually met one or had any friends who were black. Additionally, she absolutely loves Barack Obama. However, she has this incredible distrust of African-Americans as a whole. Interestingly, while I deem her behavior incredibly racist, I wouldn’t call my grandma a racist. She was the daughter of Polish laborers. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. By the 1970s, her neighborhood had begun to experience “the white flight”. I maintain, and I’m not defending her actions, that she was basically indoctrinated against African-Americans in much of the same way early Polish and other Eastern European immigrants were. The behaviors documented in Roediger’s article are eerily similar to hers.

The most interesting part of this week’s readings, to me, was the discussion of race and how it was defined. I also was intrigued by how different groups would use certain aspects of the definition to their benefit. The impression that I got from the readings was that race was used mostly to separate, both in good and bad ways. In some ways, race became a way for immigrants to embrace their identity. An immigrant’s native culture may have seemed non-white to people already in the U.S. Had all Europeans been classified as “white”, I wonder if our culture would be the same as it is today. In contrast, ‘whiteness’ was something to strive for and immigrants wanted to be sure the differences between themselves and immigrants from another country, and especially African-Americans, were acknowledged.

I think today that race has a very negative connotation and that it likely developed from the intense feelings and debate surrounding early immigration. In terms of Jacobson’s article, I would disagree with current scholars who say race is essentially made up. I take issue with the fact that their implication immediately assumes there is something bad about having multiple races. I, perhaps naïvely, don’t see a problem in acknowledging different races. I think it is kind of stupid to say that everyone is the same, because clearly there are physical differences among people. I think this only becomes a problem when people fear classification of races and this creates stereotypes and biases against specific types of people. I think history has left the term ‘race’ with a lot of baggage that I wish we could have discarded by now. So, I guess I can see why Jacobson thinks race is made up. However, I would say that it is necessary to be more specific: the implications of race are made up, but the categories and differences are merely inherent parts of humanity.

In my head, ethnicity is not separate from race, but is more like a subcategory of it. It would be interesting to note when exactly the term “ethnicity” became widely used. To me, ethnicity is a lot less strictly defined than race. Consequently, it has a more positive tone. It almost seems to me that as the immigration population increased, ‘ethnicity’ was adopted as a way to keep cultural tradition alive without being penalized for it. People could still be “white” but “ethnic”. I would say this had a lot to do with the continued discrimination against blacks and the need for non-natives and their descendants to be disassociated from them. For example, my previously mentioned relatives were all fairly intolerant of African-Americans, but firmly embraced their Polish and German heritage.

Lee’s work unfolds how the Chinese Exclusion Act served as the seed from which many other branches of American restriction policy grew.  She claims that it “provided the legal architecture for twentieth century American immigration policy.” (24) There are several pieces of Lee’s work that I find telling.  From a scholarly point of view, her use of immigration arrival files from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (only released in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s) lends her work an air of authority.  The photo of her grandparents wedding made this work real for her as she held a physical link to not only her own life, but also photos of the lives of many Chinese immigrants.   “The immigration records allow us to understand the Chinese exclusion era a way that has not been possible before.” (15) These records provide a wealth of new information about the effects of the exclusion act and Lee effectively utilizes them in her study.

Another interesting factor for me was how class played a role in the effects caused by the Exclusion Act.  Lee makes statements about how the Chinese were occasionally treated differently depending on their perceived class.  “Passengers who traveled in first or second class tended to be released on the day of their arrival, whereas third-class passengers…were brought to the detention station.” (87) One of the reasons for this is that if the immigrants were of a higher class, they posed less of a threat in competing against the white man for the manual labor jobs.  Intensive literacy tests were employed to prove high levels of education.  Immigrants were denied entrance based on the presence of calluses of their hands, which led officials to believe there were laborers.  However, she goes on to describe that regardless of this class-consciousness the immigrants were still primarily viewed through the lens of race.  She states that immigrants were primarily “viewed as Chinese…Sometimes class provided protection from racial discrimination; often times it did not.”(87)

Finally, I found the transnational organizations created because of the laws particularly fascinating.   There were many organizations developed to enable the Chinese to enter America, and in a sense they were “simply flow[ing] around the dam.” (191) The transnational businesses that developed to help the Chinese immigrate into America were complex yet exceptionally profitable.  It’s interesting that the Exclusion Act set precedents for both future exclusion practices of the US and future methods for finding ways around the laws and into America.

Caroline Moore

In Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates, the author investigates Chinese immigration in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  At a period when many Americans perceived the massive influx of Chinese immigrants as a threat to their society, their livelihood, and even their so-called “American-ness” (22), the United States government sprang to action to protect its “gates” through the implementation of strict exclusion acts barring immigration.  Prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, no restrictive laws prohibited the immigration of certain groups based on race, ethnicity, and class (24); however, growing fearful of the Chinese and fueled by cultural misconceptions and prejudice about them, the population transformed into one that endorsed nativism and “gatekeeping” (22).  Even in the later years, only when citizens of Chinese descent pledged total and utter allegiance to their “American-ness” through conforming to social norms and practices—while abdicating their “Chinese-ness”—could they remain U.S. residents.  Although Americans sought to preserve racial axes of identity in the country, when this feat became impossible as Chinese citizens took measures to assert their legal status, the best alternative was deemed a Chinese person who emulated whites in dress, knowledge of U.S. history, and through social relations with other whites (106-107).

To countless Americans, Chinese immigrants were seen not as individuals, but as a collective enemy whose habits and customs could potentially destabilize the country as its inhabitants knew it.  Caricatures like “John Chinaman” (166) that circulated through the press illustrated the interchangeability with which Americans viewed Chinese individuals.  According to many, the “strange customs [of the Chinese were going to] pollute America” (166).

In the second half of the work, Lee addresses an interesting paradox that underlies the dichotomy between immigration officials and illegal immigrants.  Paraphrasing Peter Andreas, Lee cites, “illegal immigrants are pursued by the state but are also created by the state” (148).  By imposing such strict laws and harsh regulations on Chinese immigration (or all forms of immigration, for that matter), government and immigration officials simply end up perpetuating patterns of illegal immigration.  The rejection of Chinese immigrants in California ports did not stop them from entering the United States as originally planned; it caused them to seek alternative entryways in places like Canada and Mexico (151).  In effect, the regulatory immigration laws and acts only helped sustain illegal immigration, as people sought various alternative methods to gain entrance.

While I was unfamiliar with Chinese immigration policies and the Exclusion Act before reading Lee’s work, I wish she had devoted more time to what has happened more recently to Chinese immigrants in America.  In an increasingly diverse nation like the U.S., do Chinese people now feel welcome? Were there any sort of reparations made or done to atone for past mistreatment of Chinese citizens?

 Having finished the second half of Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates, I have to say that overall I have mixed feelings. Lee obviously has a lot of passion for discussing immigration history and the Chinese Exclusion Act, given her close ties to the issue, it is completely understandable. While, I find her style and organization throughout the book a little confusing thus less powerful, I found her research, sources, use of primary documents, and use of actual names and dates quite good. She examines a period of racism and discrimination in American that many history books skim or ignore almost completely and I did not find myself surprised when she finished the book discussing US border relations with neighboring Canada and Mexico, and then tied and compared the Chinese Exclusion Act to Mexican immigration of today.

Lee’s sources were impeccable. She has clearly done her research on this topic and is an expert in American immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Act.  Her research has provided her with so many primary documents and source material that she can let the main players and the actual people that were there tell the story and relay the information.  So, Instead of saying many Chinese American citizens were affected by the Chinese Exclusion Act, she can actually provide the reader with an example, Wong Kim Ark, include a picture and tell his story. Describing how government officials would confiscate personal items and photos to store in files and keep as evidence becomes more believable when you can see the numbers and notes scribbles on her grandparent’s actual wedding photo and here her story of uncovering it. She does not have to speculate what certain people may have said or felt, because she has quotes and other written material from them. This really is her strength.

Despite this, her approach threw me off from the beginning of the book. She, throughout the book is a bit unorganized with her thoughts and style. So, it seems sometimes that she is repeating ideas and facts that have already been introduced which grows tiresome and monotonous.

One of the most interesting topics, Lee brings up, is actually the topic of control within the bureaucracy of immigration. It was fascinating learning that the origination of today’s policies began as a way to discriminate and exclude people or certain origins. However what I found most interesting while learning about the  formation of the INS and what has become the USCIS, is her remarks that much of the policies were formed and created by those that worked at Angel’s Island, not those that actually wrote the laws or created them, but with the patrollers and examiners themselves. We often forget that what the law says is not necessarily what is being practiced and that those that implement laws can choose sometimes to implement their own policy. I wish, if anything, Lee would have expanded on this.

From the very beginning of the book, I had a feeling Lee might turn her book into a social commentary on today’s immigration policies, specifically those pertaining to Mexicans. I see, like her, a lot of comparisons. Lee argues, “The immigration service’s methods to deter illegal immigration became the impetus for new immigration strategies” (219). Today many Mexicans find the application process for legal immigration to be complicated, confusing, and expensive and thus this encourages them to seek out other options of entering the United States, just like the Chinese. Although I agree she can be somewhat harsh to the American government’s side and a bit bias when she comes to the immigrants, I can not say I disagree with her. She is obviously passionate about the subject, because of the struggles her grandparents underwent in order to immigrate to the United States. She also chose to tell her story through the lens of the immigrant and for the immigrant. She is obviously not in favor of immigration or the many of the policies we had then and we have now, thus this shapes her story.