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Through the Back Door: Evading the Chinese Exclusion Act along the Niagara Frontier, 1900 to 1924
WILLIAM H. SIENER
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IN 1914 JOHN CLARK, the U.S. immigration commissioner in Montreal, dubbed Canada and the St. Lawrence River valley "the back door route" for immigrants to the United States. Others had argued previously that stronger steps should be taken to guard the back door. In 1891 O. L. Spaulding, acting secretary of the Treasury, complained that "an increasing number of aliens are now landing at Canadian ports and then entering the United States by Rail, thus practically avoiding all effective scrutiny." U.S. officials repeatedly accused Canadian steamship and railroad companies and even Canadian Customs authorities of conspiring to evade American immigration laws to bring undesirable immigrants to the United States by way of the St. Lawrence and inland ports of entry. The U.S. government was also concerned that Canadian routes might be used to avoid American quarantines against infectious diseases.1 |
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Clark's concern is indicative of both the importance of the transnational regional economy of the Buffalo-Niagara region and of the rise of a racialized, anti-immigrant ideology in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as now, a binational social and commercial community existed along the Niagara Frontier. It was, and is, a prime border crossing, closely linked to the U.S. and Canadian industrial heartlands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Buffalo was a major population, transportation, and industrial center, driven by the massive Lackawanna Steel plant and related manufacturing operations in the foundry, machine parts, automobile, aircraft, and electrochemical industries. Railroads touted the route through Buffalo and southern Ontario as the shortest route between the United States' East Coast and midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit. Flour milling and meatpacking contributed significantly to the economy. Five hundred freight trains departed daily.2 It was the third most important destination for Canadians migrating to the United States. Buffalo's iron and steel plants and its agricultural implement and vehicle manufacturers attracted significant numbers of professionals, management, and semiskilled workers in addition to laborers from nearby Canadian cities like Toronto and Hamilton and from the more distant Montreal.3 In 1900, 16.5 percent of Buffalo's foreign-born population was Canadian. Only the German- and Polish-born populations were greater. Of the 17,242 Canadian-born Buffalonians, almost 96 percent were Anglo-Canadians.4 |
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Ordinary travel between the United States and Canada involved large numbers of workers going back and forth between homes in Buffalo and jobs in Canada. Structural steel workers, railroad laborers, and cannery workers crossed the border for jobs in Bridgeburg, Ontario; Shipyard, Ontario, two miles downstream; and other small towns on the Niagara Peninsula. As many as two hundred workers at a time took shuttle trains from Buffalo to Bridgeburg each day. The official charged with monitoring Chinese immigrants, Chinese Inspector Harry Landis, reported that 2,700 cannery workers made eight thousand trips across the border each year. A newly opened blast furnace in Port Colborne was expected to further increase the volume of cross-border commuting, as was the expansion of the Welland Canal. In addition to passenger traffic, railroad freight traffic was enormous. Over twenty thousand freight cars from the western United States, and still more originating in Canada, crossed the border at Niagara Falls in 1912.5 |
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