| Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chines Exclusion in the United States and China | The American Historical Review, 108.2

Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China

ADAM MCKEOWN

The Chinese exclusion laws, enforced from 1882 to 1943, are a well-trodden subject in U.S. history. Anti-Chinese movements, congressional debates, diplomatic complications, and Supreme Court decisions surrounding exclusion were key aspects of the legal, social, and political construction of the United States as a white republic fortified against biological and cultural contamination.¹ This scholarship offers many insights into the dynamics of race, migration, and nation in the United States, but it is only the tip of the iceberg in understanding the significance of these laws. Chinese exclusion is commonly likened to erecting a wall or guarding a gate. Its enforcement was a much more complex encounter, in which social order, truth, and power were asserted through ritualized action.

Control of movement on the basis of broad categories such as race, culture, language, geographic origin, occupation, or status is nothing new in world history. The Chinese exclusion laws were more pioneering in their goal of sifting through migrants one by one and applying a status to each that determined his or her right to enter. Race was the broad framework of exclusion, but the original laws specifically barred entrance only to Chinese laborers—a shifting category that eventually included all Chinese except a few carefully defined "exempt" classes of merchants, teachers, students, travelers, diplomats, and their families. The greatest task of exclusion work was not merely to impede entry but to distinguish between those individuals allowed to move freely and those who were not. The original lawmakers had little premonition of the difficult task they were creating, and the resulting administrative behemoth expanded far beyond anything they had ever imagined.

The refinement of exclusion techniques was part of larger trends in scientific management and administrative expansion accompanying industrialization in the United States and around the world. The experience of Chinese exclusion shaped the administrative nuts and bolts of much subsequent U.S. immigration policy.² Court decisions regarding exclusion are still landmark statements on the qualifications and rights of citizenship, the powers of the state to define and exclude aliens, and the assertion of national sovereignty over international treaties.³ Exclusion and bureaucratic administration also expanded along with empire at the turn of the century. Over loud objections from businesspeople, churches, foreign diplomats, the State Department, and natives of newly acquired territories, the exclusion laws were rapidly implemented in the new possessions acquired in 1898 and bequeathed to Cuba as a legacy of conquest.⁴ Chinese exclusion and bureaucratic growth were inseparable from each other, and from U.S. expansion in world affairs.

Remarkably, given their key role in the development of immigration procedure, the exclusion laws failed to achieve much of what they were intended to do. They attained some success in limiting the numbers of Chinese entering the United States, but they were a resounding failure in the more ambitious task of determining the status of each applicant. Even immigration agents estimated that 70 to 90 percent of Chinese immigrants gained entry on the basis of fraudulent claims, despite rejection rates of 4–8 percent at U.S. ports.⁵ In the words of the commissioner general of immigration, these "statutes, which, strangely enough, have been called 'exclusion laws' ... often fail to exclude those clearly within their inhibitions."⁶ The complex machinery, exhaustive investigations, and extensive records designed to establish "true" claims and prohibit fraudulent entry actually served to create, systematize, and facilitate fraud. This was more than mere bureaucratic inertia. Intensive administrative reform from 1898 to 1905 aggressively systematized the procedures that produced this fraud, and officials continued to justify adherence to these exhaustive and exasperating procedures after 1905 as necessary to discover fraud.

Something in the procedure itself, beyond the goals explicitly stated in regulations and legislation, gave meaning and power to the enforcement of exclusion. The significance of exclusion techniques can be best understood in terms of efficacious ritual action. Rituals are a potent means of orchestrating social and power relations.⁷ A powerful ritual engages people emotionally, socially, and physically in a structured relationship. These relationships are embedded in a cosmic order that simultaneously transcends, reflects, and promises to bring significance to the sullied, ad hoc arrangements of everyday human society. Along the way, it can order and harmonize social relations and ideologies that appear to be in tension in daily life. Participants are not merely convinced of the truth of the social or cosmic order embodied by the ritual, they actively experience that truth. The actions, utterances, and symbols that are subject to diverse interpretations and contradiction in everyday life are not simply resolved by a well-performed ritual but entwined into the fabric of a larger cosmic order. In the words of Catherine Bell,

Ritualization does not embrace the lived tensions and values of social life as just one set of terms among others in its taxonomic elaborations. Rather, as the very drawing of a privileged opposition ..., ritualization subjects these tensions, terms, and social bodies to a change in status, or problematic. People do not take a social problem to ritual for a solution. People generate a ritualized environment that acts to shift the very status and nature of the problems into terms that are endlessly retranslated in strings of deferred schemes. The multiplication and orchestration of such schemes do not produce a resolution; rather, they afford a translation of immediate concerns into the dominant terms of the ritual. The orchestration of schemes implies a resolution without ever defining one ... In seeing itself as responding to an environment, ritualization interprets its own schemes as impressed upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the immediate human community itself ... Ritual practices never define anything except in terms of the expedient relationships that ritualization itself establishes among things, thereby manipulating the meaning of things by manipulating their relationships.⁸

Exclusion procedure did more than just classify Chinese immigrants. It asserted a vision of properly ordered global social relationships, a vision that was inseparable from the failures and contradictions inherent in its enforcement, as well as the routine determinations that were the result of nearly every immigration case.

Many studies have already analyzed a variety of secular activities in terms of ritual, from habits of personal interaction and consumption to labor negotiations, sports events, and government ceremonies.⁹ The very expansiveness of this work has provoked criticism that the concept of ritual has become so diffuse as to be useless as an analytic tool, and that it should be reserved for activities that are clearly set off from everyday life and characterized by an attempt to form a relationship with the sacred.¹⁰ Although portions of immigration procedure were set apart by oaths, incarceration, and special rooms where participants took up particular bodily positions in relation to each other, it would be hard to argue that participants saw themselves as engaged in anything other than a mundane, secular activity. Analytic attempts to delimit ritual activity to a distinct sacred realm, however, undermine some of the very arguments their proponents try to make about its significance in cultural life. The more effective a ritual, the less it is isolated from worldly concerns. When a ritual is experienced as an activity set apart from common knowledge about the world, it risks decay into an irrelevant, empty ceremony. Even an explicitly sacred ritual gains vitality from its entwinement with the mundane.

More fruitful than distinguishing between ritual and non-ritual activity is to apply the insights of ritual analysis to any action with pervasive formalized characteristics. Many (but by no means all) previous attempts to analyze secular rituals have focused on public displays and mass gatherings. They often suffer from simple understandings of ritual as means to facilitate social bonding, build predictability into social relations, or display state power. But not all ritualized activity is performed in public view, and not all rituals produce a sense of solidarity. Hierarchy, distinction, transformation, and the significance of mundane, expedient activities are also enacted through strategic ritualized activity. Rational administrative activity and ritual are not necessarily opposed to each other. For example, imperial Chinese scholars and officials expressed consistently divergent opinions about the nature and use of ritual, often debating whether they had supernatural or instrumental social effects. But nearly all were convinced that ritual was critical to effective rulership, and they manipulated it in the context of practical, goal-oriented statecraft, both as a tool that could be used for social and political ends and as a reality that shaped the very possibilities of practical politics.¹¹

Modern industrial societies are littered with the ghosts of rituals now deemed little more than empty ceremonies, remnants of a superstitious past. Secular society justifies itself as the creation of social structures based on rationalized efficiency. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, we tend to accept Max Weber's explanation that

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs—these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration. ¹²

Assertions like these better describe the ideology of modern bureaucracy than the practice. To be sure, bureaucracies can be highly effective and rationalized organizations, especially when a clear-cut goal can be measured in terms of profit or production. It is hard to imagine the expansion of complex industrial societies without bureaucracies, but we have so many examples of bureaucratic inertia that it is hard to accept organizational efficiency as their only goal and function. Weber was closer to the mark when describing his unease with the rise of modern bureaucratic power as an oppressive embodiment of the capitalist transformation of social relations into "objective" and calculable market relations. The drive to realize an uncontestable "natural" order is precisely what many ritual acts strive for. The fact that many analysts read Weber as a proponent of European superiority despite his grave misgivings highlights the seductive power of seeing modern bureaucracies as somehow tapped into the cosmic secrets of scientific human organization and development. An analysis of everyday activities in terms of ritual practices can give us a glimpse into the cultural ordering that produces our own convictions about what is proper and efficacious.

In 1903, the commissioner general of immigration, reflecting on the prevalence of fraudulent Chinese cases, worried that exclusion enforcement would degenerate into "merely an idle ceremony enacted at our seaports."¹³ How did he make the distinction between rational procedures that ascertained the truth of each applicant's claims and "idle ceremony"? When discussing means of communication between bureaucrats and with the public, the commissioner general and other officials consistently emphasized propriety, bearing, standardized channels, and formalized language as indispensable aspects of behavior. Administrators were clearly aware that power and privileged access to truth lay in the achievement of precision, order, unity, predictability, and continuity through procedure. The distinction between rationalized procedure and idle ceremony was not an attack on ceremony per se but on inappropriate ceremonies in which the Bureau of Immigration could not account for all activity. As we shall see, the reforms instituted from 1898 to 1905 abolished neither ceremony nor fraud, but they did create a thorough framework for intensely ritualized behavior that certainly could not be called "idle."

Lucy Salyer's Laws Harsh as Tigers, a superlative account of exclusion and the shaping of modern immigration law, explains the growth of proceduralism as a means to produce more uniform decisions and protect the Bureau of Immigration from attack. Her analysis is very convincing, but it does not exhaust the multiplicity of meanings and oppositions embodied in the enforcement of exclusion. The exclusion laws were rooted in the assumption of a world divided politically between sovereign nations and socially between distinct races. At the same time, certain individuals, defined by wealth, education, occupation, and character, had the right to move across national boundaries because they promoted the general well-being of mankind. All sovereign peoples had a right to protect themselves from "invasion" by others, but interference in the affairs of another sovreign nation could be justified if universal or "civilized" standards of justice were not being upheld. Yet justice demanded that all peoples should be treated equally regardless of differences, a goal most surely attained through the impartial rule of law. Even when the laws were broadly discriminatory, impartial procedures applied to all individual cases were necessary to determine which individuals were subject to discrimination. Professional and expert bureaucrats isolated from the temptations of profit, commerce, and factionalism were the best means of attaining impartial determinations (an assertion that was highly contested outside of bureaucratic circles). Thus immigration agents and consuls came to resent and oppose the interference of lawyers and merchants in their deliberations, at the same time as they believed that their primary duties included upholding the law and promoting commerce.

Justice, race, nation, class, commerce, individual rights, and the needs of mankind all made conflicting claims on the enforcement of exclusion. Much scholarship has already elaborated on the importance of race and sovereignty in the construction of exclusion.¹⁴ In these works, opposed positions have generally been presented as differing viewpoints in public debates. These debates were not resolved by the enactment of exclusion. Rather, they became institutionalized in the procedures and innumerable daily encounters of exclusion enforcement. They also adjusted to include the participation of innumerable lawyers, brokers, and individual migrants. Fraudulent applicants consistently passed through the Bureau of Immigration sieve, appearing to defeat the bureaucrats at their own game. But in the end, immigration bureaucrats defined the very arena and rules of encounters through their control of the terms of race, nation, legality, and status that made entry possible. To penetrate that boundary was not to join a new community but to be marked as marginal beings. Migrants became both racialized others within the United States and members of dispersed and illegitimate migrant networks in a world where the terms of participation were dominated by nation-states and their territorial bureaucracies. When understood merely as routinization, the encounters between immigration agents and Chinese migrants appear absurd. When treated as ritualized activity, they can be understood as a means of orchestrating universal and particularistic social relations within a rapidly shifting global order.

The exclusion law of 1882 was an exception to the promotion of free movement that had predominated among liberal polities since the 1860s.¹⁵ Complex interpretations of the laws and their means of enforcement were developed over the next twenty-five years, through intensive confrontation between government officials, diplomatic representatives, courts, migration brokers, lawyers, smugglers, transportation companies, and individual migrants.¹⁶ These encounters produced an encrusted agglomeration of court decisions, legislative amendments, administrative decisions, ad hoc regulations, and technicalities, a streamlined version of which became the foundation of much U.S. immigration law. Attempts to grapple with the complexities of exclusion enforcement caused a proliferation of responsibilities and new legislation through the late 1890s, followed by the consolidation and reform of enforcement responsibilities under the Bureau of Immigration after 1898. By 1907, the roles of enforcer, rulemaker, and court of first and last appeal in all matters of aliens seeking admission at the ports were consolidated under the bureau.

The original exclusion law of 1882 divided administration between uncoordinated customs collectors at various ports, state and federal courts charged with interpreting the laws and hearing appeals, and Chinese officials required to issue certificates to the exempt classes ("section six" certificates). Responsibility was further fragmented in 1884 when a new law required consular visas on section six certificates, and in 1892 when Internal Revenue agents were charged with the task of registering resident Chinese laborers. Differences in interpretation between the Bureau of Customs and the courts were the most intractable source of tension, as Chinese detained by customs agents at the ports quickly learned to take advantage of habeas corpus. From 1882 to 1891, 7,080 writs of habeas corpus were presented in California, with over 80 percent of applicants gaining their liberty.¹⁷ Enforcement also expanded beyond the border of the United States, including deals with railroad lines in Canada (and unsuccessfully in Mexico) to guard Chinese; establishing immigration stations in Victoria, Canada, and Veracruz, Mexico; cooperating with police in Hong Kong and Singapore; and endless authorizations of foreign officials around the world to issue section six certificates.¹⁸

By the late 1890s, legislative modifications had proven inadequate to control Chinese movement across the borders. Customs agents charged with enforcing exclusion were demoralized and corrupt in the face of rampant fraud, increasingly complex laws, and public opinion that criticized them for being both too harsh and too ineffective. In 1898, San Francisco Customs Collector James Dunn and newly appointed Commissioner General of Immigration Terence Powderly began a far-reaching program of administrative reform to enforce the laws already on the books more effectively. In 1900, responsibility for enforcement was transferred from the Customs Service to the Bureau of Immigration, and Powderly began to systematize the San Francisco reforms across the nation. He justified severe measures by claiming that "no system of legislation enacted thus far by Congress has more numerous or serious obstacles to surmount in order to become reasonably effective for its purpose."¹⁹

Frank Sargent, another anti-Chinese labor leader, took over as commissioner general in 1902 and further expanded Powderly's techniques of reform through organizational restructuring and morale building. Their measures included personal visits to immigration stations around the nation, more intensive investigations and surveillance (what others called "harassment") at ports and in the interior, extensive cross-referenced files, improved channels of communication among officers, a campaign against "erroneously" extending exempt status to "traders, doctors, lawyers, farmers, engineers, priests, clerks and the countless advocators bordering on manual labor," and the aggressive prosecution of court cases.²⁰ In February 1903, the Bureau of Immigration moved to the newly formed Department of Commerce and Labor, and Chinese registration records formerly held by Internal Revenue agents across the country were shipped to Washington for arrangement into "systematic order." New regulations called for the central filing of duplicate Chinese immigration records, now produced in increasingly large quantities.²¹ Centralization efforts were capped by the Supreme Court decisions on Ju Toy in 1905 and Chin Yow in 1908, which asserted that Bureau of Immigration decisions were final even in cases of persons claiming U.S. citizenship. Appeal to the courts was impossible except in cases of procedural error.

Most analyses of the development of the exclusion laws end with Ju Toy and Chin Yow. These cases indeed marked a culmination of Bureau of Immigration efforts to concentrate and systematize all enforcement under its own auspices. Nonetheless, fraud and smuggling remained as pervasive as ever. Kitty Calavita argues that the difficulties of enforcing exclusion did not merely result from vague laws but from the fact that the laws expressed fundamentally paradoxical intentions. They stipulated both a race to be barred and certain classes of people to be allowed free movement. Making these bureaucratically and judicially defined classes correspond with social reality was extremely problematic. The proper categorization of preachers, naval officers, wives of merchants, opera singers, bookkeepers, acrobats, cooks, landowners, and factory owners within the less than all-encompassing categories of laborer, merchant, teacher, student, or traveler was far from obvious. These difficulties compelled immigration agents to create more narrow and detailed classifications, culminating in Attorney-General John Grigg's 1898 opinion that the "true theory" of exclusion was not that only Chinese laborers were barred from entry but that only carefully defined exempt classes were admissible. Ironically, more explicit definitions of admissible categories made it easier for Chinese to fulfill the proper requirements and "pass." Officials were aware that the identification of individuals in terms of legal categories could be highly arbitrary and subject to manipulation, but they forcefully insisted that this was an appropriate and necessary framework through which the true identities of applicants could be ascertained. As Calavita writes, "While it was clear that merchant and laborer were in practice nothing more than occupational categories, at the same time they continued to be treated as essential characteristics, intrinsic to a person's nature."²²

Calavita's analysis highlights many of the tensions embedded in the exclusion laws. She concludes, however, that they merely resulted in inefficiency and incoherence because of the disjuncture between preconceived categories and "social reality." But these paradoxes were never resolved, even as exclusion procedures grew more systematized and predictable after 1900. Rather than opposing social reality to the assertions made by the exclusion laws, we must look at the extent to which exclusion procedures were themselves engaged with "social reality." The contradictions between these categories, the insistence that the categories were more reliable than the individuals that refused to conform to them, were not flaws to be overcome but the very fabric of intercultural and global power relations.²³

U.S. consuls were increasingly involved in exclusion enforcement after 1898. The Chinese government issued over a thousand section six certificates in 1883, but immigration officials considered that many of the certificate bearers were not actually merchants. The resulting scandal led to an 1884 law requiring consular visas on all section six certificates and a decision by the Chinese government to stop issuing certificates.²⁴ Very few certificates were issued until 1897, when both transportation companies and the Chinese government decided they wanted to facilitate the travel of Chinese merchants. At first, the experiences of individual consuls and State Department goals of promoting international commerce and friendly relations with foreign states caused most foreign service officials to resist the implementation of rigorous exclusion procedures. By 1907, the anti-American boycott of 1905, pressures from the press and government bureaus, and the logic of consular reform led the State Department to issue directives to implement systematically the investigative procedures desired by the Bureau of Immigration.²⁵

Consuls issuing visas in 1897 had no specific regulations from the Department of State and were left to their own devices in developing procedures for visa investigations. Some consuls criticized the inappropriate definitions of exempt classes established by the Bureau of Immigration. In 1897, Consul Rounsevelle Wildman of Hong Kong attacked immigration officials in California who expected merchants to wear "silken robes." He described Hong Kong as a "vast warehouse," with 65 to 85 percent of the residents engaged in some kind of merchandising. The partners in these businesses were proprietors, workmen, and laborers all in one, and there was nothing in the law to stop them from picking fruit once they arrived in California.²⁶ In developing their own standards, they also tended to rely on local Chinese social networks to produce appropriate candidates. For example, in 1903, Consul Robert McWade in Canton said he only granted visas to applicants who were both introduced by two local bankers—friends of his—and accompanied by a bondsman. He would check the applicant's body for the "signs of the 'coolie' class" and fingerprint him, but the bulk of his investigation depended on the recommendation of respected local Chinese.²⁷

As in the Bureau of Immigration, the spirit of reform was transforming consular practices after the turn of the century. This entailed drives toward professionalization, systematization of functions, increased accountability, and activist promotion of American interests overseas.²⁸ Nonetheless, reprimands and tentative directives from the State Department failed to establish any systematic procedures before 1905, but the anti-American boycott of that year spurred bureaucrats and diplomats into action. Mobilization for a boycott had begun in Shanghai (a city that produced few migrants to the United States) during the spring as a reaction against the increasingly rigorous enforcement of exclusion by the Bureau of Immigration. Boycotters were particularly incensed by the growing surveillance of "exempt" classes and the national humiliation of China being singled out for this kind of treatment.²⁹ On June 24, before the boycott had even begun, President Theodore Roosevelt responded with an order that the exclusion laws be enforced "without harshness" and that exempt classes be treated with all courtesy.³⁰ Although the boycott is generally considered to have been a failure because it spurred no change in legislation or regulations, this order was a turning point in exclusion administration. The bureau backed away from its aggressive reforms in which success was measured by numbers of rejections and deportations, and the State Department finally devised uniform procedures in line with bureau standards. All aspects of enforcement converged on a formalized and predictable set of procedures.

The wording of Roosevelt's order was repeated in a State Department circular to its consuls in China on June 26. Subsequent communications between consuls and officials reiterated the conviction that improper treatment of exempts was a result of unpredictable visa investigations subject to the whims of individual consuls and their entanglements with influential local Chinese. The boycott had proven the inability or unwillingness of both Chinese officials and consuls to assert their authority over fraudulent elements and migration promoters. It was up to the consuls and State Department to rectify this through the implementation of rigorous and impartial procedures. On March 26, 1907, the State Department finally issued explicit instructions that carefully defined merchants, students, and travelers in the narrow senses preferred by the Bureau of Immigration, outlined investigation procedures, and stipulated the proper production and distribution of standardized paperwork. The instructions insisted that any visa applicants accompanied by middlemen or "interested parties" should be treated with suspicion, and that the responsibility for investigation "can be shifted neither by confidence in the authorities issuing the certificates, who may or may not be thorough in their investigations or undeceived in their findings, nor by a delegation of the work of investigation to a subordinate."³¹ They also refrained from directly specifying exact questions and kinds of materials that could be used to ascertain exempt status. State Department officials instead emphasized the importance of consular discretion and the direct encounter between consul and applicant, "to provide elasticity in the enforcement of difficult legislation," and to make sure that Chinese could not prepare too carefully ahead of time for the examination.³² The direct, unmediated encounter between government official and applicant was to be at the heart of the encounter, mediated by the formulaic descriptions and judgments required by standardized paperwork and exclusion categories.

Roosevelt's order also marked a turning point in bureau enforcement.³³ One immigration official claimed that, after Roosevelt's order of June 1905, Commissioner General Sargent was "brutally pushed aside so far as even an opportunity to express an official opinion in matters affecting the administration of the law was concerned." Sargent subsequently grew despondent and ill, leading to his death in 1908, and his officers grew increasingly demoralized.³⁴ While this account is doubtless overdramatized, a change in enforcement style is clearly apparent in the day-to-day records of Chinese investigations. For example, before the summer of 1905, investigators in Philadelphia made extensive inquiries into all applications for return laborer certificates, collecting corroborating testimony and traveling to estimate the value of various laundries in order to ascertain the truth of debts or property qualifications necessary for a return certificate. After Roosevelt's order, the investigations became much more perfunctory, field investigations ceased, and very few certificates were denied. At first, the inspectors concluded positive investigations with cynical comments such as, "The testimony of the applicant and the witnesses agrees in nearly every particular, and although the debts in this, as in many other cases of like nature, seem improbable ... the statements of the applicant have all been verbally corroborated by the witnesses."³⁵ By 1906, however, investigators around the country had developed a number of routine formulations, such as, "There is nothing in the testimony taken to show that the applicant and his two alleged debtors are at variance as to the alleged indebtedness existing," or, "In the absence of means to discredit their statements I am constrained to commend the applicant to the favorable consideration," and, most commonly, "Statements regarding loan are in accord."³⁶ In a different means of adapting to increasingly formalistic requirements, ambitious young vice-consuls charged with visa duties no longer bragged of their wide social contacts and ability to understand the Chinese mentality as the key to successful interviews. Rather, they curried approval by showing off their ability to manage complex filing and identification systems, such as Vice-consul Perry Jester of Hong Kong in 1931, who listed fifty-four improvements he had made in the section six routine and recordkeeping, and who developed a method of categorizing Chinese facial features.³⁷

Measurements and definitions of success in enforcement also changed after 1905. Before, the bureau consistently framed enforcement goals in terms of increased deportation, increased rejection at ports, decreased immigration, and more intensive police methods. Criticism by U.S. citizens of the harsh enforcement of exclusion was dismissed out of hand, as "so little governed by patriotic respect for lawful authority as seemingly to justify these free thinkers ... in making or applauding active resistance to the laws and its executive officers."³⁸ Afterward, enforcement of the exclusion laws was increasingly phrased in terms of the need for courtesy, fair treatment, and "framing our laws and treaties as to make admission the rule and exclusion the exception."³⁹ Fraud and evasion showed little change from the nineteenth century, but immigration officials expressed much less concern. In 1911, Commissioner General Daniel Keefe even wrote that methods of administration "have been brought as nearly to an ideal point as may be expected under adverse and trying circumstances."⁴⁰ Whereas Chinese matters had once taken as many as thirty pages in the annual report, by the late 1910s they rarely accounted for more than four or five pages.

Enforcement success was now defined in terms of status quo, rather than improved control and reduced immigration. In 1920, Commissioner General Anthony Caminetti reported, "The annual immigration from China has not changed materially during more than a quarter of a century and it long ago responded to the policy of exclusion."⁴¹ The table shows that the reform measures of 1900 to 1905 did result in increased rejection and decreased immigration, but both rates (except for a short-lived reform in 1909–1910) quickly returned to pre-reform levels after 1905. The acceptable rates of the 1890s that Caminetti spoke to were the same ones deemed unacceptable by turn-of-the-century reformers. A doubling of Chinese immigration in the 1920s also belied Caminetti's optimism.⁴²

TABLE Arrivals and Rejections of Chinese at U.S. Ports, 1894–1924
Year	Cases at U.S. Ports	Rejected	Percent Rejected

1894	6840	1241	18
1895	2732	657	24
1896	4031	415	10.3
1897	6919	402	5.8
1898	7475	280	3.7
1899	6668	950	14.2
1900	6859	1065	15.5
1901	4982	918	18.4
1902	3768	336	8.9
1903	3549	567	16
1904	4409	1295	29.4
1905	3086	481	15.6
1906	2937	205	7
1907	3514	259	7.4
1908	4988	364	7.3
1909	8072	564	7
1910	7860	969	12.3
1911	5972	692	11.6
1912	6023	400	6.6
1913	6532	386	6
1914	6908	410	6
1915	6723	268	4
1916	6448	437	6.8
1917	6000	321	5.3
1918	3805	308	8
1919	3851	151	4
1920	5658	125	2.2
1921	10686	296	2.7
1922	12832	515	4
1923	13663	706	5.2
1924	13583	751	5.5
Source: Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, 1903–1924. The numbers of admissions are higher than other published statistics on Chinese immigration because they include all Chinese who attempted entry at the ports including those claiming citizenship, not just "immigrants" or "aliens." Bureau statistics do not appear to take citizens into account until 1904. The high number of rejections that year is due to a crackdown on swelling citizenship claims—559 out of 997 were rejected.

Even complaints and challenges from the Chinese and their sympathizers decreased after 1905. By 1910, Chinese would say in private that they still felt bitter about the law, but public expressions of that bitterness through diplomatic, journalistic, and legal means were infrequent. Most complaints were made by students from North China, who were unfamiliar with the procedures and felt particularly humiliated by the medical examinations rather than the procedures specific to exclusion.⁴³ This does not imply that enforcement had become any less rigorous in its formal requirements. Techniques established by 1907 largely persisted until the repeal of exclusion in 1943 and beyond. The greatest appeal to both officials and Chinese was that enforcement had become routine and predictable. Substantial investigation into the truth of each claim was largely replaced by conformance to formal requirements.

Lawyers, brokers, and middlemen continued to swarm around migrants and profit from their knowledge of migration procedures after 1905, but they had largely been excluded from effective participation in the personal interviews that were now at the heart of the investigation. Whereas bondsmen and personal recommendations had once been the best guarantee of a visa, they were now a sure way to spark the suspicion of an investigating agent. Consuls took up the attitude of one commissioner general of immigration that, "No matter how trustworthy and honorable a Chinese merchant or laborer may be in the conduct of his daily business, he seems to have no compunction whatever in practicing deceit concerning matters in which the Government is interested."⁴⁴ An applicant had to be torn out of his social networks in order to be judged on the merits as to whether he was a "bona fide" member of the exempt classes.⁴⁵ The heart of the examination was the direct encounter between government agent and individual migrant. As Hong Kong vice-consul Leighton Hope wrote in 1918, "So very much depends on the personal equation in these cases that the opinion of the examining officer is entitled to the utmost consideration."⁴⁶ The interference of relatives, businesses, charities, or other individuals and organizations that might take a "personal interest" in an applicant could only obscure insight into his true nature.

The same process that isolated migrants from their personal social networks also reinserted them into other social categories. The discretionary opinions of individual agents were all formulated within bureaucratically constructed categories of race, nationality, and class. The proper categorization of each person was not knowable through social relationships but through marks directly perceivable in the body and bearing of each individual: his mode of speaking, expression, the condition of his hands, his gait, all the way down to the amount of dirt under his fingernails and calluses on his feet. It was only through the intimate encounter of applicant and examining agent that such subtleties could be detected and the applicant categorized as a "genuine" merchant, a "bona fide" student, or a coolie. In the logic of exclusion enforcement, true identity was framed in universal categories of class, occupation, and race but was produced by the direct encounter between nation and individual. The mechanisms of investigation were in place by 1905, but facts remained elusive. Chinese migrants and exclusion administrators were trapped in a web of surveillance and evasion that perpetuated the very fraud that regulations were designed to prevent. The "truth" of each case ultimately existed more clearly in the cross-referenced files than in the individual bodies that each inspector purported to interpret.

Some of the earliest methods of fraud and evasion included bribery, false documents, and the alteration of existing documents. These tactics could be countered through photographs and fingerprints, sequential numbering of documents, multiple copies stored in Washington, D.C., and local offices, and extensive cross-referencing. Basing claims to merchant status on false companies or inflated partnerships was another common method of evasion. Some Chinese rented storefronts and set up partnerships precisely for the purpose of facilitating and profiting from migration. One such partnership in 1916 allowed individuals to register as partners for an investment of $200. Members were required to pay $35 to the partnership each time they needed testimony to obtain a merchant return certificate or to bring family members over. If a member did not want to use the opportunity himself, he could sell his name to a friend.⁴⁷ Fake merchant partnerships all repeated a familiar pattern, but each venture was relatively independent and did not have the far-reaching consequences of citizenship claims.⁴⁸

Native-born citizens and their China-born children were not subject to exclusion, but they still had to submit to initial investigation. Successful citizenship claims were made possible by exploiting gaps between the administrative and judicial branches of the government. The early exclusion laws were written with provisions for appeal from immigration decisions to the courts. In Bureau of Immigration hearings, the burden of proof was on the applicants to show their right to enter or remain in the United States. In the courts, however, the burden was on the government to show the applicants' inteligibility. A claim of U.S. birth was the safest recourse at judicial hearings, because the bureau had no access to documentary proof that applicants were not born in the United States.⁴⁹

Chinese and their lawyers knew which districts had judges who could be counted on to grant Chinese appeals, whether through humanitarian sentiments, amenability to bribery, or strict adherence to the letter of the law. During 1894 in one of the most notorious incidents, Judge Felix McGettrick in St. Albans, Vermont, allowed over a thousand Chinese arrested at the border to remain. The northeast border with Canada continued to be a problem area through 1904. Chinese walked across the border and were immediately arrested. At the bureau hearing, they would say nothing and be sentenced to deportation. On appeal, the applicant would claim to be native born, witnesses would suddenly appear from all over the country claiming to be the father, uncle, or to have known him as a babe in arms, and he would be set free with discharge papers.⁵⁰ The significance of these discharge certificates was vague. They usually stated no more than that the Chinese holder had been discharged as a result of a citizenship claim. They were not a final determination of citizenship, and if the bearer wanted to obtain a passport (issued by the State Department) or certificate (issued by the Bureau of Immigration) to visit China as an American citizen, he was subject to a more thorough investigation. Nonetheless, possession of one of these papers worked strongly in favor of the applicant, and immigration officials avoided contradicting them unless they possessed overwhelming evidence to the contrary.⁵¹

By 1907, new legislation and Supreme Court decisions had removed the right of appeal in immigration cases to everyone except those arrested in the interior who claimed American citizenship. By this time, however, a chain of citizenship claims had been established that was impossible to break. The bureau frequently asserted that if all the Chinese who claimed birth in San Francisco were actually born there, it would mean 500 to 800 male children for every Chinese woman who had lived in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake and fire (which was blamed for destroying birth certificates).⁵² On trips to China, male migrants with citizen or merchants papers claimed to have fathered at least one son, who could also claim citizenship before reaching his majority. From 1925 to 1931, 5,814 returned citizens claimed 15,580 sons and 1,048 daughters.⁵³ Fathers claiming to have eight or more sons and no daughters were not uncommon. Their nonexistent sons were known as "slots," and these could be sold, exchanged, and even transferred along with dowries to young men who wished to work in the United States.

The Bureau of Immigration responded to these schemes with extensive interviews of each applicant who claimed admission as a citizen or family member of one of the exempt classes and all of his alleged relatives. These interviews could last for weeks and included questions about all of his relatives and in-laws, the layout of his home village, the numbers of windows, doors, and animals in his household, landscape features and other villages close to his home, visits of other family members abroad, events that took place and gifts that were given on return visits, and the streets and major events in American cities where he claimed to have resided. Discrepancies between the testimonies of alleged relatives were taken as evidence that the migrant was not who he claimed to be.⁵⁴ The effectiveness of this system was dependent on an extensive system of cross-referenced files and rapid communication between Washington, ports of entry, immigration offices within the United States, and consulates abroad.

The Chinese collaborated in this process with alacrity. As F. W. Berkshire noted after starting his new job as Chinese inspector in Chicago in 1896, "The most striking fact which has impressed itself upon me ... is that the Chinamen are fully informed in advance, concerning each case, before my investigations are begun."⁵⁵ The very systematization of testimonies made it easy to fabricate a fraudulent case. Each slot came with extensive coaching papers based on previous interviews. They included answers of up to six hundred possible questions on family and village, as well as diagrams of villages that were sometimes nonexistent. Many came with contracts requiring the holders to appear as a witness in the hearings of his assumed "brothers" and "parents," and stipulating payment for each appearance. Schools in Hong Kong, China, and the United States trained the applicants in memorization, how to behave in the interviews, how to explain mistakes, how to conveniently forget the answer to questions for which they had not been coached, and proper behavior in front of the examiner.⁵⁶ One coaching paper concluded with this advice:

During the examination you should answer questions one by one but do not say anything that you are not asked. Don't be afraid. No matter how the immigration officers frighten you and cheat you, you must not be cheated. Even when the heaven drops down, you must take it as a coverlet. If you make any mistakes inadvertently, you must, when you discover the mistakes, tell the immigration officers and have them correct them ... When they ask any questions which do not appear in the statement papers or ask things long past, you should say that at that time you were too young and forgot long ago. When you forgot any statements that appear in the statement papers, you should say that you forgot instead of answering those questions at random. When the same question is asked three or four times, there must be something wrong about your answer, and you must think clearly before you answer.⁵⁷

These coaching materials could easily be seen as a subgenre of the many ritual guides that circulated widely throughout late imperial and republican China. They provided detailed models for everything from home ancestral worship to letters to officials and proper dialogues at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonial occasions. Careful preparation for formalized interaction was not an unfamiliar activity to rural Chinese.⁵⁸

Chinese migrants and U.S. government officials were all firmly trapped in a system of formalized deception. Adherence to procedure compelled inspectors to grant certificates and admit applicants who gave uncontradicted testimony, even if their sense of discernment told them that the applicant was of the "coolie class," or not a "genuine citizen" marked by American bearing and linguistic skills.⁵⁹ Agents even admitted that it was more likely for a fraudulent candidate to gain entry than a genuine one who had not received the proper coaching and other services provided by brokers.⁶⁰ Consul George Anderson in Hong Kong admitted that over 75 percent of the visas he had issued by 1911 were for fraudulent cases. He believed that most of them were actually merchants in the interior, but, because of the difficulty of obtaining evidence there, they created false cases for themselves as Hong Kong merchants.⁶¹ Once a Chinese man submitted a fraudulent paper, he had to perpetuate that identity even when bringing in his own children.

     A successful case was marked by adherence to formal requirements, as structured by the cross-referenced files. The effect was not to find out who the applicant really was but to make sure that he was properly enmeshed into the cross-referenced web of surveillance. Investigators were most concerned to obtain answers that fit the preestablished pattern of previous testimony. As suggested in the coaching advice quoted above, they would even prompt applicants to rephrase answers, asking the stenographer only to record answers that were relevant to the question, elaborate on simple, one-word answers given by Chinese for the benefit of the record, or call back witnesses to inform them of discrepant statements and allow them to reconcile the contradiction.⁶² The preference for standardized over individualized answers is illuminated by the difficulties a Chicago inspector had in dealing with the unorthodox responses of Kong Sing about the mercantile status of Kong Gong:

     Q: Did Kong Gong ever work in the store for one year continuously and engage in no other labor during that year?
     A: Now, suppose I ask you what time you come to the office and what time you close, you can not answer. When he worked in the store he worked in the store, and when he worked outside he worked outside.
     Q: What did he do when he worked outside?
     A: Now suppose I asked you this; you are working in the office, now you do Government work, but when you go home you do your own work. Now, how can I answer that question?
     Q: You, then, can not state that Kong Gong was ever for one year at one time in your store continuously, all his time devoted to its business?
     A: A Chinaman is employed at a time for one year or two years as white people are. Of course, when he is in the store a year he is in the store a year. When he is in the store two years he is in the store two years and ...
     Q: Can you answer that question yes or no?
     A: Yes, for if I say no how can he be a merchant?⁶³

Kong Sing may have perceived the absurdity of it all, but his alleged nephew Kong Gong failed to attain merchant papers because of it.

Immigration agents and consuls were quite aware of the failure of this system to uncover fraud as intended. As early as 1899, reforms instigated by the San Francisco collector to collect more testimony were criticized by special agent J. D. Power, "Surely this cumbersome system with its retinue of employees, with all the attendant delay, circumlocution, and expense, cannot be considered an improvement upon the former method."⁶⁴ The incessant collection of testimony was often criticized as only providing the opportunity for Chinese to establish a record of their false claims.⁶⁵ A 1934 report from Vice-consul Donald Dunham in Hong Kong offers one of the more concise summaries of Chinese techniques of evasion:

In determining relationships the most satisfactory method of investigation has been the examination and cross-examination of the applicants. The elements of conflict are collusion between the aliens' close relatives, efforts of immigration brokers, and coaching by schools in Hong Kong designed especially to prepare Chinese for the questions they are likely to be asked on examination by the consular officer abroad and by the immigration authorities in the United States. The first two difficulties can be overcome by minute interrogation but the schools are painstaking in their tutoring and the smallest detail rarely escapes them. Any new turn in phraseology of the questions is reported by aliens to the schools, incorporated in their drilling, and is brought to light within an astonishingly short time in the testimony of subsequent applicants ... It is a simple matter for the schools to persuade them they must know the exact answers to a set of secret questions in order to receive favorable consideration.⁶⁶

Dunham went on to explain that it was difficult to counter the influence of the coaching schools because the possible questions were limited, and they would inevitably become formulaic. He was clearly aware that the very systematization of information made it easier for false facts to be consistently reproduced, but his only recommendation was the creation of more files, more testimony, more systematization, and more cooperation with the Bureau of Immigration in accumulating and sharing that testimony. "The effectiveness of the consular examination depends in a measure on the completeness of the transcripts."⁶⁷ The only solution was a perpetuation of the very conditions that produced the problem in the first place.

"Truth" and "rights" were not at issue in these investigations so much as the ability to control the production and deployment of information. It did not matter if the applicants were really who they claimed, but their claims must be recorded, filed, cross-referenced, and easily accessed. The more insightful bureaucrats realized that the files limited actions and decisions as much as they served to monitor the migrants. As one inspector described his experience after two weeks at Angel Island, the immigration station in San Francisco Bay, "What has impressed me most is the remarkable system that has been developed to protect the Government against its own officials."⁶⁸ Migrants and bureaucrats alike were subsumed in the embrace of the cross-referenced files they had created. The files were a product of their own willfulness, both their cage and their only possibility for salvation—whether that salvation be passage into the United States or the seamless surveillance of movement.⁶⁹

Chinese involvement with migration fraud was inseparable from the process of migration itself. As with most other migrant groups, Chinese migration was not a process of monodirectional relocation but of circulation. Money earned abroad was intended for the benefit of a family in China, and migration could be a family economic strategy over several generations. A father would migrate, come back, and have a child who would migrate, returning to marry and have a child, and so on for generations. Entire villages would even specialize in migration, leaving behind wives to take care of the family altars, fields to be worked by migrants from further inland, and children studying in migrant-funded schools that trained them in skills such as accounting, languages, or geography that would be useful for their future lives abroad. Migration was a self-perpetuating cycle, with money made by earlier migrants supporting the journeys of later migrants.⁷⁰

Extensive networks of interlocked businesses, clan associations, and native place organizations grew up around this migration, channeling money, people, and information. Without these organizations, migration would not have been a worthwhile enterprise. No money could have been sent home, the wealth and prestige of migrants could not have been exercised on village affairs, and villagers could not have maintained their demands on the migrants' affections and money. Similarly, these businesses and organizations were dependent on continued migration, and they actively recruited more. Control of information about border crossing and access to migration opportunities was a source of profit and prestige. Every aspect of migration was commodified. False papers, medical inspections, visas, witnesses who would claim to be your uncles and brothers, paper families, and old ladies who knew you as a babe in arms in San Francisco could all be bought, sold, and exchanged. Hong Kong courts even upheld suits demanding repayment on unfulfilled contracts for illegal migration and smuggling.⁷¹ Brokers and businesspeople made the most profit by placing themselves at the nexus of migration opportunities, but possession of a good paper that provided stable entry opportunities and opportunities for derivative slots could be a personal investment for anybody. A sudden revocation of the exclusion laws would have meant material loss for many individuals.

These migration opportunities circulated through extensive flexible networks that were just as well organized yet less centralized and routinized than the official bureaucracies. The basic techniques of circumventing exclusion remained the same over decades, but the exact personnel and institutions always changed from opportunity to opportunity. The efficacy of these networks was demonstrated in innumerable small evasions of the exclusion laws. The standard bureaucratic account (articulated by both Chinese and U.S. officials) of these activities was of ignorant peasants with little concept of right or wrong who were manipulated by cynical and self-serving brokers.⁷² U.S. officials had confiscated enough Chinese letters carefully discussing the cost and efficacy of various genuine and false papers, the degree of rigor of enforcement at various ports, and sources of money and credit for the purchase of papers that they should have known better than to resort to such boilerplate stereotypes.⁷³ Such images, however, justified the rigor of immigration laws as beneficial to duped and ignorant peasants, and depicted the alternate sources of social power embodied in these transnational networks as activities bordering on the criminal.

Beyond purely material benefits, many Chinese also found that the exclusion laws reinforced less tangible aspects of their status. The ambivalent Chinese relationship to the social terrain of exclusion came out most clearly during the 1905 boycott. Only the most radical students challenged the right of the United States to exclude laborers. Most accepted the right of sovereign nation-states to regulate entry as they wished (an acceptance shaped by their own desire to rid China of extra-territorial treaties). The most common complaints against exclusion were articulated by San Francisco editor Ng Poon Chew: "Chinese laborers of all classes have been excluded from the United States by mutual [treaty] agreement, and the Chinese themselves are not now asking for any change in this arrangement, but they do ask for as fair treatment as other nationalities receive in relation to the exempt classes."⁷⁴ Claimants to exempt status saw themselves as cosmopolitan businesspeople or students, the representatives of a new, modernizing China, whose right to move around the world with others of their class was guaranteed by international treaty. They accepted the assignment of identity on the basis of race and nationality but claimed that a certain level of "high" culture or wealth allowed them to transcend that status. Their possession of high culture was reinforced by exclusion categories that distinguished them from uneducated and uncultured "coolies." The problem in 1905 was that the laws were not being enforced in a manner that emphasized these distinctions, as exempt classes were harassed and lumped together with the "coolies." The establishment of more stable and predictable procedures and documentation after 1905 gradually mitigated the more vocal complaints.

Why did U.S. officials adhere to a procedure they thought was "cumbersome, exasperating, expensive and relatively inefficient"?⁷⁵ All of the developments described so far could potentially be dismissed as typical bureaucratic inertia and routinization. Yet the Bureau of Immigration continued to put enormous effort into expanding the interviews and files and rewarding officers who contributed to increased systematization. Plans to overhaul exclusion enforcement, re-register all Chinese, and raise department morale were often proposed but never amounted to much more than tinkering.⁷⁶ Something in the very process of subjecting Chinese to this procedure and formally organizing the information was, in and of itself, worth the trouble and embarrassment.

Many aspects of the encounters between Chinese and immigration officials correspond to common descriptions of ritual. They were standardized and repetitive procedures. The result was highly predictable if participants were properly prepared. But complete knowledge of the details and proper preparation was mysterious and esoteric information, accessible to only a few experienced lawyers, brokers, and administrators. Language was highly formalized, and unfamiliar forms of communication were neither expected nor desired. The entire procedure depended more on proper behavior and form than on the contents of statements. As with most rituals, the participants may have had very different interpretations of the acts and symbols, or no interpretation at all. More important was that the procedure was executed properly, in correct sequence, with the correct paraphernalia, with the proper words in the proper places, and every document filed in its proper place according to the proper technicalities. In this way, distinctions were confirmed and status assigned. The complexities of social life were rearranged into a concrete order that drew conviction from a pervasive yet unspecific cosmic order in which socially constructed law and natural human qualities became one.

What kind of order was orchestrated through these ritualized immigration encounters? Zeng Cangling, the Chinese interpreter at the U.S. consulate in Amoy during the 1930s and 1940s, had a keen insight into this question. He wrote a pamphlet teaching applicants how to pass their visa examinations. It described many details about the sequence of events, how to fill out forms, what to say, what to wear, and the kind of facial expression to present (emotionless and ritualized). Zeng argued against common perceptions that bribes were necessary or that the process was unpredictable and dependent on whether the consul liked the applicant or not. He insisted that all the consuls were honest and impartial. Everybody who went through the process as he prescribed would be granted a visa. He explained, "Even though [the consuls'] personalities are not the same, they are all one in maintaining their country's directives. All the consuls humiliate Chinese and call it the exercise of competence."⁷⁷

Immigration procedure embodied two contradictory aims, bound together as one well-ordered package. On the one hand, the exclusion laws were an exercise in force, a demonstration that the U.S. government could obstruct the desires of individual Chinese, probe their bodies, measure them, evaluate them, label them, humiliate them, detain them in dirty sheds, and treat them like criminals. On the other hand, proceduralism and administrative expansion were promoted as a vehicle of justice, rule of law, fair play, and modern efficiency. Immigration encounters were long and humiliating procedures, but they were also an orderly and impersonal procedure based on clearly stated law and scientific inquiry applied equally to all migrants. Chinese who knew how to behave properly in accordance with the law rarely had problems gaining entry. Those who encountered problems had only themselves to blame because of their inability to fulfill impartial legal standards. These contradictory drives—arbitrary force and the rule of law—were unified as one in the implementation of the exclusion laws. What Commissioner General Powderly had once called an "idle ceremony" was actually a complex act of hegemony.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the terse little notes with which bureaucrats increasingly responded to complaints after 1907. Before then, complaints often prompted embarrassing investigations by both official and non-official committees. As the exclusion administration grew increasingly predictable, complaints received little more than bland assertions that migrants were "dealt with as the law requires," or that, "If the Chinese did not comply with the regulations and were rejected on that account ..., they could blame no one but themselves."⁷⁸ Chinese still complained, "The practice with the immigration officials is to regard every Chinese applicant for admission as a cheat, a liar, a rogue and a criminal." But such complaints only reiterated the obvious, a consequence of the very existence of the cross-referenced files that officials and Chinese had worked together to produce.⁷⁹ As conceded by a committee of San Francisco merchants who sent a delegation to inspect Angel Island in 1926, "Apparently the Bureau of Investigation has to be technical ... When they have not done so they have found themselves open to attack and ... they naturally are on the alert to strictly follow the laws and rulings."⁸⁰ This same dynamic between the rule of law and hegemonic force was apparent in the Open Door Policy and U.S. colonial expansion in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Both were premised on promises to bring fair play, the rule of law, and the positive benefits of civilization to backward lands in a way that cruel European imperialists had failed to do. Yet these future achievements could not be attained without the often violent reorganization of local society, in which insurrections were repressed, commercial obstacles razed, and local institutions, morality, and physical qualities condemned for not conforming to "civilized" standards.⁸¹

This orchestration of coercion and civilizing rule of law in immigration encounters was entwined with other, often contradictory macro-categories. The exclusion laws marked off the world and defined personal identity in terms of not only race and nation but also proscribed and exempt classes. As active proponents of a modern, economically progressive world, businesspeople and educated members of the exempt classes expected freely to cross, intermingle, and transcend the boundaries of race and nation that made large portions of the world off-limits for the proscribed classes. Even the secretary of commerce and labor recognized the difficulty in reconciling these categories:

The real purpose of the government's policy is to exclude a particular and well-defined class, leaving other classes of Chinese ... as free to come and go as the citizens of any other nation. As the laws are framed, however, it would appear that the purpose was rigidly to exclude persons of the Chinese race in general ... It is needless to point out that discriminations on account of race, color, previous condition or religion are alike opposed to the principles of the republic and to the spirit of its institutions.⁸²

In the very act of highlighting the conflict between the law, the claims of class, and the inescapable social significance of race, the secretary obscured their intransigent durability through his implication that they would somehow be dissolved within the principles and "spirit" of the republic. Despite the apparent lack of clarity, the institutions of migration were still embedded in a just order.

Less openly acknowledged but equally significant, the exclusion laws were also an arena in which territorial bureaucracies confronted geographically dispersed migrant networks. The power of officialdom was rooted in the existence of states defined by territory and culture. The creation and suppression of "fraud" was crucial to the establishment of a moral opposition between bureaucrats and migrant networks as sources of social power. Fraud distinguished between the "genuine" individuals (identified by officials as bearing the natural marks of their class) and the "false" identities (obscured by the intervention of selfish interests and linked to unofficial documentation). The constant production of fraud was also necessary because none of these interactions and cultural assertions could have taken place without a steady flow of immigrant-participants to join in the proceedings and collaborate willingly in the production of false identities. Weaker nations (such as Peru, Cuba, and the post-independence Philippines) that could not afford an extensive social performance like the exclusion laws were much more willing to interpret their laws strictly and stop all Chinese immigration when they chose.⁸³ But periods of complete exclusion alternated with periods of massive immigration through smuggling and special privileges. These weaker nations could not maintain stable control over their own borders, much less project hegemony beyond their borders and lay claim to define the categories of a global social order.

The ordeal at U.S. ports has some resemblance to a rite of passage, the ritualized crossing of a boundary into a new identity.⁸⁴ Many small events, such as the fumigation of clothes and luggage, boarding the steamer in Hong Kong, the tossing overboard of coaching material at the sight of land, or the ferry ride across the water to Angel Island could be interpreted as symbols of separation from old social roles. The time spent in incarceration during the interview procedure and the subjection to invasive medical examinations have many aspects of the "liminality" associated with the transitional stage between separation and reincorporation. The migrants were isolated from the social world, often for months. Social distinctions of clothes, food, and lodging were reduced or abolished. It was a betwixt-and-between period of invisibility, unfamiliarity, and the suspension of normal relationships and responsibilities. The migrants were left only to ponder the fabrication of their new fictional families. Returning migrants and those with section six certificates (that is, migrants with a better claim to belong to a transnationally mobile global elite) passed through more quickly and experienced a less intensive version of this transition. Family members of exempt classes and first-time claimants of citizenship—referred to as "raw" citizens in official documents—bore the brunt of this process. These were the migrants most deeply engaged in the construction of a new identity for the cross-referenced files.

Liminality is often characterized as a period of creative playfulness and intense social bonding that transcends the usual social constraints, or even as a period of transformative liberation in which a new social identity can be constructed. State rituals have generally striven to suppress this kind of liminal experience, but such sensations were clearly not prevalent during the incarceration of Chinese migrants. Although some found it to be a period of relaxation and game playing, most became depressed, angry, suspicious of their fellow inmates, and humiliated by their own weakness and that of their nation.⁸⁵ It was a grim liminality, clearly shaped by the weight of the state. Nor was it followed by any significant rites of reincorporation. The migrants merely left the immigration station. They returned to social concerns shaped by their old families, villages, and the networks from which they had been separated during the ordeal. Only now, these families were invisible, as the men joined "bachelor" enclaves and the networks were marginalized as sources of fraud and disreputable practices that existed in the interstices between legitimate national communities. Similarly, the migrants possessed new names, new families, new villages in China, new citizenship, and the chance to create a new home in the United States, but none of these possessions implied incorporation into U.S. society (which was itself being constituted through exclusionary procedures such as these). Rather, the experience marked the Chinese as suspicious, illegitimate, and fraudulent, leaving them with the skeleton of a social identity.⁸⁶ The "raw" citizens had not been "cooked."

Each migrant entered these encounters as a unique and individual case. The truth of that case could be perceived only when he or she had been removed from former social relations and reinserted into a new set of relations as recorded in the cross-referenced files. The complex history of that individual could then be resolved into a clear-cut status through appeal to authoritative macro-categories. This process invested the migrants with legal identities but stripped them of much of their social identity—except for those who could now move freely as cosmopolitan merchants and educators. The ultimate effect of these encounters was not to exterminate movement and replace it by boundaries and static categories of race and nation. It was to establish hegemony over movement and define legitimacy and hierarchy on the world stage in terms of race, class, nations, particular kinds of institutions, and particular kinds of procedures.

Other scholars have attempted to explain the incongruity between the aims of exclusion and the massive evasion of those laws, often with very optimistic conclusions. Calavita has argued that the contradictions between the basic categories of race, class, and nation and their lack of conformance to "social reality" were a flaw that facilitated resistance by Chinese.⁸⁷ Other scholars have looked at how administrators and judges were forced into decisions that went against their immediate desire to exclude Chinese because they were "captives of law," driven by an overriding commitment to the letter and spirit of national statutes and by the determination of Chinese to take advantage of those rights.⁸⁸ In other words, somehow, through all the technicalities, arbitrary evaluations, prejudice, and bad legislation, the force of justice and social reality was still made manifest. This is precisely the power of ritual, to convince us that, deep within all the chaos and contingency of human affairs, a greater truth and purer justice does exist and will ultimately liberate us from the inequities of daily experience. Unfortunately, participation in the ritualized behavior that confirms that truth is inseparable from participation in the very process that produced inequity in the first place.

This work has benefited from comments by Lauren Benton, anonymous reviewers for the AHR, and audiences at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and the history departments at Columbia University, Northeastern University, the University of Otago, and SUNY, Binghamton. Research was supported by fellowships from the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and a Northeastern University Provost Grant for Research and Scholarship.

Adam McKeown is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936 (2001), "From Opium Farmer to Astronaut: A Global History of Diasporic Chinese Business," Diaspora 9 (2000), and "Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949," Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999). This article is part of a larger project on migration and the development of international identification procedures across the Pacific. He hopes to someday write a cultural history of the world since 1830.

Notes

¹ On public debate over Chinese immigration and the origins of exclusion, see Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Stuart Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969); and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971). On diplomatic aspects, see Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York, 1983); Delber McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900–1906 (Detroit, Mich., 1977); and Shih-shan Henry Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868–1911 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1983). On legal and administrative aspects, see Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America (Philadelphia, 1991); Charles McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, 1994); R. D. McKenzie, Oriental Exclusion (New York, 1927); and especially Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, 1995). This treatment of exclusion is echoed in Chinese-language scholarship, with a stronger emphasis on how exclusion resulted from the political weakness of China. See Mai Lijian [Him Mark Lai], Cong huaqiao dao huaren—Ershi shiji Meiguo huaren shehui fazhan shi [From overseas Chinese to Chinese American—History of the development of Chinese society in the twentieth century] (Hong Kong, 1992); and Liu Boji, Meiguo Huaqiao Shi [History of the overseas Chinese in the United States] (Taipei, 1976).

² Keith Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and the National Identity (Stanford, Calif., 1996); and Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers.

³ Chan, Entry Denied; Owen Fiss, History of the Supreme Court, Vol. 8: Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888–1910 (New York, 1993), 298–322; and McClain, In Search of Equality.

⁴ For arguments against exclusion in the Philippines, see National Archives and Record Administration (hereafter, NARA), Washington, D.C., RG 59, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Amoy, 1844–1906, January 12, 1899, no. 38; October 28, 1899, no. 58; NARA, RG 350, entry 5, General Classified Files, 1898–1941, of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, file 370/43, 370/69; and editorials in the Manila American, September 2, 1902, March 19, 1903, and March 31, 1903, and reports of speeches on April 8, 1903, p. 10. On extension to Puerto Rico and Cuba, see Bureau of Insular Affairs, files 184 and 185. For Hawaii, see NARA, RG 85, entry 9, Bureau of Immigration Subject Correspondence (hereafter, BISC), file 51830/199. As late as 1928, the Chinese inspector of Hawaii wrote, "The enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion and Immigration Laws in this territory cannot be popularized. Planters, the tourist bureaus, the large body of Oriental residents and the unusually large percentage of internationally minded whites in this territory, have little sympathy with any restrictions or supervisions of international travel." BISC, 55391/79A, Inspector A. E. Burrett to Commissioner General Harry Hull, July 2, 1928.

⁵ Estimates can be found in Wen-hsien Chen, "Chinese under Both Exclusion and Immigration Laws" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1940), 421; NARA, RG 59, entry 702, General Records of Department of State, Visa Division, Correspondence Regarding Immigration, 1910–1939 (hereafter, SDVD), files 151.10/3, 151.01/16; and University of California, Berkeley, Asian American Library, Judy Yung Collection, Folder 47, "Immigration Inspector #1," p. 2.

⁶ Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration (hereafter, Annual Report), 1911: 134.

⁷ The literature on ritual is vast. In addition to works cited below, I have been most influenced by Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1993); Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge, 1986); and Bloch, Ritual, History, and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology (London, 1989); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1960); and James Watson, "Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of T'ien Hou ('Empress of Heaven') along the South China Coast, 960–1960," in David Johnson, ed., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 292–324.

⁸ Bell, Ritual Theory, 106, 110.

⁹ The variety of approaches to ritual in secular and industrialized contexts is apparent from a list of typical titles: Robert Bocock, Ritual in Industrial Society: A Sociological Analysis of Ritualism in Modern England (London, 1974); Terrence Deal and Alan Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, Mass., 1982); Mary Douglas, "The Contempt of Ritual," in Douglas, In the Active Voice (London, 1982), 4–8; Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (Chicago, 1971); Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays of Fact to Face Behavior (New York, 1967); Julian Huxley, ed., A Discussion on Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 251 (1966); David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, Conn., 1988); William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); John Meyer and Brian Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony," American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 340–63; Sally Falk Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, eds., Secular Ritual (Amsterdam, 1977); Dennis Rook, "Ritual Dimension of Consumer Behavior," Journal of Consumer Research 12 (1985): 251–63; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, N.J., 1995), and Victor Turner, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).

¹⁰ Bell, Ritual Theory, 88–93; Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, N.J., 2001); Max Gluckman, "Les Rites de Passage," in Gluckman, ed., Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations (Manchester, 1962), 1–5; and Jack Goody, "Against 'Ritual': Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic," in Moore and Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, 25–35.

¹¹ Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif., 1994); James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C., 1996); Patricia Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China (Princeton, N.J., 1991); Joseph McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in China (Cambridge, 1999); Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China (Chicago, 1998). See also David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987); Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J., 1980); and Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985).

¹² H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford, 1946), 214.

¹³ Annual Report, 1903: 97.

¹⁴ See note 1.

¹⁵ Leo Lucassen, "A Many-Headed Monster: The Evolution of the Passport System in the Netherlands and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century," in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 235–55.

¹⁶ The following paragraphs are drawn from Kitty Calavita, "The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and 'Passing': Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910," Law and Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1–40; Chan, Entry Denied; Erika Lee, "Enforcing and Challenging Exclusion in San Francisco: U.S. Immigration Officials and Chinese Immigrants, 1882–1905," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 11 (1997); McClain, In Search of Equality; and Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers.

¹⁷ Christian Fritz, "Due Process, Treaty Rights, and Chinese Exclusion, 1882–1891," in Chan, Entry Denied, 29–30.

¹⁸ Erika Lee, "Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924," Journal of American History 89 (2002): 54; and NARA, RG 59, entry 192, Numerical and Minor Files of the Department of State, 1906–1910, file 223/64–5.

¹⁹ Annual Report, 1901: 46.

²⁰ Annual Report, 1905: 80.

²¹ Annual Report, 1904: 137, 141.

²² Calavita, "Paradoxes of Race," 17. She expands these arguments to the entire history of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in "US Immigration Policymaking: Contradictions, Myths and Backlash," in Anita Böcker, et al., eds., Regulation of Migration: International Experiences (Amsterdam, 1998), 139–58.

²³ See also Immanuel Wallerstein, "Culture as the Battleground of the Modern World-System," Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 31–56.

²⁴ NARA, RG 59, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Canton, China, 1790–1906 (hereafter, Canton Despatches), January 31, 1884, no. 44.

²⁵ This is elaborated in Adam McKeown, "Migration and Transnational Identification: China and the United States, 1898–1911," unpublished manuscript.

²⁶ NARA, RG 59, Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Hong Kong, 1844–1906 (hereafter, Hong Kong Despatches), October 6, 1897, no. 13; November 18, 1897, no. 20; and February 16, 1898, no. 38.

²⁷ Canton Despatches, November 3, 1903, no. 324; December 9, 1903, no. 335.

²⁸ Wilbur Carr, "The American Consular Service," American Journal of International Law 1 (1907): 891–913.

²⁹ Wang Guanhua, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Wang Lixin, "Zhongguo jindai minzuzhuyi de xingqi yu dizhi Mei huo yundong" [The rise of modern Chinese democracy and the boycott against American goods], Lishi Yanjiu, no. 1 (2000): 21–33; and Zhang Cunwu, Guangxu sanshiyi nian Zhong Mei gongyue fengchao [The 1905 political uprising against the Sino-American exclusion treaty] (Taipei, 1966).

³⁰ Hunt, Making of a Special Relationship, 243–44; Delber McKee, "The Chinese Boycott of 1905–6 Reconsidered: The Role of Chinese Americans," Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986): 165–91; Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 164. Roosevelt's order was also published in Chinese newspapers; see Canton Despatches, August 9, 1905, no. 63.

³¹ A copy is in Bureau of Insular Affairs, 12177/66.

³² SDVD, 151.10/360.

³³ Fitzgerald, Face of the Nation, describes how the control of immigration laws and enforcement shifted from public interest groups to administrative policy networks over the course of the twentieth century. He cites the general immigration law of 1924 as a turning point, but the Powderly-Sargent reforms and the effect of Roosevelt's order would locate the beginnings of this shift two decades earlier.

³⁴ Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official (New York, 1925), 88–89.

³⁵ NARA, Mid-Atlantic Region, Philadelphia, RG 85, entry 172, Letters Concerning Chinese, 1904–1911, Philadelphia District Office, letter dated September 9, 1905.