Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders by McKeown Adam M

Author:McKeown, Adam M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/World
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

Asians were among those who should be peremptorily rejected. Powderly was critical of the exclusion laws as they existed, but he felt they should be enforced as rigorously as possible so long as they were on the books. He called the union of customs and the Chinese Bureau “unnatural” because of its mixed mandate of facilitating trade and keeping people out, and he helped transfer authority to the Bureau of Immigration in 1900.8 He worked closely with James Dunn, who had begun a rigorous system of enforcement upon his appointment as collector of customs in San Francisco in 1899. Dunn traveled around the nation, giving advice to Chinese agents and other government officials.9

But whatever their reformist zeal, neither Powderly nor Dunn had the political acumen to survive the “friction” engendered by their reforms. Powderly’s Ellis Island investigations generated great animosity that led to his dismissal on corruption charges in 1902. Dunn was a victim of charges by lawyers and the press that accused him of using “nimbleness in the art of vituperation... to continue the infliction of injustice upon offending Chinese, to insult gentlemen applying at the Bureau on business, and to reap petty vengeance upon attorneys.”10 He was transferred to St. Louis in 1903. That same year, however, the Bureau of Immigration was transferred to the Department of Commerce and Labor, and Powderly and Dunn’s reforms were continued with even greater skill by Commissioner General Frank Sargent, former grand master of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, and by the San Francisco Commissioner of Immigration Hart Hyatt North, a progressive bureaucrat who had been appointed in 1898.

Powderly, Dunn, North, and Sargent established rigorous and systematic interviews at the ports (described in detail in chapter 10), more thorough investigations to verify Chinese claims, and more thorough and standardized reporting by agents on the ground. They constructed extensive cross-referenced files and improved channels of communication around the nation. Chinese registration records formerly held by internal revenue agents and duplicate copies of other documentation now being produced in increasingly large quantities were centralized in Washington for arrangement into “systematic order.” Documents in the possession of Chinese were cross-checked with centrally filed documents each time a migrant petitioned the bureau. The use of photography and the Bertillon system of physical measurement to identify laborers were expanded. Immigration officers were encouraged to learn legal procedures and assist public attorneys in aggressively pursuing Chinese cases in the courts. Opportunities for bribery and outside intervention were reduced by excluding lawyers from hearings, fixing fees for commissioners who heard Chinese cases, and regulating the issue of deportation warrants by local officials.11 Supreme Court decisions in Sing Tuck (1904), Ju Toy (1905), and Chin Yow (1908) capped the twenty-year legal fight to stop appeals to the courts by making administrative decisions final in immigration cases at the border, even for migrants claiming U.S. citizenship.12

Organizational reforms were accompanied by the clarification of formal regulations and categories. The Treasury Department began this process in 1899 by publishing a collection of treaties,

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