Mae M. Ngai is Associate Professor of U.S. History at the University of Chicago.

IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS

ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA

By Mae M. Ngai

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07471-9

Contents

List of Figures and Illustrations……………………………………xiList of Tables…………………………………………………….xiiiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xvNote on Language and Terminology…………………………………….xixIntroduction Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History……………..1PART I: THE REGIME OF QUOTAS AND PAPERS………………………………15One The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in
Immigration Law……………………………………………………21Two Deportation Policy and the Making and Unmaking of Illegal Aliens……56PART II: MIGRANTS AT THE MARGINS OF LAW AND NATION…………………….91Three From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration in
the Invisible Empire……………………………………………….96Four Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and the National Boundaries of Class………..127PART III: WAR, NATIONALISM, AND ALIEN CITIZENSHIP……………………..167Five The World War II Internment of Japanese Americans and the
Citizenship Renunciation Cases………………………………………175Six The Cold War Chinese Immigration Crisis and the Confession Cases……202PART IV: PLURALISM AND NATIONALISM IN POST–WORLD WAR II IMMIGRATION
REFORM……………………………………………………………225Seven The Liberal Critique and Reform of Immigration Policy……………227Epilogue………………………………………………………….265Appendix………………………………………………………….271Notes…………………………………………………………….275Archival and Other Primary Sources…………………………………..357Index…………………………………………………………….369

CHAPTER 1

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and theReconstruction of Race in Immigration Law

Each upthrust of nativism left a mark on Americanthought and society…. [T]he anti-foreign wavethat flowed without pause for two decades in theearly twentieth century … must stand alone in itspersistence, in its complexity, and in themassiveness of its institutional deposit…. [T]hecountry would never be the same again, either inits social structure or in its habits of mind.—John Higham

Although Congress legislated the first numerical restrictions in 1921, itwould be nearly a decade before permanent immigration quotas were implemented.The intervening years were filled with contention and difficulty asCongress debated the design of a new system. All were keenly aware of thestakes: the new order would codify certain values and judgments about thesources of immigration, the desired makeup of the nation, and the requirementsof citizenship.

The nativists who had led the drive for restriction believed there wereserious flaws in the 3-percent quotas that were established in 1921. The lawset the quotas according to the 1910 census because data from the 1920census was not fully compiled at the time. Using 1910 as the base, the southernand eastern European countries received 45 percent of the quotas andthe northern and western European countries received 55 percent. Althoughthe quotas reduced southern and eastern European immigration by 20 percentfrom prewar levels, nativists believed it was still unacceptably high. Theyargued for a 2-percent quota based on the 1890 census. That was when, theyargued, the sources of European immigration shifted, altering the racial homogeneityof the nation. The 1890 formula reduced the level of immigrationto 155,000 per year and reduced the proportion of southern and easternEuropean immigration to a mere 15 percent of the total.

But, the 1890 formula was crudely discriminatory and therefore vulnerableto criticism. Opponents of the bill pointed out that using the 1920census figures, the most up-to-date, was conceptually more sound, but sincethat gave even greater weight to the newer immigrants, it defeated the wholepurpose of the quotas as far as the nativists were concerned. Proponents ofrestriction thus labored to devise a plan that would discriminate withoutappearing to do so. W. W. Husband, the commissioner general of immigration,advocated a plan to set quotas according to the rate at which eachimmigrant group became citizens. Naturalization was an indication of assimilation,Husband contended. Moreover, he believed that some nationalities”naturally” sought American citizenship, while others did not. Husband arguedfor disfavoring the immigration of those groups that resisted assimilation,rather than “advertising and going out into the highways and bywaysand dragging people into Americanization…. [W]hen you try to change [aman] by a hothouse process it does not work,” he said. Not surprisingly,Husband found that the rate of naturalization was 67 percent among northernand western Europeans and 32 percent among southern and easternEuropeans.

Another proposal was introduced by David Reed, the Republican fromPennsylvania and chair of the Senate immigration committee, and JohnTrevor, a leading restrictionist and head of an immigration-restriction coalitionof patriotic orders and societies. Trevor, a New York lawyer, sat on theboard of the American Museum of Natural History and was an associate ofMadison Grant, author of the best-selling tract The Passing of the Great Race.In March 1924 Trevor submitted a proposal for quotas based on “nationalorigin” to the Senate immigration committee. Like other restrictionists,Trevor warned that the new immigration threatened to lower the standard ofliving and dilute the “basic strain” of the American population. But Trevorturned the debate on its head by arguing that the quotas enacted in 1921discriminated against native-born Americans and northwestern Europeans.Those quotas were based on the number of foreign born in the population,leaving “native stock” Americans out of the equation. As a result, the 1921act admitted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe on a “basis ofsubstantial equality with that admitted from the older sources of supply,”discriminating against “those who have arrived at an earlier date and therebycontributed more to the advancement of the Nation.” To be truly fair, Trevorargued, the national origins of the entire population should be used as thebasis for calculating the quotas. He calculated an apportionment of nationalorigins quotas based on the nation’s population in 1920, which gave 16 percentof the total to southern and eastern Europe and 84 percent to northernand western Europe. The quotas were nearly identical to those calculated at 2percent of the foreign-born population in 1890, yet could be declared nondiscriminatorybecause they gave fair representation to each of the nation’s”racial strains.”

In May, Congress passed an immigration act based on Trevor’s concept ofnational origins quotas. It restricted immigration to 155,000 a year, establishedtemporary quotas based on 2 percent of the foreign-born populationin 1890, and mandated the secretaries of labor, state, and commerce to determinequotas on the basis of national origins by 1927. The law also excludedfrom immigration all persons ineligible to citizenship, a euphemism for Japaneseexclusion. Finally, Congress placed no numerical restrictions on immigrationfrom countries of the Western Hemisphere, in deference to the needfor labor in southwestern agriculture and American diplomatic and tradeinterests with Canada and Mexico.

Taken together, these three components of the Immigration Act of 1924constructed a vision of the American nation that embodied certain hierarchiesof race and nationality. At its core, the law served contemporaryprejudices among white Protestant Americans from northern Europeanbackgrounds and their desire to maintain social and political dominance.Those prejudices had informed the restrictionist movement since the latenineteenth century. But the nativism that impelled the passage of the act of1924 articulated a new kind of thinking, in which the cultural nationalism ofthe late nineteenth century had transformed into a nationalism based onrace.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “race” and “nation” wereloosely conflated in intellectual discourse and in the public imagination.Race indicated physical markers of difference (especially color) but also oftensimultaneously referred to culture—commonalties of language, customs, andexperience. Race, people, and nation often referred to the same idea. In themid- and late nineteenth century, physical anthropology gave rise to “scientific”classifications that treated race as a distinctly biological concept. SocialDarwinists believed civilization evolved to higher levels as a result of racecompetition and the survival of the fittest. Many, including Herbert Spencerand John Fiske, also held neo-Lamarckian views that cultural characteristicsand behaviors acquired from the environment were inheritable. Of course,neo-Lamarckianism was two-faced, as it could both claim the inheritabilityof socially degenerate behavior and provide opportunity for race improvement.Thus, some social evolutionists believed that immigrants from the”backward” peoples or races of Europe might eventually become Americanized.

The nativism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century compriseda cultural nationalism in which cultural homogeneity more than race superioritywas the principal concern. Restrictionists did not entirely discount thepossibility of assimilation but complained that the high volume of immigrationcongested the melting pot, creating “alien indigestion.” But by WorldWar I, restrictionists spoke increasingly of “racial indigestion” and rejectedthe idea of the melting pot altogether. The shift in thinking evidenced theinfluence of eugenics, which had grown after the rediscovery of Mendeliangenetics in the early twentieth century disproved Lamarckianism and severedenvironment from biology.

The eugenicists were strict biological determinists who believed that intelligence,morality, and other social characteristics were permanently fixed inrace. They believed racial boundaries were impermeable and that assimilationwas impossible. In its most radical articulation, eugenics espoused socialpolicy that advocated race breeding and opposed social reform because, asCharles Davenport, the founder of the Galton Society, said, the latter “tendsto ultimately degrade the race by causing an increased survival of the unfit.”Witnesses who testified at congressional hearings frequently invoked racetheories alleging the superiority of “Nordics” over the “Alpine” and “Mediterranean”races of southern and eastern Europe and warned that race-mixingcreated unstable “mongrel” races. During the 1920s the House committeeretained a scientific expert, Harry H. Laughlin, the director of theEugenics Institute at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the research arm of theGalton Society. Laughlin supplied Albert Johnson with copious amounts ofdata on “degeneracy” and “social inadequacy” (crime, insanity, feeblemindedness)showing the alleged racial inferiority and unassimiability of southernand eastern Europeans. Laughlin also cited the psychologist Robert Yerkes’sintelligence tests conducted among soldiers during World War I as evidenceof racial hierarchy. The army tests shocked contemporaries because they purportedto show that the average white American male had the mental age of13 (a score of 12 ranked as “moron”). Eugenicists seized upon Yerkes’s studybecause it appeared to vindicate their innatist theory of intelligence: the testsindicated low intelligence among African Americans (10.4), and rankedPoles, Italians, and Russians barely higher (10.7 to 11.3).

To the extent that historians have focused their attention on the legislativeprocess leading to the 1924 act, the race-nativism of men like MadisonGrant, Harry Laughlin, and John Trevor has dominated the story of the law.No doubt, scientific racism clarified and justified fears about immigrationthat were broadly based, and also enabled the descendents of the old immigrationto redeem themselves while attacking the new immigrants. But ifthe language of eugenics dominated the political discourse on immigration,it alone did not define the national origins quota system. Placing the eugenicsmovement in the foreground of the story of the Johnson-Reed Act hasobscured from view other racial constructions that took place in the formulationof immigration restriction, some of which have turned out to be moreenduring in twentieth-century racial ideology.

In fact, the national origins quota system involved a complex and subtleprocess in which race and nationality disaggregated and realigned in new anduneven ways. At one level, the new immigration law differentiated Europeansaccording to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability. Atanother level, the law constructed a white American race, in which personsof European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemedto be not white. In the construction of that whiteness, the legal boundariesof both white and nonwhite acquired sharper definition. Thus, paradoxically,as scientific racism weakened as an explanation for Euro-American socialdevelopment, hereditarianism hardened as a rationale for the backwardnessand unassimiability of the nonwhite races. Moreover, the idea of racial “difference”began to supplant that of racial superiority as the basis for exclusionarypolicies. Lothrop Stoddard, a leading race-nativist who explicitly advocatedfor white supremacy in The Rising Tide of Color in 1920, argued in1927, “When we discuss immigration we had better stop theorizing aboutsuperiors and inferiors and get down to the bedrock of difference.”

The Invention of National Origins

It was one thing for David Reed and John Trevor to convince Congress that asystem of quotas based on “national origins” was a conceptually sound andnondiscriminatory way to align immigration with the composition of theAmerican people. But it was quite another matter to actually design thatsystem—to define the “national origins” of the American people and tocalculate the proportion of each group to the total population.

The Johnson-Reed Act mandated the formation of a committee under theDepartments of Commerce, Labor, and State to allocate quotas by 1927. Dr.Joseph A. Hill, an eminent statistician with a thirty-year tenure at the Bureauof Census, chaired the Quota Board, as the committee was known. Computingthe national origins quotas was arguably the most difficult challenge ofHill’s career: Congress would reject reports submitted by the Quota Boardand postpone implementation of the quotas twice before finally approving athird report in 1929.

Indeed, the project was marked by doubt from the beginning. The lawrequired quotas to be allocated to countries—sovereign nation-states recognizedby the United States—in the same proportion that the American peopletraced their origins to those geographical areas, through immigration orthe immigration of their forebears. Census and immigration records, uponwhich the Quota Board relied, however, were woefully incomplete. Thecensus of 1790, the nation’s first, did not include information about nationalorigin or ancestry. The census did not differentiate the foreign-born until1850 and did not differentiate the parental nativity of the native-born until1890. Immigration was unrecorded before 1820, and not classified accordingto national origin until 1899, when the Immigration Service began designatingimmigrants by “race or people.” Emigration was not recorded at all until1907 and not recorded according to nationality until 1909. To complicatethings further, many boundaries in Europe changed after World War I, requiringa translation of political geography to reattribute origins and allocatequotas according to the world in 1920.

Before the Quota Board could address the data (or lack of it), it had toconceptualize the categories that comprised the national origins quota system.”National origin,” “native stock,” “nationality,” and other categorieswere not natural units of classification; they were constructed according tocertain social values and political judgments. For example, “native stock” didnot refer to persons born in the United States but to persons who descendedfrom the white population of the United States at the time of the nation’sfounding. The board defined the “immigrant stock” population as all personswho entered the United States after 1790 and their progeny.

The law defined “nationality,” the central concept of the quota system,according to country of birth. Although the statute made no explicit referenceto race, race entered the calculus and subverted the concept of nationalityin myriad ways. Ironically, nationality did not mean “country of birth”as far as defining the American nationality was concerned. The law excludednonwhite people residing in the United States in 1920 from the populationuniverse governing the quotas. The law stipulated that “‘inhabitants in continentalUnited States in 1920’ does not include (1) immigrants from the[Western Hemisphere] or their descendants, (2) aliens ineligible for citizenshipor their descendants, (3) the descendants of slave immigrants, or (4) thedescendants of the American aborigines.”

The Quota Board applied that provision according to race categories inthe 1920 census: “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,”and “Hindu.” It discounted from the population all blacks and mulattos,eliding the difference between the “descendants of slave immigrants”and the descendants of free Negroes and voluntary immigrants from Africa.It discounted all Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians as persons “ineligibleto citizenship,” including those with American citizenship by native-birth.The provision also excluded the Territories of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, andAlaska, which American immigration law governed and whose natives wereUnited States citizens. In other words, to the extent that the “inhabitants ofthe continental United States in 1920” constituted a legal representation ofthe American nation, the law excised all nonwhite, non-European peoplesfrom that vision, erasing them from the American nationality.

On a practical level, eliminating nonwhite peoples from the formula resultedin larger quotas for European countries and smaller ones for othercountries. For example, African Americans comprised 9 percent of the UnitedStates population in 1920; if they had been counted, and their “nationalorigins” in Africa considered, 9 percent of the quota would have been allocatedto west African nations, resulting in 13,500 fewer slots for Europe.

Race altered the meaning of nationality in other ways as well. Formally thequota system encompassed all countries in the world, except for those of theWestern Hemisphere. China, Japan, India, and Siam each received the minimumquota of one hundred; but the law excluded the native citizens of thosecountries from immigration because they were deemed to be racially ineligibleto citizenship. Congress thus created the oddity of immigration quotasfor non-Chinese persons of China, non-Japanese persons of Japan, non-Indianpersons of India, and so on. With regard to the independent Africannations, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa received quotas of one hundredeach, amounting to a concession of two hundred immigration slots for blackAfricans. European mandates and protectorates in Africa, the Near East andFar East—for example, Tanganyika, Cameroon, Palestine, New Guinea—eachhad their own quotas, which in practice served to increase the quotas ofGreat Britain, France, and Belgium, the nations with the largest colonialempires (table 1.1).
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