Deportation. Torrie Hester
the appeal rates in favor of Chinese defendants represented a policy failure. In 1901, Terence V. Powderly, the U.S. commissioner general of immigration, tried to do something about it. Steps taken by Powderly and his successor Frank P. Sargent would lead to more deportations, but they would not be as effective as later policy revisions. In the meantime, the round of revisions started with Powderly reifying the racial animus undergirding Chinese exclusion.
To Powderly, agents were not effectively using racial and cultural knowledge for Chinese exclusions when administering law. “The natural difficulties [in deporting under Chinese exclusion],” he wrote in a report to Congress, arose “from the apparent similarity, to those unfamiliar with the distinctive physical characteristics of the Mongolian, of all Chinese, from their totally different standards of morality, from their mental acuteness and ingenuity, and, worse than all, from their apparent ability at any time to command the use of considerable sums of money.”60 Here he espoused much of the same logic behind Chinese exclusion in the first place as well as behind the white witness requirement. Powderly hoped that officials better versed in the anti-Chinese racial attitudes of the era could more effectively prosecute Chinese immigrants.
Powderly also hoped to make policy more effective by the further centralization and specialization of immigration authorities. The early legislation of Chinese exclusion did not make clear who was authorized to swear out the complaints that triggered deportations. The Geary Act, for instance, stated that Chinese laborers could be arrested upon a complaint filed “by any party on behalf of the United States.”61 Labor council operators and some private citizens accordingly swore out warrants against Chinese immigrants.62 Congress clarified jurisdiction in 1893: local and private citizens could not swear out warrants of arrest.63 Yet, this clarification did not address the issue of divided enforcement within the federal bureaucracy. Congress assigned responsibility for swearing out complaints and arresting Chinese workers to officials within the U.S. Customs Service known as “Chinese inspectors” and U.S. attorneys.64 Powderly believed that this was “productive of confusion and relatively ineffective administration of the laws.”65 Powderly wanted Customs out of enforcement, because “[c]ollectors of customs are appointed primarily for the enforcement of customs laws. Their duties under the Chinese laws are additional thereto, and in many instances are regarded by them as merely subordinate to the former, if not occasionally rather in conflict with their interests as collectors of the ports.”66 Instead, he wanted a more centralized force dedicated to immigration enforcement.
Congress responded to Powderly’s call for centralization by assigning most of the Chinese exclusion enforcement to the Bureau of Immigration in 1903, which had by then been developed to administer the immigration laws that applied to non-Chinese immigrants.67 Immigration officers replaced customs officers at the ports. The voluminous records of Chinese exclusion, generated in large part by the issuance of certificates of entry and residence, were also transferred from the Internal Revenue Service to a central immigration office in Washington, D.C.68
A key part of the Bureau of Immigration’s efforts to increase the efficacy of its enforcement of Chinese exclusion focused on increasing exclusion rates at major ports of entry. Under the new directives, the number of people admitted as Section 6 immigrants dropped over 60 percent at ports along the West Coast. (“Section 6” was popular shorthand for the portion of the Chinese Exclusion Act that defined as exempt teachers, students, merchants, and travelers, who could be admitted with the presentation of a certificate from the Chinese government.) To increase exclusion rates, officials turned the restrictionist law—one that allowed exempt classes—into one that operated more as a racial exclusion.69
As the number of Chinese immigrants excluded at the western borders of the United States increased, Chinese immigrants started to enter the United States through other entry points. More immigrants moved to enter the United States through Canada or Mexico, where there were very few border inspectors. U.S. officials responded by creating new inspection points for Chinese inspectors in efforts to close off these new migration routes through the nation’s contiguous borders. This step pushed immigration routes farther east as Chinese immigrants tried to cross into the United States from Canada, beyond immigration inspection points in the West.70
Even before the changes, deportations under Chinese exclusion had cost the government more than it wanted to spend. The government paid for the initial proceedings through a system of facilitative payments. At each step in their hearings, U.S. commissioners charged fees for their services.71 Between 1901 and 1906, for example, U.S. commissioners charged seventy-five cents for issuing a warrant of arrest; twenty-five cents for every subpoena issued to a witness; five cents for each subpoena for an additional witness; ten cents for administering an oath; and forty cents for providing copies of the warrant of arrest. During the actual hearing, the commissioner charged thirty cents for the first witness and five cents for each additional witness. In addition, each commissioner charged five dollars per day for his role in charging and “reducing the testimony to writing when required to by law or order of the court.”72 In 1896, for hearing the case of United States v. Charlie Oak, the U.S. commissioner for Arizona’s Third Judicial District charged a total of $7.80. In 2015 dollars, this came to around $220. In the case of United States v. Cheong Foung, heard in 1900, the same commissioner charged $7.60.73 In 1909, the facilitative fees in the United States v. Sui Sing case totaled $8.30.74 Then there were the expenses of the appeals, which were even higher because they took place in the federal courts.
After 1903, as more Chinese immigrants immigrated farther east, the cost of deportations from eastern regions of the country increased. A deportation from northern New York cost more than a deportation from San Francisco. In 1901, the government spent on average about $52 per deportee under Chinese exclusion. That year, the government deported a total of 328 Chinese aliens at a total cost of $46,940.22.75 In 1903, the Bureau of Immigration deported a total of 704 Chinese immigrants, including 307 from the eastern region along its northern border, 228 from the western Canadian boundary region, and 138 from the Mexican boundary region. These deportations cost $80,375.45, about $65,000 of which went to deporting people from communities along the U.S.-Canada border—increasingly from communities in the East. This represented about 25 percent of the entire operating budget for all of Chinese exclusion.76 In 1904, the government spent $75,536.10 deporting Chinese immigrants, at an average cost of $112.24 each.77
In the first decade of the twentieth century, therefore, under Chinese exclusion much about deportation proceedings had been worked out. As a protection rather than a punishment, they fell under civil rather than criminal law. The distinction was an important one in terms of burden of proof, standards of evidence, and the rights of defendants, all of which favored the government over defendants. Policy makers had also included in the deportation proceedings of Chinese exclusion explicitly racialized legal practices. Lee Joe, one of the litigants in Fong Yue Ting, had faced one of these. He was ordered deported because he had not secured a white witness to prove his legal residence.
Officials administering Chinese exclusion, however, felt the deportation policy was not working. The deportations cost more than they wanted to spend. And, in spite of the civil status, and in spite of the racialized procedures, Chinese defendants were defeating deportation orders in some districts in as many as 90 percent of the cases.78 By the turn of the century, immigration officers were puzzling out ways to better realize the racial goal of the policy—to deport more Chinese immigrants—by restoring the civil nature of proceedings. Their early efforts centralized enforcement. In 1909, immigration authorities tried a new strategy, which relied on the general deportation policy that applied to all non-Chinese immigrants.
Deportation Proceedings Under General Immigration Policy
Congress and immigration officials built a policy to deport other immigrants that ran parallel to Chinese exclusion. To do so, they developed a list of qualitative deportable categories that applied to immigrants from everywhere else.79 The deportation proceedings established to administer these categories differed from the deportation proceedings under Chinese exclusion. Most notably, immigrants processed under general immigration law had very limited access to the federal courts in