Unsung America. Prerna Lal
German immigrants included Friedrich Münch, Carl Strehly, Eduard Mühl, and Arnold Krekel. Together, they served as editors and contributors of German language newspapers in Missouri, writing articles and commentary against slavery in the 1800s, before the rise of popular abolitionist sentiments.
Friedrich Münch, in particular, penned many articles in the 1850s and 1860s in opposition to slavery, and successfully mobilized thousands of Germans to join the Union Army to fight the Confederates in the Civil War. He also opposed deportation of people who were formerly enslaved, stating, “We’ve no right to send away people who were born here, who have committed no crime, and who have indeed worked for the common good of their neighbors.”10 Yet Münch was no hero; he made decisions that were hypocritical and repugnant despite his advocacy. He purchased an enslaved person to help his wife with chores. He could not foresee integration, and so he proposed resettling emancipated people in a separate territory, such as Florida.
In a similar vein, fellow German journalists, such as Carl Strehly and Eduard Mühl, wrote against slavery in the 1840s for Hermanner Wochenblat before it became a popular movement.11 Initially, they were against abolition of slavery, and thought that the moral arguments against slavery would certainly turn the tide, but they changed their minds as they became disillusioned with the lack of progress.
Unlike the other first-generation German immigrants who came from educated and bourgeoisie backgrounds, Arnold Krekel came to the United States when he was seventeen years old from Prussia and had no fortune.12 He worked low-wage jobs to support himself as his family settled in St. Charles, Missouri, where Krekel experienced much antagonism from the pro-slavery population. In response to growing nativism against German and Irish immigrants, Krekel founded the St. Charles Demokrat in 1852. He was appointed as a US Western District Court judge by Abraham Lincoln, and presided over the Missouri Constitutional Convention of January 11, 1865, signing into law the Ordinance of Emancipation, which freed all the enslaved people in Missouri without any compensation to the enslavers.13
These German immigrants were regarded with much scorn where they lived. Their neighbors threatened them with violence and guerilla warfare because of their anti-slavery, pro-Union agenda. They were also living in extremely xenophobic times. The newly arrived Irish and German immigrants found themselves targeted by the nativist Know-Nothing movement.
After the Civil War, many Germans integrated over time with Anglo-Americans and abandoned their support for black liberation, though German immigrant pioneers such as Münch and Krekel continued to support and advance black suffrage and education. In this way, they helped to define a notion of American citizenship that valued racial justice, labor rights, and suffrage for all.
While these early German immigrants were unable to eradicate the negative impacts of slavery, their efforts helped create a more just society. Their conflict with native-born Americans shows us that immigrants did not need to adopt regressive anti-black views. Still, even with some foreign-born allies, it was up to African Americans to lead the struggle that ultimately won citizenship for all persons born in the United States.
Wong Kim Ark
Even after the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, states still saw it within their authority to invoke police power to control migration at the state level. California tried to limit and exclude Chinese immigrants based on their earlier use of police powers to restrict black migration to the state.14 After the courts struck down taxation laws designed to target Chinese immigrants, California began to focus on character and conduct, such as lewd behavior, in order to craft laws for restricting Chinese migration. And “as California goes, so goes the nation.”
Instead of quelling these discriminatory state laws, the federal government passed exclusionary laws against the Chinese. The Page Act of 1875 prohibited the entry of immigrants who were considered undesirable, including anyone from Asia coming as a contract laborer, any Asian women engaging in prostitution, and any convict from another country.15
Unsatisfied with the Page Act, Congress followed up with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly placed a ten-year ban on immigrants from China, a clear example of race-based exclusion.16 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was amended and renewed several times. Subsequent acts extended the discrimination by prohibiting reentry after leaving the United States, and requiring all existing Chinese residents to obtain a certificate of residency in order to prevent deportation. The Exclusion Act and later reauthorizations banned all legal migration from China, and Chinese immigrants living in the United States were denied citizenship even if born in the United States.
One of the people denied citizenship was Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873 to noncitizen parents. When he was twenty-one, he visited his parents, who had returned to China. When Wong Kim Ark returned to the United States in 1895, he was denied entry on the grounds that he was not a United States citizen. Instead, he was confined on board the steamship, and had to file a writ of habeas corpus for his freedom. He was asked to present two white witnesses who could attest to his birth, because as a Chinese person, his own testimony carried no weight in the eyes of the law.
His case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which explicitly rejected limitations on birthright citizenship and ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a United States citizen by virtue of his birth on US soil, even though his parents were not US citizens.17 The acceptance of birthright citizenship in 1898—a time when hysteria over Chinese immigrants was high—advanced the fundamental constitutional value of jus soli for all. Over time, courts have continued to defeat many efforts to limit birthright citizenship.
Even after he won citizenship, Wong Kim Ark faced persistent discrimination. Whenever he visited his parents abroad and returned to the United States, he was forced to show to show sworn affidavits that he was born in the United States.18 The United States did not repeal Chinese exclusion policies until 1943.19
The federal use of its immigration enforcement power to racially discriminate against Chinese immigrants directly contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection to all. But despite the ruling in favor of Wong Kim Ark, over the next hundred years, the federal government continued to try to limit the immigration and naturalization of certain ethnic groups. We have these rights today only because people like Dred Scott and Wong Kim Ark stood up to fight for them. And we will only keep these rights if we continue fighting for them.
Chinese Six Companies
With the nation in the grip of hysteria about the supposedly unassimilable Asian immigrants, Congress continued to make new laws targeting them. The Scott Act of 1888 prohibited reentry by Chinese laborers who had left the country. It also nullified all existing certificates of identity that had permitted the bearers to make temporary trips to China.20
In 1892, Congress passed the Geary Act, which extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another ten years, and required Chinese immigrants to register with the US government or face imprisonment with forced labor and deportation.21 But trying to get a registration certificate (a precursor to the Green Card) most certainly meant forced labor in jail and deportation because most Chinese immigrants at the time were unauthorized migrants who were considered deportable from the United States. It was designed to be a catch-22. No other immigrant group had to carry around documents proving their lawful status until 1928, when the government started issuing immigrant identification cards.22
These registration cards had their roots in the system of slavery. Before the Civil War, enslaved people were forced to carry identifying passes when they left the plantation, and free black people were required to bear papers proving that they were not slaves. The new registration requirement fueled anger in the Chinese community, leading to comparisons with “dog tags.”
The Geary Act also required white witnesses to testify to a Chinese person’s immigration status, and punished unauthorized immigration with one year of imprisonment and hard labor, along with deportation. In an early act of collective civil disobedience, led by the Chinese Six Companies, Chinese refused to register because they considered the law discriminatory and dehumanizing.
Established in 1862, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), also known as the Chinese Six Companies, was an association of Chinese merchants. The main goal of the CCBA was to help Chinese migrants