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The Strange Land

Just finished reading the arduous history of Chinese Americans in Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (2025) by Micheal Luo. Chinese, we learn, started arriving on the West Coast in the1850s during the California gold rush. They continued to come for the construction of the intercontinental and other railroads after the Civil War. Chinese merchants and service workers followed. They did not all come at the same time or for the same reason, but there was a constant influx of Chinese, and a virulent hostility to them accompanied their arrival.

Today many oppose immigrants who are here illegally. They maintain that the “rule of law” requires that the “illegals” be removed from the country. That was not the reason for opposition to Chinese immigration. The Chinese were not in the United States illegally. Although some Eastern seaboard states tried to restrict Irish immigration, the federal government had placed no restrictions on immigration when the first Chinese influx began. Instead, at the time of our founding and beyond, the country welcomed immigrants. Michael Luo writes: “In the beginning the door was open. The Founding Fathers celebrated the multiplicity of difference in their young republic and recognized that filling the country’s vast, open spaces with newcomers was necessary for securing its future.”

Even so, by the 1840s, many did not want Chinese to be those newcomers. Jobs were a major concern. Today some voice a similar concern that the undocumented take work away from lawful residents. However, few leading the present deportation mania are lining up outside Home Depot for the day labor jobs or clamoring for stooped employment in the lettuce fields. In contrast, in the nineteenth century the hostility to the Chinese was led by whites, often immigrants themselves, who did want jobs in the mines or on the railroads or in the fields, and many of these jobs were held by the Chinese. Whites were not only willing to fight to do difficult and dangerous work, they were also willing to commit atrocities. Luo reports not only about unpunished murders of Chinese but unpunished massacres of them. Not only were Chinese homes and establishments burned without punishment, but time and again whole communities were torched. Luo reports so many atrocities that their recitation, a history that seldom gets reported, becomes mind-numbing.

In addition, the Chinese provoked hostility because they were the “other,” just as many immigrants are viewed today. Some Americans from the beginning had conflicting thoughts about immigration. New residents were necessary for a prosperous country, but immigrants with different customs could warp the country. Even Ben Franklin was concerned about the influx of non-English-speaking Germans into Pennsylvania. Less than a century later, it was easy to see the Chinese as “other” who could never become truly American.

The legal landscape changed for the Asian immigrants after the Civil War. The 1790 Naturalization Act restricted naturalization to “free white persons of good moral character,” a provision which was in effect until well into the twentieth century. Although he does not fully explain how, Luo reports that a few Chinese were naturalized despite this provision, but the law prevented almost every Chinese immigrant from becoming a citizen. However, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all those born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. In 1898 the Supreme Court held that a child born in the United States to a non-naturalized Chinese immigrant couple was, nevertheless, a citizen. There was now citizenship for few of the Chinese Americans.

But the group of Chinese Americans, citizen or not, remained small because of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It prohibited the immigration into the United States of Chinese laborers. For the first time a Chinese immigrant was deemed illegal. Only laborers were excluded, and many seeking entry claimed to be merchants or some other profession that did not require manual labor. Someone had to decide whether the person was excludable under the Exclusion Act, and a new immigration bureaucracy was born. After the Chinese Exclusion Act paved the way, it became easier for the United States to restrict immigration by nationality, restrictions that materialized in the 1920s.

The concern over illegal Chinese immigration widened. The 1790 Naturalization Act stated that children who were born abroad of U.S. citizens were natural-born citizens unless the father had never been an American resident. After the Fourteenth Amendment, the number of Chinese American citizens increased, many of whom returned to China. Chinese, mostly male, started appearing at ports of entry claiming to be citizens as the children of citizens. Government officials often thought that the birth documents showing lineages were fraudulent. The problem of “paper sons” increased after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed birth records. Lengthy, often humiliating detentions, investigations, and interrogations were routine.

The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect until World War II when it became an embarrassment since China was an ally in the fight against Japan. Indeed, China had started its war of resistance against Japan in 1937, and Luo reports that 14 to 20 million Chinese were killed in the fighting by World War II’s end.

American immigration laws changed in the 1950s and 1960s, and concern over Chinese immigration morphed into something more modern. With mainland China controlled by Mao, the concern was not about laborers taking jobs away from Americans. Instead, the fear was over communist spies and the stealing of American technology by Chinese students and professionals. A similar rationale fuels many of today’s fears about Chinese immigrants.

On the other hand, many now view Chinese and other Asians as strivers in a traditional American sense, who show that “outsiders” can be successful in the United States. They are a “model minority.” If so, as Strangers in the Land illustrates, that status has been achieved in spite of a tortuous and tortured American history.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Inclusive Declaration of Independence and the Founding of America

The Fourth of July celebrates the United States of America and its birth, but with our current mood many only want to point out the country’s current and historical shortcomings. Every Fourth, I urge all to read the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so, it is natural to focus on the multiple ironies of its most famous phrase: “all Men are created equal.” However, as we know, in eighteenth century America, women, Native Americans, and indentured servants were not seen as equal. And, of course, slaves were not equal. Any fair assessment of our history acknowledges, as Thomas E. Ricks states in First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped our Country (2020), that slavery was not a “stain” on the country; it was woven into the original fabric. And that weft and warp made the celebration of liberty painful to many Americans throughout our history, which was perhaps most powerfully stated by Frederic Douglass on July 5, 1852. Just as the Declaration should be regularly read, so too should this speech. (Africans in America/Part 4/Frederick Douglass speech (pbs.org.)

The Fourth of July is our birthday, however. Some might temper a child’s birthday celebration with a discussion of the child’s shortcomings, but I would hope that the major thrust of the party is, in fact, to celebrate the kid. We should be realistic in assessing our country, but there has always been much to celebrate, and the Fourth is a time of celebration. Because it is so easy to mock the Declaration’s equality statement, it is too easy to overlook the many ways that in its founding the country also furthered egalitarianism and inclusiveness.

We know many of the Declaration’s phrases—“When in the Course of human Events”; “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; and others. But we often miss something about the tenor of the Declaration as a whole. There are no classical allusions or references. By eighteenth century standards, the language is simple. The document was not written for the elite peers of those who signed the document but for a wide swath of what were to become Americans.

Its logic demanded an inclusive appeal. The Declaration asserts that a government derives “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed” not from the Divine Right of Kings. It declared “the Right of the People” to change government. The Declaration with these contentions could not just be addressed to an elite, aristocratic audience. It +was not directed to the enslaved, but it was seeking the approval of almost everyone else—the farmer, the joiner, the tavern owner, the schoolteacher, the sailors, the ship captain, the log splitter, and yes, the slave owner and trader. For an eighteenth-century document, its intended audience was remarkably inclusive.

The notion of the consent of the governed was a radical, egalitarian break from America’s English roots, and the emerging country’s conception of “the people” was much broader than almost anywhere else in the world. This is reflected in who could vote. Today we note the shortcomings of a franchise limited to propertied white males, but we seldom consider, as Jill Lepore does in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), that a higher percentage of people could vote in the colonies than in England. The franchise was narrow by modern standards, but it was broad for its time.

Part of the reason for the inclusiveness of the Founding Era’s America was the high rate of literacy among its people, perhaps the highest of any country of its times. The seventeenth-century Pilgrims, Puritans, and others who settled here held beliefs that rejected an authoritarian church. They believed that the eternal truths came from the Bible, not from an authoritarian church, and, therefore, it was important that people could read the Holy Book. Literacy was stressed as well as the ability of each person to reason. Jefferson and the others may have expected that the Declaration would be read out to those assembled in taverns and inns, but they also knew that many people would read it for themselves, and all were expected to think and reason about the document, which led to its inclusive appeal to the people.

The Declaration did mention “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and the signers said that they had acted with “a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence,” but it did not beseech God, a god, or Jesus Christ for independence. Just as some only criticize the Declaration for its hypocrisies without recognizing its advances, some focus on the listing of God and divine providence and conclude erroneously that the Declaration was an act of religious faith, or, more particularly, the signers’ Christianity. But these references, which include the almost pagan formulation of “Nature’s God,” were not invocations of any particular divinity to grant them a new country. Government depended on the consent of the governed, not on divine will, and the appeal was to the people, not to some version of God. The Declaration’s wording was inclusive; it did not exclude any particular believer or any nonbeliever from its ambit. It rejected the too-often divisiveness of religion and relied on the reason of the people.

This lack of a religious appeal is not surprising. Thomas Ricks shows in First Principles that neither Christianity nor any other religious influence was prominent in the Revolutionary period. This only began to change in 1815. He reports that there was one minister for every 1500 people in 1775 America while there was one for every 500 by 1845. Scott L. Malcomson writes in One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventures of Race that in 1790 only one in ten white Americans was a member of a formal church. Jill Lepore in These Truths agrees that the country was founded in one of its most secular eras.

Of course, slavery existed throughout the country when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and we should not forget how that institution shaped our country. Nevertheless, for their time, the Founders also created an egalitarian and inclusive government in ways we now seldom appreciate. For example, unlike many of the state and foreign governments of the time, the United States had no property qualifications to hold office. In an era when they were common, no religious tests were required for holding office. And we seldom notice that the new country paid its officials. Many governments did not, so only the rich who could afford to be uncompensated could hold office. Unlike in other countries, all whites, or at least all white males, could hold office.

The new country also broke from history and the practices of most countries by having no hereditary offices. A formal aristocracy died in the United States. Revolutionary America also moved to a more equal society by repealing primogeniture laws, which dictated that the firstborn male child would inherit his parent’s entire estate. This extraordinarily egalitarian reform, whose importance is seldom noticed today, was led by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia.

A related change in property law was also happening during this time. Under English law, aliens could buy property, but they could not inherit it. Aliens could sell the land they owned, but they could not grant it in a will. Instead, on death, an alien’s property went to the state. Revolutionary America began to repeal such inegalitarian laws, helping to make the country more inclusive and prosperous.

The country’s first naturalization law had some of the same characteristics as the Declaration of Independence. It showed simultaneously both racial restriction and social inclusiveness. The law limited naturalization to free, white citizens who had lived in the country for two years. We, of course, notice that nonwhites were excluded. (“Free” meant indentured servants could not be naturalized until they completed their periods of indenture.) Blacks could not be naturalized until 1870, and other nonwhites could not be naturalized until well into the twentieth century. There was no legal definition of whiteness. When areas of Mexico became part of the United States in the early1850s, the former Mexicans of those lands were made citizens, and there was an implicit recognition that they were white. The Supreme Court dealt with whiteness and naturalization several times and concluded that Asians and South Asians were not white but that Syrians and Armenians were. In 1922 the Supreme Court held that a high caste Sikh was neither white nor black and could not be naturalized. He had fought for this country in World War I.

However, in addition to noting the racial restriction, we should also consider the inclusiveness of this law. It did not impose a property requirement for citizenship. The rich and the not rich could become citizens. Aristocratic origins did not matter. There was the racial limitation, but no national origin requirement. There was no religious test. At a time when Catholics could not hold office in England and Jews could not become citizens in many places, they could in the United States.

We should keep both racial restrictions as well as these inclusions in mind when we consider this country’s origins. The founding era accepted an institution whose ramifications have troubled us throughout our history, but it also gave us foundations for much of what is good in this country.

I am sure that some will mostly criticize America on the Fourth, which is their right. And I am sure that some will call such critics unpatriotic, which is their right.

Patriotism has often been a contentious concept. Vicksburg, Mississippi, offers an example of its fragility. Exactly four score and seven years ago to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to American General Ulysses S. Grant after a forty-seven–day siege. This was certainly one of the most important actions of the war because it gave control of the Mississippi River to the Americans and severed the confederacy.

Thus, July 4, 1863, was another Fourth of July for patriotic Americans to celebrate, but Vicksburg didn’t see it that way. The town did not honor the Fourth of July for the next eight decades. They continued to identify as confederates, not as Americans. Vicksburg simply ignored Independence Day until after World War II when General Dwight Eisenhower visited the town on the Fourth. Even so, Vicksburg did not want to celebrate the United States. It called the celebrations during Eisenhower’s visit a “Carnival of the Confederacy,” a title I am told that was dropped only when the country and Vicksburg celebrated the Bicentennial in 1976. I’m not sure what to make of their tenacious grasp of a different brand of “patriotism.” I guess I’m just glad that they finally celebrate along with the rest of us.

And I hope all Americans can find something to celebrate this Fourth of July.

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Marra, the Movies, American History, and Irony (continued)

          Perhaps the biggest irony for America in World War II is that this country fought against the self-proclaimed master race with a segregated army drawn from a society that oppressively discriminated. In Anthony Marra’s novel Mercury Pictures Presents we meet a patriotic Black man who has enlisted. He protests when he can’t get served a hamburger in a Utah café. To get the American citizen to leave, the counterman pulls a shotgun, which he inadvertently discharges, killing a German POW who was being served. The Black is convicted of manslaughter because of his “provocation,” and a lengthy sentence is imposed. I don’t know if Marra based this on a real incident, but events equally as bizarre were a common occurrence in this land of equality.

          Ironically, our racial definitions were harsher than Germany’s. Most places in America that legally segregated used the “one drop” rule. If any ancestor of a person was Black, then that person was Black. One drop of Jewishness was not sufficient for the Nazis. A Jew was someone who had three or four Jewish grandparents, not simply one drop of Jewish blood. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was classified as Mischling, think mulatto. Of course, the Mischlinge, while not fully Jewish, were still oppressed in fascist Germany, and that led, at least as depicted in Philip Kerr’s prizewinning If the Dead Rise Not, part of his Bernhard Gunther series, to a black-market activity. In the novel, Gunther finds a forger to alter the birth records and other documents of his one Jewish grandparent who places the altered papers in official files. Thus, Gunther retroactively “Aryanizes” his nana.

          We may know that legal segregation in American states required a definition of Black. However, few remember today that federal law also required a definition of “white.” Our first naturalization law passed in the 1790s stated that only free, white people could be naturalized, and this legal restriction was carried forward into the twentieth century. Of course, the Fourteenth Amendment passed after the Civil War said that anyone born in the United States was a citizen. Many freed from slavery could not prove their place of birth, and in1870 a law was passed allowing Blacks to be naturalized. Otherwise, only whites could be naturalized, but “white” was not defined, which led to a series of bizarre federal cases. They culminated in United States v. Bhagat Singit Thind, decided by the Supreme Court in 1923. Thind was an Indian Sikh who had come to the United States in 1913 for graduate studies. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a sergeant in the First World War, and in 1919 petitioned for citizenship. He said he was white, in fact Aryan, because his caste of Indians and Europeans shared a common descent from Proto-Indian Europeans. The Court rejected his naturalization petition and reiterated what it had said earlier, that “white” as used in the statute did not have a scientific meaning but was “synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” Southeast Asian Indians did not fall into this category. Other court decisions held that while Syrians and Armenians were white and could become U.S. citizens, those who were not white included the Chinese; half-white/half Native Americans; Hawaiians; Burmese; Japanese; Native Americans; half white/half Asians; Filipinos; three quarters Filipino/one quarter whites; Afghanis; and Arabians.

          Although non-whites, except for Blacks, could not be naturalized, for our first century, they could immigrate to this country. Immigration was unrestricted until the racially- and class-based Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted in 1882, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country. Of course, many Chinese laborers had entered before that to work during the California gold rush and later to construct railroads. Those who had been in America before 1882 were in the country legally and could remain but had their own confino. If they left the country to see family in China or for any other reason, they could not return. The exceptions, however, were the small number of Chinese Americans who had been born in this country. In 1898, the Supreme Court interpreting the birthright citizenship provision of the Fourteenth Amendment held that Wong Kim Ark was an American citizen because he was born in the United States, and thus, he could not be denied re-entry into the country under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

          Few Chinese had been born in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. While male Chinese laborers had come to the United States before the Exclusion Act, few Chinese women had, and a Chinese person claiming birthright citizenship was treated with grave suspicion by the immigration services. The presumption was against citizenship, and since record-keeping of births had often been spotty, proving an American birth was often difficult. That was the premise of a pretty good play I saw recently at Manhattan’s Atlantic Theater, The Far Country by Lloyd Suh and directed by Eric Ting. The play opens with a funny, frightening, disturbing interrogation of a Chinese man claiming birthright citizenship by federal authorities with the added twist that it is 1909 in San Francisco and the 1906 earthquake had destroyed almost all government and personal documents.

          Perhaps because of lessons learned from fighting Hitler or, again, possibly because of how well our communist enemies exploited our racial laws for propaganda, our racial restrictions on naturalization changed after World War II.

(concluded December 2)

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Birthering Trump (concluded)

Kamala Harris does not fall into the groups—Native Americans and children of diplomats–that the Fourteenth Amendment’s clause “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States was meant to exclude. The new birther argument about Harris instead centers on her parents’ immigration status when she was born. It contends, I think, that unless her parents were lawful permanent U.S. residents at her birth, and not just here on student visas or some other status or here illegally, she is not a citizen. According to this new theory, the Fourteenth Amendment requires a person when born to be subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States. We can debunk this position: this is not in the text of the Constitution; it is a logically incomprehensible proposition: and the most apposite Supreme Court case held against it.

But I don’t want to debunk the theory. Instead, I want to give birthers their due and take it seriously and apply it to Donald J. Trump. Let’s ask the truly important question: Is Trump a natural born citizen?

Trump’s mother Mary Ann MacLeod Trump was born May 10, 1912, in Scotland. Supposedly, she supposedly obtained a visa to come to the United States in 1930. (Have you seen that visa? In our history, many people not from primitive toilet countries have come here illegally. Get on it, birthers.) However, she apparently went back and forth between Scotland and the United States several times in the 1930s and remained at least sentimentally attached to her homeland all her life. MacLeod married Fred Trump in 1936, and reports say that she was naturalized on March 10, 1942, in Brooklyn. (Have you seen those naturalization documents? Have you seen the long form naturalization papers? Get on it, birthers.) People do lie about being naturalized or at least Trumps do. Fred and Mary Ann Trump reported on the 1940 census that she was naturalized when she was not. (Why did they lie about this? What were they hiding? Get on it, birthers.)

Donald Trump was supposedly born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York, but have you seen that birth certificate? Reports say that his mother “returned to her home area in Scotland often during the course of her life.”  (She declined to speak English there as if she was a foreign agent.) Is it possible that Donald was actually born in Scotland on one of her, as far as we know, secret trips to the Hebrides? Birthers, have you looked for birth records in the U.K. to see if Trump was born there?

Of course, birthers should not accept that Trump’s mother was a citizen when he was born until those authenticated and not forged naturalization papers are produced and it is explained why the parents lied about the naturalization. (Was the naturalization, if it did occur, a product of fraud?) If those unproduced records show that the mother was naturalized in 1942, she was a U.S. citizen when Donny was born, but if we accept the contentions about K. Harris, both parents would have to be citizens or permanent residents to make the child subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States when born. What about Trump’s father?

Standard sources say the president’s papa was born in New York City, but Donald J. Trump is not a standard kind of guy. At least three times the president has said that his daddy was born in Germany. Birthers should take Trump at his word about his ancestry. Surely, you don’t think that he would ever, ever say anything that was not true. Clearly, then, the important issue becomes whether der Vater was a citizen or at least a permanent resident when the Trumpster was born. Birthers, demand that the president produce the immigration and naturalization records of his old man. If he can’t, and I for one am quite confident that he cannot, then the conclusion must be that Trump’s father was here illegally and that he was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident when the wunderkind was born. Birthers, show that you are not just racists and also want to make sure white people are eligible to be president. Show that you are not just right wing loonies but want to check on the bona fides of all candidates even if they are right wing loonies. Start checking, and you might find, that by your logic, Trump is not a natural born citizen and cannot be president.

Who out there knows anything about the birth of Mike Pence?