Geary Act (1892) Required Chinese to Carry Certificates of Residence

 The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was only valid for 10 years so the Geary Act was enacted in 1892 to extend the exclusion of Chinese laborers for another decade. It went beyond the 1882 law by adding a burdensome requirement that all Chinese had to carry on their person a Certificate of Residence such as shown below or risk deportation or imprisonment for one year if found without it. Application to the Collector of Internal Revenue required the testimony of two WHITE witnesses affirming they knew the applicant was a resident. The Certificate of Residence requirement applied to all Chinese, even those entitled to entry such as merchants.

Chinese resisted this requirement with only 3,169 of the estimated 110,000 Chinese in the country registering by the deadline. Qing Ow Yang, the Chinese vice consul in San Francisco, wrote to the government:

Do you know what the Geary bill means to the laboring Chinese in this country? It means, sir, that they are placed on the level with your dogs. If you have a dog, a black and tan, a Llewellyn setter, a pointer, you buy a license tag for it and fasten it to the dog’s collar, and the number in the dog’s tag is its immunity for arrest by the poundman. Under the Geary bill the laboring Chinese carry their number in their pocket and any man who so desires may stop them and demand to see their “tag”…

The Chinese Equal Rights League in New York and Brooklyn held that the bill imposed taxation without representation as Chinese immigrants had to pay the "illegal costs and expenses" of enforcing the law. As a concession to the Chinese, the McCreary amendment provided an additional six months for Chinese to register for the residency certificates.  Even so, only 13,242 Chinese laborers or 14 percent of those required by law to register, complied.

Several Chinese that refused to register for their certificate of residence brought suit that, upon appeal, was brought before the Supreme Court in Fong Yue Ting v. United States in 1893. Important questions brought before the Court was whether the Act violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China, whether hard labor and deportation constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the Eighth Amendment, whether the Act violated Fifth and Sixth Amendments protections by permitting imprisonment with hard labor without prior indictment or jury trial, whether the act violated the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition against the taking of property or liberty without due process, among other issues.

The Geary Act provisions for imprisonment and forced labor were invalidated by Wong Wing v. United States in 1896 with the Supreme Court ruling that non-citizens have rights to courts and due process under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, but the government could still detain people pending deportation.
The Chinese Consulate, the Six Companies, and many Chinese in the U.S. stated that they refused to pay their way back to China if deported. The cost of arresting and deporting as many as 85,000 unregistered Chinese was estimated at more than $7 million, but Congress had authorized only $60,000 and failed to provide a mechanism for deportation within the Geary Act.

When Ny Look, a Chinese Civil War veteran was arrested in New York for failure to register, the U.S. Circuit Court in the Southern District of New York ruled that there were no deportation provisions in the law and as Look could not be detained indefinitely, therefore he should be released.

The required Certificate of Residence seems to have not been enforced frequently and ended in 1943 with the repeal of the original 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.  However, in its place, the Smith Act or Alien Registration Act passed in 1940 required all noncitizens in the U.S.to register for an AR-2 card, the forerunner of today’s Green Card. This law was not aimed specifically at the Chinese threat to white labor but was in response to growing concern over growing armed conflict in Europe and a rise in subversive activities of communist and socialist movements in the United States that might “advocate, abet, advise, or teach” the violent destruction of the U.S. government.

I recently discovered that my father had been issued an Alien Registration number in 1949. I do not know whether he had to carry it at risk of deportation if he did not have it if asked to present it to an authority.