Underground Chinese Tunnels: Facts, Fantasies, and Finances

Underground Chinese Tunnels, Pendleton, Oregon     

     Pendleton, Oregon, a small town located in a remote area about 200 miles east of Portland, attracts many visitors to take tours of underground “tunnels” in the part of town where Chinese immigrants lived in the late 1890s and early 20th century.  The 1910 U.S. Census listed 83 Chinese, almost all men who were laborers, a few cooks and domestics, and several laundrymen. During that period anti-Chinese feelings were strong and the Chinese were often victims of assault, robbery, and even homicide.  It was especially dangerous for the Chinese to be in public spaces after sundown.  

    Did these conditions prompt the Chinese to dig underground tunnels to enable safe after-dark movement from one Chinese-owned business to another, especially for illegal activities like gambling and for businesses such as opium dens and brothels. Tunnels were thought to have concealed entrances through which escape was possible in the event of a police raid. The tunnels were a Chinese community secret until the city began to repair potholes on sidewalks in front of Chinese stores in the 1980s, long after the Chinese occupied these buildings.

    For many years popular commercial tours of these tunnels have existed that are promoted as having an “actual historian” as a guide. They are a lucrative source of tourist spending in Pendleton. The photos below do not represent the original condition of the underground tunnels but involve some "prettying-up" by the tour company.  Although many other towns in western states are thought to have also had underground tunnels, the physical evidence is weak and none of them have reconstructed an actual underground space as Pendleton has.

https://offbeatoregon.com/H1001e_Pendleton.html

Is There Evidence That Underground Spaces Were Part Of A Tunnel?

Ideas that early Chinese dug tunnels to provide hidden living and working spaces fascinate the general public and are in keeping with the widespread view that the "heathen Chinee" were mysterious or inscrutable. Despite the attraction of underground Chinese tunnels to tourists,  Priscilla Wegars, an authority on the archeological study of Chinese communities in the northwest,  indicated that she has never found any documentation or substantiation for these rumored "Chinese tunnels." In cities where the Chinese owned buildings, they utilized the basements for storage, as living quarters, or as opium dens. There were interconnecting hallways between adjacent buildings, but these spaces were not part of a larger system that would warrant them being called "tunnels."

There were indeed passageways under the sidewalk for buildings with stores that were once used for delivery access, or to admit light into the basements. The architectural term for these passageways is "sidewalk vaults,” and they can be found in the sidewalks of many towns throughout the West. The passageways underneath them are simply access channels and have no connection with early Chinese residents. The same can be said for the so-called "Chinese tunnels" rumored to exist in Boise and Pocatello, Idaho; Baker City, Oregon; Seattle and Tacoma, Washington; Victoria, BC, and many other places.

These basements were not dug by the Chinese occupants but were created when the building was constructed.  The fact or idea that the Chinese used these spaces does not prove the Chinese dug the interconnecting passages between adjacent buildings to create "tunnels."  If the Chinese dug tunnels, what did they do with all the earth they had to dig through? How could it be disposed of without anyone noticing.  Moreover, with such a small Chinese population of 83 mostly older men at its peak in 1910, it doesn't seem possible they could have constructed any underground tunnel.

https://webpages.uidaho.edu/AACC/research.htm#tunnels

Underground Tunnels in Fresno Chinatown? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1mrGZU5Hpk  A local Fresno tv news story about the “underground Chinese tunnels” complete with 'spooky' background music.” 

The historic Chinatown in Fresno was approximately six blocks just west of the railroad tracks.  In 2007, most of the buildings were gone but Sanborn fire insurance maps from the 1880s show it was once a densely populated area, home to the Chinese laborers who laid Fresno’s foundations, and to successive layers of immigrants from other ethnic groups The area had family-run stores, temples, churches, Chinese and Japanese schools, but also provided hidden spaces under street level for illicit activities of gambling, prostitution, and drinking during Prohibition.

Many business establishments had basements, some of them interconnected. Of those that can still be seen today, some end in bricked-off walls that longtime residents say hide tunnel entrances. Archaeologists believe the tunnels may have been built to provide cool underground storage in a region known for the sweltering summer heat.  Although the archaeological study was just beginning in 2007, there appears to be some evidence of underground “linear structures” that could have been tunnels or simply large drainage pipes. Locals believe if Chinatown and its excavated tunnels can be developed for heritage tourism, it could bring some income to an impoverished area.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/09/27/secret-tunnels-underneath-fresnos-chinatown-probed-by-archeologists/

Bakersfield Chinese Underground

     Despite many stories about underground tunnels in Bakersfield, California, many Chinese immigrants remain skeptical. Most of the so-called tunnels, some argue, were simply extended basements that were sometimes connected to neighboring basements. In the days before air conditioning, underground rooms provided much-needed relief from the valley’s notorious summer heat, and also provided storage space for businesses.

        In the view of one Chinese resident, “We didn’t go into any tunnels; it was just a basement not connected to any other basements or passageways. It was simply a back door. There were no tunnels. Just cellars,”  

https://www.bakersfield.com/news/the-legend-of-bakersfields-downtown-tunnels-truth-or-fiction/article_1e0428e9-68f7-5c1b-b27b-e0b914f61943.html

Napa, CA. Chinese Underground

The evidence in support of underground tunnels is no more compelling in Napa, California, than in other cities with similar stories, leaving one to wonder if they exist mainly in the fantasies many people hold about the Chinese, and the hope by towns that tours of these tunnels would bring financial income to cash strapped towns.

A Napa television station video looked at the possibility that tunnels once existed under the stores in Chinatown. 

https://tinyurl.com/y2dkex6d

Missionaries in China: Help versus Harm

    Until well into the twentieth century few Americans living beyond the western and northeastern United States ever met or interacted in person with Chinese immigrants.  One reason was there were few Chinese in part due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the entry of Chinese laborers, a group that had been previously welcomed by capitalists as a large supply of cheap labor.  Moreover, the majority of Chinese immigrants did not speak English well, if at all.  

    Despite Americans lacking much direct contact with the Chinese people, they nonetheless held strong impressions, often incorrect or demeaning about these “Celestials” as they were often called in the 19th century, that they formed from accounts of explorers, merchants, and missionaries. Another popular epithet, heathen, focused on the uncivilized aspects of Chinese, worship of idols, and their uncleanliness.

    The earliest views of Chinese held in the West, which was generally positive and respectful, came from anecdotal accounts provided by explorers such as Marco Polo and American merchants in the early19th century        

              (  Empress of China. (see Lee, Before Chinatown)   

    Later in the mid-19th century, China was in turmoil and disarray after being defeated and humiliated in two costly Opium Wars with Great Britain who had introduced opium from India to China to pay for its own 'addiction' to China's tea that caused a trade imbalance of silver payments. 

    This uncertain situation provided a golden opportunity in China for Christian missionaries to engage in medical as well as evangelical missions.

     Many missionaries regarded Britain’s victories in the Opium Wars as a sign that God was readying China for the arrival of the Word. “Roberts added, “we are willing to see anything which has a tendency to accomplish these desirable ends”— the opening of China to Christ. 

 .  (See Minden)  

Chinese Anti-missionary Sentiment due to the Harm of Opium

    Much of the Chinese opposition to Christian missionaries arose from the fact that opium was a harmful and illegal commodity, and that despite their vigorous advocacy of the rule of law, Westerners were the chief importers of the drug. Indeed, the connection drawn in the minds of many Chinese between the missionaries and the illegal activities of their countrymen was discrediting all missionary claims of benevolent intent and undermining their assertion that Christianity represented a superior foundation for moral behavior.  Many missionaries began to hold the view that the opium trade, or rather the stigma of lawlessness that was associated with it, was becoming a major obstacle to the spread of the gospel in China.

    By the mid-1850s, the attitudes of American missionaries toward the opium question had undergone a fundamental transformation. Humanitarian concern for the impact of opium on the health and welfare of the Chinese people was supplanted by a greater concern over the impact of its illegality on the reputation of Westerners in general, and thus on the winning of greater numbers of converts to Christianity. There was no greater proof of this change than the influential contribution made by American missionaries to the agreements associated with the Treaty of Tianjin negotiated in 1858.  70

    Thus, for the sake of easing their own consciences, and, perhaps, to more effectively spread the Gospel in China, missionaries helped to open the country more widely to the importation of opium. After the signing of the Treaties of Tianjin, the importation of the drug increased dramatically and opium addiction became one of the most devastating scourges ever to afflict the Chinese people.

 

To save the heathen Chinese, it was first necessary to demonize them.

  see john pomfret

The first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, arrived in 1807, but during the first twenty-seven years in China, Protestant missionaries claimed only ten converts. 

In 1830, E. C. Bridgman arrived in Canton with the evangelical zeal of the Second Great Awakening.  He was one of the first Americans to acquire a mastery of the Chinese language, earning wide recognition as the foremost American expert on Chinese society and politics.3 

From May 1836 to April 1837, Bridgman and Williams? printed seventeen articles on the history and present state of the opium trade in China, most of which illustrated the various ways that the drug was exerting an evil influence on the moral, commercial, and political life of the nation. 

p 44

Peter Parker, the fourth American Protestant preacher in China, arrived in Guangzhou in 1834. A graduate of both Yale’s medical college and its divinity school, he was the first medical missionary in China. Parker and the other early Protestants shared some similarities with the Catholic Jesuits who had been coming to China since the sixteenth century. Through good works, they sought to convince the Chinese of the superiority of their faith.  In his application to the American Board, Parker described dual goals: disseminating “the blessings of science and Christianity all over the globe.” 

    Issachar Roberts arrived in China in 1837 after mortgaging his Mississippi farm and preaching in Macao. While the first group of Western missionaries studied Chinese and hobnobbed with the upper classes, Roberts was drawn to the masses.  Roberts moved to Hong Kong and then in May 1844 to Guangzhou 

     Peter Parker and Issachar Roberts disagreed about how to change China. Parker and others sent out by the American Board believed that long years of study, an additional specialization, and a healthy respect for the culture were the keys to China’s kingdom. They were scholars, not bomb-throwers. They wanted, in Parker’s words, to “heal” China, to help it become stronger.

      James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) was a British Protestant Christian missionary who spent 51 years in China and founded the China Inland Mission (CIM, now OMF International) which was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to China who established 125 schools and directly resulted in 18,000 Christian conversions, as well as the establishment of more than 300 stations of work with more than 500 local helpers in all eighteen provinces.

    Taylor was known for his sensitivity to Chinese culture, even wearing Chinese clothing, and for his zeal for evangelism. Under his leadership, the CIM was non-denominational in practice and accepted members from all Protestant groups, including individuals from the working class, and single women as well as multinational recruits. Taylor has been referred to as one of the most significant Europeans to visit China in the 19th Century.

    While it can hardly be disputed that the medical mission was of great benefit for the Chinese, the evangelical mission was a much less successful endeavor, with few converts. Evangelical efforts became an increasingly frustrating and fruitless effort given the unsavory connection drawn by the Chinese between Western opium smugglers and Christian missionaries.   Missionaries were accused of hypocrisy by the Chinese to whom they preached their message of Christian salvation and benevolence.

    Most missionaries were white men, and although many came with a white wife and children, their effectiveness with Chinese women was limited. By the late 1890s, Baptist churches approved of sending white women missionaries to China.

    The resistance and hostility among Chinese, described as 'yellow demons,' toward Christian missionaries attempting to convert them to Christian religious beliefs and practices is illustrated in an article published in 1900 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune which reported that Chinese made crudely drawn but pointed cartoon images that dramatically conveyed their negative feelings toward missionaries. The illustration below shows the hostility and resistance toward western missionaries and their attempt to convert them to Christianity.

    The missionary, represented on the left by a hog tied to a cross, is being skewered with arrows shot by little Chinese demons at the command of a mandarin.   The legend on the cartoon reads, "Ask the beast if he is still thinking of coming (to China)."

heading?

    Missionaries may have had biases in their reports in seeking continued financial support.  They had to convince their churches of a need for the Chinese to be saved i.e, poverty, drug abuse, crime, child abuse.  The worse the picture that missionaries presented about the Chinese, the more likely they were to receive financial backing from their churches. Moreover, they had to show progress or success in the conversion of the Chinese to Christianity. 

    Furthermore, they did not deal with a cross-section of the Chinese population. Missionaries dealt with the Chinese who were receptive to evangelical outreach and/or in need of medical care and treatment. In contrast, they had little contact with more affluent segments of the population so their reports to the American public painted an inaccurate picture of the Chinese overall.

              

(Similarly, see C.K. Marshall admission blog post in Blue Gray civil war site)

           see MGM Cartoons: 

Pearl Buck views

    Currently, more than a century later, despite the formidable resistance to Christianity for decades, millions of Chinese in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America identify or affiliate with Christianity.

How Americans Acquired Their "knowledge" about Chinese

    The accounts of the Chinese that Christian missionaries sent back to America were one of the primary sources of information about the Chinese for the American public and highly influential on how Americans perceived the Chinese. 

       As Lazrich (2006) observed: “Christian missionaries, deeply motivated by the zeal of their convictions and the imperative force of their religious ideology, served as the vanguard of Western cultural penetration wherever they ventured to establish themselves. And while their methods and goals were not always in harmony with those of their profit-seeking countrymen, missionaries would come to serve a predominant role in shaping the earliest formal diplomatic relations between the Western powers and the traditional societies and governments of the non-Western world.”

    Missionaries had great influence in shaping the first U.S. treaties with the Chinese since their mastery of the Chinese language and experience in dealing with Qing officials were indispensable to the diplomats representing the United States.

Missionaries in China attracted some Chinese to study in the U.S, and some became Christians who wanted to return to China as missionaries,  Being fluent in Chinese, and being Chinese, in many ways they could establish better rapport with the Chinese which facilitated their conversion rates.

Missionary Work with Chinese in the U.S.

    Historian Derek Chang analyzed how the Baptist Home Mission approached conversion attempts among the growing number of immigrant Chinese around 1869, an increase due largely to the 10 to 20,000 Chinese brought from China to work on building the Central Pacific portion of the Transcontinental Railroad.  Using Portland for his analysis, Chang noted that although evangelical Christians made extensive efforts to convert the Chinese, they depicted the Chinese in a negative light, as heathens who worshipped false gods,  engaged in opium smoking, and brought Chinese women over as virtual slaves who were forced into prostitution.  

    Chang also noted the simultaneous goal of Baptist missionaries toward converting black Americans in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Although both the Chinese and blacks were viewed in a negative light and hence in need of conversion to Christianity, there was an important difference between the two populations.  Most of the Chinese were unacquainted with Christianity and also found it acceptable to hold more than one belief system such as Buddhism and Taoism. In contrast, even before slavery was abolished, blacks already were practicing their own version of Christianity.  Chang pointed out that white missionaries wanted to retain power in the churches involving Chinese and blacks, but found that these groups wanted autonomy and self-control.

    Missionaries were much more successful in converting Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. than those in China. One attraction was the opportunity for the Chinese to learn English from missionaries and Sunday School teachers. Being in the U.S., the Chinese wanted to acquire better acceptance from the American public, and becoming Christians was a major means at a time when Chinese were generally disparaged and regarded as "heathens" who would never assimilate to American values.

   A 1903 newspaper account of the Chinese in Birmingham, Alabama, showed that despite the harsh and discriminatory treatment of Chinese across the country in 1903 that began much earlier and continued for many subsequent decades, there were efforts by Christian churches in the highly segregated Deep South, to convert these "heathens" to Christianity through Sunday School classes.

    The Second Presbyterian Church provided 15 teachers for 15 Chinese students of unspecified ages.  It was felt that the 1:1 ratio would expedite their acquisition of English.  It is questionable if there were as many as 15 Chinese children in Birmingham at all!  The 1900 census showed only 5 Chinese, all adult males, and the 1910 census showed only 10 Chinese adult males. No women or children were listed in either census. This discrepancy probably is due to poor enumeration that failed to record any Chinese children, or women, if there were any.

   The pastor cited the importance of this outreach "because the Chinese are subject to many temptations peculiar to American cities." He did not cite specific temptations but implied that Sunday School experiences would protect them. As an aside, he did not seem to recognize how effectively Chinese parents discipline their children to behave.

    A final argument by the pastor for the value of Sunday School experiences for Chinese children was that when they retire and return to China, they may play a role in the evangelical goal of spreading the Gospel in China.    

                                  

     The evangelical mission in Birmingham was by no means an isolated one, but one that could be found increasingly in towns, large and small, across the country by 1900.

Two Opposing Views About Chinese Exclusion

 The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which lasted until 1943, was passed to prevent cheap Chinese labor from depriving Americans of work. Additional justifications included racist xenophobic views that the Chinese were inferior, unassimilable, devious, unhygienic, and immoral, to name a few.

However, there were notable defenses of the Chinese such as Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll's argument in 1899 against the unjust exclusion that fell on deaf ears. Green was a free thinker, abolitionist, and considered the foremost orator and political speechmaker of late 19th century America.

    In contrast to Ingersoll's defense of the Chinese, an article published in the Birmingham newspaper on January 3, 1911, p.17 argued for continuing the exclusion of Chinese. Using the caricature of the Chinese as a cheater who outmaneuvers two white men trying to cheat him in a card game in a poem written in 1870 by Bret Harte, Plain Language From Truthful James that was more widely known as The Heathen Chinee. The 1911Birmingham article invoked the image of the devious untrustworthy "heathen Chinee" created way back in 1870 to depicts the many sneaky ways the Chinese devised to gain entry illegally into the country. 

  

  

Many of the arguments were specious. If the Chinese were 'unassimilable,' it was not an inherent trait of the Chinese but a condition imposed by the racist barriers that denied Chinese naturalization, opportunity to testify in court, and the denial of their bringing wives and children from China, among other impediments. The closing claim, without evidence, that the Chinese had 10,000 copies made of landmarks to aid immigrants in answering questions from immigration officials was a smear against the Chinese.

Chinese Sunday School in Birmingham, Alabama, 1903

 

   This 1903 newspaper account of the Chinese in Birmingham, Alabama, caught my attention for several reasons. It showed that despite the harsh and discriminatory treatment of Chinese across the country in 1903 that began decades earlier and continued for many subsequent decades, there were efforts by Christian churches, even in the Deep South, to convert these "heathens" to Christianity through Sunday School classes.

    The Second Presbyterian Church provided 15 teachers for  15 Chinese students of unspecified ages.  It was felt that the 1:1 ratio would expedite their acquisition of English.  That might be a valid point but, I was surprised that there were as many as 15 Chinese children in Birmingham at all!  The 1900 census showed only 5 Chinese, all adult males, and the 1910 census showed only 10 Chinese adult males. No women or children were listed in either census. This discrepancy probably is due to poor enumeration that failed to record any Chinese children, or women, if there were any.

   The pastor cited the importance of this outreach "because the Chinese are subject to many temptations peculiar to American cities." He did not cite specific temptations but implied that Sunday School experiences would protect them. As an aside, he did not seem to recognize how effectively Chinese parents discipline their children to behave.

    A final argument by the pastor for the value of Sunday School experiences for Chinese children was that when they retire and return to China, they may play a role in the evangelical goal of spreading the Gospel in China. 

     The evangelical mission in Birmingham was by no means an isolated one, but one that could be found increasingly in towns, large and small, across the country by 1900.

El Paso Chinese

    By the early 1870s, a great depression hit the United States and unemployed Americans blamed the cheap labor of the rapidly growing number of Chinese immigrants. Consequently, the  Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering, and for those already in the country from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. 

    The Chinese in El Paso found illegal means to bring in their countrymen. Chinese were thought to have built tunnels to smuggle Chinese across the Mexican border from Juarez into El Paso. 

       In 1881, the first 1200 Chinese arrived in El  Paso to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad connecting El Paso and California.  After construction was completed, some workers moved on to work in other places in the U.S., some returned home to China, but others remained in El Paso.  Evidence that a large Chinese community developed in El Paso is seen at the Concordia Cemetery, which has a sizable section for burials of Chinese.

      Sam Hing was a Chinese operating in El Paso as a labor contractor recruiting Chinese laborers looking for work on the  Southern Pacific work crews. Hing became one of the most prominent, influential, and successful Chinese.  By 1900, Hing, having moved to Mexico, was reputed to be worth as much as $15 million.  

     Hing attributed his financial success to his dedication to work and smart investments. However,  he is alleged to have treated the Chinese laborers he hired like slaves so his financial gains were at their expense.  Two laborers about to be deported testified about the horrible treatment they received working for Hing.

An El Paso newspaper article written in 1940 about the early days of Chinese in El Paso did not cite the year but noted that Sam Hing eventually moved from El Paso to Mexico with his fortune and married a Mexican woman.

                                         



Chop Suey...the Font, Is it Racist?

Upon his death in November 1901, the Sunday Call newspaper in San Francisco devoted an entire page in tribute to Li Hung Chang, a powerful statesman, and diplomat, who they dubbed the "Yellow Napoleon." Such recognition was deserving, but I wondered if the font chosen for headers was not in poor taste. Known variously as Chop Suey font or later in the 1950s as Mandarin font, it was created in 1883 by the Cleveland Foundry and has become the go-to graphic whenever one wants to emphasize the foreign or exotic aspect of Chinese, and other Asians.

    Critics, such as Crystal Wang, of the font have argued it perpetuates a harmful, if not outright racist, stereotype.

Wang cites two egregious uses of the Chop Suey font in advertising Chinese food and promoting 'humor' on clothing items.

Political campaign ads have used the font to invoke imagery of Chinese, and other Asian, candidates for political offices as foreigners.

On the other hand, it must be recognized that Chinese restaurants have employed Chop Suey font in ads and menus for decades and might be accused of promoting its use.  However, Chinese restaurants promoting Chinese food would seem more justified than a clothing brand in using Chop Suey font.

 The comedienne, Margaret Cho, who is Korean lamented how the Chop Suey font boxed her in the way she was promoted.

Oh if I had a dollar for every time I have seen ads promoting me with racist caricatures, fonts or descriptions – I would have many, many, many dollars, flying off me like lettuce leaves that you could roll up some rice and dried shrimp and chili paste in. The first time was when I was about 16 or 17, on a wall of hastily pinned up notices for upcoming shows. My name blazed in big bright letters in the Chop Suey font, pointy, sword shaped lines to create words, familiar from Chinese restaurants and pretty much anything of Asian origin repackaged and sold everywhere that is not Asia.

Under my name, which was tremendously exciting to see in print, way back then, no matter what font it was in, was a small caricature of a coolie, in a rice paddy hat, with bucked teeth and holding chopsticks, rice spilling out everywhere. The futility of rice eaten with chopsticks – this has never made sense to me. It’s very hard to pick up these tiny pieces of food with sticks. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. I am not sure I will ever, if I haven’t by now.

   

Finally, perhaps it is fitting that the 1901 newspaper articles on Li Hung Chang used Chop Suey font. After all, it is believed that "chop suey" __the dish was literally invented for him on a visit to New York and Philadelphia in 1893!

Two Chinese Fought Racial Discrimination, One Win and One Loss At the U.S. Supreme Court

Yick Wo was a laundryman in San Francisco for 22 years in the late 19th century.  A law passed in 1880 banned Chinese laundries in wood buildings, unless they had a permit. The law was proposed as a public safety measure as laundries in wood buildings had high risks of starting fires. Yick Wo defied this law and continued operating his laundry. He was fined and jailed for his failure to comply with the ban. His case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins 1886, went to the US Supreme Court. 

Of about 200 Chinese laundrymen, only one was granted a permit, yet almost all white-owned laundries, which were also in wood structures, received a permit. The Supreme Court ruled in Yick Wo's favor, not because there was no fire risk, but because its discriminatory enforcement would close all Chinese laundries, and thus violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

Gong Lum operated a grocery store in Rosedale, Mississippi. The School Board ruled in 1924 that his two daughters, Martha and Berda (3rd and 4th from the left bottom row in the class photograph) could not attend a white school in Mississippi on the grounds that they were not Caucasians and should attend a school for colored children. Gong Lum obtained legal assistance to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him, Gong Lum v. Rice, 1927, upholding school segregation. Gong Lum lost the fight and responded by moving his family across the Mississippi River to Arkansas.

These cases illustrate some of the discriminatory barriers the Chinese faced, and how they fought back with legal action.  Even though they did not always get favorable rulings, their cases became significant historic legal decisions in American history.

Chinese Exclusion (1882) Is Followed by Expulsion (1892)

     The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act failed to stem the tide of Chinese immigration that posed a  great threat of cheap labor taking jobs from white labor. Ironically, in the 1860s, American tycoons recruited thousands of Chinese laborers to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. Upon its completion in 1869, Chinese railroad workers moved to build peripheral railroads as well as entered other occupations including mining, fishing, farming, lumbering, and manufacturing, fields which they were eventually barred from forcing hundreds to run hand laundries and later, Chinese restaurants.  In 1892 when the original Chinese Exclusion Act was due to expire, Thomas Geary proposed a 10-year extension known as the Geary Act which required all Chinese in the United States:

1. to have 2 white witnesses attest that he was not illegal and apply for a Certificate of Residence bearing his photograph

2. and, if stopped by the collector of revenue (later replaced by the Customs Office) without their Certificate of Residence, face a fine up to $1,000,

 3. and be jailed for up to a year of hard labor,

 4. and finally be deported.   

    Chinese strenuously objected to this draconian law. The Chinese Six Companies advised the Chinese to resist this demeaning law, which essentially required them to wear what amounted to a “dog tag.” Furthermore, it was proposed, but not approved, that Chinese detained when attempting to enter the country could no longer file a writ of habeas corpus, which previously enabled many to circumvent immigration requirements.

    The Geary Act raised fears of the threat of work stoppages, reduced cotton trade, and possible violence toward American missionaries in China. The China Equal Rights League vigorously protested the Geary Act, and one of its leaders, a laundryman named Fong Yue Ting along with Wong Quan, and Lee Joe went to the U.S. Marshal's office in Manhattan in 1893 to turn themselves in as illegal residents.  The judge ordered them deported and their lawyers immediately appealed the decision on the grounds that the deportation order was done without due process.  Fong Yue Ting v. United States went to the U.S. Supreme Court where Joseph Choate, the lawyer for the Chinese challenged the constitutionality of the ruling.

    Justice Horace Gray held that Congress had the power to deport, and that power is absolute and unqualified, following an earlier ruling in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) of plenary power which does not allow appeals of government decisions. Ping had made a trip to visit China and held a Certificate of Residence that entitled him to reentry, but he was denied on the argument that prohibiting immigrants from re-entering the country was an exercise of sovereignty. In the case of Fong Yue Ting, the U.S. Supreme Court held that immigration expulsion was so closely aligned with immigration exclusion that it fell within the realm of Congress's plenary power over matters related to foreign relations. The court did not view deportation as a punishment arguing that it was but a method of "enforcing the return to his own country of an alien who has not complied with the conditions upon the performance of which the government of the nation acting within the Constitutional Authority as determined is continuing to reside there."

    In other words deportation merely an administrative process, and not a criminal ruling, which would trigger 5th Amendment protections. However, returning unauthorized immigrants to their country of origin is not subject to due process protections. Dissenting Justice Stephan Field, who in many past cases defended Chinese exclusion, maintained that deportation went too far. He challenged the view that deportation was merely an administrative process because it involved deprivation of liberty, and removal from home, family, business, and property.

    Ultimately, what saved the Chinese from the full application of the Geary Act was the enormous financial cost of identifying, arresting, detaining, imprisoning, and deporting all unlawful Chinese immigrants. The estimated cost was more than six million dollars, far exceeding the $50,000 Congress had allocated for enforcement of the Geary Act.  There was no option but to order U.S. Marshals and Customs officers to refrain from enforcing the Geary Act. 

    The Fong Yue Ting ruling dealt with the deportation provision of the Geary Act but did not address the legality of the imprisonment component. The Chinese Six Companies challenged Section 4 of the Geary Act which allowed judges to send deportees to prison while awaiting deportation. In1892 Wong Wing, Lee Poy, Lee You Tong, and Chan Wah Dong walked into the offices of the US Marshal in Detroit and admitted to an unlawful residence in the United States and did not have Certificates of Residence. They were sentenced to serve 60 days in jail and then deported, a ruling which was immediately appealed.

    Wong Wing v. United States took four years to reach the Supreme Court where lawyer Frank Canfield challenged a deportation hearing as not meeting the Constitutional requirements for depriving persons of their liberty and that the Constitution guarantees due process to every person subject to imprisonment. No person, regardless of immigration or citizenship status, can be summarily be imprisoned without a jury trial and protection from cruel and unusual punishment. 

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Wong Wing v. United States that unlawful residence was not a crime. Unlawful residents who had committed no crime should not be subject to criminal punishment. The Court, therefore, prohibited federal judges from sentencing deportees to prison prior to deportation. If arrested Chinese cases were summarily adjudicated, they could still be forcibly removed from the country, but could not be imprisoned awaiting deportation.

    Wong Wing v. United States decriminalized unlawful residence within the United States and prohibited imprisonment as a practice of US immigration control, a view that remains valid to this day.

     The Wong Wing ruling on May 18,1896 attracted little public attention perhaps because it was overshadowed by the ruling on the same date of the Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, decision that established the “separate but equal” doctrine regarding public facilities for whites and blacks. It reasserted white supremacy in the face of black emancipation and defined the basic architecture of race relations in the United States for many decades.

    Since 1896 there have been nearly 50 million deportations and forced removals from the United States. Despite the Wong Wing v. United States decision, most of today's deportees, largely Hispanic rather than Chinese, were forcibly confined within one of the nation's carceral facility between capture and deportation. In Los Angeles alone, the jails are so clogged with persons awaiting deportation that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has contracts with private companies to cage the overflow of detainees. Defenders of this practice hold that it is "not imprisonment in a legal sense."

For more information:

Kelly Lytle Hernandez. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill, N.C.: 2017.