CHAPTER IV

AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF LEGISLATION DEALING WITH IMMIGRATION

IMMIGRATION and naturalization are closely interdependent. Without the former there would be no possibility of the latter.

From the beginning of our history until 1875 the immigration of aliens was encouraged. No limitations of any kind were placed upon it for nearly a century. When limitations were imposed they were imposed on grounds of moral and physical deficiencies, and for economic reasons.

The Act of March 3, 1875, forbade the importation of women for immoral purposes, the supplying of coolie labor, and the entrance of alien persons under sentence for felonious crimes other than political.

The Act of August 2, 1882, forbade the admission of convicts, lunatics, idiots, or persons unable to take care of themselves.

The Act of February 26, 1885 (amended February 23, 1887), prohibited the introducton of contract labor.

The Act of March 3, 1891, added the following classes to those forbidden admission: Paupers,

persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease, persons who had been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, polygamists and assisted immigrants.

The Act of March 3, 1903, also added other classes to the prohibited list, such as epileptics, persons who had been insane within five years, or who had had two or more attacks, professional beggars, anarchists, prostitutes, procurers, and those previously deported.

The Act of February 5, 1917, which is the most comprehensive law that has ever been passed, reaffirmed all the above provisions for exclusion and added many others, such as consumptives, defectives both mental and physical who are thereby rendered unfit to earn a living, persons from certain sections of Asia specified by latitude and longitude, and aliens over sixteen years of age who cannot read some language.

No people or race has even been excluded by name except the Chinese.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, was limited in its operation to ten years, and in its scope to laborers. It was, however, re-enacted in 1892, and again in 1902, for periods of ten years each. In 1904, as we have already stated in Chapter III, when the Chinese Government denounced the treaty of 1894 which then became terminable, Congress voted

that "all laws regulating, suspending, or prohibiting the coming of Chinese persons . . . are hereby reenacted, extended, and continued without modification or condition."

The Immigration Act of February 5, 1917, in addition to many specifications as to physical, psychological, and moral defectives who are to be excluded, contains, as has just been stated, a comprehensive provision for general restriction, that, namely, which describes by latitude and longitude certain geographical regions of Asia and adjacent islands, natives of which should not be admitted. The geographical area referred to does not include Japan nor east China, but does include the majority of the islands of the Pacific, all India, and the major part of the continent of Central Asia. This phraseology of latitude and longitude was hit upon as a substitute for the proposal to exclude "Hindus and persons who cannot become eligible under existing law to become citizens of the United States by naturalization, unless otherwise provided for by existing agreements as to passports, or by existing treaties, conventions, or agreements that may hereafter be entered into."

To this phraseology the Japanese Government had objected since it was believed to be aimed especially at the Japanese and was suspected of being a prelude for annulling the "gentlemen's agreement."

region is, however, not absolute. Those excepted are government officers, ministers, or religious teachers, missionaries, authors, artists, merchants, and travellers for curiosity, their legal wives and their children under sixteen. Such persons, however, when admitted to the United States, must maintain their status and occupation at the risk of deportation.

The manifest purpose of the numerous restriction provisions of the Act under consideration is the exclusion of those persons who are physically or morally unfit for life among us, and the protection of our industrial and manual laborers from a possible vast immigration of ignorant and illiterate laborers from lands whose standards of life and economic conditions might easily cause our people serious difficulties.

Congress has thus passed six laws restricting immigration on moral, physical, and economic grounds, dealing in every case with individual characteristics, and nine laws dealing with Chinese. But in none of them is there reference to any race or people except to Chinese. The law of 1917 is the first one to apply a general principle of exclusion to any other peoples than to Chinese. It does not, however, as we have seen, specify races but regions, and it applies the restriction only to laboring classes.

The restriction of Japanese labor immigration which has been rigidly maintained since 1908 was undertaken by the Japanese Government in order

to render unnecessary federal legislation restricting Japanese, which legislation no doubt would have been passed had the Japanese Government not taken its action.

Such are the principal points in the history of our immigration legislation. We must now study the history of our legislation dealing with naturalization.