Smuggler Nation (71 page)

24
. Kitty Calavita, “The Paradox of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910,”
Law and Social Inquiry
25, no. 1 (2000): 15, note 10.

25
. We obviously do not know the precise number of Chinese who entered the country illegally across the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders, but according to Lee an estimated seventeen thousand Chinese clandestinely entered this way between 1882 and 1920. See Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 151.

26
. “Smuggling Chinese from Canada,”
New York Times
, 28 September 1884 (on fees for smuggling Chinese into the U.S. from Ontario); “The Chinese Question,”
New York Times
, 27 November 1885 (on the continued dependence on Chinese labor in the Northwest); “How the Chinese Are Smuggled,”
New York Times
, 8 September 1896 (on the use of Montreal as a transit point for smuggling Chinese immigrants).

27
. Quoted in Julian Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(March 1891): 516.

28
. Quoted in McKeown,
Melancholy Order
, 144.

29
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 176.

30
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 153.

31
. Quoted in Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 153.

32
. Quoted in Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 170.

33
. Quoted in McKeown,
Melancholy Order
, 142.

34
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 154.

35
. Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,” 521.

36
. The case is detailed in Sarah M. Griffith, “Border Crossings: Race, Class, and Smuggling in Pacific Coast Chinese Immigrant Society,”
Western Historical Quarterly
35, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 473–92.

37
. Prince and Keller,
The U.S. Customs Service
, 191.

38
. See, for example, William H. Siener, “Through the Back Door: Evading the Chinese Exclusion Act Along the Niagara Frontier, 1900–1924,”
Journal of American Ethnic History
27, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 34–70.

39
. Ralph, “The Chinese Leak,” 516.

40
. According to a U.S. Immigration Bureau spokesman, “Since Canada places a head-tax of $500 on Chinese entering that country [in January 1904], the duty of guarding the Canadian border had been simplified, as the supply of Chinese to be smuggled has been practically limited to recruits gathered from among the Chinamen admitted to Canada prior to the assessment of the head-tax mentioned.” Quoted in Kenneth Bruce McCullough,
America’s Back Door: Indirect International Immigration Via Mexico to the United States from 1875 to 1940
(Ph.D. dissertation, Texas A&M University, 1992), 110–11.

41
. The 1894 Canadian Agreement between the U.S. government and Canadian transportation companies essentially made possible the extension of U.S. immigration law beyond the U.S. border. See Marian L. Smith, “The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at the U.S.-Canadian Border, 1893–1993: An Overview of Issues and Topics,”
Michigan Historical Review
26, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 129.

42
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 176–79.

43
. See Kennett Cott, “Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue, 1876–1910,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
67, no. 1 (1987): 63–85.

44
. Quoted in Lee,
At America’s Gate
, 181.

45
. Quoted in Patrick Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 13.

46
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 14.

47
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 157.

48
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 99.

49
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 100.

50
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 100.

51
. Quoted in Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 159.

52
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 93.

53
. Quoted in James Bronson Reynolds, “Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Law,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political Science
34, no. 2 (1909): 368.

54
. Quoted in Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 159.

55
. See especially Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 162–64.

56
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 60.

57
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 184.

58
. Lee,
At America’s Gates
, 185.

59
. “Bribes from Chinese: Customs Officers Accused of Accepting Them,”
Washington Post
, 25 August 1901.

60
. In addition to trachoma, the list included “tuberculosis, favus, syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy, delirium tremens, idiocy, hernia, valvular heart disease, pregnancy, poor physique, chronic rheumatism, nervous afflictions, malignant disease, deformities, senility, debility, varicose veins, bad eyesight,
and any disease or deformity which might interfere with an immigrant’s ability to earn a living.” See McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 200.

61
. See Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 71.

62
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 105. On the smuggling of Jews across the border, see Libby Garland, “Not-quite-closed Gates: Jewish Alien Smuggling in the Post-Quota Years,”
American Jewish History
94, no. 3 (September 2008): 197–224.

63
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 106–7.

64
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 107.

65
. See, for example, “Smuggle Chinese by the Thousand: Eight Arrests Made in Huge Conspiracy of Trainmen, Mexicans, and Chicago Orientals,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, 29 May 1909.

66
. For a more detailed account, see Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 109.

67
. See Perkins,
Border Patrol
, 2.

68
. Perkins,
Border Patrol
, 52–53. As Perkins tells the story, Charlie Sam invited him for a drink to announce that he was retiring and moving back to China. During their friendly conversation over drinks, Sam allegedly confessed that he was responsible for organizing the smuggling of Chinese through El Paso and recounted how on one occasion he had barely eluded an undercover sting operation set up by Perkins and his men. According to Perkins, “we parted with many good wishes for our unknown futures.” Perkins also recounts (p. 40) a meeting with Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution in which Villa unsuccessfully tried to recruit him to smuggle arms, in violation of the U.S. embargo.

69
. Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 115.

70
. As retired Border Patrol agent Clifford Perkins notes in his memoir, “The Service recognized the decreasing importance of the problem [Chinese smuggling] by changing my designation from Chinese Inspector to Immigrant Inspector on 1 July 1917, although my duties remained the same.” See Perkins,
Border Patrol
, 49.

71
. For more details and context, see especially John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

72
. Zolberg describes this as the emergence of “remote control,” by which is meant “the elaboration of an extensive immigration bureaucracy abroad.” See Zolberg,
A Nation by Design
, 264.

73
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 48.

74
. Quoted in Siener, “Through the Back Door,” 60.

75
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 49.

76
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 230.

77
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 51–52.

78
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 52–53.

79
. Quoted in McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 6.

80
. McCullough,
America’s Back Door
, 6, 230–31.

81
. Quoted in Tichenor,
Dividing Lines
, 172.

82
. These are detailed in Perkins,
Border Patrol
, 89–90.

83
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 155.

84
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 156.

85
. See A. H. Uln, “New U.S. Border Police Force Now Combats Smugglers,”
New York Times
, 10 May 1925. The most detailed history is provided by Kelly Lytle Hernandez,
Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

86
. See, for example, “Bootlegged Immigrants,”
New York Times
, 5 May 1924. While painting an alarming picture of the problem, the editorial notes: “The exact number of bootlegged immigrants is not known. They have been estimated at from 17,000 to 200,000 a year.”

87
. See “Smuggling Aliens into the USA,”
Washington Post
, 14 September 1924. The subheading in bold warns of “Dealers Who Bootleg Whole Boatloads of Human Souls!”

88
. Quoted in Ettinger,
Imaginary Lines
, 162.

89
. Perkins,
Border Patrol
, 55.

90
. Quoted in Zolberg,
A Nation by Design
, 257.

91
. Quoted in Aristide Zolberg and Robert Smith,
Migration Systems in Comparative Perspective: An Analysis of the Inter-American Migration System with Comparative Reference to the Mediterranean-European System
(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, 1996), 9.

92
. Zolberg,
A Nation by Design
, 257.

93
. For a more detailed discussion, see S. Deborah Kang, “Crossing the Line: The INS and the Federal Regulation of the Mexican Border,” in
Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories
, ed. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

Chapter 13

1
. W. J. Rorabaugh,
The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 21.

2
. John Kobler,
Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
(1973 reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 31–33; Daniel Okrent,
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
(New York: Scribner, 2010), 7–8.

3
. Quoted in Rorabaugh,
The Alcoholic Republic
, 97.

4
. Rorabaugh,
The Alcoholic Republic
, 8, 99.

5
. Quoted in Okrent,
Last Call
, 7.

6
. James Morone,
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 292.

7
. More generally, see Holly Berkley Fletcher,
Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Routledge, 2007).

8
. Quoted in Sean Dennis Cashman,
Prohibition: The Lie of the Land
(New York: Free Press, 1981), 22.

9
. Okrent,
Last Call
, 101.

10
. Quoted in Kobler,
Ardent Spirits
, 11.

11
. Thomas M. Coffey,
The Long Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920–1933
(New York: Norton, 1975), 69.

12
. Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin,
Drinking in America: A History
(New York: Free Press, 1987), 154.

13
. Quoted in Michael Woodiwiss,
Organized Crime and American Power
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 183.