The Passport in America: The History of a Document (31 page)

The need for a complete manifest also came from Williams’ belief in its importance as a record of arrival. He appeared to be keenly aware that
“imperfect manifestation” affected how immigrants would subsequently appear in the memory of the state. In an attempt to follow the law as he understood it, Williams ensured that after the immigration inspection but before being filed, manifests were corrected in long hand, though he was angry that his “expert” inspectors had to spend as many as six hours doing this, after they had each inspected four to five hundred immigrants.
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As it was a document that could be referred to in the future, Williams worked to ensure both that it would survive until needed, and that any required information could be easily retrieved. This translated into an attempt to standardize the appearance of the manifest and to introduce a better indexing system. Early on, he requested that steamship companies prepare manifests on “good quality paper,” since they would “become permanent Government records.”
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That request appears to have been ignored as Williams eventually took control of printing and distributing manifests to the various steamship lines to ensure uniformity of appearance and to facilitate their eventual binding. At this time he introduced different-colored manifests for aliens reflecting their location on the ship: first class on light pink paper, second cabin on light yellow, and steerage on white.
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In his first months on the job, Williams also sought to ensure that the federal government would be able to use manifests to remember immigrants after they had left Ellis Island and entered U.S. society. To that end he introduced an alphabetical card index organized by name according to nationality—when in doubt as to which name was an immigrant’s surname, clerks were instructed to index the immigrant under both names. As he explained it in a report, each card contained a “reference to the sheet of the manifest on which the name appears, so that data not transferred to the card can be readily obtained from the original source.”
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Within a year this indexing required the “constant work” of seven clerks.
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It is unclear how successful these clerks were in maintaining this as a useful and retrievable collection, especially when immigrants subsequently needed to verify when they arrived, usually for the purpose of naturalization. Thanking Williams for providing such information, a letter writer acknowledged the “unfailing devotion to an ideal and stick-to-it-iveness of purpose that characterized your search and discovery.”
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Despite these hesitant efforts to establish a system of documentation to record the arrival of immigrants, their inspection primarily relied on an official reading of their appearance and bodies. Identification at Ellis Island was organized around the body as it was presented. Officials visually surveyed
immigrants to see if they matched their understanding of a noncitizen and then of a member of undesirable social groups. The writing of marks on, and the attachment of cards to, clothing emphasized that the individual identity produced in the immigration inspection process was both site-specific and temporary. This system apparently solved the problem of identification as immigration officials understood it. These measures were sufficient to adequately enforce immigration policy along borders that were not set up for the rigorous enforcement of laws, as the nearly 99% admission rate indicates; the complaints about resources from officials at both seaports and land borders imply that this low exclusion rate was not the product of an efficient inspection system. However, the use of the manifest with a card index points towards the archival logic that would soon come to ports of entry when the federal government needed to be able to know, recognize, and remember individuals. But prior to World War I, immigration officials primarily understood the problem posed by immigration regulations to be the identification of some
body
, not some
one
—the articulation of an individual to a racial group or set of behavioral traits via their body or personal appearance. That the privileging of appearance over documents was a result of lack of a perceived need for documents is evident in the contemporaneous existence of a system of documents to police movement across U.S. borders introduced, not under immigration law but through the Chinese Exclusion Acts. However, in practice, the frequently limited authority officials granted to those documents, in contrast to the information they saw in Chinese bodies, further fleshes out why a document such as the passport had no significant role at the U.S. border prior to World War I.

In 1882 Congress passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act. This was a response to the complex economic, racial, and cultural context in which opinion had turned against Chinese during the preceding three decades, when nearly 300,000 Chinese immigrants had entered the United States. Throughout the 1870s, national party and labor politics fueled the perception of the economic threat of Chinese labor and, along with racial and cultural arguments about the impossibility of Chinese assimilation, created a situation in which the federal government instituted its first significant action to police a part of the U.S. border.
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While labeled an “exclusion act,” this legislation in fact only restricted Chinese immigration. The target of the 1882 Act was new
laborers. It limited Chinese migration to the United States to merchants and their families, college students, and travelers, and allowed laborers resident in the United States to remain; Chinese women could only enter if married to a man in the exempt categories. The difference between the exclusion of all Chinese people and the restriction of most provided the space for the federal government’s first comprehensive attempt to regulate entry to the country. In contrast to other immigrants, whom officials excluded by looking for physically marked individuals within a largely admitted group, the management of Chinese exclusion involved identifying admissible individuals within a largely excluded group. To enforce the 1882 act and its subsequent revisions and renewals, the federal government introduced what an early historian of Chinese immigration regulation labeled, “an elaborate system of registration, certification and identification”
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—a system that continued to develop until the legislation was overturned in 1943 and initially replaced with an annual quota of 103 Chinese immigrants. However, recent scholarship has shown that this system of documents, while elaborate in design, was far from successful as a mechanism through which to verify the identity of applicants, particularly before the early years of the twentieth century. For although the introduction of identification documents acknowledged the difficulties associated with verifying the identity categories of the act through the appearance and bodies of Chinese, the documents created the additional need to record information accurately and to link the document to the correct person.

The initial act, along with subsequent renewals through 1892, created a series of documents to ensure that Chinese immigration was restricted according to the law: return certificates, “Section Six” certificates, and registration certificates.
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Return certificates were issued to already resident Chinese laborers who temporarily left the country, though San Francisco customs officials issued them to merchants as well. The Chinese government issued Section-Six certificates to exempt individuals; after 1884 they had to be visaed by a U.S. consul. Registration certificates were introduced in 1892 for all Chinese laborers legally living in the United States. The arbitrary nature of a system based on documents was made evident by an 1888 act that invalidated return certificates; it is estimated the act stranded at least twenty thousand laborers abroad, as U.S. officials now claimed these were merely certificates of identity, not a guarantee the bearer could enter the United States.
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As an identification document, these certificates exposed the difficulties in unambiguously identifying an individual to ensure that a document
remained in the hands of the person to whom it had been issued. Despite the legislation requiring that the certificate include “all facts necessary for identification of each such Chinese,” these facts frequently proved insufficient for accurately connecting a person to the document, and at some ports, notably Portland, Oregon, a limited administrative infrastructure meant the certificates were not even issued—a fact that, once known, led many Chinese who entered the United States without documents to claim they had departed from Portland. The assumed physical similarity of Chinese also negated the usefulness of identification documents in the eyes of officials. The very similarities that allowed an inspector to identify an individual as a “Chinaman” became the characteristics that prevented the reliable identification of that “Chinaman” as a distinct individual through a document. Chinese were seen to be similar “in color of skin, eyes, hair and style of their features,” as a collector of customs wrote in 1885.
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Therefore, the physical description on certificates was organized around “significant marks or peculiarities.”
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An example of the pattern of physical description that resulted is evident from a return certificate for a store porter in the mid-1880s: “Small brown spot left corner left eye. Small pock pit right corner right eye. Small pit near each corner mouth. Pit near right side nose.”
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While this could only but “confirm” the uncivilized status of Chinese that justified exclusion, it did little to assist in the enforcement of that exclusion. Inspectors became increasingly frustrated with the one short line provided for writing a description and the lack of guidelines for what constituted a significant mark or peculiarity.
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Although there were attempts to introduce the more “scientific” methods of fingerprinting and Bertillonage on later certificates, these did not last; the latter was dropped as part of a series of deals to end the Chinese boycott of American goods in 1905.
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While the addition of photographs was a potentially more reliable representation of appearance, it did not change the fact that many officials claimed Chinese looked similar in appearance.

As well as trying to link individuals to documents, officials had to connect potential Chinese immigrants to the identity categories outlined in the acts. In assessing whether an arrival was a merchant or a member of one of the other exempt categories, officials rarely privileged the Section-Six certificate issued in China verifying the bearer as exempt. While various acts sought to define “merchant” more clearly, at border stations officials read the body for signs of a life of manual labor. The majority of the denials of admission to Chinese with Section-Six certificates were largely based on a reading of class derived from “personal appearance,” a criterion upheld on appeal.
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The confidence
of a judicial declaration in 1882, that “it would not be easy for a Chinese laborer or coolie… to simulate the dress, manners and general appearance and bearing of the merchant, student, teacher or traveler,” continued to influence the evaluations of officials in the early years of the twentieth century.
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The bodies of people who claimed to be Chinese merchants were read for evidence of labor: calluses, sunburned legs or arms, the size and shape of fingers, were all interpreted as proof that the applicant was in fact a laborer. In their decisions inspectors sometimes also argued more generally that an individual did not look like a merchant: “He makes statements to the effect that he is a man of wealth and standing in his own country, yet comes in the garb and manner of the poorest laborer…. He is undoubtedly a fraud”; or, more simply: “[He has] a non-mercantile personal appearance.”
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Clothing, appearance and manner, and even handwriting, were thus assumed to be reliable ways to connect someone to one of the categories in the act. Any occasional inconsistency was of limited concern in a system of enforcement that gave discretion to the officials who were face to face with potential immigrants. However, in the initial years of enforcement, unsuccessful Chinese arrivals enjoyed almost overwhelming success in having courts overturn officials’ decisions, in part because the burden of proof shifted to the government. The range of nondocumentary evidence the courts accepted also challenged the authority of documents, with one judge arguing that nonproduction of a document was not conclusive evidence of the fact of exclusion.
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