[ Originally posted on my old blog on August 8, 2008, as Part 4 of my series on Chinese American Exp
[ Originally posted on my old blog on August 8, 2008, as Part 4 of my series on Chinese American Experience. ]Given the current political climate surrounding the “immigration debate”, it is a strange twist of history that during the Exclusion era, some Chinese migrants attempted to enter the US by dressing up as Mexicans and crossing the Southern border. Some never made it and ended up settling in Mexico. Others managed to sneak through with Spanish surnames.Part Four of our series looks at some of the ways that Chinese migrants — driven from their homeland by social upheavals, civil war, famine — worked around the Exclusion laws in order to fight for better lives, most famously the system of “paper sons” which actually included some “paper daughters”; though of course US officials made it harder for women to enter, seeing that a cornerstone of Exclusion strategy was preventing Chinese women from starting families in the US.It began with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake whose fires consumed US immigration records. An elaborate cottage industry sprang into existence in which Chinese Americans claimed to have children in China, in order to create immigrant slots which could be sold along with detailed coaching books containing instructions on how to get through the extensive interrogation process in the notorious Angel Island detention facilities. Illegal? Yes, but does it really make sense to respect racist laws intended to shatter families and destroy a people? The paper son system enabled the Chinese American population to start growing again after many years of decline, and can thus be credited with reviving the Chinese American community from its precipitous slide toward extinction. -- source link