Transcript - "Criminalizing Migration and Indefinite Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison"
February 23, 2023 -- CRG Angel Island Forum Series
Listen to "Criminalizing Migration and Indefinite Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison" with Elliott Young.
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon and welcome to our event "Criminalizing Migration and Indefinite Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison "with Professor Elliot Young.
Before we begin let me say that there's live captioning available if you locate the button on the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.
I will begin with the land acknowledgment . We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley Community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in Consistent with our values of community and diversity we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the University's relationship to native peoples by offering this land acknowledgment we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples. My name is Leti Volpp, I'm the director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. And we are thrilled that you can be with us with us for today's event which is the second of three public lectures forming the Center for Race and Gender's Angel Island Forum Series. The series was designed to accompany the campus-wide project a year on Angel Island organized by the Arts and Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab.
Our first speaker in the series was Professor Erika Lee. And today's event will be followed by another public lecture, February 23rd by Professor Nayan Shah on "Bodily Defiance and Immigration Detention.
Many thanks to the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative for co-sponsoring these events.
Let us now hear from our featured speaker whom I'm going to introduce. I am thrilled that we get to hear today from Professor Elliot Young. Professor Young is a Professor of History at Lewis and Clark College and a renowned expert on the long history of migrant mobility criminalization and detention in the Americas. Professor Young is the author of three books "Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II" Alien Nation Chinese migration and the Americas from the Coulee era through World War II", "Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border", and most recently this book, "Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System" published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. I could read to you what Professor Erica Lee says about this book as Professor Lee wrote a blurb quote, "We have long needed a history of immigrant detention and forever prisoners delivers drawing on archival documents as well as his own experience as an expert witness in recent asylum cases. Young brilliantly continues the dismantling of America's nation of immigrants myth and instead shows how our long history of criminalizing migration has led us to build the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants a nation of immigrant prisons. This is an essential read for anyone invested in building a more just society." Professor Young is also the co-founder of the Tepoztlan Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas and is the founder of the Migration Scholar Collaborative a hub for scholars sharing work with the public with the aim of decriminalizing migration and opening wider pathways to legal immigration in the United States. He has also served as co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing, and as an expert witness for over 500 Asylum cases for refugees fleeing Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, and Cuba.
Professor Young will begin with the lecture and then there will be an opportunity for Q&A. Please post your question or comment into the Q&A button on the bottom of the screen.
Without further ado let me turn it over to Professor Young. Thank you.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Thank you, Leti, and thanks Ariana for organizing behind the scenes and for inviting me to this talk. I'm honored to be presenting along with my colleagues Erika Lee and Nayan Shah. And I'm very glad that Professor Lee preceded me and I'm sure she delved deeply into the history of Angel Island specifically.
What I want to talk about today is a little bit adjacent to Angel Island and in some senses preceded it and it what it's what went on at a different prison to the north of San Francisco, off the coast of Tacoma, Washington.
McNeil Island prison where Chinese were held on immigration charges in the late 1880s, well before Angel Island opened.
So I'm going to just share my screen and then you could see some slides as we go along. S
o by the time of the Trump Administration the United States locked up more than half a million foreigners every year for immigration-related offenses. At its height in 2019 more than 50 000 immigrants, men. women and children were being caged in hundreds of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention facilities on any given day it took more than a century for the laws to be developed and the infrastructure created to lock up so many immigrants. And Angel Island certainly stands as one of the hubs of that early history of incarceration.
But even before 1910 when Angel Island was opened Chinese were being caged in warehouses on docks in San Francisco, and more systematically at a prison off the coast of Washington State. This slide "The Chinese Must Go!" is comes from one of the purges that happened in Tacoma, which is a few miles from where McNeil Island prison stands. So in the mid-1880s Chinese were being purged in pogroms from towns up and down the Pacific coast, including into Canada. These were spurred on by angry white working-class mobs and government officials who feared economic competition and who viewed Chinese as a danger to the purity of America, as a white ethno state. This poster from Tacoma Washington from 1885 illustrates the anti-Chinese sentiment led by the mayor himself.
In the wake of those pogroms increasing numbers of Chinese were being picked up for unauthorized presence in the country and sent to the remote McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, off the coast of Seattle or Tacoma. Closer to Tacoma. McNeil Island was set up as a jail in 1875, but a decade later it became the center of efforts to enforce Chinese exclusion, by locking up Chinese laborers who had entered without authorization.
Judges invoked the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first piece of federal immigration restrictionist legislation, but they were sentencing the Chinese to six months of hard labor at the prison. This imposition of a criminal penalty for unauthorized presence in the country that off a debate about the legality of migrant detention that ultimately reached the U.S Supreme Court. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had made it a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment up to five years for those who forged certificates of identification, section 10 of the Act provided for seizure of ships for refusing to abide by the strict requirements to report all Chinese passengers on their manifests. Section 11 of the Act stipulated that those who helped to smuggle unauthorized Chinese into the country could be fined up to a $1000 dollars and a year in prison. The only consequence, and it was still a major one for Chinese found to be unlawfully in the country, was that they would be deported at the U.S. government's expense.
Two years later however, in 1884 the Act was amended to include Section 16 making any violation of the provisions of the of the this act a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to a $1000 dollars and/or imprisonment of up to a year.
So that's the 1884 Amendment. It's not clear if the vague provision was intended to criminalize Chinese found in the country without authorization, but the U.S. attorney in Washington territory used this provision for just that purpose. In 1892, a new provision Section 4 mandated that Chinese who were found unlawfully in the country could be imprisoned for up to one year at hard labor.
So in the five years between 1887 and 1892, 243 Chinese were imprisoned on the islands. Almost all of them for illegal immigration or smuggling. Their sentences range from six months to an indeterminate period, and they served between one month and two and a half years. Thus began the criminalization of migration in the United States. Up to 1892, Chinese at McNeil were mainly charged with unlawful presence or violation of restriction act.
After that point they were charged with more specific violations including smuggling and forgery, but unlawful presence disappeared completely as a charge. So over time charges would vary as new laws were passed, but the government always had a vast array of tools by which to imprison unauthorized migrants.
And this document that you're seeing now is one of those sentences for people to be committed to McNeil Island for six months for being unlawfully in the United States.
These are some of the images that were taken of the mugshots of Chinese who were at McNeil Island. And it's an incredible source that in the absence of much documentary evidence of the lives of these Chinese we at least have these photographs of them, although in this very difficult position of being in prison.
So after their six-month punishment had expired the U.S. government Marshals attempted to return Chinese at McNeil Island prison to Canada from whence they came. And that was the language of the Chinese Exclusion Act. So ever since this act prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers, Chinese used either Canada, Mexico or Cuba as springboards to enter the U.S. clandestinely .So they would enter through those other countries and then cross the border clandestinely as a way to get into the United States.
In one instance the U.S. Marshal marched the Chinese to the boundary line with Canada and ordered them to keep going. And what he, one of the reports about this said, "The United States Customs officer at Semiahmoo explained to the Chinamen that they must not come back to this side or the next time they would lose their queues. The Chinese seemed glad to get out of custody, and last we saw them they were going down the road toward New Westminster, on a dog-trot, chattering like a lot of parrots."
So this description by the Marshall revealed the informality, the brutality, and illegality of these informal deportations. Essentially the Marshal was forcing the Chinese to return to Canada illegally by clandestinely pushing them across the international border. One explanation is that these early deportations were improvised by local officials who had no guidance or precedent to follow. However this case shows that the policy was designed and approved by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Attorney General. The threat to cut off the queues and references to the chattering like a lot of parrots highlights the racist discrimination faced by Chinese, particularly on the West Coast.
However Canada had also established its own restrictions against the Chinese. A head tax required to be paid by every Chinese entrant and so when the Chinese brought by the Marshals could not pay the head tax the Canadians refused their entry and the Chinese were sent back to McNeil. And they faced their indefinite detention. US Attorney White pleaded with the State Department in Congress and he said, "Relieve us from this difficulty... the penitentiary will soon be overflowing with contraband Chinamen...." The legal and moral quandary this posed was daunting, "as the subject now stands" he wrote, "they are subject to indefinite imprisonment."
So for years scores of Chinese were being piled up at McNeil Island while the government figured out what to do with them. And it's important to remember even though the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, the government didn't really have the infrastructure either legally or in terms of detention places to know what to do with people who were pending deportation.
On June 18, 1889, Washington Territory Supreme Court Justice Cornelius Hanford complained directly to Benjamin Harrison. President Benjamin Harrison about 19 Chinese who had been arrested in October of 1887. And two years later still languished on McNeil Island. For Hanford deportation was acceptable but incarceration was not. As he said, "It is contrary to the fundamental law of this nation that any being should be subjected to repeated imprisonments, amounting to perpetual incarceration for not doing that which is powerless to do." In other words, leaving the country, going to Canada was not possible. Nonetheless Hanford refused to hear their cases and instead issued another writ of deportation.
The Washington Justice wrote that he did not presume to tell the president how to act, but he pleaded with him to intervene in this case to avoid the embarrassment of territory officials, and to as he put it set at liberty 19 poor miserable captive strangers. Finally, in 1890, the first deportations of Chinese back to China began from McNeil Island. Sparking what would become more than 130 years of detentions and deportations.
While there is no record of major protests by the Chinese in the prison Chinese complained about their conditions of their incarceration and at least one Chinese man attempted to commit suicide and later escaped. Several Chinese also died while awaiting deportation at McNeil Island. Their last days on earth spent behind bars.
So that's the sort of local story of what's going on in McNeil Island, but the legal story is a broader one that impacts impacted not only Chinese migrants everywhere in the United States, but comes to impact all immigrants in the United States to this day.
There are a host of other thorny questions that needed to be worked out, including what legal rights detainees had while awaiting deportation. The right of the state to detain someone while awaiting deportation was held as an inviolable right of sovereignty in Fong Yue Ting the 1893 Court decision and in Wong Wing in 1896. In Fong Yue Ting, the Court ruled that deportation should not be considered a punishment and therefore there was no requirement for a jury trial. In the Wong Wing decision the Supreme Court again reaffirmed the right of the state to deport and to detain someone while ascertaining whether the person had a right to be in the country. But it also limited the conditions of imprisonment. The court argued that the case raised serious constitutional issues, including Fifth Amendment due process rights, the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a jury trial. Given that Wong Wing was sentenced to hard labor without the benefit of a jury trial or due process required by a criminal conviction the court found the punishment to be unconstitutional. The government had the right to sentence a non-citizen to hard labor the court upon but not without the benefit of a judicial trial. Since hard labor was always reserved for "infamous crimes "giving a migrant such a sentence without a trial violated the Constitution.
As the court wrote, "To declare unlawful residents within the country to be an Infamous crime, punishable by deprivation of liberty and property, would be to pass out of the sphere of constitutional legislation unless provision were made that the fact of guilt should first be established by a judicial trial." So in this very important decision the court affirmed the absolute right of the State to deport and detain a non-citizen, but it also established limits on the harshness of detention for non-citizens who had not had a judicial trial. And in doing this the Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the criminalization of Chinese by creating a legal fiction wherein their detention was not considered imprisonment in a legal sense.
Nonetheless, U.S. immigrant inspectors were constantly frustrated by their inability to punish immigrants with lengthy prison terms. And the ease with which deported migrants returned to the United States across the border. So if they were if they were able to be kicked out to Mexico or Canada they could very easily in those days, without a militarized border, simply cross the border again.
So facing that situation in 1907, the Immigrant Inspector Marcus Braun recommended making illegal immigration a felony. And here we see sort of a pressage of what would later come to be a major part of enforcement that we have today of felony convictions for for a legal entry. And when Marcus Braun suggested 1907 was, "Do not support the Chinese caught to be unlawfully within our jurisdiction have the law amended and put the Chinaman in prison, make it a felony to come into the United States clandestinely; put him in prison to earn his passage home, and after having spent two three or more years in prison, deport him with the money he earned in the workhouse." Heeding Braun's advice, finally in 1929, Congress stepped in once again to criminalize unauthorized entry as a misdemeanor offense and unauthorized re-entry as a felony.
And the criminalizing of unauthorized Chinese migration in the 1880s and early 1890s presaged what would happen then in the 1930s and beyond, when now Mexico, increasingly Mexicans were being criminalized for migrating. So in this period Mexicans accounted for 85 to 99 percent of such prosecutions.
So if we turn to the kind of criminal charges that the Chinese at McNeil Island faced. We could see that, and who was ended up in McNeil Island, McNeil Island was perhaps the most cosmopolitan locale on the west coast at the time featuring people from over 70 different countries, as well as those born throughout the United States. They were sent to McNeil from the entire length of the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles, California, all the way up to Anchorage, Alaska.
Considering that the total foreign-born population on the Pacific Coast from 1900 to 1930 was between 18 and 23 percent. An astonishing 29 percent of people locked up at McNeil Island from that in that period were foreign-born. Even more dramatically in the decade between 1887 and 1896, 54 percent, more than half of those imprisoned at McNeil Island, were foreign-born. So McNeil Island was a federal penitentiary, and this may help to explain the disproportionate number of foreigners as immigration violations obviously fell under Federal jurisdiction.
Nonetheless, these statistics show that immigrant incarceration was not ancillary to federal prisons but in fact was the main purpose in their early years. So looking at these charts we could see from 1887 to 1939 Mexicans were the largest group of foreign-born people comprising 19 percent. Next Chinese comprised 18 percent. Canadians were the third largest group making up 11 of the foreign-born. the presence of these three groups that McNeil is disproportionate to their representation in the general population of the West Coast states from which they were drawn. Although the numbers of Europeans from individual countries was not significant, together Europeans made up 35 percent of the foreign-born people.
So that's who was incarcerated at McNeil Island. If we look at the charges that they incurred we could see that a dramatic shift occurred in the kinds of charges Chinese received in the late 19th century compared to the period from the 1920s onward.Whereas almost all Chinese were held at McNeil for "being in the U.S unlawfully" or violation of the Restriction Act from 1887 through 1892. After that year Chinese were charged increasingly with drug and alcohol crimes. Unlawful presence completely disappeared as a charge after 1892. Therefore from 1893 to 1939 only six percent of Chinese charges were immigration related. But after 1921 almost every Chinese at McNeil faced a charge of violating the Harrison Narcotic Act or other drug acts.
So what this shows is that new laws created new opportunities for criminalizing Chinese and other foreigners. When they were able to be incarcerated they were incarcerated under immigration charges. and then when that became more difficult they simply turned to drugs charges to lock them up. And if we look um at who the charges for other people locked up at McNeil we could see that drug and alcohol crimes accounted for 40 percent of the crimes committed by foreign-born people at McNeil. And that's roughly divided equally between drugs and alcohol. Opium smuggling and violations for marijuana and other narcotics accounted for most of the drug charges, while violation of the of prohibition and the charge of selling liquor to Indians, made up most of the alcohol-related crimes.
The large number of immigrants locked up for violation of drug and alcohol-related crimes suggests that they were disproportionately targeted for enforcement. The second most frequent crime accounting for 21 percent of the charges, was simply for being in the country unlawfully. So immigration-related charges, including smuggling of aliens, accounted for another three percent, and white slavery or another four percent. White slavery linked immigration controlled to ideas about moral purity by criminalizing the transport of women who engaged in sex work or were believed to have been trafficked for "immoral purposes.
Many of the people imprisoned for unlawful president at McNeil might have been held pending deportation rather than serving specific criminal sentences. If we look at other kinds of charges we find that property crimes, like robbery larceny, motor vehicle theft, made up less than four percent of the total. And violent crimes were a very small proportion of the rest of the charge, murder accounting for less than one percent. So these are probably things which we're familiar with that reflect present-day mass incarceration. And what it shows is that even in this early 20th century, drugs, alcohol and immigration charges, accounted for more than two-thirds of the charges against the foreign-born at McNeil Island.
The significance of drug alcohol and immigration-related charges especially for Mexicans and Chinese, suggests that these groups were being targeted for enforcement. And this chart shows you the the different charges, the different, these different, three different groups had. These three kinds of offenses made up a majority of the charges that the three largest groups of foreign-born inmates.
But as you could see Chinese and Mexicans were far more likely than Canadians to be charged with these violations. Almost all Chinese and Mexicans were in McNeil for either immigration or drug and alcohol violations. While only about half of the incarcerated Canadians were locked up for these reasons. The data also reveals that Mexicans were charged more frequently with immigration-related offenses, while Chinese were charged with drug and alcohol violations. Although this is just one snapshot of a penitentiary over a 50-year period.
The data shows that the federal prison was being used far more frequently to lock up non-white foreigners for victimless offenses, than to punish these those people for violent crimes. Although the intake list for McNeil do not note race, the prison inmate magazine, "The Island Lantern," published monthly census information about inmates in 1928 and 29. And from that data we could get a sense of the so-called race of the people there, and some of these categories don't really make sense because military is listed as a race. But this is what was included in that publication. So the snapshots of the prison population show that even as that there were sizable numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and "colored people" at McNeil in the late 1920s. Well over 70 percent of the inmates were considered white. Although the prison does not define what is meant by white, the other categories suggest that all people of European descent were included in that category.
So now if we bring this story back to Angel Island. Ships left San Francisco more frequently for China than from Tacoma, but immigration officers in San Francisco faced other obstacles. Such as being forced to release incoming Chinese pending their hearings.
In San Francisco, officials complained that Chinese would routinely claim U.S. birth or residency upon arrival. If denied entry their lawyers would fight, file writs of habeas corpus, and the judge would issue bail so they could be discharged while their cases were pending. In 1887 an examiner for the justice department found that the habeas proceedings in San Francisco were "tinctured with fraud" and "Court officials who earned large sums of money by processing hundreds of Chinese petitions every quarter." So the problem these immigration officials faced was that many of the Chinese simply skipped bail and disappeared if they lost in court.
The Collector of Customs and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney investigated the records of the district and circuit courts and found that 119 habeas cases involving Chinese had resulted in a deportation order that had not yet been executed. So after several notices just 40 of those Chinese were remanded to the court. But the fact that the majority were still missing, suggests that it was difficult for them to enforce Chinese exclusion without incarcerating the Chinese while their cases wound their way through the courts. Such a conclusion of course meant that Chinese fighting deportation would end up spending much more time behind bars.
The question raised therefore in the late 1880s due to the Chinese at McNeil Island prison of how long a non-citizen could be detained while awaiting deportation was still not clarified in the early 20th century. In general, the rules governing deportation required the government to hold non-citizens for no longer than six months, but they allowed the state to keep them longer if they cannot deport within that time limit. And so this situation that they found themselves in San Francisco helps explain the impetus to finally build and open Angel Island in 1910.
The longest detention at Angel Island extended for almost two years when a Chinese woman was held on suspicion that she was being brought into the country for "immoral purposes". After filing three appeals on her behalf asserting that she was the wife of a Chinese merchant, her attorney was finally successful in August 1918 in gaining her release. One Chinese man, Edgar Yuen Fong had his deportation case drag on for 21 years. And those of you who are lawyers or familiar with the asylum process know that today given the over 2 million case backlog, many asylum cases are dragging on for three four or more years. So this case dragged on for 21 years from 1918 until he was finally deported after exhausting his appeals in 1939. Although it appears from the criminal docket he was out on bail for most of that time. He was in detention in Ellis Island in December 1936 and remained in custody until his deportation more than two years later.
The lengthiest and ultimately unsuccessful deportation that is on record was against Carlos Marcelo, a Sicilian mob boss limped along from 1953 until he was finally sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1982, for conspiring to bribe the U.S. District Court Judge. Marcelo died in 1993 in New Orleans having successfully fought his deportation for over 40 years. So that case dragged on but ultimately the authorities were never able to grab him.
However, beyond these extraordinary cases thousands of Chinese and others were imprisoned for months at a time on immigration charges and then deported. After 1910 Angel Island became the primary site of Chinese migrant detention. And by the beginning of the 20th century immigrants were a growing piece of the carceral system and over a hundred thousand foreign-born people were locked away in jails, prisons and insane asylums each year.
So I want to take that historical story and bring it up to the present. And in the last few years an intrepid group of federal Defenders along with the help of historians such as Kelly Lytle Hernandez at UCLA and Debbie Kang at the University of Virginia, have challenged the constitutionality of the law that was passed in 1929 which criminalized a legal entry. And for those who follow these things closely this 1325 1326.
Those two laws account for the majority of federal accounted for the majority of federal prosecution, So essentially in recent years the entire Federal Judicial System has been mobilized and weaponized to criminalize and and to incarcerate immigrants charged with illegal entry or re-entry. But in the summer of 2021, a year and a half ago, a Nevada Federal District Court Judge finally ruled that the illegal re-entry charge was unconstitutional and the reasoning was that it is based in racial animus. And to get at that reasoning require this historical argument going back to 1929 and understanding the context of the legislators who passed this this particular provision . And then showing in each subsequent reenactment of the of the Immigration Act that there was continuing racial animus.
So for instance in the 1950s when the McCarran Walter Act was passed and this criminalization migration was incorporated the in the legislative debates Mexicans were routinely referred to with the derogatory term "wetback" which the court noted was obvious sign of their racism. So you could see it in the language they use you could also see it in terms of the enforcement against whom detention and deportation lands, and it almost entirely detention deportation lands on Latino individuals from Mexico and Central America, overwhelming proportion of people.
After that case was decided in Nevada the Biden Administration appealed the ruling the next day and the Ninth District Court has heard the arguments but is not yet ruled on on that particular case even if the Ninth District concurs and decides that this charge is unconstitutional. It's very unlikely given the Supreme Court we have today that that they will concur with that.
And so there's a legal challenge to this criminalization of migration which is valiantly making the effort to use the history to argue for the racism of that past history. But I think there's also lots of other people working outside of the legal system to try to raise awareness, awareness of this history of criminalization and make the argument that people should not be criminalized for the simple act of migration. So this talk and research comes out of the book, "Forever Prisoners" that Leti had mentioned. And I just wanted to to mention that, to give a context for that.
But I will stop my screen share, and I'm happy to answer any questions or any comments you may have. Thank you.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you so much. That was wonderful to hear. I really appreciate the linking of this historical period with the question that's on the table right now pending before the Ninth Circuit. How do we think about the criminalization of illegal entry and re-entry as a racial project?
But let me remind those of you who are listening to this on the webinar there's a Q&A button and please post any questions or comments for Professor Young.
I'm going to get started by saying how you think about trying to do what some might call a history from below. When you're looking through the eyes of the State and so I found your use of the photographs taken at McNeil prison just so poignant and intense and and kind of the way to try to discern the lives of people who are being like literally "looking through the eyes of the state".
So and I'm, I'm sure you've given this a lot of thought I know that in this book as a whole. Those of us who've had a chance to read more of the book for more recent histories where you have access to the stories of individuals who are still alive, it's just like unbelievably compelling and moving uh to hear you know their narrative of what's been happening to them in this system of immigration prison. But if you could say more about how you as a historian try to tell history about people whose lives are difficult to access other than through the yes of the government.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Yeah. It's a sort of methodological problem that historians face the archive is set up, most archives are set up by the government, so they record the government's perspective. You can on occasion have the voices of people like Chinese immigrants come through in court transcripts and other places, but those are a lot of times those are highly mediated like in a court transcript you're not getting access really into people's lives.
And so it is what I try to do in the book is a lot of immigration history is written with a lot of references to legislation and a lot of data. There's lots of numbers and graphs and charts and I'm guilty of some of that. But what I try to do in the book is have that context but then in each of the chapters talk about stories, of individual groups or individuals when I can. Because I think that really to communicate the the depth of the experience of being in detention and being deported, one needs to sort of understand that stories on an individual basis.
So as you said for some of the other chapters which are about Japanese-Latin Americans who are kidnapped from Peru during the second World War and brought to the United States to be put in immigrant detention and then exchange for U.S. prisoners held by the Axis powers, that follows a a particular family. There's a story about a Salvadoran woman who came to this country when she was five years old and ends up getting deported for a hot check, fraudulent check charge. and having to be separated from her three U.S. citizen children.
So all of those stories I think helped to fill in the gaps for the Chinese in this period unfortunately the archive and the McNeil Island records had no information besides these statistical like logs of the Chinese who were brought in. And but they did have this record of the photographs and so I tried to use the photographs as a way of seeing them and trying to interpret. And I think you know if I was an art historian I would probably be better at doing this, and it made me a little uncomfortable to kind of read into images and try to discern what's going on because obviously the context of those photographs it's not someone taking their own portrait. They're , t's like within, it's part of this carceral logic and personal technology, and yet using those photographs I think you can hopefully get a better sense of their their humanity and them as individual, individual people.
But I think you know much more can be done there's always more in the archives and more stories that can be unearthed and I think that that's really the job of historians is to. Even when you know people say there's you can't find it, if you look especially people who have the language skills to read Cantonese. you know looking at community archives. looking at all other alternative archives, as a way to to tell those stories I think is crucial.
LETI VOLPP: Fantastic. The questions are piling in uh without further ado I will start reading some of them. "Thank you for", this is Jacqueline Messiani, "Thank you for your presentation and the information shared. Are incarcerated people included in the census? If so, what transparency does that provide?"
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Yeah, so there are Census records of incarcerated people it. In the period that I'm looking at it does indicate whether someone was a foreign-born, so you could see how many foreign-born people. That doesn't necessarily tell you their citizenship because some people could be foreign-born but U.S. citizens. But what you see in the early 20th century is that there was a disproportionate number of foreign-born people especially in mental hospitals and one of the chapters focuses on this. And so you have to ask yourself in New York City it was upwards of 80 percent of the people in the State Mental Hospitals were foreign-born. How were they ending up there? We, it's hard to imagine that that rate of mental illness was just so much higher amongst the foreign-born.
So one explanation is that either limited language skills or the lack of cultural understanding that people were simply picked up for behaving in ways which were seen as non-normative and put into these mental hospitals. And so you could kind of track those numbers and this is really important to think about because right now in places like California and Portland and New York, the leaders you know these are all Democratic leaders are calling for increased civil commitment of people with mental illness. And so I fear sort of a re-emergence of what happened in the early 20th century when the vast majority of people were not locked up in jails and prisons but instead in mental hospitals. That we're gonna sort of, as we've made some progress on decarceration from jails and prisons particularly in California, that this is kind of the back door towards mass incarceration.
LETI VOLPP: That's fascinating and so important. I just want to add another like a footnote which is this kind of nefarious way in which apportionment and the census and imprisonment work together. Where I think currently, I don't know historically, people are counted as where they're imprisoned, and so and we know apportionment you know in terms of how many representatives are sent to Congress is based on population. And so we have a situation where we have these you know oftentimes rural towns where the population is greatly swelled by people who are incarcerated, who are primarily black and brown often, who cannot vote themselves because of felony disenfranchisement, but then their body is counting for purposes of having you know more members in Congress. Right So it's it's it's horribly reminiscent of this, you know idea of, you know people who are enslaved as counting as three-fifths of a person but not counting as as people who can vote. Anyways I just want to put that up there.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Yeah. I mean, in Oregon where I am the highest concentration of Black people in the state is in Salem. Ad if you know Salem it's on a particularly Black town and the reason for that is that's where the the state prison is. So that's why they have the highest concentration. So it's yeah it's kind of grim.
LETI VOLPP. So grim. Okay, have a question from Aida Rogers, "I'm interested in how U.S. foreign policy interests have shaped who has been deemed worthy of entry? It is interesting that white Cubans were granted parole quickly in the 1980s, whereas Haitians and black Cubans, who perhaps immigration officials thought were Haitian, faced longer and at times indefinite detention as you mentioned in the introduction to your book. What accounts for this discrepancy beyond the recognizable racial dimension? Do refugees and immigrants coming from "enemy states" like Cuba received different treatment? If so, how is it different? Why is this the case?
ELLIOT YOUNG: Yeah. So I was just talking about this in an Immigration Asylum Law class today. The history of sort of refugee acceptances is intimately tied up with U.S. foreign policy. So after the Vietnam War large numbers of Vietnamese came into the United States as refugees. After World War II there were large numbers of Europeans from Eastern Europe who were brought in to the United States and allowed in. But then if we see the more recent wars Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or after following the genocide in Rwanda, very few refugees were actually allowed in after those after those conflicts. So foreign policy does have a lot to do with it especially in the past, after World War II was almost entirely people fleeing from communist countries.
And that's where the Cuban refugee streams, where you know there's a whole complete different set of laws for Cuban refugees. The Cuban Adjustment Act which allows them to legalize their status after a year. Although Obama changed the law to make it harder now if you just come in across the border. So more Cubans are being incarcerated now and lined up for deportation. Although those deport, Cuba has not yet accepted those people so they're finding themselves yet again in these conditions of indefinite detention, pending their deportation. So the book um in one of the chapters talks about the case of the Mariel Cubans who come in the 1980s. 125,000 Cubans come in. There that group was disproportionately black and poorer than the group that came in in the 1960s who are whiter Cubans. And although the vast majority of them were paroled, the ones who were paroled and allowed to join their families were people who had family ties, so the whiter Cubans. The ones who remained in prison because they were caught on say a marijuana possession charge and then ordered deported tended to be darker skin. And so by the time you get to late 1980s you have thousands of black Cubans in prison pending deportation, who had been imprisoned for years sometimes up to a decade and essentially facing indefinite detention.
And that leads to a prison uprising where they seize prison, Atlanta Penitentiary a Detention Center in Oakdale, Louisiana for two weeks. It's the longest lasting prison uprising in U.S. history and it's a fascinating story. But definitely foreign policy and race racism are key to understanding sort of how different, why different groups are let in. The other factor is whether there is within the United States an advocacy group for that particular group, so Jews during the 1980s of the so-called "Refuseniks" had advocacy within the United States. So large numbers of those people coming out of the Soviet Union were allowed in. Other groups who don't have significant advocacy within the U.S. simply aren't allowed in.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you, super informative. I'm going to read another question from Gregory Chan, "Have you connected the work done by Jean Pfaelzer in her book, "Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans" such as the more than 200 "roundups" that occurred in California between 1849 and 1906. Not to mention the purges in Washington and Oregon." We could also mention here Beth Lou Williams's work I suppose.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Yeah, both of those are amazing historical accounts of that the anti-Chinese programs which occurred along the entire West Coast in the 1880s. And it's really what gives rise to McNeil Island because the government is responding to this populist upsurge against the Chinese and the demand by people to enforce this immigration restriction act. Which had been in place since 1882, but people saw Chinese coming in. And so then that leads to them, okay we're going to find the people who are in the country unlawfully, put them in prison and deport them. And so all of that context or that those verges are the context for the legal remedy. And so basically the state steps in to do what the mob does but to do it through the law. But essentially they're have the same ends which is getting rid of eliminating Chinese from the United States.
LETI VOLPP: Another question that came in from Jacqueline Messiani, "Are there any additions of the Island Lantern available digitally or on the web?
ELLIOTT YOUNG: I don't believe so. This is, I I've been going up to the National Archives in Seattle is where I found the that that it's a prison magazine that was published by the the incarcerated people themselves. So it's really interesting to see obviously the what got out, it was highly I'm sure controlled what information got out. But there's a whole, there are databases of prison newspapers and there's a long history of prison newspapers including really famous one from the Angola prison Louisiana, "The Angolite" which has been digitized. I don't think this "Island Lantern" one has so you'd need to make your way up to the Seattle National Archives dig through paper. Yeah.
LETI VOLPP: So I have another question for you. Which is like why is there amnesia? Right? When, I mean this history in some ways makes such a compelling case that the prototypical "illegal immigrant" is Chinese, like like. Why is this not, why, why is the Chinese person not centered in that imagination of like, you know. I don't know if this has to do with what the historian Mae Ngai describes with the kind of raising of the border and the era of national origins quotas and the construction of the racialization of who is the "illegal immigrant" kind of eclipsing this history? Or does this have to do with assumptions about Chinese immigrants as"alien" but not illegal? I I'm just fascinated to hear a few thoughts about this.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Yeah, I think what happens is that the you know after the 1930s the Mexican becomes the new image of the illegal alien and so that til today people think about that as the illegal alien. And even in this fight against 1326 against the illegal re-entry charge. The lawyers have decided to go back to the 1929 charge which in the argument is this is based on anti-Mexican racism. I don't understand why they don't go back to 1880, the 1880s because it's the same criminalization that happens in the 1880s, but it's against the Chinese. I think there is absolutely a kind of amnesia. I'm not sure if it has to something to do with you know the model minority myth and this idea of the Chinese as as being sort of now in a separate category from other and Asians in general from other immigrants. But but I definitely you know the history is very clear that the original group against whom all of these laws were created, all of these ideas the illegal alien, as Mae Ngai you know shows so well, is the Chinese originally. And then that later gets extended to these these other groups. And I think it just helps to show in terms of this court case the racism. Because there's nothing more clear than the Chinese Exclusion Act as being a law based in racial animus.
LETI VOLPP: That's so interesting. I have more thoughts about this that I will make, tell you outside of the like webinar. I mean one thing that's really special speaking to you from Berkeley Law is that the Dean of the Law School here did the oral argument in the before the Ninth Circuit in December. So you know many of us are are thinking a lot about that case and and eagerly or not eagerly awaiting the outcome, so. But yeah it's, I mean, and it's to me this amazing story about, for people who are in the legal space how to work with historians, and how historical research can inform contemporary legal argument. And how important it is to know history right. And how history is forgotten. And how history can resurface and shape how we understand a law that's impacting you know thousands and thousands of people today. Anyway this was absolutely invaluable.
So appreciative of your time with us in this forum and I want to thank you very, very much Professor Elliott young for speaking with us today. So thank you.
ELLIOTT YOUNG: Well thank you. Thank you and thanks for all the great questions it's always great to engage with this material and and hear other people engage with it as well. So thank you for participating.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you. Okay, bye-bye.