Recorded on April 23, 2025, this panel marked the 150th anniversary of the Page Act of 1875, one of the first federal laws to restrict immigration to the United States — especially Asian immigration, as the law prohibited the importation of Asian contract workers, prostitutes (a provision targeted against Chinese women), and criminals.
The interdisciplinary group of UC Berkeley professors discussed their current work related to race, gender, or labor in US immigration history or Asian American Studies, and their thoughts on the legacies of the Page Act and related issues for the United States today.
Panelists included Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley; Leti Volpp, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley; and Matrix Faculty Fellow Hidetaka Hirota, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley and Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies.
The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Department of History, Department of Ethnic Studies, the Asian American Research Center, and the Center for Race and Gender.
Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).
Podcast and Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
SARAH HARRINGTON: Welcome. And thank you, all, so much for coming today and joining us for today’s Matrix On Point panel. My name is Sarah Harrington. I’m the program manager here at the Social Science Matrix. A quick thank you to the Matrix staff for helping us put this event on today. And then a big special thank you to Hidetaka Hirota, who’s one of this year’s Matrix faculty fellows, for putting this fantastic group together for this panel.
We’re really pleased to have this excellent group of scholars here today to help us reflect on the legacy of the 1875 Page Act, one of the earliest federal laws restricting immigration to the United States. This event offers an opportunity to examine its enduring implications for race, gender, and labor in US immigration history.
I would now like to introduce our moderator today. Hidetaka Hirota is a social and legal historian of US immigration, specializing in nativism, immigration control, and policy from the Antebellum era to the Progressive era. His research has appeared in leading history and migration studies journals. At UC, Berkeley, he teaches US Immigration History and codirects the Canadian studies program. He is also one of this year’s Matrix faculty fellows. So without any further ado, I would like to turn it over to Hidetaka.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you.
SARAH HARRINGTON: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. Before we start this event, I’d like to thank the Social Science Matrix team, especially Sarah Harrington, for enormous assistance with the logistics of this event.
And I also want to thank all of the departments and centers who generously cosponsor this event, including Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, BIME, the Department of Sociology, the Department of History, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Asian-American Research Center, and the Center for Race and Gender.
So this year, 2025, marks the 150th anniversary of the Page Act of 1875. This law was passed in the midst of growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the 19th century in the United States, especially here in California. And the law criminalized the importation to the US of women for the purposes of prostitution, and abandoned admission of such women as well as convicted criminals.
And the law also prohibited Americans from importing to the US forcibly recruited contract workers from Asia, from China, Japan, or an oriental country. The law prohibited the admission of so-called coolie workers, laborers. And the law made a violation of this provision a criminal offense.
So this act was one of the first national immigration laws that developed in the 19th century. But also, it had enormous implications for the discourse on race, labor, gender, sexuality, and morality in the US in the subsequent periods.
So I’m hoping to use this event as an opportunity to think about the significance of the Page Act related to issues of race, gender, and labor in US immigration history and Asian-American history. So the goal is big. The Page Act is important, but also, I’m hoping to provoke discussions of broader issues, as I said– race, labor, gender, and immigration, and Asian-American history.
And today, we are extremely fortunate to have three specialists in these fields at US Immigration and Asian-American history. All are UC, Berkeley professors, esteemed scholars. And I’m going to introduce all of them now. And then we’d like to develop around table conversation based on the questions that I have in the next 15 minutes. And then we will do Q&A toward the end. OK?
So right here on my left and to your right, I guess, Catherine Ceniza Choy is a professor of ethnic studies at UC, Berkeley and an award-winning historian of Asian-American history. She is the author of Asian-American Histories of the United States, published 2022. The book examines nearly 200 years of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US.
Her previous books include Empire of Care, on Filipino nurses in US history, and Global Families, on Asian international adoption. Professor Choy has been widely cited in media outlets such as New York Times, CNN, and The Atlantic. She previously served as chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and associate dean in multiple university divisions.
On your right edge, Cybelle Fox. Professor Cybelle Fox received a BA in History and Economics from UC, San Diego, and a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University. Her main research interests include the welfare state, immigration, race and ethnic relations, American political development, as well as historical and political sociology.
Her most recent book, Three Worlds of Relief, compares the incorporation of African-Americans, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the American welfare system from the Progressive era to the New Deal. Professor Fox won six book awards for Three World Relief, including the C. Wright Mills award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
Her next book project focuses on the rise of legal status restriction in American welfare, social welfare policies since the New Deal. Her work has appeared in the American Behavioral Scientist, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of American History, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Social Science History, Political Science Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, Law and Social Inquiry, and Studies in American Political Development. She is also co-author of Rampage– The Social Roots of School Shootings.
And in the middle, Leti Volpp, is a professor of law at UC, Berkeley, and a scholar of Immigration Law and Citizenship Theory, examining how law is shaped by culture and identity. She has published extensively on issues of immigration, gender, and race, with work appearing in Constitutional Commentary, Columbia Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others.
She is the editor of Looking For Law in All The Wrong Places and Legal Borderlands. Professor Volpp has received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations, and is a member of the American Law Institute. Here at Berkeley, she directs direct the Center for Race and Gender and is affiliated with multiple interdisciplinary programs on campus.
As you can tell, we have a wonderful group of scholars for this event. And I would like to start our conversation at this point. So my first question is actually about your work. So this event is about Page Act. So I think it makes sense if I ask, how your earlier or current research intersects with the Page Act itself or related issues, as I said, race, gender, labor, class, sexuality, morality in US immigration or Asian-American history? So yeah, it’s a time for you to introduce your work to the audience. So why don’t we start with Professor Choy?
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: OK. Thanks so much, Hidetaka. Thanks so much for being here. The Page Act certainly intersects in terms of the historical theme of migration, how migration is gendered, racialized, and classed in all three of my monographs, from Empire of Care, which was about Filipino nurse migration to the United States, certainly, a gendered professional stream of migration to global families, which was about Asian international adoption, the history of that here in the United States.
The United States is an international adoption nation. It’s the leading country that receives internationally adopted children. We tend not to think of that as a form of migration, but it is.
But the Page Act and my work intersects most directly with my most recent book, Asian-American Histories of the United States, which you pointed out was published in 2022 by Beacon Press as part of their series on revisioning history. And it’s an overview kind of book, and it’s really meant for the broadest audience possible.
And you had mentioned, it spans 200 years. And one of the unique or distinctive aspects of the book is that it has a nonlinear or what some people have described as a backwards chronology. And what I point out in the introduction is that, when and where Asian-Americans enter in US history is a complex question. These are complex questions because this is such an incredibly large, I mean, the fastest growing racial ethnic group in the United States coming from over 20 sending countries– from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, over 24 million strong at this point. So it’s such a diverse group. And so how do you approach an overview of a history with so much diversity?
And so the way I approached it was through this idea of taking different origin years in history and saying that there is no one singular linear history that actually, you can take different origin years, and then through what I call this constellation approach, learn about and further explore particular themes in various Asian-American histories.
And so the first chapter begins in 2020, and the conclusion ends with 1869. But one of the years that I chose to feature was 1875, precisely because of the Page Act as an important origin year for history of the objectification of Asian-American women. And each of the chapters goes back to a particular origin year, but then also moves forward in time.
And I wrote the book primarily during our COVID-19 years, 2020, 2021. And so very much what had happened in Atlanta with the spa shootings in March of 2021, where six of the eight people who were killed in those shootings were Asian-American women. And this was such an important moment for our Asian-American communities, for communities in Atlanta, this idea, where is this coming from? Why did this happen? The perpetrator of these heinous crimes said that race had nothing to do with it, that he was having a bad day.
And so throughout that chapter, I posed certain kinds of questions to the reader. And one of the questions is, why is it that the perpetrators of violence get to establish this discourse about what happened? And I emphasized how important the Page Act is for not only the racialization, but also the sexual objectification of Asian-American women. How it’s not the only thing contributing to these kinds of discourses, and knowledge, and experiences that Asian-American women have had historically? Certainly, popular culture contributes to this as well.
And I think the last point I want to make, because I know this is a discussion, is, another point about the Page Act is the way that it was enforced. I mean, it was really about the immorality of women in connection to prostitution and the exclusion of that. But the way it was enforced was to have enforcement, specifically in ports in Asia, and even more specifically, Chinese women were targeted.
So part of it is the law. And then part of it is the enforcement. Part of it is the legacy that we’re living in today. And that association continues with us. And the Atlanta spa shootings was just one iteration of that.
So I’ll end with another question that I present to the reader regarding the Page Act and the association of Asian-American women with prostitution or immorality, historically, which was brought up by the historian, Mae Ngai, which is, how do you prove a negative? When you’re in enforcement, and the officers are deciding whether or not you’re a prostitute, I mean, how do you go about proving a negative?
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you. I think we will go this way.
LETI VOLPP: OK. Well, this is fantastic, because what I’m about to say is completely in dialogue with these really wonderful remarks. So I wrote something that briefly talked about the Page Act. 20 years ago. And it’s basically a story about intersectionality. So this term, coined in 1989 by law faculty member Kimberlé Crenshaw, perhaps, best encapsulated by the title of a book, which was, All The Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, And Some of Us Are Brave. So it’s like, what happens if you try to look at particularly, the experiences of women of color and see how discourses that are focused on race and on gender tend to occlude what their particular experiences were?
So I was trying to write a history of dependent citizenship and marital expatriation centering Asian and Asian-American women. So I will say, we have Nancy Cott in our audience, who wrote the, I won’t say seminal, this is something I’m actually trying to get people to not use as the word “Seminal,” but to say “Germinal.” Exactly. Germinal or foundational work, Public Vows– A History of Marriage and Nation, if I remember correctly, which basically paved the way for people thinking about how to write a history of marriage and its intersection with nation in the United States.
So we had a history, where the logic of coverture, This Idea that when a woman married a man, her legal identity was subsumed into that of her husband. This idea was imported into immigration law. So a woman’s status would follow that of her husband. And that enabled both women, who were foreign born through the act of marriage, become citizens of the nation state, but also, as of 1907, meant that US citizen women who married non-citizen men actually, through the act of marriage, lost their citizenship.
So there was campaigning about this. There was a legislative remedy, what was called the Cable Act in 1922, which many people had pointed to and said, well, this solved the problem. But when you look at the legislation, that actual bill specifically says that if you are racially ineligible to naturalize, you will still lose your citizenship. And if you’re racially ineligible to naturalize, you cannot basically be a citizen. And so there was then piecemeal legislation fixing this in the early 1930s.
Anyway, so looking at that, it made me think about the Page Act and the conventional statement which is that Chinese Exclusion started in 1882, or that the first race based federal immigration law was enacted in 1882, or the first federal restrictive immigration law was in 1882, which was the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And it puzzled me like, why do people periodize history in this way? Why are they not thinking about 1875 as the advent of Chinese Exclusion? And is it possibly because there are questions of, as the act says, lewd or immoral conduct involved that this doesn’t seem purely about race in the same way as the Chinese Exclusion Act?
But if you think about the Chinese Exclusion Act, it was also about conduct, and that it wasn’t targeting all Chinese, it was specifically targeting Chinese laborers. That’s a form of conduct. You’re a laborer, and you’re not a merchant.
So anyway, so something that I think is interesting to think about, and in doing a little bit of research for this talk, I found a piece posted in 2022 by the National Park Service about the Page Act. And in it, they point to the fact that there was actually a Senate apology in 2011, issuing a statement of regret for its earlier passage of restrictive immigration laws, including the acts of 1875 and 1882.
I thought, wow, that’s really amazing. Let me look at that apology. When you actually look at the apology, it doesn’t say anything about 1875. It starts in 1882. Anyway, so there’s something very, I don’t know, telling about these repeated occlusions, which, perhaps, we can think about a way in which stories of race are told about male bodies, typically.
The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot or a little about more recently is actually, I love, by the way, this idea of, history is constellations and problematizing, that you take a year, and x starts in this year. But thinking also about how history is used to explain the present. And so there’s a way in which the Page Act has been used as this really interesting shorthand.
And I’m not at all saying, this is what you’re doing at your book. This is in the popular press. And the popular press, it feels like the Page Act serves as this kind of like too much explanatory force is given to it. It’s like the Page Act explains Atlanta.
I think it’s people are searching for something that proves right that the US nation state is founded on racism and sexism that is particularly aimed at Asian, Asian-American women, and here is proof. The Page Act explains this, there’s a piece in the nation I saw which is basically titled The Roots of the Atlanta Shooting Go Back to the First Law Restricting Immigration.
I think it’s also interesting for us to think about, what is occluded in that story? And what is occluded about thinking about anti-Asian violence against Asian women? How is this formed by, this is a particular workplace? What is the role of US militarism in creating massage parlors that have typically accompanied US military bases? How that was brought to the United States by people who had been involved in that and then in Asia and then moved to the United states? The question of, I mean, staggering age of a lot of the women that were killed in this.
Anyway, so there are, I think, other things going on in there. So questions of localism, globalism, militarism, labor, sexuality that tend not to be thought about when there’s this unilinear direct line that gets drawn.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you.
CYBELLE FOX: Thank you. So unlike these two brilliant scholars, my work is not directly related to the Page Act of 1875. I do study the race and immigration and the American Social Welfare System throughout the 20th century. So my first book, as Hide mentioned, Three Worlds of Relief, compare the incorporation of African-Americans, Mexicans, and European immigrants into the American social welfare system in the Progressive era and the New Deal.
And my new work, which is fully drafted and about to be sent out for review, explores the rise of legal status restrictions in American Social Welfare Policy from the new deal all the way up to 1994, with the passage of the Proposition 187 Ballot Initiative here in California, which you might remember, attempted to bar undocumented immigrants from all non-emergency social services as well as public education, from kindergarten through college, and then tried to require cooperation between social service providers and immigration officials.
So central to all of my work is the importance of race and racism for the treatment of immigrants in the United States, just as racism was central to the passage and impact of the Page Act. Racism is important in helping us understand why restrictive immigration laws are proposed or passed. And certainly, nonwhite immigrants in my work have typically been disproportionately targeted or affected by restrictive policies that have been adopted.
So in both the first book project and the current one, I show that European immigrants were incorporated into the early American Social Welfare System, while Latinos, especially Mexicans and Asians, were often excluded or at times, expelled from the nation for their attempt to gain access to these benefits.
So let me give you a little example. At various moments in time in the 20th century, social welfare agencies have cooperated with immigration enforcement in ways that made those who tried to apply for assistance either for themselves or sometimes, for their American born children, targets of deportation.
So in my first book, I discussed the role that social welfare workers in particular played in the expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the nation during the mass repatriations of the Great Depression. And those similar social workers in areas where there were lots of European immigrants protected European immigrants from immigration enforcement actions. So instead of encouraging and trying to expel Mexicans from the nation, social workers who worked with European immigrants tried to protect them from that sort of treatment.
Now, in the new book project, I detail a second less well-known episode but really important one, actually, of cooperation that occurred in the 1970s, when the federal government weakened confidentiality provisions embedded in welfare law that allowed cooperation between welfare, hospital, and immigration officials.
So during the 1970s, welfare and hospital officials sometimes reported undocumented immigrants to immigration officials. They threatened to call immigration officials to achieve other ends, including consent to sterilization. There was a huge episode of that in Los Angeles. And they forced welfare applicants to visit immigration offices to verify their eligibility for benefits.
When, due to understaffing or underfunding, immigration officials actually refused to deport individuals who were reported to them by these agencies, hospital officials sometimes hired private ambulances to repatriate migrants themselves. And welfare officials stationed welfare caseworkers in immigration offices in order to clear the backlog in immigration status verification forms, so more people could be expelled from the country and taken off the social welfare roles.
Alarmed by this rise in cooperation between welfare, and hospital, and immigration officials in the 1970s, Peter Schey, who, at the time, was this young immigrant rights attorney in California, one of the few who were working there, he later became a very prominent attorney, he charged that welfare agencies in the 1970s were being transformed into, quote, “the law enforcement arm of the migra or the IMS, the immigration service, a phenomenon that activists linked directly to the great repatriation that happened in the 1930s.
So these 1970s era restrictions affected men and women, young and old, of various nationalities, including immigrants from China, and the Caribbean, and Central and South America. But since Mexicans were both legally and socially constructed at that moment in time as the prototypical unauthorized immigrant, they were disproportionately impacted by this policy shift.
So, again, to reiterate, the tie for me is the centrality of race and the targeting of specific ethnoracial groups in the construction of restrictive immigration and immigrant policies, and then in the implementation of those policies.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you. This is great. My original plan was to let the panelists respond to each other, but I want to actually follow up with a really quick question based on what you said. So I see, what’s common here is labeling, legal status, determining somebody’s status. Page act was essentially about labeling, who’s prostitute? Who’s coolie? And Leti mentioned the Cable Act as well, and the legal treatment of immigrant women, and legal status restriction in Cybelle’s case.
So what’s the challenge of doing research on legal status? Policy about labeling. What’s so interesting, exciting about doing research on policies about labeling or legal status? Yeah, if anybody has any ideas. I thought that’s interesting, before we move on.
And Cathy introduced a really interesting point in Page Act. Yeah, it technically it prohibits prostitutes, but then how can you prove the negative? And that’s really an important struggle. I mean, it’s a very important, I think, dimension of this act. But again, yeah, I wonder if any of you can address the importance of the challenge of studying labeling or legal status in relation to immigration of Asian-Americans.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: You see how challenging that question was?
[LAUGHTER]
I can try to take a stab at it. I mean, I think that one of the things that’s challenging is, I think, in terms of historical methodologies, that you have to understand the time period on its own terms. And I agree with you, what we do as historians is not this presentist kind of approach.
So in some ways, at the same time, we are here in the present and doing this kind of research. So I do think one of the challenges is understanding or trying to understand– why are there particular labels at that particular time? And what do they mean? And how do they translate today? Or how they’ve changed? Because they have.
I also think, another challenge is something that we work on, which is this not knowing, this occlusion or in Asian-American histories of the United States, I call it this theme of erasure. It’s like when the general public doesn’t necessarily know, even though this is such an important legal statute, the Page Act. But if you would ask someone about an important law, that’s not what they would remember. And so part of the challenge is also remembering and making those connections. I don’t know. What do you think?
CYBELLE FOX: Oh, sure. The question of labeling comes up a lot in my new work in a variety of different ways. The book is really about why we started to get legal status restrictions in American Social Welfare Policy. And they emerge in the 1970s, when the federal government, which I think I’ll talk about a little bit later, barred undocumented immigrants from virtually all social welfare programs. And then state and local communities had to do the work of implementing this new federal ban.
And there were lots of questions. It was really hard to implement in practice for a whole variety of reasons. It had all these horrible consequences. But it was actually challenging for social welfare workers on the ground, because they had to figure out, well, what does it mean to be an illegal alien, for example? Which was the language that they were using at the time. Who counts? And who doesn’t? And they didn’t actually have any great definitions on the ground. So there are lots of battles about who counts as undocumented and who doesn’t count as undocumented.
And part of that has to do with the language in the federal law that restricted benefits to either legal permanent residents or individuals who are called PRUCOL, Permanently Residing Under Color Of Law. But no one defined what PRUCOL was. And the entire intent of it was to make undocumented immigrants ineligible.
And so you get all these different definitions across various federal programs but also from state to state, about who actually counts as PRUCOL and who doesn’t count as PRUCOL. And therefore, who is undocumented for the purposes of the food stamp program, but not undocumented for the purposes of the Medicaid program? And then different states adopted different language about who was eligible for state benefits.
So even just the idea of, who counts as undocumented in this country? Who is meant to be barred by these laws? It took a long time for folks to try to start to sort that out.
And I’ll say, the other way in which labeling comes up a lot in my work is that undocumented immigrants are barred by virtually, every federal social welfare benefit. But they’re thought of and labeled as costly, and for state and local communities, unfair burdens.
And so a lot of the book is actually trying to understand if undocumented immigrants are actually barred by federal law from the vast majority of federal social welfare benefits. And if study after study after study shows that they contribute more in taxes than they consume in social welfare benefits, how does this idea of undocumented immigrants as costly and unfair burdens arise historically? Why is it so powerful?
And I’ll just say quickly that I actually think that the reason that stereotype comes about is because of federal restriction in the 1970s. I won’t go into the details of it, but I’m happy to talk about it further. But there’s this paradoxical consequence that when the federal government barred undocumented immigrants from all these federal social welfare benefits, this idea of undocumented immigrants as costly and unfair burdens actually followed in the wake of that, as a direct result of that federal change in policy.
LETI VOLPP: So I’m just thinking about just two examples, both connected to things the Trump administration has been doing. So one of them actually links to something Cybelle was saying about permanently residing under color of law, or we could think of temporarily residing under color of law. And the way in which JD Vance, I don’t know if you remember in his debate with Mike Waltz and then in subsequent lots of administration rhetoric, has tried to portray people who are here on temporary protected status or here on humanitarian parole as, quote unquote, “illegal.”
So it’s like this labeling, putting people from what a Biden administration perspective would be. These people have lawful presence. Even if they don’t have lawful status, they have lawful presence into another box.
The other thing I’m thinking of is the argument that’s being made by the Trump administration and litigation around the executive order, around birthright citizenship, which is that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were lawful permanent residents, which is a category that didn’t historically exist at that time.
So basically, if you remember, the executive order purports to deny birthright citizenship to anybody born to parents who are– if you have parents who are here on either temporary visas, so they’re what are called non-immigrants, they’re here on a H-1B visa, or student visa, or there’s tourists, and/or your parents are undocumented, you, according to this executive order, are no longer supposed to get birthright citizenship.
And there’s no relationship between those categories of legal status of person and the historical jurisprudence on this issue, which does exempt certain people from actually being able to access birthright citizenship, but it’s not on the basis of their legal status, it’s on the basis of whether they’re, quote unquote, “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
And there are three categories of people that, clearly, historically, were exempted– people who have diplomatic immunity, so you work for the embassy of such and such. This is why people don’t pay parking tickets when they work at the UN in New York City. They’re millions of dollars owed in parking tickets.
So you have diplomatic immunity. You are born to a hostile invading army. So one possible argument that certain people have floated is like, oh, undocumented immigrants are an invasion. But it’s clear that what is meant by a hostile invading army in the historical jurisprudence, including in the Wong Kim Ark case, is a situation where this invading army actually is in control of the government, which is not the situation at all that one would think of, there’s no context in the United States where people who are undocumented immigrants are actually in control of the US government.
And the third category is a historical category of people who were born to Native American tribal communities, where their sovereignty is recognized, which is why there was subsequent statutory citizenship granted for those persons.
And so the thread here is about obedience. Like, do you have to obey US law. That’s what is supposed to mean subject to the jurisdiction thereof. OK. So nonetheless, there’s this argument that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were lawful permanent residents, and so there’s a correlation with what the administration is trying to do.
And they’re described as residents in the case, but that doesn’t mean that they had the category of lawful permanent resident today, which includes the possibility of naturalizing as a US citizen. They couldn’t naturalize as US citizens because of racial restrictions on naturalization that began in 1882, with a specific provision within the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act against persons who were Chinese, and then was extended to lots of different groups of persons and were not lifted until the middle of the 20th century.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you. Thanks so much. This is really insightful. I was going to ask three questions in total, but I want to make sure we have time for questions for the end. So I’m going to skip the next one. I’m going to skip my third one, actually.
So yeah, it’s something about what we do as public intellectuals. So immigration, Asian-American history remain really important subjects today. But nevertheless, I think, those Asian-American immigration history are often told in a misleading ways, or simply misunderstood, or even distorted in the public discourse as we hear them.
So as a public intellectual, what are the things that you would like your nonspecialist audience to know about immigration or Asian-American history? What kinds of misunderstanding, or neglect, or distortion in public discourse on immigration Asian-American history would you like to correct? Put simply, as a scholar, what would you like to say in response to what’s going on in public discourse on subjects related to immigration or Asian-American history?
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Well, there are so many things I’d like to say.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Yes, I know.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: But I will try to keep it succinct. I’ve been asked before, I’ve been in conversations before about, what is it about Asian-Americans? Is there no understanding about Asian-Americans in US history or contemporary American issues? And I’ve responded that it’s not that there isn’t a common understanding, but it’s often a misunderstanding. And there are multiple levels of this misunderstanding. I mean, the first is the perpetuation of the popular stereotype of the model minority that has multiple iterations, but some of the iteration is that Asian-Americans are honorary whites, they don’t complain, they’re quiet and submissive.
Partly related to this is another kind of discourse that I’ve been engaged with, where people will say, even in the most benign terms in conversation, that Asian-Americans just don’t really matter. When we’re talking about race and US history, they’re just not as important, and that’s not even meant to be hostile. But that is some of the discourse that is being shared with me.
And I think I’d like people to know that Asian-American history is such an integral part of American history, and that you can’t really know American history without knowing Asian-American history. I mean, one example that Leti has emphasized here has to do with the Wong Kim Ark case and its establishment of birthright citizenship, which is, in our discourse very much in the present day regarding immigration and the United States. So that’s just one example of that important precedent.
The Page Act is certainly another. And I’m glad that you’ve been doing so much work to change the public consciousness with all these events that you’ve organized about how important the Page Act has been for this precedent, for exclusion, based on not solely race, but that intersectionality, that race, gender, sexuality, class.
I mean, there are other things, things like, of course, 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, but the importance of the 1965 Immigration Act or the Hart-Celler act, how important that was to civil rights legislation? And what an impact that had on the Asian America we know today, which is such a large group? Part of it is highly educated. Part of it has to do also with the provisions and the infrastructure of the Immigration Act of 1965.
I think about the 1980 Refugee Act. How important Asian-American history, our US participation in the Vietnam war, the secret war in Laos? I mean, we are you’re also commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, the fall of Saigon. And how it led to historically, one of the largest refugee resettlements of Southeast Asians in the United States? This is so important because it changed our country from an ad hoc policy regarding refugees to something more institutionalized.
So there’s so much more I could say, but I’m going to leave it at that.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Perfect.
LETI VOLPP: So like Cathy, I also have a whole list of things, just quickly. I mean, I think something that’s interesting to think about are ways in which the government will frequently say, oh, we’re concerned about conduct, like behavior. That’s what we’re trying penalize. It’s not about your identity or your status, but I think it’s important for us to think about ways that these are fused.
So, for example, with the Page Act, it’s like lewd and immoral behavior makes you a prostitute, which is racialized as Chinese. Unlawful immigration renders you, quote unquote, “illegal,” which gets racialized as, quote unquote, “Mexican.” Criminal conduct turns into, you are a criminal, which is also racialized.
And we can see right now, what’s happened with people from Venezuela. And people are being subject to kidnapping and rendition, disappearing, either put into torture prison in El Salvador. Also, there’s reporting of one person who’s just completely disappeared, and nobody will say where he is.
Because they have a particular national origin, and that seems to be enough, possibly, there’s a tattoo they may have, absolutely no bearing with being put in this category of a gang member. There’s now all this documentation that there’s no relationship between having tattoos and being a member of the particular gang, the [INAUDIBLE], which they say they’re targeting. Anyway, so that’s something that I would like people to think about.
The fact that there was a statute of limitations, historically, on deportation, I think is amazing. You’d been here for a year, that’s long enough. You’ve set down roots. We’re not going to deport you. And then it was extended to five years. And then it was abolished.
But the fact that this existed once might suggest, maybe we can imagine it again. So I think it’s also fantastic to think historically about alternative realities that could possibly exist. The idea that, why don’t people just get in line in terms of getting legal status, thinking about trying to explain to people all the time, why there is no effective line?
For many, the idea that undocumented migration is this new phenomenon, this is something that particularly is surfacing around, again, birthright citizenship, where the presumption is that when the legislators who created the 14th Amendment said, all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens, that they didn’t imagine that there were undocumented immigrants, and therefore, they could not have contemplated this. And therefore, this clause has no meaning for people who are born to undocumented immigrants.
But there’s wonderful research, Gerald Newman writing an early piece, and then more recently, Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman, that people who were trafficked here in violation of the federal laws regulating or prohibiting the slave trade and were, in fact, living in the United States in violation of federal law, were foreign born people who were illegally in the United States in 1868. And this is a historical analog to today’s parent who’s undocumented, who has a child in the United States. And that’s precisely who the framers were thinking of when they created the 14th Amendment. So that’s just a few of the things I think about.
So one myth that I think is especially pernicious is this myth of the bootstrapping white ethnic. I think a lot of white Americans, we like to tell ourselves that unlike today’s immigrants, our ancestors didn’t make much use of government services and came in lawfully. So in the run up to welfare reform, one congressperson said, quote, “My ancestors and most of our ancestors came to this country not with their hands out for welfare checks.” Or someone wrote in to a newspaper, “Our ancestors came here legally and didn’t place great demands on government services.” And national polls suggest, these attitudes are totally widespread.
And so my first book, Three Worlds of Relief, was really meant to interrogate that assumption, by comparing, again, the incorporation of Blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants into the early American Social Welfare System.
And I was able to show that these groups were treated very differently by both the Progressive era and New Deal Social Welfare System. European immigrants were largely included within the boundaries of social citizenship, people who should be incorporated into the American welfare state. Black Americans were largely excluded. And Mexicans straddled the boundaries of social citizenship until relief officials forced them out, not only from the boundaries of social citizenship, but also from the nation.
And the book tries to show this by looking at a whole variety of different social welfare programs that were in existence during that period. But I’m going to focus in on one important piece of national legislation, which is the Social Security Act of 1935.
So the Social Security Act is really important because it essentially created the modern American Social Welfare System. It creates social insurance programs, like Social Security and unemployment insurance. And then it also created means tested public assistance programs for the elderly, for the blind, and for dependent children.
And the traditional way that scholars told the story about inclusion and exclusion in the Social Security Act along racial lines was that because of occupational restrictions that barred agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security and unemployment insurance, Black Americans were far less likely than white Americans to be covered by social insurance programs. And then they’re relegated to the more demeaning means tested public assistance programs, which had few federal standards or protections. And this is true. And it’s a very important part of the story.
But in my work, I show that those same occupational restrictions also barred the vast majority of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, as well as Filipinos and Japanese residents from the more generous social insurance programs.
And the real winners here in terms of inclusion are not just whites, but foreign born whites in particular. So why is that? First, foreign born whites, especially Southern and Eastern European immigrants, were disproportionately represented in the occupations covered by social insurance, by Social Security.
Second, the Social Security Act contained no federal citizenship or even legal status exclusions. So both authorized and unauthorized immigrants had a federal right to Social Security and unemployment insurance. And this was true from 1935 all the way up into the 1970s, when I told you that the federal government first barred undocumented immigrants from virtually every social welfare program.
So to make sure that European immigrants understood this, that even if they had entered the country without authorization, that they were still going to be eligible for the Social Security Act. A prominent immigrant advocacy organization put out a newsletter during the Depression, assuring their readers that the applications forms for Social Security didn’t ask questions about citizenship, or when or in what manner a non-citizen entered the United States. And they also told noncitizens that they could file for benefits under their American names, decreasing the possibility that you could ever match Social Security files with immigration records.
And then to even prevent that possibility, Frances Perkins, who was the Secretary of Labor but in charge of the immigration service at the time, specifically instructed immigration field officers to quote, “refrain from requesting information from the Social Security board for immigration, naturalization, and other purposes.”
Not only that, European immigrants are not only more likely than native born whites to work in occupations covered by Social Security and then eligible, regardless of their citizenship or legal status, they’re also more likely than other groups to be nearing retirement when the program was first created. The age structure of the population of these European immigrants was such that almost half of foreign born whites were in their later working years by the time the first Social Security checks were issued. And this was not the case for any other group, including native born whites.
And the way they design the Social Security program is that workers who are nearing retirement needed to only work a few quarters to be eligible for Social Security for the rest of their lives. So consequently, these European immigrants contributed very little to the Social Security system, but then became eligible for this benefit their whole working lives. So instead of insurance for these retirees of European origin, Social Security was much more akin to welfare, but without the means test and without the stigma that often comes with it.
So I think this really reinforces that we have to be really wary of this romanticized notion of the bootstrapping white ethnic, who came to the United States the right way, who didn’t make use of the social welfare system that existed at the time. I think it’s very clear that the early American social welfare system was designed for all European immigrants, including those without authorization to be in the country. And that was never the case for Mexicans and for many Asian immigrants as well.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you. Does anybody want to respond to any comments? I have comment, but– [CHUCKLES]
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Well, I would love to hear how you would answer that question, Hidetaka, because you’ve organized now multiple events regarding remembering the Page Act for organization of American historians, and the Immigration Ethnic Historical Society, and now, this. What’s on your mind about what you would like the public to know about Page Act?
HIDETAKA HIROTA: First of all, thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, this is not necessarily about the Page Act itself, but I want to respond to some of the comments you three just said. So for example, Leti mentioned this statute of limitation to deportation. So if you’re in the United States for five years, for example, deportation would not apply to you, so your status here is guaranteed. That’s the policy that this country used to have, but that was abolished.
I think a few things that we need to know that existed in this country, because today, I think one of the things that I noticed is that some of those things are considered as if they were even unthinkable. So the statute of limitation is one thing. And then for example, 1950s and later, there was government’s policy for legalizing undocumented immigrants. And that was part of the US policy. But again, it seems like that’s not even thinkable at this point. So it’s not even considered a political option.
So when I speak to the public, I try to refer to this, just to let us know that these were the actual policies that existed here. It could be conceivable if there is a political will. And I have so many things to say about this myth that all the European immigrants came here legally. It’s a gross myth. And I’ve written some op-eds on this topic.
But let me tell you, everyone here, a lot of Europeans came to the United States through the Canadian borders, unlawfully. As of 1895, seven inspectors guarded the entire Canadian border, seven individuals. I mean, how could you guard the border with the team of seven people? So, I mean, there was no way to establish strong surveillance against unauthorized immigration.
And so we’re talking totally different periods between then and now when it comes to an authorized immigration. And even Ellis Island, if you have $30 in cash, you could be admitted, you could be considered a self-sufficient [INAUDIBLE] immigrant. But then if you’re an international student here, you know how much money you have to have in your bank accounts to get an F-1 visa, tens of $1,000, just to prove that you’re not going to be a public charges.
So again, I think, yeah, our ancestors came legally. Our ancestors were virtuous, law-abiders. I think that is one of the myths that I’ve always challenged in my own work.
Anyway, we have 20 minutes or so. And at this point, I would like to take questions from the audience. And yes, please raise your hand. And maybe you can identify yourself.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I’m Yumi Kim. I’m in the History Department. I arrived just a few months ago. I’m a historian of Japan and Korea. I have actually so many questions, but I’ll just pick one. We usually do this thing where we’re like, I have two or three, but I’ll just do one.
Especially in thinking about what, is it Cybelle, you were saying about the Social Security Act and the various contingencies involved, it made me want to ask the question of– for you three or four, how much white supremacy is an explanatory factor for you when you’re thinking about the histories, and events, and peoples you’re looking at?
And I asked this question because this is feedback I get from students. It’s something I think about myself. There are always contingencies. And yet, the way white supremacy is often dehistoricized and seen as a transhistorical universal phenomenon, I’m often asked this question, or I ask myself the question too, is– does white supremacy have enough force as an explanatory factor? Or is it better to really insist on the various contingencies?
But when you insist on the contingencies, it often makes it seem like then white supremacy is not at play as much. And so I’m just wondering, how the concept or the ideas around white supremacy, if that is something you think, with and if it’s useful for you.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Yeah, that’s such a great question. So thank you for asking. I’ve been wanting to meet you, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
It’s great, you’re here. For me, the answer is both. I think it is important to take into account the historical racial formation of white supremacy. But I also think the contingencies are important. I’m just going to give one historical example.
When I write about the rise of the United States as a historical power through imperialism, including places like Hawaii and the annexation of Hawaii, the take over, as well as American colonialism in the Philippines, among other places, I also point out that it didn’t have to be that way, and that there was actually also an anti-imperialist movement here in the United States. And so it’s always, I think, more complicated than the factor of white racial supremacy.
On the other hand, it is also white racial supremacy. And we also have to take into account today, I mean, I think about, I’m so influenced by David Roediger’s book, Wages of Whiteness. And I think it really helps me understand not only the 19th, early 20th century, but also why there might be continuing anti-immigrant sentiment today, even among other immigrants.
It has to do with that psychological wage of whiteness, even when it’s going against your interests. Actually, solidarity, common class consciousness could be very empowering, but there is an attraction of white racial supremacy and those wages of whiteness. So that’s a concrete way, I hope, to address your question.
LETI VOLPP: Welcome to Berkeley. It’s such an interesting question. And I think I haven’t really thought about this consciously. I will say, I think everything I write is shaped by the presumption that racism is foundational to this historical and present day structure of US state and society. I don’t tend to say, it’s white supremacy, in my writing. And I think that’s something that I should think about.
I wonder if a corollary of this might be the ascendancy of anti-blackness as a theoretical lens through which many scholars are now writing. I’m thinking, for example, Claire Jean Kim, who famously wrote about what she called racial triangulation of whites, Blacks, and Asians, where there’s a field of racial positions.
And you can see that as incredibly exemplified in justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy versus Ferguson, where he says there is a race so different from our own, we will never allow them to become citizens, but they are allowed to ride in the White train car the way that brave soldiers, who fought for the Union, are not, who are African-American.
So you see simultaneously, white social supremacy, white civic belonging. In this earlier piece, she said, Black civic belonging but Black social subordination. Asian somewhat elevated social subordination but completely debased civic belonging. And then more recently, she said, I’m stepping away and think anti-blackness actually is foundational. And the civic belonging that I was thinking about earlier is actually less belonging in that people were also expelled from that.
And so anyway, so I feel like these are, I think, active questions that I need to struggle with. I would say that, I think, whenever we’re thinking about, just as people tend to periodize history around certain bodies, there’s a way in which certain historical experiences are correlated with certain racialized bodies, which needs to be opened up.
This is from the wonderful foundational, germinal, Omi and Winant, racial formations. So it’s like, Asians experienced exclusions. Native Americans experienced genocide and removal. Mexicans experienced conquest. African-Americans experienced racial slavery in Jim Crow. But it’s like then, you don’t think about ways in which those racial communities also experienced those other phenomenon as well. So, for example, how do we think about exclusion, like immigration exclusion, that they experienced as well?
CYBELLE FOX: Yeah. And I would say, white supremacy is central to the construction of the Social Security Act. I may have made it seem like it was all contingent. I think the only piece of that that was contingent was the grandfathering people in and the age structure of the population. But the people who crafted the Social Security Act had European immigrants in mind when they were designing the early modern American social welfare system.
The two key people in there were Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins. And they both had long histories working as social workers in the Northeast and Midwest with immigrant populations. And Frances Perkins had even worked in a settlement house.
And so when they were imagining, who are we building this welfare state for? Who are we building Social Security for? They were imagining the immigrants that they had been working with for a long period of time, the White immigrants from Europe that they’d been working with for a long time. And they knew exactly who would be included and excluded from the more generous social insurance provisions of the act.
The act was drafted by the Committee on Economic Security. And so going through their records, you can actually see that they estimated, what proportion of each population, including foreign born whites versus native born whites versus African-Americans, who’s going to be included and who’s going to be excluded from this policy that we’re designing right now? So in crafting it, they had full knowledge of what they were doing. And the goal was about protecting the White worker, including the foreign born white worker in particular. That was why Social Security was even necessary.
And it wasn’t an accident that there were no citizenship or legal status restrictions in the act, either. The principal alternative to the Social Security Act being debated at the time barred all noncitizens. Anti-immigrant sentiment was incredibly high.
The first public opinion polls that were fielded nationally were fielded during the Great Depression. And they asked multiple times whether noncitizens should have access to relief, or if those who used relief should be expelled from the country. And the vast majority of Americans did not think they should have access to these programs.
So against that, the people who are, again, crafting the Social Security Act are very consciously trying to make sure that this population not only will be covered by this legislation but then won’t be excluded by citizenship or legal status restrictions. So white supremacy is foundational to– who’s included? And who’s excluded? Who’s imagined as deserving of this new welfare system that’s being born and who’s not?
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Thank you.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My name is Helen. I’m a junior undergraduate here. So I had a question going back to the change in the social welfare system that you talked about in 1971. So considering who was on the Supreme Court and the rise of neoliberalism in that era, to what extent do you think neoliberalism may have played a role in restricting access to the social welfare system?
CYBELLE FOX: I think most people date the rise of neoliberalism to the late 1970s and not the early 1970s, when these restrictions in federal policy are formed, so more important than something we might call neoliberalism. I would say, actually, anti-blackness in particular is really foundational for why we start to see the rise of legal status restrictions. It comes at a moment when there’s a racial backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and against the rising welfare roles.
And the main targets of that racial backlash are Black Americans. Many of them assumed to be recent migrants to California or the Northeast and Midwest from the South, so not international migrants, but domestic migrants. As well as in New York City, they were also thinking about Puerto Ricans from the island. And there was this huge backlash against this group and this perception that they were migrating to these parts of the country that had higher welfare benefit levels and that they were placing an undue burden on the social welfare system.
And so there’s this huge effort in the early 1970s that state and local officials are engaged in, in trying to reduce the size of the welfare rolls. And in part, again, the main target are Black Americans and maybe Puerto Ricans from the island, but the Supreme Court passes a decision, Shapiro v Thompson, that prevents them from barring people from access to benefits if they hadn’t been in the state for a certain amount of time, so these residence restrictions.
So state and local officials are desperately looking for, well, who can we bar from assistance? And so in the process of trying to figure out– what can we do? What is legal? What is in our control? They start to think about international migrants instead of domestic migrants.
And at that same moment, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, their union, they want to get more resources for immigration enforcement. And so they start to construct undocumented immigrants in particular as welfare-dependent.
And so there’s this convergence of state officials desperately looking to reduce the welfare roles, primarily motivated by anti-blackness. Immigration officials often rank and file who are desperately looking for more resources for immigration enforcement, who both construct this stereotype of undocumented immigrants as welfare dependent. And then state officials end up barring state. And then federal officials end up barring undocumented immigrants from these programs. So it’s much more, I would say, is race matters at this early moment much more.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: I think we have five minutes. So we take multiple questions and then let the appellants respond.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. Hi. My name is Nancy Cott. I’m a historian too. I want to get back to the Page Act. And I would certainly applaud making the common knowledge as to when Chinese Exclusion anyway, if not all Asian, began. But I wanted to ask you all to perhaps, comment on, how come something even earlier didn’t come up in any of your comments, which I see as even more or equally foundational to treatment of Asians in America, which is the exclusion of anyone who was not either white or a descendent of Africa from the change in the Naturalization Law that was passed in 1870?
And actually, Harlan’s opinion, which you just referred to, makes reference to it, that Sumner’s idea was to just say, anyone can be naturalized. And the Californians, I think it was, or the Californians and the Coloradans said, no, we don’t want Asians ever to be able to be naturalized. And when was that overboard in the Hart-Celler Act?
LETI VOLPP: 43, right?
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: 52.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: 52 for all Asians.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: For all groups.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: For Chinese, 43.
LETI VOLPP: 43 Chinese. 46, I think, Filipinos and Indians.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Asian and Indians.
LETI VOLPP: People from Guam, 50. And then everybody, 52.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I was struck that you mentioned that. So maybe just–
HIDETAKA HIROTA: We can take a few more. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Lila. I’m an undergrad. I probably don’t need a microphone, I’m loud. But anyway–
CREW: It is recording.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK. What impact did the Page act have on the creation of the border patrol, the US-Mexico border? That’s what I’m curious about.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: One more? Yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right. My name is Judy. I’m a former US history teacher. So I also like going back to the Page Act, because I’m wondering, we haven’t really specifically referenced reconstruction. And we’ve referenced the 14th Amendment. And I really love the fact that you brought up the anti-racialization of the movement against Black people in America really came from the 1860s and ’70s, when there was pushback against reconstruction. And so I just would like to know, in the context of reconstruction and the election of 1876, how the Page Act of 1875 may have been pushed?
HIDETAKA HIROTA: Anybody wants to respond? I can try, as a historian, 19th century US historian here. Broad answers. I’m going to give a really broad answer here.
So the Page Act should be really understood as part of the US government’s attempt to establish control over, essentially, membership, the who’s in? Who’s out? And the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, those were really created as the efforts to integrate the African-Americans or formerly enslaved people into the American polity.
But then Page Act is a forerunner of the later Chinese Exclusion. And I think it’s not an Exclusion Act, it’s only exclusion. But again, they think that purpose is essentially the same, that is, the federal government creates control over, who’s in? Who’s out? In other words, it’s a control over membership. So I think that’s the context. That’s how Page Act fits into the broader reconstruction politics.
And the Page Act itself doesn’t really affect the Mexican border. But again, I think Page Act still is important because it paved the way toward Chinese Restriction Act and then later, Chinese exclusion laws essentially encouraged Chinese to go to Mexico and Canada first. And then as a result, the United States responded by militarizing US-Canada borders first and then US-Mexico borders later. So the Page Act itself might not heavily influence US-Mexico border control, but again, I think we need to understand this as part of a longer process.
And again, the naturalization was incredibly important because the 1870 act is really the boundary. Who’s in? Who’s out? And exactly, Charles Sumner, former abolitionist from Massachusetts, said that, why don’t we make naturalization colorblind? But then the California politicians, realizing that that’s going to make Asiatic Americans, and we don’t want that. And thankfully, from my perspective, towards the end of the 19th century, birthright citizenship was guaranteed for people of Chinese descent, as a result of Wong Kim Ark. But again, as we responded, the naturalization was not permitted for Asians as late as 1940s and 1950s.
But again, I think the Citizenship Act, Naturalization Act of 1870 was again part of this broader reconstruction package that was designed to reestablish the federal control over territorial sovereignty and membership. Any response?
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Yeah. Well, I’ll respond to Nancy’s question. I mean, I think citizenship is such an important theme in Asian-American history. I do see, just from my standpoint, the Page Act being more about entry and migration, the exclusion of it, who’s included?
It is in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act about the ineligibility of Chinese to become citizens. And I have no doubt there’s an intersection here. But I think that was just my emphasis when I was presenting about the Page Act and when I’ve talked about it in scholarship. They absolutely go hand in hand.
Again, I think with the issue regarding Border Patrol, this is about federal statutes now as opposed to local regional ones. And so the idea of immigration being connected historically at this point to US national sovereignty, and with it, enforcement, even though I don’t think it’s necessarily always directly connected to US-Mexico border patrol, I do see there’s a connection there regarding systematic enforcement.
LETI VOLPP: I’ll just add that we could think of the citizen is correlated with the idea of freedom at this moment. And that you can see in the Page Act, the Chinese male worker a.k.a. “The Coolie” and the Chinese female a.k.a. the prostitute are correlated with both ideas of unfreedom. So there’s definitely a lot of scholarship on thinking about ways in which the recently emancipated Black Americans from slavery or enslavement, ways in which Chinese immigrants were positioned in relationship negatively to this recently emancipated population in terms of, we don’t want another phenomenon like that.
CYBELLE FOX: And I’ll just add that racial bars to naturalization certainly mattered in the early American social welfare system, not in the federal welfare state that was created and survived the Great Depression, but the WPA program initially had no citizenship or legal status restrictions but adopted them in the course of the program. The entire program was done by 1942, but obviously, individuals ineligible to naturalize were therefore, completely barred from access to the WPA. I think that’s part of the history that we need to explore more in terms of its effect on Asian populations.
But also old age assistance, even though the federal government had no citizenship or legal status restrictions, it allowed states to adopt citizenship restrictions if it wanted to. Basically, they thought the Social Security nativism was so high, the Social Security Act would not pass without some sort of option to restrict. And so many states barred noncitizens from old age assistance early on.
And the states that kept those restrictions in place the longest were states that had large Mexican or Asian populations. And of course, whereas in theory, Mexicans could naturalize to be able to get access to old age assistance when those laws were in place that barred naturalization for different Asian groups, then there was no option to naturalize, and so then complete exclusion from those programs.
HIDETAKA HIROTA: One last thing before we close, I forgot, I want to say this. The Page Act really established that the traveling single women will be seen as potential prostitutes. So in other words, the Page Act really established the family as a normative group. And eventually, anti-prostitution provisions were incorporated into immigration law. And Mexican women coming through the Mexican border, for example, were subjected to this skepticism. If, I mean, Mexican women without husbands were traveling, they would be seen with suspicions. And then they could be excluded as prostitutes. So I think there is very important implications of the Page Act for later laws and beyond Asian-Americans.
Anyway, with my own remark–
[LAUGHTER]
–I would like to close this event. Thank you for joining us today.
CATHERINE CENIZA CHOY: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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