Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law
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Focusing primarily on the exclusion of the Chinese, Lucy Salyer analyzes the popular and legal debates surrounding immigration law and its enforcement during the height of nativist sentiment in the early twentieth century. She argues that the struggles between Chinese immigrants, U.S. government officials, and the lower federal courts that took place around the turn of the century established fundamental principles that continue to dominate immigration law today and make it unique among branches of American law. By establishing the centrality of the Chinese to immigration policy, Salyer also integrates the history of Asian immigrants on the West Coast with that of European immigrants in the East.Salyer demonstrates that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans mounted sophisticated and often-successful legal challenges to the enforcement of exclusionary immigration policies. Ironically, their persistent litigation contributed to the development of legal doctrines that gave the Bureau of Immigration increasing power to counteract resistance. Indeed, by 1924, immigration law had begun to diverge from constitutional norms, and the Bureau of Immigration had emerged as an exceptionally powerful organization, free from many of the constraints imposed upon other government agencies.
AcknowledgmentsIntroductionCh. 1From Counting to Sifting Immigrants1Ch. 2Contesting Exclusion: The Chinese and the Administrators37Ch. 3Captives of Law: Judicial Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws69Ch. 4The Eclipse of Judicial Justice94Ch. 5Drawing the Sieve Tighter: The Rise of Nativism and Administrative Power121Ch. 6Bureaucratic Tyranny: The Bureau of Immigration and Its Critics139Ch. 7A Fair though Summary Hearing: The Shaping of Administrative Due Process179Ch. 8Its Own Keeper: Procedural Reform in the Bureau of Immigration217Epilogue: Immigration Law in American Legal Culture245Appendix: Methodology253Notes255Bibliography309Index325
