renews exclusion of Chinese
laborers for another ten years and requires all Chinese to register.
Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. upholds constitutionality of Geary Law. The "Fond Yue-Ting v. United States," the Chinese community raises money to test the constitutionality of exclusionary legislation.
Fong Yue Ting v. United States, confirmed the right of the Congress to treat aliens as it wished. It became the constitutional bedrock for all subsequent questions as to Congress' rights in regard to immigrants and aliens. Fong and two other Chinese men were arrested for violating provisions of the 1892 amendments to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The extension not only continued to bar Chinese laborers from American shores but required those already in the United States to obtain a certificate of residence from an internal revenue officer stating that they were legally entitled to be here.
A person of Chinese ancestry caught without such certification was to be deported by a federal judge unless he could prove with the aid of "at least one credible white witness" that he was a resident of the United States at the time of the passage of the law and that he had, for a valid reason, been unable to obtain the required document. Fong Yue Ting, though a permanent resident of New York City since 1879, had never bothered to register and was arrested.
Justice Horace Gray, summarizing for the Court, noted that another defendant who tried to get the necessary certificate could not do so because "the witnesses whom he produced to prove that he was entitled to the certificate were persons of the Chinese race and not credible witnesses." Justice Gray continued: Congress, having the right, as it may see fit, to expel aliens of a particular class, or to permit them to remain, has undoubtedly the right to provide a system of registration and identification of the members of that class within the country, and to take all proper means to carry out the system which it provides.
Later Courts have consistently reaffirmed the majority viewpoint in Fong that Congress has absolute discretion in deciding whom to admit, and whom to ban from, this country. And as if to underscorethe confidence that the majority had in its position, three years later Justice George Shiras, Jr., reiterated: No limits can be put by the courts upon the power of Congress to protect, by summary methods, the country from the advent of aliens whose race or habits render them undesirable as citizens, or to expel such if they have already found their way into our land and unlawfully remain therein.
BACKGROUND:
Later Courts have consistently reaffirmed the majority viewpoint in Fong that Congress has absolute discretion in deciding whom to admit, and whom to ban from, this country. And as if to underscorethe confidence that the majority had in its position, three years later Justice George Shiras, Jr., reiterated: No limits can be put by the courts upon the power of Congress to protect, by summary methods, the country from the advent of aliens whose race or habits render them undesirable as citizens, or to expel such if they have already found their way into our land and unlawfully remain therein.
RACIALLY COERCED LABOR & CLASS STRUGGES BACKGROUND:
This racialization process was crucial to the first phase of the Asian-American experience, that of a racially coerced labor force. Asian Americans were systematically stripped of their political, economic, cultural, and citizenship rights and thereby condemned to be a vulnerable labor force that was made available to white capital at a price much cheaper than white labor.
Although the lower wages and substandard living conditions the Chinese were forced to accept certainly increased the profits of white capitalists, there was much more significance to the racially coerced labor force than short-term "superprofits." In fact, turning the Chinese into a racially coerced labor force was a fundamental condition for the development of capitalism in California.
At that time, labor was so scarce and land so plentiful that free people had better alternatives than to become wage slaves. As with slavery and sharecropping in the U.S. South, coercing people of color into serving as labor was central to the primitive accumulation and the early accumulation of capital in California; they were barred from owning land and forced to become the labor counterpart to (white) capital in mining, railroads, agriculture, and factories, which propelled California's booming economy and helped forge the first continent-wide national economy.
OTHER LABORERS' OPPOSITION:
The racial cordoning of Asians also enabled non-capitalist whites to monopolize small businesses, independent trades and farms, and privileged positions within the workforce, not to speak of land, education, and political power.
A careful look at the "white workers" who led the anti-Chinese movement reveals that the most organized and vocal section were actually independent craftsmen or highly paid skilled workers, not regular wage workers, who in the nineteenth and early twentieth century commonly joined the same skilled craft unions and indeed dominated the U.S. trade union movement until the 1930s.
What they feared was that factory based capitalist industry or agribusiness, basing itself on semi-free Chinese labor, would successfully displace their small businesses or farms, independent trades, or highly paid skilled labor jobs: in short, that their small-scale petit bourgeois production and trades would be undermined by capitalist enterprises and they themselves might be proletarianized. Thus the status of Chinese labor became a significant issue in the class struggle between small, independent producers (miners, artisans, and farmers) and large-scale capitalist enterprises.
At the same time most unskilled white workers also joined the crusade to exclude the Chinese in order to increase their own employment opportunities and to fulfill their own concepts of white supremacy.
Rather than fight white capital for equality and build solidarity
among all workers, white
labor demanded the exclusion of Chinese labor from the country to
advance the condition of white workers at their expense.
| Here
we had a classical
racist trade union tradition: white workers (skilled and unskilled)
banding together in unions and political organizations in the name
of "Americanism" and "free (white) labor" to defend their privileges
over non-white workers. |
