The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [79]
The fire destroyed much of the city, but most important for the Chinese, it destroyed city birth and citizenship records. The loss of these municipal files allowed many immigrants to claim that they were born in San Francisco, not China, thereby enabling them to establish U.S. citizenship. Because all foreign-born children of American citizens are entitled to U.S. citizenship, a Chinese immigrant who managed to convince the American government that he was a citizen could then return to his homeland and claim citizenship for children born in China.14 Or he could tell American authorities that his wife in China had given birth to a son, when in reality no child had been born, and then sell the legal paperwork of this fictitious son to a young man eager to migrate to the United States. These so-called immigration slots were sold either through an individual’s network of relatives and acquaintances or through emigration firms. Traditionally, these firms—known as Gold Mountain firms—were import/export companiesthat also served as travel agencies, hotels, postal carriers, and banks for remittances. As crucial middlemen for Chinese émigrés, they were well placed to act as brokers in the illegal “paper sons” program.
The paper sons phenomenon naturally aroused the suspicions of the U.S. government. Authorities could not help but notice that the ratio of Chinese sons to daughters reported to be born during visits to the motherland was something like four hundred to one. They also commented on the high number of Chinese who alleged American citizenship. One federal judge noted that “if the stories told in the courts [are] true, every Chinese woman who was in the United States twenty-five years ago must have had at least five hundred children.” To detect paper sons, the government detained the Chinese at immigration stations and subjected them to lengthy interrogations.
At first, San Francisco officials detained Chinese arrivals in “the Shed,” a windowless two-story frame building at the edge of the Pacific Mail Steamship company’s pier. The Shed was filthy; one observer reported that it was “overrun with vermin” and that “the odors of sewage and bilge are most offensive.” After a period of detention at the Shed, one Chinese merchant declared the Americans “a race of pigs.” Even Chinese immigrants in the classes exempt from the exclusion laws—merchants, professionals, intellectuals—faced humiliation upon arrival and then weeks of bureaucratic frustration.
In 1910, the government fenced off ten acres of Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, as an immigration facility. This island had previously served as a military depot for recruits as well as a detention center for prisoners of the Spanish-American and Indian wars. Officials found its location advantageous for two reasons: as with nearby Alcatraz, the surrounding bay formed a natural barrier to escape; moreover, the physical isolation provided effective quarantine for the communicable diseases that American officials claimed were “prevalent among aliens from oriental countries.”
Over the next thirty years, some 175,000 Chinese immigrants, along with arrivals from other countries, would pass through Angel Island. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of the Chinese were detained until they could prove who they were, which usually required detailed investigations. Though modeled on Ellis Island near Manhattan, for decades the primary immigration gateway for the United States, Angel Island served a much different