Documentary Clues about Clandestine Migration: Steamship Passenger Manifests and the Chinese American Diaspora, 1882-1943

Ken Chew, University of California, Irvine
John Liu, University of California, Irvine
Gary Richardson, University of California, Irvine
Mark Leach, University of California, Irvine

Chinese labor played a paramount role in building the physical infrastructure of the post-Gold Rush American West. Chinese laborers, who once comprised 10 percent of California's population, dug mines, drained swamps, laid roadbeds, and performed hard rock excavation for the mountainous segments of the transcontinental railroad. Yet, aside from a few well-worn generalities, little is known about the demography of Chinese Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This ignorance certainly applies to the era of Chinese Exclusion, 1882-1943, when, with few exceptions, legal immigration of Chinese to the U. S. was brought to a standstill. Even so, lack of demographic data has hindered neither the construction nor the general acceptance of a "population story" to account for events of this period. In certain crucial respects, that story now appears to be wrong, however. In the standard account, anti-miscegenation laws in concert with the prohibition on immigration caused the highly masculine Chinese American population to progressively diminish through cohort aging and mortality. Yet U.S. census data from 1860 through 1930, recently made available, shows a Chinese American population dominated at every decennial count by an overwhelming majority in the prime working ages (15-54). Using a series of population simulations presented at last year's PAA meetings, we show that that the maintenance of such an age profile could only have been achieved through clandestine migration. Yet, how was such migration effected under the draconian constraints of Exclusion? In this poster we will describe our early exploration of an untapped archive that promises to address the question of clandestine migration. What were the means? Who was involved? At what volumes? At what proportion of legal migration? With what timing? Important answers exist, we believe, in a collection of steamship passenger lists created by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). In barring the entry of all but a few new Chinese immigrants, the 1882 Exclusion Act mandated extreme scrutiny on Chinese residents who wished to leave but later re-enter the country. Exit and re-entry permits were used to ascertain the earlier residence status of any particular Chinese seeking to enter the U.S. Among other ramifications, this meant that arriving steamships were compelled to record detailed information about the personal characteristics of their Chinese passengers, including the names and locations of their employers. Through the National Archives (NARA), we have acquired INS records for 500,000 Chinese person-voyages undertaken during Exclusion (1882-1943) at the ports of San Francisco and Seattle, where all but a very few Chinese embarked or disembarked. Throughout the past summer we have designed coding protocols and a relational database for transcribing these records. We are just about to begin the lengthy process of transcription. Our poster will present a first demographic sketch of the Chinese American diaspora during the Exclusion era: Where, specifically, did migrants originate, and what were their specific destinations in the U.S.? What were the typical conditions of passage? What were their occupations? What was the role of clans, villages, firms, trade associations, or other sponsors? More generally, how did domestic and international events and trends among other U. S. groups shape the number and composition of Chinese migrants, their intervals between trips, and the duration of their sojourns? Beyond these questions, systematized data from the archives can be used to address a variety of even more complex issues. At best, the data will allow confirmation of and provide estimates for the prevalence of illicit worker switching, wherein older workers were sent home to China to be replaced by a younger counterpart using the same re-entry permit. Through this mechanism, we hypothesize, the Chinese were able to maintain the optimal age composition for workers in their North American frontier economic enterprises. The poster will describe the structure and characteristics of the 500,000-person-voyage NARA archive. Selective presentation of quantitative results will be spiced up with complementary illustrations from the microfilmed manuscripts or other historical objects (e.g., maps, steamship portraits).