Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

During World War II, the US government evacuated 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were citizens, from the West Coast and sent them to internment camps. In contrast, German and Italian Americans were scrutinized individually when appropriate. As Ngai notes, the internment of Japanese Americans nullified their citizenship because of race and presumed all to be disloyal (175). President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 made the evacuation possible, as it gave the military authority to remove persons for military necessity. There was no evidence to support the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The US military additionally discharged honorably all Japanese Americans serving and draft boards stopped inducting Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Although internment was grounded in racism, the WRA, under the leadership of New Deal liberals, sought to assimilate Japanese Americans in the camps via schooling, work, and self-government. The WRA viewed Japanese culture as anti-liberal and saw Japanese Americans as “racial children in need of democratic tutelage” (179). Many in the camps were culturally aligned with Japan but not political supporters of its militarism. They balanced American and Japanese nationalism, often sitting on the fence. The future was an unknown. The balancing of dual nationalisms was disrupted by the loyalty questionnaire.

Officially called the Application for Leave Clearance, the questionnaire was developed in 1943 to determine the loyalty of potential recruits for a voluntary segregated military unit of Nisei. The WRA proposed that the questionnaire be administered to all internees over the age of 17 for purposes of identifying the disloyal. Those who were not disloyal could then be relocated out of the camps. The questionnaire, for which registration was compulsory, was lengthy and contained two “incendiary questions” (183). The first of those questions asked males if they would serve in combat duty wherever ordered and the second asked both males and females if they would forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor. For Issei, answering yes would render them stateless, since they were excluded from US citizenship. Some families pressured their children to say no to avoid military service. Despite rewording of the offensive questions, 13% of internees said no or refused to register at all.

The largest percentage were at Tule Lake, where 42% said no. The camp became a segregation center for “disloyal” Japanese Americans, with 12,000 housed there. In 1943, there were mass demonstrations following the death of a farmworker, followed by martial law with 350 detained in the stockade, which became a symbol of oppression. There was conflict within the camp between one group who were not willing to die for the US but wanted to retain citizenship and another who would do anything to aid Japan (186). Assuming that all in the camp would be deported to Japan after the war, administrators did little to address the disorder in the camp.

In July 1944, Congress passed the Denationalization Act, which allowed citizens to renounce their citizenship voluntarily. Targeted at Japanese Americans, the law conflicted with a long tradition prohibiting the renunciation of US citizenship on US soil and during war. While the US government expected this law to be a means to identify the truly disloyal Japanese Americans, it instead became a means to remain in the internment camps. The Supreme Court had ruled in Ex Parte Endo that the government could not detain citizens it knew were loyal.

As a result of that ruling, the Western Defense Command rescinded the exclusion order of Japanese Americans from the West Coast and would only exclude people on an individual basis and the WRA announced that it would close the internment camps within the year. Japanese Americans concluded that to stay in the camps, they would need to renounce their US citizenship. At Tule Lake, 85% of citizens renounced mainly to ensure the option of repatriation, to avoid resettlement among a hostile white populace, and to avoid the draft. Others claimed that nationalists pressured them to do so. At Tule Lake, there were 5,049 applications for renunciation.

Almost immediately, people started changing their minds. However, the Justice Department refused all appeals to restore citizenship or withdraw applications. Given President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 2655, which called for dangerous enemy aliens to be removed from the US, the renunciants faced deportation. Civil rights attorneys, led by Wayne Collins of the American Civil Liberties Union, embarked on a 13-year battle to restore the citizenship rights of Japanese Americans. Collins argued that the renunciations should be voided because they were not voluntary, as they were made while deprived of liberty and under pressure. Additionally, he challenged the constitutionality of the Denationalization law under the 14th amendment because it specifically targeted Japanese Americans.

After granting a restraining order, a federal judge canceled the renunciations and restored citizenship. However, a federal appeals court partially overturned that ruling. It allowed for 899 cancellations but required individual hearings for the rest. By 1959, using a procedure of administrative clearance, the Justice Department had restored citizenship in 4,978 of 5,409 cases and denied 347 restoration. Ngai argues that the legal argument of duress exaggerates the influence of nationalists and casts the renunciants as victims without agency. It shifts the blame to the Japanese and ignores dual nationalism, with its divided loyalties and pragmatism, from the equation (200).

The JACL Convention in 1946 had voted to bar renunciants and draft resisters from its membership in a demonstration of its loyalty to the US. By the late 1950s, the Cold War had changed the United States’ relationship with Japan: It was then its main ally in East Asia. In 1952, the Immigration and Naturalization Act repealed Japanese exclusion from citizenship. As Ngai notes, “a general rehabilitation of Japanese Americans’ citizenship was underway” (197).

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Chinese persons born in the US were entitled to citizenship but Chinese Americans remained marginalized socially. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the standing of Chinese Americans varied depending upon American foreign policy interests. Given China’s status as an ally in World War II, Congress repealed the Exclusion Act and therefore opened the way for non-quota family immigration after the war. The quota for Chinese immigration was set at 105 and applied to all ethnic Chinese in the world.

Due to the Exclusion Act’s legacy, approximately 25% of the Chinese population in the US in 1950 had an illegal status. Most were “paper sons,” or derivative citizens, who had entered the US in the first half of the 20th century posing as the sons of Chinese with American citizenship by birth (204). With the onset of the Cold War, China once again became an enemy and there was “a new urgency to eliminate illegal immigration” (204) from China.

Between 1882, the year the Exclusion Act passed, and 1943, Chinese merchants, students, and diplomats as well as those claiming to be paper sons could enter the US. Since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed the Hall of Records, Chinese could easily assert native birth. Between 1920 and 1940, 71,040 Chinese persons came to the US as derivative citizens. Ironically, earlier state efforts to challenge the status of Chinese immigrants created a paper trail that assisted the immigrants. With no trust in official records, state authorities concluded that confession was the only way to prove fraudulent cases.

In 1950, 117,000 Chinese Americans applied for passports as derivative citizens in Hong Kong. Under the leadership of the extremely conservative Everett Drumright, the process required extensive documentation and was virtually impossible to fulfill. Issuing a report marked by racial hostility, Drumright clearly wanted to limit Chinese immigration. Reflecting Cold War fears, he asserted, without any evidence, that China was sending in spies. Worried about charges of racism, the State Department ordered that individual cases be investigated and it sent 23 additional investigative teams to Hong Kong to do so. Like Drumright, the State Department believed that most cases were fraudulent.

In the US, the Justice Department was similarly cracking down on illegal immigration from China. It issued a broad subpoena in February 1956 to all family associations in San Francisco, with the goal of demonstrating that paper sons were lying about their family origins. The Chinese Six Companies, a council led by merchants comprising all the family and district associations in San Francisco, successfully challenged this blanket subpoena. The investigations continued, with a more specific focus on individuals. Chinese Americans had no choice but to perpetuate false lineages to bring true family members to the US. A large percentage of these individuals confessed to doing so, as they did not think it a crime. The US Attorney pursued criminal charges against those who confessed and declined to prosecute others who were more likely to be bringing over those who were not relations.

Chinese Americans in other cities feared similar crackdowns. In March 1957, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) held a nationwide conference in Washington, DC to promote immigration reform. Seeking to adjust the status of paper sons, the CCBA helped to promote the Chinese Confession Program. Initiated in San Francisco in 1956, the governmental program promised to “assist confessors ‘if at all possible under the law’ to adjust their status” (218) and remain in the US legally. For example, those who had been in the country seven years or who had served in the military 90 days could obtain legal status. The INS had a great deal of discretion in the administration of the program, a fact which rendered its rulings arbitrary at times.

Due to the intense anti-Communist atmosphere at the time, with attendant fears of deportation and criminal charges, at least 11,336 Chinese confessed between 1957 and 1965. An additional 19,124 were implicated by the confessions of others and 5,800 slots on family trees were eliminated for future immigration. Those who confessed had to claim that they were “amenable for deportation” (221) and then apply to stay in the country. The vast majority received legal status, with only a small number deemed ineligible to stay. Of the latter group, an even smaller subset was deported.

Given the times, it was mostly left-wing activists who were deported or faced criminal charges. As Ngai explains, there was a bargain at the heart of the Confession Program: Those settled in the US mostly obtained legalized status in exchange for closing off future paper immigration. This program settled the legacy of illegal immigration from the exclusion era but did not necessarily bring social legitimacy to paper immigrants (223).