A History of the Geary Act

The Geary Act dramatically expanded Chinese exclusion by requiring all Chinese immigrants in the United States to register with the federal government, under threat of deportation. The law required “all Chinese laborers within the limits of the United States, at the time of the passage of this act . . . to apply to the collector of internal revenue” for a certificate of residence within a year. In addition to extending the anti-Chinese provisions of the 1882 Restriction Act and 1888 Scott Act for ten years, the law stipulated the summary deportation of any “Chinese person or person of Chinese descent convicted and adjudged to be not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States” following imprisonment with hard labor for up to a year.

 

In response, Chinese migrants and their allies on both sides of the Pacific joined together to defy the federal government, rewriting the mechanisms of Chinese exclusion for themselves. Through diplomatic channels, Qing officials pressed successive presidential administrations to intervene. Christians of various denominations held mass meetings across the United States and sent hundreds of petitions to Congress pleading for the future of Christianity. Chinese laborers in the United States voted with their feet by refusing to register, while the merchant elite collected funds to organize and instigate a test case at the Supreme Court. A motley crew of white allies—from former abolitionists in Boston to expats in Nanjing—joined the chorus of dissent. Together, these individuals rendered the law unenforceable for over a year and compelled federal officials to amend the law in November 1893. 

 

As soon as the Geary Act passed, the San Francisco-based Chinese Six Companies sought to mobilize Chinese residents for mass civil disobedience. They distributed tens of thousands of leaflets in Chinese quarters across the nation urging their fellow Chinese not to register. One leaflet read: “[The Geary Act] degrades the Chinese and if obeyed will put them lower than the meanest of people . . . It is a cruel law. It is a bad law. Read it and see how cruel the law is to our people . . . No Chinese can read this law without a feeling of disgust.” “Let us stand together,” the Six Companies insisted. “We hope all will work with us and then we can and will break this infamous law.” The merchants leading the Six Companies operated with “both repressive and benevolent means,” as one historian puts it. At the same time as they made appeals to justice and rights, the “masters” of the Six Companies made clear the consequences that awaited all who failed to comply with their orders. The above proclamation, for instance, promised retaliation against anyone who registered: “You will repent it if you do . . . Again we warn you not to obey the law.” Elsewhere, they asserted that any person who registered “loses his respectability in the eyes of his countrymen.” If they got into trouble thereafter, “the Six Companies will pay no attention to him.” 

 

Everyday Chinese appeared to be staunchly against registration, regardless of pressure from the Six Companies. In an interview with the San Francisco Call, Yung Hen, a well-educated poultry dealer, offered a critique of the registration regime that evidenced his sharp understanding of American racial hierarchies: “For some reason you people persist in pestering the Chinaman, who likes to be let alone. It is not enough that we are here, but you now insist on labeling us . . . Why do they not legislate against Swedes, Germans, Italians, Turks and others? There are no strings on those people.” More than a witty quote provided to the local newspaper, Hen’s reasoning evidence the fact that many Chinese individuals in America had at least an awareness, if not strong understanding, of broader political currents. 

 

Some Chinese strategically allied themselves with sympathetic white allies. As soon as the law passed, hundreds of Chinese in New York City held mass rallies in protest of registration. Out of these rallies, a group of merchants and professionals formed the Chinese Equal Rights League (CERL), an organization created for the singular purpose of dismantling Geary’s namesake legislation. Serving as intercultural brokers, the CERL found common cause with white Progressives and former abolitionists in the Northeast. As but one example, the CERL’s Secretary, Wong Chin Foo, was close friends with William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., son of the preeminent abolitionist. At a November 18 mass meeting at Tremont Temple Baptist Church organized by the League, Garrison, Jr., said he was disgusted by the nation’s representatives and charged them with having learned nothing from the Civil War: “It seems an anachronism to be holding a public meeting in Boston, in 1892, to take measures for the protection of another persecuted and abused people within our gates. Only the question of colour has changed . . . the black man no longer needs to be defended, but the yellow man from the ancient nation of arts and civilisation is crouching in our midst in fear of Christian Blows.” A week prior, Garrison, Jr., served as point person for the CERL’s petition effort to Congress and wrote to famous Bostonians asking if he could use their names to demand a repeal of the Geary Act. The letter read: “Since the Fugitive Slave Law no such infamous enactment has disgraced the statute books of the nation . . . It cannot be possible that a people professing to be Christian can justify such legislation . . . The registration clauses should be immediately and unconditionally repealed.” 

 

The most significant protest came not from diplomats, merchants, or non-Chinese allies, but ordinary Chinese folks. Most importantly, Chinese denizens simply refused to register. In San Francisco, only 439 of an estimated population of 26,000 eligible Chinese had registered by April 1893. A report from the secretary of the treasury showed that only 13,242 Chinese had obtained a certificate by the May 1893 deadline, representing about 14 percent of the total Chinese population residing in America. When a California jute mill threatened to fire any Chinese worker who refused to obtain a certificate, the jute workers went on strike. The Six Companies allegedly denounced and boycotted all Chinese merchants who had registered or provided translation assistance for would-be registrants. In a no-win situation for most Chinese—fail to register and risk white retaliation, register and get shunned by your brethren—most stuck with their fellow Chinese. 

 

The noncompliance campaign was facilitated in part by a pending Supreme Court case that questioned the law’s constitutionality. By March 1893, the Six Companies had raised $60,000 in legal fees through its $1 “donation” campaign. With this substantial purse, the Six Companies joined forces with the Equal Rights League to hire a team of white lawyers who offered thirteen different attacks on the Geary Act’s constitutionality. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court confirmed the Geary Act’s constitutionality in Fong Yue Ting v. U.S. “The right of a nation to expel or deport foreigners who have not been naturalized,” Justice Horace Gray opined in a 6–3 decision, was “absolute and unqualified.” For Gray and the majority, this authority rested upon the same grounds as “the right to prohibit and prevent their entrance into the country” that the court had established in Chae Chan Ping (1889). With the decision, the Supreme Court solidified the legal grounds upon which America could perform mass ethnic cleansing through immigration law for the first time. As many as a hundred thousand Chinese were now subject to immediate deportation—if the federal government truly wished to rid the country of this “undesirable” class of migrant, it could now legally do so with 86 percent of the Chinese population in the United States.

 

The federal government was not prepared to take this step. The ruling had taken the executive by surprise. President Grover Cleveland compared the law to “herding human beings like sheep and branding them like cattle” and secretly hoped the Supreme Court would squash it. The Department of State was so confident the law was unconstitutional that it intimated to Tsui as much. After Justice Gray finished delivering the court’s ruling, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle, set to oversee a newfangled mass deportation machine, ran out of the courtroom to the White House where he and the president spent hours deliberating the international ramifications were they to begin forcibly removing Chinese laborers from the United States. The New York Times observed that “any European power” who faced a similar policy would consider it “ample cause of war.” Carlisle and Cleveland made a similar calculation and hastily sent additional gunboats to join the Pacific naval fleet.

 

Beyond moral reasons, the logistics of having to enforce the Geary Act proved daunting. Estimates put the cost of deportation somewhere between $35 to $55 per capita. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Willis Witter believed total enforcement would cost upward of ten million dollars. Congress, however, had only appropriated $50,000 for the law’s enforcement, thanks largely to pro-Chinese congressional allies who refused to sufficiently fund the law. The Cleveland administration made it clear to their Chinese counterparts that they had no intention of executing the law even after the Supreme Court had confirmed its constitutionality. Secretary Gresham guaranteed Minister Tsui in a series of letters that “the terms and requirement” of the law “will necessarily cause its enforcement to be attended with some delay.” He said to expect continued non-enforcement of the law until the next session of Congress, “at which time there is ground to anticipate further legislation on the subject.” 

 

Rather than repeal the Geary Act or alter the law in a fashion that would make registration less onerous, Congress moved in a different direction. In November 1893, with pressure from the Cleveland administration, Congress passed an amendment that set a new deadline for registering. Introduced by Representative James McCreary (D-KY), the McCreary Amendment was an uneasy compromise between international diplomacy and domestic Sinophobia. Most importantly, it gave all Chinese migrants an additional six months to register, a move that one paper dubbed “a surrender of a principle to a gang of insolent alien law-breakers.” At the same time, to appease exclusionists, the law bolstered the registration regime by giving the original law more teeth to its bite. It made all Chinese guilty until proven innocent, declaring that any Chinese found without a certificate “shall be deemed and adjudged to be unlawfully within the United States.” It also denied bail to all Chinese awaiting deportation and ordered the immediate deportation of convicted felons. The amendment further required two non-Chinese witnesses to prove the veracity of merchant (exempt) status and reintroduced the photograph requirement for certificates. 

 

Everyday Chinese finally chose to comply. In January 1894, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Six Companies, the Chinese Board of Trade, and the Chinese Consul-General were preparing an official proclamation urging their fellow Chinese to register. The paper further claimed that the Six Companies had already begun posting an unofficial circular around Chinatown informing its residents on the law’s requirements, advising “all laborers to comply with the law.” With approximately 110,000 Chinese living in the country, the Treasury Department reported 106,811 Chinese had registered by May 3rd, 1894. 

 

Despite official pronouncements of victory, the Geary Act’s efficacy as a measure of exclusion is less than clear. Though they did not offer full-fledged legal status, certificates of residence did provide registered Chinese some degree of legitimacy and allowed documented migrants to exit and reenter the United States more freely. In addition, it is almost certain that the certificate system featured widespread fraud. There was no penalty for registering more than once or for registering in multiple locales, and there was a well-documented black market for false papers.

 

The legacies of the Geary Act are found in many facets of the modern American state. A precursor to contemporary green cards, certificates of residence helped usher the use of photo identification and other technologies of surveillance into the federal government. The law also inaugurated the forced removal of undesired subjects by criminalizing unregistered (read: undocumented) immigrant status. Historians such as Kelly Lytle Hernández and Erika Lee have gone so far as to argue that the Geary Act’s legacies can be seen in the mass detainment of undocumented immigrants in present-day California as well as the racist surveillance and policing cast upon Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Americans following 9/11.