Americans Without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship

3. The Biological Politics of Japanese Exclusion

The Biological Politics of Japanese Exclusion More than any other modern state, America traditionally has welcomed immigration, which forms its economic life-blood and provides the basis for the expansive conception of civic identity for which the country is known and admired today. The primary period under discussion in this chapter, the 1920s, however, witnessed a substantial departure from this tradition in relation to a group about which white Americans already had felt ambivalent or actively hostile for two generations, namely immigrants from Asia—and, especially in the early-twentieth century, from Japan. As with the story of juridical racialism as it concerned both American Indians in the 1880s and the insular territories in the 1900s, the ideological source of the restrictive stance toward Asian immigration in the 1920s was a form of juridical racialism that blended modern racial thought, specifically of a biological variety, and national economic interest . Its statutory result was the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act, which placed strict national quotas on immigration from southern and eastern Europe and, by prohibiting immigration by groups ineligible for naturalized citizenship under federal law, including , as I will explain, the Japanese, imposed an absolute bar on immigration from Asia.1 This chapter examines the juridical-racial features of the movement for Asian and Japanese exclusion that led to the Immigration Act, exploring the homological conceptual relation between a now-discredited form of social scientific thought, that of racial eugenics, judicial approaches to state and national economic regulation, and the construction of increasingly restrictive American civic boundaries within an expansive conception of national power. In addition, this chapter highlights the relation of the socio-legal worldview underlying Asian exclusion to a particular elite understanding of masculinity. 3 81 I begin by examining the racial and legal ideas that shaped the life of Madison Grant, lawyer, zoologist, and prominent advocate of immigration restriction, whose views about race and American civic life the Immigration Act enshrined. In portraying Grant’s potent mix of masculine self-fashioning and biological politics, I also reveal how Grant’s vision of a strictly consolidated, independent, and inviolable self, the self of the legal field of contract, found its political counterpart in the ideal of a strictly consolidated, Anglo-Saxon nation state.2 In the course of my analysis, I examine Grant’s upbringing, education, and work as an advocate for both environmental protection and the notorious Nordic doctrine ; in addition, to illuminate his thought and motivations, I consider Grant’s close relationship with his brother Deforest, a Northeast industrialist ; and I discuss how Grant’s theories of race, law, and citizenship were advanced by Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, who cosponsored the Immigration Act in Congress. Next, I turn to two decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning Asian immigration. The first, Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), advanced Congressional plenary power over immigration as an incident of national sovereignty.3 The second , Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), formed the basis for the Japanese exclusion provision of the Immigration Act of 1924 by establishing that Japanese were not “white persons” and so ineligible for naturalized citizenship under Title XXX of Revised U.S. Statutes § 2169.4 In examining Chae Chan Ping and Ozawa, I consider the men who wrote each opinion of the Court, Justice Stephen J. Field and Justice George Sutherland; the economic interests the decisions affected, including those of domestic American labor and of Japanese immigrants in the western United States who sought to own title to real property; the individual agreements and international treaties the decisions helped abrogate; and, finally, the indirect interplay of issues of race and contract in the Court’s decision-making. Madison Grant, the Nordic Myth, and Japanese Unconscionability For the first hundred years of its existence, with the notable exception of the Alien Act of 1798, the U.S. federal government was largely uninvolved in immigration issues, leaving what minimal regulation of aliens existed to the states.5 This was the era of the “open door,” when Ameri82 | The Biological Politics of Japanese Exclusion can immigration policy enabled a plentiful supply of workers to settle a growing country. But the national approach to immigration began to change in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in large part due to pressure from western states, whose residents feared economic competition from Asians.6 In the face of sometimes violent...