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There is no part of [the Canadian border] over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hindrance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not walk boldly across it at high noon. JULIan raLPh, “the chInese Leak,” harper’s new MonThLy Magazine, march 1891 Eleven months after passage of the 1882 Immigration Act that barred pauper immigration into the United States, the New York Times reported that twenty-eight immigrants fresh from Ireland had been found “helpless and starving” in the streets of Buffalo, New York. According to the article, the immigrants had crossed into the United States from Canada, where a “large number” of impoverished immigrants from Ireland were purportedly landing at the ports of Quebec and Montreal with plans to enter the United States. Many of the immigrants were “almost destitute, having neither money nor friends, and . . . too feeble, by reason of age or infirmity, to support themselves.” Federal authorities maintained that they were being shipped to the United States through Canada with the assistance of government authorities in Ireland.1 A month later and a few thousands miles west along the U.S.-Canadian border, American customs authorities in Washington Territory discovered Chinese workers immigrating across the international border as well. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had stimulated an active smuggling trade across the waters of Puget Sound, and in August 1883 the Tacoma, Washington, collector of customs reported that nearly 100 Chinese immigrants had illicitly entered the United States from Canada within a matter of a few days.2 In both Buffalo and Seattle and at various points elsewhere along the Canadian and Mexican borders in the 1880s, American authorities confronted new transborder immigration streams stimulated by enforcement of immigration restrictions at maritime ports of entry. After 1882, migrants subject to exclusion from the United States, principally Chinese Chapter 2 DIverteD streams: DIscoverIng a PermeabLe borDer, 1882–1891 3 ImagInary LInes workers but also those who might be judged paupers, began to make use of the extensive land borders that joined the United States to its northern and southern neighbors. Their successful efforts to slip into the United States in a roundabout fashion demonstrated to American officials that enforcement of the immigration restrictions was going to prove far more difficult, resource intensive, and frustrating than initially imagined. Indeed, one of the more significant, if somewhat hidden, legacies of the early restrictive acts was the redirection of excludable immigrants to the contiguous land borders with Mexico and Canada. By the late 1880s, tens of thousands of aspiring immigrants subject to American restrictions had begun skirting federal inspection by entering the United States across the Canadian and Mexican borders. This chapter considers the first decade of experiences with enforcement of national immigration restrictions, in particular how these new laws stimulated smuggling and illicit entry on the Mexican and Canadian borders, the nature of that undocumented entry, and the first efforts to police border crossing. At least three distinct patterns of transborder migration by excludable aliens developed in the 1880s. First, a fair number of European emigrants excludable under the provisions of the general 1882 Immigration Act entered the United States by way of the Canadian border between Maine and Michigan. The Canadian route into the United States had been used for decades, principally by British subjects, but increasingly after 1882 it became the preferred route for British migrants liable to be judged public charges. Second, Chinese laborers in search of work on the West Coast defied the Chinese Exclusion Act by slipping into the United States across the Canadian border, principally through British Columbia. A third pattern, which developed after the tightening of the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1888, brought Chinese into the Southwest through the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora. Not only did these border-crossing activities in the 1880s lead directly to the establishment of a federal border control regime in the United States after 1891, they also revealed the inherent difficulties of enforcing immigration law at the border. In their efforts to cross the border immigrants and smugglers relied on sometimes ingenious methods of deception and disguise and exploited the advantages to be found in the physical and cultural landscapes of the northern and southern borders. Customs authorities charged with enforcing immigration laws along the borders discovered the disadvantages to which the border environment subjected them even as they developed strategies and methods that allowed them to begin to counter efforts...

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