Fraudulent Papers? Illegal Business? An American Success Story

This week in North Philly Notes, William Gee Wong, author of Sons of Chinatown, writes about his father’s immigration.

My father used partially fraudulent papers to legally enter the United States more than a century ago. In Oakland, California, where he landed in its cozy, tight-knit Chinatown, he operated an illegal business, selling lottery tickets, to survive the Great Depression.

Because he broke some laws, was he “vermin” who “poisoned the blood” of America? Or was he more an innocent, naïve outsider who wanted to be an insider in the fabled American Dream and who left a legacy of four generations of productive, law-abiding Americans of full or partial Chinese descent?

I’m biased, of course, but I look upon Pop – the English-language name I used when we shared 20 years together in Oakland’s Chinatown before he died in 1961 – as a typically hard-working immigrant who had to survive numerous pratfalls to grow a family in his adopted country that didn’t exactly embrace him and his kind.

Immigration is an issue that endures as an emotionally fraught political and cultural issue that was birthed in the last quarter of the 19^th century when the overwhelmingly white male U.S. Congress decided to exclude the ethnic group that Pop and I belong to. Some of us descendants of exclusion-era Chinese and other Asian immigrants get the distinct feeling that some longer-standing descendants of white European immigrants still don’t want us to share the American Dream. (Witness the outbreak of anti-Chinese, anti-Asian hate during the coronavirus pandemic. To be fair, some of the haters were non-white people.)

Far be it from me — a retired print journalist who is more a generalist than a policy wonk — to offer a sensible, humane formula to solve our immigration conundrum, when numerous legislators, scholars, and other experts haven’t yet been able to effectuate. But maybe Pop’s case offers to hint as to why many people from other countries are willing to break U.S. laws to come here for a better life.

Pop was a mid-teenager when he was processed through the Angel Island Immigration Station in 1912, 30 years after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and a year after the Qing dynasty fell to a republican revolution. To circumvent the exclusion law’s restrictions, Pop and his sponsor had to lie about aspects of his family and village life.

One category of Chinese immigrant that could legally enter under the Chinese Exclusion Act was “son of a native,” meaning an American-born citizen. Pop’s sponsor, his “father” on paper, was allegedly born in San Francisco in the late 19^th century. (Pop’s real parents spent their lives in isolated rural villages west of Hong Kong and Macao in a much poorer and chaotic China than today’s Superpower.)

U.S. immigration officials couldn’t disprove Pop’s paper father’s American birth claim in part because records were destroyed during the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fires in 1906. “Father” and “son” used coaching papers to create partially false stories of their personal and village lives to satisfy U.S. authorities that my future father was indeed eligible for legal entry. These paper son (and daughter) schemes were Chinatown’s civil disobedience to an unjust racist law.

Pop was far from unique. Chinese American scholars estimate that a large majority of Chinese immigrants during the exclusion era (1882-1943) were directly related only on paper. They had to take this “crooked path” to gain legal entry.

He learned English at the (American) public school. He returned to China several times, starting in 1919 to marry, grow a family, and start a business to help aspirational migrants find their way to America. Finally, in 1933, he brought his young family of wife, posing as his sister, and three young daughters to be with him permanently in Oakland, where three other girls and I, the only son, were born.

In the 1930s, he sold lottery tickets, an illegal business at that time. Many other Chinatown denizens did the same. Oakland’s white political and police officials were classic hypocrites in that they knew about these illicit activities but allowed them to exist after bribes and staged raids. In fact, the gambling industry powered much of Chinatown economically until the U.S. government imposed a punishing tax in the 1950s. Ironic, isn’t it, that the lottery is perfectly legal – and thriving – all over America today.

Pop made a bad decision that sunk his lottery business and tipped our family into temporary poverty. World War II helped save our family’s fortunes – Pop and his oldest daughter worked in a shipyard, then he and Mom opened a restaurant that fed hungry wartime civilian workers, catapulting us into the beginnings of American middle-class. Yes, a modest immigrant success story.

You would think many Americans of all ancestral heritages would celebrate this Good America. Somehow, collectively, we can’t seem to rest on those laurels. Instead, as America becomes less white by the day, a goodly number of descendants of white European immigrants want to go backwards to a whiter, more Christian America.

Those trying to fix our broken immigration system should keep in mind examples like Pop’s story to craft a solution that is fair, just, and understanding of why so many people still want to come here. These policy makers must also acknowledge that almost all these migrants are desperate for a safer, better life and aren’t sociopathic criminals and lowlifes, as labeled by a certain sociopathic criminal lowlife former president who wants to be president again.

The Political Incorporation of Chinese Migrants

This week in North Philly Notes, Amy Liu, author of The Language of Political Incorporation, recounts lessons she learned studying how Chinese migrants are treated in Europe.

Central-Eastern Europe is not an oft-discussed migration destination. Yet, places such as Hungary are some of the most popular European countries for Chinese migrants. Likewise, the Chinese constitute one of the largest migrant populations—not just in Hungary, but in all of Europe. To better understand the Chinese in Europe, I surveyed over 2500 Chinese migrants in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, and Serbia. I find that while the vast majority still held on to their Chinese passports (Beijing forbids dual citizenship), there is substantial variation in the migrant networks. Some are from parts of southern China with large migrant populations in Europe. These southern Chinese communities have a distinct vernacular that ensures their insularity—not just from the local Europeans but from other Chinese.

Everyone else is resigned to larger, all-inclusive Chinese networks. The diversity of these networks requires Mandarin Chinese—the Chinese lingua franca—to be the operating vernacular. The use of this lingua franca means the average Chinese migrant engages regularly with other Chinese persons from different backgrounds. They also interact with the locals more frequently—whether it is because the locals had learned Mandarin or because the Chinese migrant had learned the local European language. This repeated, regularized diversity in interactions translates into a differential: The Chinese in lingua franca networks were on average more trusting of authorities (6 percentage point differential) and civically engaged (7 percentage point differential) than their co-nationals in insular networks.

The surveys were conducted over a five-year period—all before the COVID outbreak. For over a year now, the pandemic has put the Chinese—those in China proper and its migrant/diaspora population globally—on display. As we begin to return to some post-pandemic normalcy, here are two lessons the Chinese in Europe can teach us.

First, what drives higher incorporation levels among the Chinese in the lingua franca networks (i.e., diversity) is also what undermines it when there is a crisis. When I was doing surveys in Romania, the tax authorities launched a four-month raid of Chinatown. It was part of a larger, national campaign to collect unpaid taxes. Responses to these raids—seen very much as an ethnic attack—varied by networks. Those in the insular networks bunkered down and weathered the storm. Conversely, those in the inclusive networks finger-pointed and demarcated new group boundaries. There was sudden suspicion of anyone and everyone that was different. And here is the irony: Those most hurt by the raids were those who trusted and engaged more before; and conversely, those who had been insular were left relatively unscathed. The troubling implication is that anti-Asian hate crimes—while they do not discriminate against passport color or the generation number—affects those who were better integrated in the U.S. And this makes bouncing back after the crisis subsides even harder.

Second, political rhetoric—even the empty rhetoric—matters. During my research, Hungary—led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party—pursued aggressive nationalist rhetoric. And policies matched the rhetoric (e.g. the border fence). Yet, during this time, Chinese migrant attitudes towards the Hungarian authorities remained consistently high (86% in 2014; 95% in 2018). The interviews corroborated these numbers. Interestingly, even at the height of targeting the Muslims and refugees, Fidesz reached out to leaders in the Chinese community to emphasize the Chinese were not the targets of the xenophobic policies. Similarly, text analysis of Hungarian language newspapers across the political spectrum showed when the Chinese are talked about, it is rarely negative. Even as COVID broke out in Hungary, Orbán refrained from associating the Chinese with the virus. This is in stark contrast to his American counterpart. What the former U.S. president did to link COVID with the Chinese cannot be undone. As the Asian-American community tries to make sense of what happened last month in Atlanta, the Biden administration must exercise caution in what it says and how it says it.