The China Business

In 1903, a journalist named Poultney Bigelow traveled to Malone, New York, a mill town in a region of the Empire State so remote that the state’s own senator declared it “the Siberia of New York.” Bigelow was something of an accidental muckraker. The son of a powerful U.S. statesman, he had quickly lost interest in his law degree and instead carved out a career in international reporting. He preferred the topic of corruption, writing exposés of foreign governments as well as the questionable dealings of his own family members. Malone was the county seat of Franklin County, fourteen miles south of the border and home to 10,000 residents, many of them dairy farmers. It was not a location that frequently saw well-connected writers pass through town.

Bigelow came to Malone to explore what he called “the back door to the state of New York.” The halls of Ellis Island were the front door, where Jews, Romanians, Croats, and Italians entered to become citizens. But the northern reaches of New York were something else entirely, Bigelow warned in his dispatch. It was a land of unregulated entry and local corruption, far from the consciousness of most Americans.

The journalist’s report centered on the Franklin County Jail, a three-story, brick structure with six steel cells that had been “properly condemned” by the state commissioner of prisons for its dangerous conditions. In the jail sat dozens of Chinese migrants, most of whom had been apprehended after crossing the Canadian border and nearly all of whom claimed to be U.S. citizens. The town was in the process of building a new jail or “detention house” exclusively to detain the rising number of people arriving in violation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that banned Chinese laborers from admission to the United States. The law had been fueled by grassroots activism that claimed Chinese migrants were, in the words of the San Francisco mayor, “a threat to everything that goes to make up American civilization.” Lawmakers, unions, and everyday Americans latched onto a shared understanding that Chinese were a separate race, with customs, habits, and bodies that made them fundamentally unassimilable and dangerous. When Congress codified the exclusion law, it became the United States’ first federal policy banning entry on the basis of race and nationality — a culmination of decades of political organizing and messaging about the so-called Chinese Problem, much of which centered on California and the Pacific Northwest. Despite its West Coast roots, the law’s reverberations echoed nationwide.

Bigelow anticipated a familiar story, as communities throughout the United States were expelling Chinese residents through local policies and, more commonly, through vigilante violence. But after speaking with Franklin County Sheriff Ernest Douglass, the writer was surprised to find that the sheriff treated Chinese migrants “like pets,” emphasizing that they were easier to take care of than jailed Americans. Sheriff Douglass, an imposing man who had been elected for his “fearless integrity” and long career in law enforcement, had good reason to be enthusiastic about Chinese migration. He earned about a dollar a week from the federal government for each “federal prisoner” held at the Franklin County Jail. In the previous three years, the sheriff had pocketed $20,000 from migrant incarceration. “The Sheriff has therefore a direct pecuniary interest in detaining the Chinaman as long as possible,” Bigelow concluded.

Even beyond the troubling financial implications of this arrangement, Bigelow suggested that there was something fundamentally odd about the situation in Northern New York. These “Chinese prisoners” claimed to have been born in the United States, making them U.S. citizens. They were not accused of committing a crime. And yet, they were stuck in American jails for month upon month. Under common law, individuals suspected of crimes were innocent until proven guilty. In the case of Chinese migrants, Bigelow observed, “we put them in jail first and let them prove their innocence afterwards.”

By the early 20th century, the Supreme Court had demarcated immigration as the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, yet localities proved critical to carrying out immigration law. A cornerstone of this cooperation came through towns and cities granting the federal government use of local jails. Immigration policing moved Chinese migrants from a more fluid category of “entrant” into the new category of “Chinese prisoner,” creating a form of legibility from which communities could profit. Rather than viewing Chinese prisoners as a threat to law and order, New York border towns instead viewed them as a low-risk, high-reward population that channeled federal money into rural communities. Migrants’ incarceration transformed them into a potential commodity.

Localities’ focus on fees and revenue created tension with the efforts of the federal government. Chinese migrants may have been desirable to local officials, but their unauthorized presence in the United States, the expense of their incarceration, and their use of the courts to resist exclusion laws threatened a nascent federal Bureau of Immigration eager to assert its enforcement power. Chinese migrants in Northern New York, like Chinese migrants throughout the country, successfully utilized habeas corpus petitions to undercut the legal barriers posed by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The petitions claimed that the jailed Chinese men were U.S. citizens, unlawfully detained by the immigration service. If Chinese migrants could survive the months of captivity, the federal government’s lack of evidence to refute their claims of citizenship meant that most would eventually be freed. 

Most Chinese who crossed into the North Country traveled by trains departing from Montreal, disembarking just north of the boundary line and walking across the border on foot. Sometimes their crossings were facilitated by networks of Chinese in Montreal, who prepped migrants for interrogations and provided witnesses who could testify to their identities. Other times entry was brokered by enterprising New Yorkers, as federal officials griped about a lack of law enforcement intervention. While the United States excluded groups of Chinese based on occupation and labor status, the Canadian government attempted to deter migration with a $50 head tax on all Chinese laborers in 1885, which increased to $500 by 1903. In the years following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, American policymakers suggested that Canada’s more lenient policies had “practically nullified” U.S. border enforcement efforts.

In communities such as Malone, Chinese migrants entered with the expectation of arrest. Then, at a hearing before a U.S. immigration commissioner, migrants would claim that they had been born in the United States. The Bureau of Immigration had little recourse in proving these testimonies false; agents attempted to discredit the witnesses by highlighting inconsistencies in their testimonies and hoped that the courts would err on their side. In nearly all cases in which the courts sided with the government, a Chinese migrant would appeal the decision of the immigration officer and, if the resources were available, secure legal representation. 

Through its liberal appeal process, the Bureau of Immigration contended that the courts were in effect “doing that thing which is expressly forbidden by law and treaty, to wit, naturalizing Chinamen.” Between 1895 and 1905, at least 5,714 Chinese were admitted as citizens after entering through the northern boundary. And even when the United States did manage to successfully reject migrants, removal from the East Coast was a tremendously expensive project; by 1904, deportations from New York and New England represented the bureau’s largest per capita expense.

The root of the bureau’s problem was that when Chinese claimed U.S. citizenship, the district court virtually always granted habeas corpus, moving their case from an administrative tribunal to a full legal hearing. In September 1903, the bureau sent Special Assistant Attorney John L. Lott to Malone to observe the processing of sixty Chinese men picked up by immigration officials near the border. Several Chinese travelers were bound for Cuba, using Malone as a stopover before continuing south. Several were returning laborers who held appropriate documentation. The remaining 45 “were seeking to enter upon the pretended claim that they had been born in the United States,” Lott reported. After the district court granted habeas corpus for those declaring citizenship, the detained men met with lawyers and interpreters—in Lott’s words, “[furnishing] the opportunity to perfect the fraud” by crafting stories about family relations, birthplaces, and migration histories that could be confirmed by outside witnesses. The bureau claimed that, because the immigration officer at Malone did not possess the singular authority to deny admission, the entire system of border law enforcement could be easily undermined. Lott concluded his report with a recommendation: The only way to end such “gross frauds” was to close the port of Malone and transfer all Chinese cases to a neighboring Vermont district where the courts had opted not to review writs of habeas corpus. The bureau saw its relationship to the federal courts as a critical determinant of its success in the region — critical enough to contemplate the costly project of shutting down an entire immigration station in order to drive migrants into a district where the courts had been more favorable to the agency.

Aside from the immigration service, the presence of Chinese migrants in Northern New York was also of interest to a more reform-minded group: the New York State Commission of Prisons, an investigatory body tasked with maintaining a basic level of decency in New York’s carceral institutions. The overcrowded conditions at Franklin County Jail produced jurisdictional friction between the federal government and the State Commission of Prisons. The commission noted that the county jail was encouraged to accommodate federal prisoners but that the sheriff “[was] not compelled to receive prisoners at the jail” when it was already filled to capacity. The jail clearly violated state laws requiring the separation and classification of prisoners — men from women, violent offenders from nonviolent offenders—but the commission offered few remedies, short of closing the nation’s borders. 

The inability of the nation to effectively enforce its immigration laws had generated a local predicament that local government had little ability to address. The federal government owned and operated large immigration detention spaces at Ellis Island and in San Francisco Bay; in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston it had access to detention stations operated by steamship companies. Since 1880, the government used a federal prison at McNeil Island, off the coast of Washington, to detain Chinese migrants with criminal charges (including a common allegation of “unlawful presence”) whom it struggled to deport. However, the United States had no short-term federal jails and no real plan for how removal would look in rural extremities. County jails, alongside an assemblage of other coercive institutions including mental hospitals, almshouses, and private detention homes, became the solution.

While the commission bemoaned the dangerous jail conditions, a new phenomenon was concurrently rising in Malone: the birth of the town’s so-called Chinese business. A growing number of locals and visitors were receiving federal money for watching, arresting, keeping, and examining Chinese migrants. Four deputy marshals who patrolled the border each received a $7,300 annual salary, the U.S. commissioner earned fees for each defendant, and the U.S. Marshals earned fees for each arrest. Witnesses arriving from New York City and Boston to testify in the Chinese citizenship cases each cost the federal government an average of $40.80 for travel and lodging. Most critically, the sheriff could reap a substantial sum of money from Chinese migration. The Franklin County sheriff earned fifty cents a day for the board of each prisoner. For detained Chinese, these stays lasted anywhere from a week to 18 months. By September 1900, Sheriff Douglass held 91 Chinese prisoners in the Franklin County Jail, collecting $45.50 per day. “The Chinese business has flourished like a green-bay tree in Malone,” observed a reporter from the nearby town of Plattsburgh. The townspeople’s potential profit off “Malone’s monopoly” complicated the enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws. If the sheriff could now make a year’s salary in a single month of holding one hundred Chinese migrants, what incentive did the system have to move efficiently?

Excerpted from The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration. Copyright © 2024 by Brianna Nofil. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Buy This Book