Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders

melancholy order

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

MATTHEW CONNELLY AND ADAM McKEOWN, EDITORS

The idea of globalization has become a commonplace, but we lack good histories that can explain the transnational processes that have shaped the contemporary era. Columbia Studies in International and Global History will encourage serious scholarship that is not confined to a single country or continent. Grounded in empirical research, the titles in the series will provide fresh perspectives on the making of our world.

Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia; Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought

Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture

MELANCHOLY ORDER

Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders

ADAM M. McKEOWN

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

NEW YORK CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2008 Adam McKeown

Paperback edition, 2011

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51171-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McKeown, Adam, Ph.D.

Melancholy order : Asian migration and the globalization of borders / Adam McKeown.

      p. cm. — (Columbia studies in international and global history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14076-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-14077-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-231-51171-1 (e-book)

1. Asia—Emigration and immigration. 2. Globalization—Asia. 3. Boundaries—Political aspects. 4. Emigration and immigration—Government policy. 5. Passports. I. Title.

II. Series.

JV8490.M44 2008

325′.25—dc22 2008022230

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

For Gina,

my treasure of coerced migration

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Globalization of Identities

PART I: BORDERS IN TRANSFORMATION

 1.  Consolidating Identities, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

 2.  Global Migration, 1840–1940

 3.  Creating the Free Migrant

 4.  Nationalization of Migration Control

PART II: IMAGINING BORDERS

 5.  Experiments in Border Control, 1852–1887

 6.  Civilization and Borders, 1885–1895

 7.  The Natal Formula and the Decline of the Imperial Subject, 1888–1913

PART III: ENFORCING BORDERS

 8.  Experiments in Remote Control, 1897–1905

 9.  The American Formula, 1905–1913

10. Files and Fraud

PART IV: DISSEMINATING BORDERS

11. Moralizing Regulation

12. Borders Across the World, 1907–1939

Conclusion: A Melancholy Order

Primary Sources and Abbreviations Used in Notes

Notes

Index

Tables and Figures

Tables

 2.1.  Global Long-Distance Migration, 1840–1940

 2.2.  World Population Growth, 1850–1950

 5.1.  Chinese Immigration Laws around the Pacific, 1852–1888

 6.1.  Events of 1885–89

Figures

 2.1.  Global Migration, 1846–1940

 2.2.  Return Migration as Proportion of Emigration, 1870–1937

 2.3.  Chinese Migration, 1850–1940

 2.4.  Indian Emigration, 1842–1937

 9.1.  Chinese Arrested, Deported, and Debarred from the United States, 1896–1930

10.1. Categories of Chinese Arrivals in the United States, 1894–1940

Acknowledgments

Writing is painful. Thinking and research are pleasures. A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, junior faculty development grants from Northeastern and Columbia universities, and a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Migration allowed me to indulge my pleasures. Visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore greatly eased my pain.

Many people have assisted in the development of this book through a diverse range of contributions, including commenting on drafts, pointing out errors, providing logistical support and sources, or making offhand remarks that crucially shaped my thinking. After writing a book about identification and categorization, I am acutely aware of the inadequacy of any attempt to properly classify their contributions. So I will express thanks through the simplest and most egalitarian method that I know, alphabetical order:

Jerry Bentley, Lauren Benton, Ulbe Bosma, Adrian Carton, Pär Cassel, Henry Chan, Diego Lin Chou, Matt Connelly, David Cook-Martin, Nicola Di Cosmo, Peter Dimock, Nicholas Evans, David Feldman, John Fitzgerald, Lisa Ford, Donna Gabaccia, Julian Go, Mike Grossberg, Eric Han, Dirk Hoerder, Walter Huamaní, Paul Jones, Ira Katznelson, Doug Knox, Adam Kosto, Philip Kuhn, Marilyn Lake, Eugenia Lean, Erika Lee, Steven Legomsky, Liu Hong, Leo Lucassen, Greg Mann, Patrick Manning, Sucheta Mazumdar, Leslie Page Moch, Prabhu Mohapatra, Brian Moloughney, José Moya, David Northrup, Pablo Piccato, Meha Priyadarshini, Qiu Liben, Anupama Rao, Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Anthony Reid, Anne Routon, Saskia Sassen, John Scanlan, Elizabeth Sinn, Lok Siu, Neil Thomsen, Charles Tilly, Tiffany Trimmer, Mika Toyota, Gray Tuttle, Theresa Ventura, Michael Williams, John Witt, Xiang Biao, Yang Bin, and Henry Yu.

Of course, even the most rationalized method of classification cannot systematically recognize every feature of a complex reality. Thus a mass expression of gratitude must go out to the many audience members who have listened and commented on various manifestations of this book. The students of my graduate seminar, International Orders, also read a rough draft of the entire manuscript in the fall of 2005 and influenced my thinking more than they probably know. Finally, a special expression of nepotistic gratitude must be reserved for Cecily and Gerri McKeown. I am afraid that the final product will not even partially make up for their sacrifices in making it possible.

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. It is possible, answers the doorkeeper, but not at this moment. Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. And the sight of the third man is already more than even I can stand. There are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long thin Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity.... The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone. ... During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself.... Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door to the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man’s disadvantage. What do you want to know now? asks the doorkeeper, you are insatiable. Everyone strives to attain the Law, answers the man, how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me? The doorkeeper perceives that the man is nearing his end and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended for you. I am now going to shut it.

—Kafka, The Trial

Introduction

The Globalization of Identities

The modern passport is a palpable manifestation of an idealized global order. It is a tangible link between the two main sources of modern identity: the individual and the state. It specifies a unique individual within a matrix of standardized physical categories, and it guarantees that identification with the marks and seals of a recognized nation state. It embodies both the most private and the most bureaucratically alienating of identities, being an object of intense personal attachment even as it is a tool of global regulation and standardization. The photograph, accumulated visas, seals, and amendments further enrich it as a token of personal history even as they entrench the bearer more deeply within the files and machinery of state surveillance.¹

The modern passport is addressed to a global audience; other documents can establish the link between nation and individual for domestic purposes. The passport announces to other states that the issuing state will take responsibility for the identified individual. To cross international borders without such a document (in the absence of special agreements to the contrary) makes one illegal, irregular, or a stateless person who must depend on the mercy of others. The efficacy of the document depends on recognition of the issuing entity as part of an interlocked order of nation states. The ability to generate standardized forms of identity is, in turn, an important part of obtaining this recognition. Although the passport claims merely to be official recognition of a preexisting individuality, the act of documentation itself makes nations and individuals into realities.

Of course, this model obscures as much as it reveals. Both individuals and nations still reserve many powers for themselves. Every person thinks there is more to himself or herself than can be embodied in a document. And nations rarely consider passports to be conclusive proof of nationality. Most accept passports only as a matter of comity and insist that they are under no legal compulsion to do so. Passports provide few guarantees other than a state’s promise to accept the bearers when they return. This model is especially misleading in its insistence on the equality of individuals and of nations.² Entry visas (or the privilege of moving across borders without one) and residence permits make finer distinctions beneath these formal claims of equality. They enforce distinctions of wealth, politics, and occupation and categorize individuals according to kinship, marriage, education, money, job, language, race, religion, intentions, and experience of persecution. Much of the actual documentary proof of identity is produced not by states and individuals, but by companies, political parties, friends, families, brokers, and lawyers. But despite these ever-proliferating participants and categories, the possible public identities are remarkably standardized around the world. The individual remains the final object of identification, and states still monopolize the authority to stipulate forms of evidence and make final decisions.³

What kind of world has made possible these passports, visas, and permits? They do not merely record a preexisting reality. They emerged as part of a global process of creating stable, documentable identities for individuals, and dividing those individuals across an international system of nation states. More specifically in terms of regulating global mobility, a multitude of new institutions, technologies, legal structures, and categories have constructed international borders as the primary site of regulation. Indeed, the ideas that border control is a foundation of sovereignty and that sovereignty entails a power to unilaterally regulate human entries have become basic principles of the international system, even as the institutions and techniques to exert this control have diffused and standardized across those borders. The very possibility of identifying an immigrant at the border, before he or she has been inserted into a web of domestic identification, depends on the legibility and reliability of documents and identities produced by foreign nations. In turn, the ability and willingness to produce such documents has become one of the many qualifications necessary for recognition as a state within the international system.

The global system of migrant identification and control is not inherent to the existence of an international system. It was a fairly late development, the specifics of which emerged from a series of historical contingencies in the continuing suppression of nonstate sources of identity and unregulated cross-border mobility. In particular, most of the basic principles of border control and techniques for identifying personal status were developed from the 1880s to 1910s through the exclusion of Asians from white settler nations.⁴ In other words, migration control did not emerge as a logical or structural necessity of the international system, but out of attempts to exclude people from that system. But by the 1930s these practices that were developed to fortify the edges of the international system had become universalized as the foundation of sovereignty and migration control for all states within the system. And far from being the repression of natural freedoms, this universalization was grounded in the expansion of institutions and ideals that have made it possible for us and even compel us to imagine ourselves as free, autonomous, self-governing individuals.

Globalization of Borders

The history of modern international identity documentation is a global history, inseparable from processes of human mobility and the proliferation of modern nation states. As such, it should be part of the history of globalization over the past two centuries. This assertion is not as simple as it may first appear because globalization is often understood as a process of increasing interaction. Passports, borders, and migration controls are often perceived as obstacles against integration and the very principles of free exchange that are at the foundation of an interactive world. But regulation and flows are inseparable. Identity documents and migration regulations were often established with the intention to both protect and hinder movement, or, to put it more precisely, to facilitate and block certain kinds of mobility.⁵ Indeed, to be a free migrant is possible only in conditions of extensive government suppression of private coercion and other activities that may hinder safe passage. Much of the work of passports and bounded national territories is to provide precisely this kind of suppression and encourage mobility. The history of globalization as interaction is inseparable from the globalization of borders.

Globalization is a fundamentally time-based process. But most understandings of globalization distort the relevance of history, precisely because of the tendency to see globalization as something that overcomes rather than interacts with borders. Globalization is often defined as increasing flows, expanding interconnections and fragmentations, or time-space compression that overcomes older separations and distinctions. In this perspective, flows and interactions are historically dynamic. Cultural and political borders are static and unitary, necessary foils to globalization. They mark off traditional units that are prior to and outside of globalization, bereft of any significant historical dynamic other than as obstructions that are increasingly transcended, penetrated, or undermined. This kind of global history—whether written in 1848, 1898, 1948, or 2008—often begins in the recent past of no more than twenty to thirty years, leaving earlier history to the hegemony of national territorialism, immobility, stable identities, and tradition.⁶ As a result, explains David Ludden, we imagine that mobility is border crossing, as though borders came first, and mobility second.⁷

Scholarship on globalization has generated a powerful vocabulary of networks, diasporas, nodes, fields, unbundling, deterritorialization, scapes, and systems to describe interactions across diffused and transregional spaces. But these concepts have remained static, situated within the unhistorical epoch of the new.⁸ Defined against the static past of borders, debates over globalization have often revolved around question of whether flows of goods, information, and especially people are undermining the sovereign state. From a historical perspective, this is an odd question because migration and the consolidation of an international system of nation states have emerged symbiotically over the past two hundred years. They were and still are complementary processes. To be sure, flows and borders are often in tension, but it is precisely this tension that is the most important source of historical dynamism.

Attempts to write a deeper history of globalization usually describe a linear process that germinated in Europe as far back as the medieval period and then gradually expanded to engulf the world.⁹ These are histories of unilateral diffusion rather than globalization. They leave no place for the processes of mutual interaction that are key to most understandings of contemporary globalization, as if the digestion of intervening contacts with the rest of the world had little impact on the processes themselves. Histories of the international nation state system also take this tack, finding its origins in medieval cities, the Protestant Reformation, and the establishment of a Westphalian System of territorial sovereignty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The subsequent global spread of this system without significant modifications is then a fait accompli.¹⁰

Interest in globalization has nonetheless stimulated pathbreaking historical research on the global movement of goods, people, and ideas beyond Europe. There is a growing awareness that writing history from the perspective of nation-based containers has obscured historical processes of interaction. Even in terms of simple measurement of interactions, the flows of goods and people from the 1890s to 1910s reached per capita levels similar to the present.¹¹ These histories tend not to describe a linear process, but cycles of expansion and retreat. The cycles are sometimes depicted as periods of penetration and resistance (by those who are suspicious of globalization), or as a belle époque and backlash (by those who are not). The methods of economists, excellently suited to measure movement, exchange, and market integration, often dominate these understandings of globalization.¹² However these flows are interpreted, these global narratives still tend to be about quantity, placing material flows in a unique position of historical agency.

Given the extent to which borders have been taken for granted in histories of globalization, attempts to write global histories framed as anything other than an expanding West tend to be fragmented and incoherent, an endless string of comparisons between nations and regions. But starting points for a more nuanced history can be found in analyses of contemporary globalization that envision mutually constitutive processes of homogenization and differentiation.¹³ Contact generates not only assimilation and convergence, but also new ways for people to distinguish themselves from each other and from what they perceive to be a homogenizing universalism. Interaction also generates standardized categories for framing difference, such as ethnicity, nationality, race, rights, or even loyalty to a sports team. To appropriate these symbols and institutions is to claim participation in a wider social field by selectively asserting the terms of difference that will be recognized by other groups and not mark one as backwards. Roland Robertson has schematized these processes into four basic ways of identifying and belonging in the world: individual nations, an international system, individual selves, and humankind as a whole. These are experienced (but not necessarily acknowledged) as in tension with each other: society vs. individuality, geopolitical competition between states vs. a harmonious international system, the relativization of cultures vs. common sentiments of humanity, universal human rights vs. national self-determination.¹⁴ These tensions are key mechanisms of change within the global field.

This approach can be the basis of a rich global history grounded in the mutual entanglement of flows and borders. For example, as late as the turn of the twentieth century, the world political map still contained a multiplicity of political units: nation states, city states, princedoms, federations, empires old and new, protectorates, colonies, dominions, extraterritorial enclaves, customs receiverships, clans, and other kin-based units, with a broad spectrum of subordination and autonomy among them all. When we follow flows of information after the mid-nineteenth century, we find that two of the most widely diffused kinds of knowledge were of (1) the institutions and attitudes that constituted a sovereign, independent nation state; and (2) the institutions and attitudes that constituted a sovereign, free individual (discussed more in the following section). By the early 1960s a mosaic of nation states with similar institutions and similar claims to autonomy covered most of the world. It was a spectacular diffusion and homogenization of political forms.¹⁵ These forms are now taken for granted as precisely the opposite of globalization, the basic units of a fragmented, preglobalized world. Yet they are themselves the products and vehicles of global interaction.

In global histories of flows, the consolidation of states and borders is sometimes explained as a backlash against nineteenth-century globalization, a retreat into protectionism, nationalism, and racism impelled by the insecurities and change brought by interaction.¹⁶ Such an account is helpful but hardly sufficient. The flows of information and power that helped to establish these borders were inseparable from the knowledge and practices that facilitated and guaranteed the flows of goods and peoples in the first place. Those latter flows were made possible by institutions that enforced customs laws in predictable ways, adhered to standardized means of diplomatic and commercial interaction, implemented international agreements, and provided predictable legal and commercial protections. State monopolization of the means of mass violence; the suppression of pirates, bandits, and autonomous lords; the consolidation of territory; and the policing of borders and jurisdictions were the very means by which states protected those flows.¹⁷ The more that state institutions conformed to internationally familiar standards of consolidated borders and power exerted over individuals, the more fully they could participate in global interaction. If they did not participate voluntarily, gunboats and colonial conquest made it mandatory. It was a story of standardization, but without convergence into a single polity. Many parts of this story have already been told in the context of national and colonial histories; international identity documentation and migration control provide material to write the story as a global history.

Regulating Migrant Identities

Modern border control and international identity documentation emerged in the late nineteenth century as part of the expanding global industrial economy. More direct causes included the rise of the international state system, mass mobility, and new technologies of generating and organizing data such as fingerprints, photographs, and sophisticated filing systems. Emergent ideals of individual rights, equality before law, national unity, self-rule, and the free movement of goods, money, and people were also part of the package. These ideals can be glossed as liberal principles or, in a term more appropriate to the late nineteenth century, the standards of civilization. But any label runs the risk of obscuring the many contradictions within these ideals. The total compatibility between individual freedoms and the management of society for the greater good theorized by men like John Stuart Mill has rarely worked out so smoothly in practice. Of particular relevance for migration was the fact that self-rule, a crucial source of freedoms, was inseparable from the conceptualization of a people. A polity capable of self-government was one that respected individual freedoms and had institutions that preserved individual rights. An effective political community of and for the people was the main guarantor of these individual freedoms. This often required membership controls, whether to protect the existence of liberal institutions or merely as the right of a free, self-governing people.¹⁸ In practice, the vigilance of membership controls often grew in direct proportion to the egalitarianism of the community, coming in tension with ideals of free mobility and the universality of individual rights. These tensions were mitigated and obscured through categories such as race or illegal aliens that could justify unequal treatment.¹⁹

In the 1860s and 1870s the scale was tipping in favor of laissez-faire ideals of free movement. It was increasingly difficult to justify the control of human movement except in exceptional circumstances of threat and subversion. Great pressure was placed on Asian nations and colonies to partake of these ideals. But at the same time new controls started emerged in the 1880s to restrict the mobility of Asians to white settler nations. Unlike earlier controls, these new controls focused on entry rather than exit, concentrated on the border as the main site of enforcement, and developed extensive mechanisms to distinguish individual identities, which proved at the time to be even more difficult than distinguishing races. Tellingly, the controls were created by white settler nations around the Pacific that saw themselves as the forefront of the liberal freedoms of the nineteenth century. These nations were the sites of multiple innovations in democratic governance and self-rule, such as secret ballots, women’s suffrage, universal education, and progressive labor laws. Ideals and practices of self-rule were also the foundation of exclusionary policies. Modern border controls are not a remnant of an illiberal political tradition, but a product of self-conscious pioneers of political freedoms and self-rule.

The erection of border controls gave a physical presence not only to national borders, but to the cultural macro categories that divided the world into East and West, civilized and uncivilized. These macro divisions justified border control, even as border control transformed them from imagination into reality. The administrative cordon around the Pacific demarcated the line between progressive democracies and stagnant Asian polities, between free migrants and coolies. Asians’ unfree condition demanded exclusion, selection, and surveillance. This, in turn, generated opportunities for evasion that prompted investigations that even further demonstrated the extent to which Asians did not live up to ideals of free migration and displaced the blame for harsh enforcement onto the migrants themselves.

Pressures from Asian nations and proponents of free mobility and racial equality eventually caused these controls to be reformulated in ways that appeared nondiscriminatory and accommodating of individual freedoms. This developed in the context of three seemingly irreconcilable challenges: (1) the justification of migration controls in the context of liberal ideals and extraterritoriality in Asia; (2) the development of modes of control that were compatible with and could even produce free movement and intercourse, both as a universal right and as a condition for economic growth; and (3) the standardization of identification procedures and migration norms around the globe, which included an insistence on the sovereign right of a nation to control entry as it pleased.

Migration and Self-rule

On the surface, demands that Asia be opened to foreign trade and travel existed uncomfortably alongside the movement to exclude Chinese from the white settler nations. But within the broader logic of civilization that framed many global encounters, both demands could be made perfectly compatible. Extraterritoriality in Asia was the flip side of self-rule. The principles that justified the exclusion of Asians from the white settler colonies could also be used to justify the penetration of Europeans into Asia, and vice-versa. Liberal ideals were often formulated in opposition to images of a tyrannical European past. Peoples beyond the North Atlantic were similarly conceived as nations in their nonage: uncivilized savages, Asian despotisms, people enthralled by superstitious customs or otherwise incapable of self-rule.²⁰ They did not provide rights and equality before law, or even basic protections of life and property. To obtain these rights and protections in Asia, foreigners had to be subject to their own law if they were to properly exercise the universal right of intercourse. And only through intercourse and learning could these nations be brought out of their nonage. Few contemporaries linked settler self-rule and extraterritoriality as complementary aspects of the same ideals, but both of these locally specific practices were presented as necessary consequences of broad global distinctions between peoples. The rhetoric of civilization was ideally suited to this task, encapsulating a vision of deep institutional differences that could be simultaneously characterized as deep historical cultures and as stages along a common trajectory of progress. The very vagueness of the contents of civilization made it an ideal tool to simultaneously assert separateness and the need to adhere to common global standards.²¹

In the context of multiple diplomatic, administrative, and legal pressures, however, it took finesse to develop the practical institutions of migration control in ways that simultaneously justified extraterritoriality and exclusion. This was resolved by asserting that free mobility in the interior of nations and equal access to law were features that distinguished the civilized states from barbaric and despotic ones. The lack of these features in Asia justified intervention. Their presence in the white settler nations, however, could justify exclusion of the uncivilized because liberal institutions of self-rule may collapse under the weight of so many children of despotism who were ignorant of republican virtues. The need to uphold liberal institutions meant that Asians within the border were promised (but not always given) free movement and equal access to law, but only on the condition that those outside the border had no necessary rights at all and could be hindered from entering at will.

In this way, the basic legal and political justifications of modern migration control did not develop out of intercourse between formally equal nations and peoples. Rather, they developed in the context of isolating particular peoples from participation in the modern world. Universal liberal ideals were no longer derived from the mere existence as a human, but from the existence of state institutions that could enforce them. By the early twentieth century, these principles were promulgated as the norms for interactions between all peoples and nations. This was possible because diplomatic pressures and the consciousness that these principles could potentially be applied to non-Asian migrants produced a tendency to replace the vocabulary of race and distinction with legal phraseology that was self-consciously race neutral and ostensibly universal in its application. This neutralized language obscured the racial origins of migration control and projected them into the universal standards of the international system. This broader promulgation also entailed breaking the more general idea of free intercourse—fundamental to mid-nineteenth-century liberalism—into component parts of migration and commerce (diplomacy having already broken away earlier in the century). To this day, strong ideologies still promote free commerce and exchange of information as a global good and something that should be subject to international negotiation and pressure. Few people make similar claims about unhampered international migration. Migration control was also broken into different aspects: excessive restrictions of domestic movement and departure are still strongly criticized as infringements on human rights, but few critics ever question a nation’s collective right to protect its borders by limiting entry as it chooses, although some critics may insist that a liberal state should exercise those powers sparingly.²²

Regulating Free Migration

At the very least, an acceptable immigrant was expected to be free. Such a demand was unavoidable in the wake of the suppression of the slave trade and the decline of European indenture, but it was far from clear what a free migrant might be. This issue was debated endlessly in nineteenth-century discussions about the status of labor contracts. Was the ability to bind one’s own labor for a certain period of time a fundamental expression of freedom or a subversion of it? At a more fundamental level, the emerging ideal of the free migrant drew on a deep mistrust in liberal thought of all factions, special interests, privileges, intriguers, cabals, conspiracies, and partial societies that intervene between the sovereign individual and the public interest.²³ The disrepute of bonded migration was part of a broader attack on the private organization of movement and violence. Legitimate migration was to be uncoerced, voluntary, undertaken as a result of individual decisions and for the sake of a better life. From this perspective, transportation agents, brokers, and recruiters of all kinds were potential abusers and rightful targets of suppression unless they collaborated with government regulation.

But the private exploitation of migration was often difficult to disentangle from family and village networks or the dealings of any entrepreneur who operated beyond the reach of a single government. In this context, social networks and guarantors that had once been the main producers of identity became increasingly unworkable. Identities linked to ancestry, caste, class, title, or ranks of nobility were also increasingly suspect as well as being of little utility in differentiating between the many equally poor and undistinguished people in the mass migrations of the nineteenth century. New methods of identification had to be developed.

This challenge was met by isolating the individual as the agent of migration, possessor of rights, and object of regulation. The creation of the free individual migrant was not only a moral imperative but a regulatory imperative, the best means of extracting a mobile population from one set of institutions and power relations and depositing it in another. Migrants were torn out of informal social networks and institutions and repositioned as individual bearers of distinguishable qualities and documentation that could be fixed within a matrix of standardized categories and cross-referenced files. Intermediary organizations were gradually pushed out or criminalized, except for large transportation companies and other organizations that collaborated with government supervision. Identity became less a function of who one knew or could claim as a relative than of the ability to fulfill carefully defined categories of family, status, occupation, nationality, and race. This helped create actual migration patterns that more closely approximated the ideal of free migrants making independent choices to better their own lives and that of their families. Individuals and their families even came to be seen as the natural units of migration that existed prior to rather than as a product of regulation. Regulations then claimed to select and protect these free individual migrants from the abuses of private interests. Increased regulation could thus be presented as a means of fulfilling rather than impinging on free movement and individual rights.

In the minds of many, the free migrant, not hampered by obstructive regulations and custom, was also an imperative for economic and social development. Only when government obstacles to movement were removed would the economy and individual abilities achieve their full potential. This perspective was troubled with contradictions when applied to particular situations. For example, under what conditions could Asian migrants be understood as free when it was believed that tyranny and servility were the very conditions of their existence? Also, the free movement of people was possible only under certain protections against abuses and illegitimate contracts, all of which could easily be interpreted as the interference of government power. In practice, the very possibility of a free migrant was inseparable from forms of government surveillance. From medical inspections to the regulation of steamships, from contract laws to liable to become a public charge clauses, migrants were distinguished into those who were part of the global engine of intercourse and those who were a potential threat or dead weight. The individual under government surveillance was the foundation of the idea of the free migrant and of the new migration laws and identification techniques that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century,

Standardization

Merely isolating the individual was not enough to generate an identity. In fact it made the process more difficult. How was it possible to fix and verify an identity not grounded in a network of mutually accountable relationships? The very act of trying to identify an individual at the border made the development of new techniques into an inescapable necessity. Any previous identity produced by evasive and potentially exploitative social networks was inherently unreliable. A new identity had to be generated on the spot. Indeed, the very construction of the free migrants was the act of ripping them out of previous social networks and reinserting them into new matrices of bureaucratic power.

The new identity needed to be categorized and easily accessible, that is to say standardized, if it were to be an effective means of regulation. This took two forms: the characterization of each person as a unique, physical object, and the development of technical, testable categories of status, occupation, and family that could be standardized within and across nations. Technologies like photography, fingerprinting, and anthropometric measurement helped to define persons as unique objects. But mere measurement and representation were of limited usefulness without the development of complex relational filing systems. Identification of the corporeal human was of little social significance if it could not be embedded in an institutional memory as retrievable data. Through files and forms organized according to well-defined categories of race, occupation, nationality, and family, identities could be fixed and the information made available to multiple officers and institutions. Individuals themselves had to repeatedly reproduce their recorded identity in order to obtain institutionalized benefits and rights. Technical identification became social and personal identity.²⁴

Many of these techniques were first exercised on international migrants through the regulation of Chinese, especially to North America, through the enforcement of Chinese exclusion laws. These laws specified categories of Chinese who could and could not enter. Bureaucrats had to develop techniques to systematically sift through massive numbers of migrants one by one, determine the truth of each claim for admission, and apply a status that could fit each applicant within prefabricated social categories. These included standardized interrogations, the systematic collection of documentary and corroborating evidence, and the evaluation of signs on the individual’s body and bearing. This evidence had to be arranged in methodical order with transparent interpretations. But even these technical procedures would have been ineffective without the collaboration of other officials and lawyers around the world in the production of standardized paperwork. Pressure was especially exerted on the Chinese government to clarify the proper authorities and methods of issuing documents and to suppress brokers and agents that might subvert proper identification.

The techniques designed to control Asians became the template for practical workings of general immigration laws in the white settler nations, and ultimately around the world. By the 1920s, appropriation of these laws by particular nations was driven less by practical needs than by the need to produce the documentation expected by other nations and to live up to international standards of a well-governed nation state. States often claimed that immigration law was a domestic concern, not subject to international negotiation. But this very assertion of a unilateral prerogative was part of a broader diffusion and standardization of principles about what it meant to be a sovereign state within an international system.

The History of International Identification and Identities

The entire history of global migration control and identity documentation, not to mention the globalization of borders, is an extremely broad topic. This book focuses on the documentation of status and the formulation of the border as a site of control, arguing that basic principles were developed through the control of migration from Asia to the white settler nations in the late nineteenth century. Less attention is given to other equally important and arguably more fundamental procedures, such as the global development of medical inspections and technologies of physical identification, including photography and fingerprints. In particular, the creation of that other East-West divide, the one separating Europe from the Ottoman Empire and (sometimes) Russia, was a crucial nexus for the creation of modern sanitary cordons, medical inspections, and refugee policies. And the development of physical identification technologies such as fingerprints took place on a global scale in which colonies were very prominent sites.²⁵

Also, the public debates and political coalitions that are the meat and potatoes of most nationally based studies of migration policy are not prominent in this analysis. Such approaches are very relevant for understanding the timing and specifics of certain migration policies but rarely look at the effects of those policies, begging the question of how politics and legislation matter. They also take for granted the broader principles of border control that have framed those debates and policies, and were more the products of enforcement than of political debate. Of course, race and its role in ordering the world is the crucial context for understanding both migration policy and its enforcement in the nineteenth century.²⁶ If race seems to be downplayed in this work in favor of a focus on civilization and technical discussions of law and administration, this is only because I want to emphasize the extent to which seemingly neutral vocabulary can redeploy principles of hierarchy and discrimination even as it claims to overcome them.

My analysis is strongly influenced by Michel Foucault’s microphysics of power and institutions that actively produce knowledge and individual identities, especially through the disciplines of examination, enclosure, and standardization. Many other studies have emphasized the role of migration laws in creating racial and sexual identities, a few drawing explicitly on Foucault.²⁷ But they have largely focused on the racial and sexual categories that marginalized and excluded migrants from the national body. Very often, they imply that once we unmask the technologies of the state we can recover a more equitable social justice or more radical individuality. In other words, the assertion of individuality and incorporative ideals of the nation are taken as the standpoint from which to critique power rather than as the exercise of power. To be sure, categorization, distribution, and normalizing judgments are important aspects of the microphysics of power. But the particular categories themselves are of less significance than the processes of individualization and categorization. The specific racial, occupational, kin, and political contents of migration categories have shifted over time and across nations, always contested even from their very inception. The individualities and nations that are the objects and frames of these categories, however, are almost never questioned.

In the words of Foucault,

Perhaps, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.... We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.²⁸

Foucault suggests that we think of not the ‘centre of power,’ not a network of forces, but a multiple network of diverse elements.²⁹ Migrants were not only the objects of monolithic state regulation, but one of the diverse elements that created the knowledge and regulation of mobility. To critique the repressive activities of migration categories is precisely to demand the gentleness, humanity, and inclusivity that are the hallmark of modern power, to recreate the liberal tradition of fearing power as an external imposition. I follow Foucault in emphasizing the modern human soul as the primary product of power rather than the site of critique, but I go beyond him in situating this power globally.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 takes a broad look at the rise of mass migration and new processes of regulation up to the 1870s. The four chapters in this part focus, respectively, on premodern regulation, patterns of global migration, the surveillance of Asian indenture, and the centralization of regulation. Six related themes are developed: (1) the ways in which Asian migrations have been forgotten and placed outside progressive trends of world history through the creation of borders across the Pacific, thus obscuring the hierarchies within globalization; (2) the simplification of multiple sites of regulation in favor of national borders and centralized controls; (3) the privileging of individuals and their families as the natural units of migration; (4) the creation of the free migrant as the main object of regulation; (5) the suppression of private forms of organization other than those that are willing to collaborate closely with the government, and the importance of the latter in developing new forms of state regulation; and (6) the rise of laissez-faire ideals as inseparable from the formation of an international system and centralized controls. In sum, part 1 argues that the mass mobility of free migrants has been inseparable from the emergence of new forms of control, with threads of power extending from ideologies of world order and inequality, to national borders, through charitable organizations, transportation companies, brokers, and migrant businesses, and down to the surveillance of individual bodies and our deepest feelings of social and personal identity.

Part 2 takes up the narrative of how the principles of modern migration control were produced out of the restriction of Asian migration to the white settler nations in the late nineteenth century. It begins with a discussion of the administrative, political, and ideological difficulties of initial attempts to control Chinese migration in the middle of the century. Different nations, departments, and individuals disagreed on how to interpret the laws and who had the authority to interpret them. Continuing international crises with China in the late 1880s over migration and indemnification, and struggles between central and local enforcement institutions in the white settler nations, led to the first unambiguous legal decisions and diplomatic policies that justified border control in the context of liberal ideology. The nation and civilization replaced the individual as the site of universal rights, and the border marked the limit of where such rights needed to be recognized. Many of the documents used in this section are familiar from the specific histories of Chinese exclusion in each nation. Rather than reconstitute the details of each of those histories, the account constructs the story as an international process and emphasizes the emergence of general principles from these encounters.

Part 3 analyzes the practical enforcement of the new principles of border control through the administration of the U.S. Chinese exclusion laws at the turn of the twentieth century. The United States is particularly important because, unlike British dominions, it was an independent nation state dealing directly with Asian nations and was repeatedly compelled to justify the policy and practice of migration control within an international system. As a result, the U.S. laws were also compelled to make the clearest distinctions between certain kinds of people who were and were not allowed to move: those that embodied the progressive promise of intercourse and those that threatened to undermine liberal institutions. Five processes are emphasized: (1) the extraction of individuals from their social networks and reinsertion into new administrative categories and cross-referenced files; (2) the establishment of what Aristide Zolberg has felicitously called remote control by consuls in China;³⁰ (3) the standardization of procedures within the United States and across nations; (4) the continuing failure of migration control to achieve its stated objectives and the reasons for those failures; and (5) the symbolic power of border encounters in asserting an international order of states and hierarchies.

Taken together, parts 2 and 3 describe the creation of an institutional trajectory for modern migration control in a world of nations and individuals. Some of the prominent features of this creation included:

• Bureaucratic procedure as a nexus of interests and power. In speaking of identity documents and migration control, it is easy to fall into an analytic rhetoric of state power and invasive bureaucracies versus the freedom and rights of the individual. Conventional narratives of national migration control policies are often plotted as a story of democratic rights gradually chipped away by relentless and unaccountable bureaucracies. But in practice, democratic and popular institutions were often more willing to completely disregard migrant rights than were the bureaucrats and executive institutions that were responsive to multiple domestic and international pressures. The need to participate in an international system and negotiate multiple demands ultimately proved stronger than constitutional protections and rule of law in preserving the last vestiges of migrant rights.

Actual migration procedures emerged at the nexus of several competing interests and were generated from innumerable decisions, encounters, pressures, and expedient compromises around the world. The participants included migrants and lawyers evading rules, exploiting loopholes, challenging procedures, or demanding by-the-book interpretations; clerks and midlevel officials making daily decisions; departmental officials constructing definitions, writing regulations, and justifying policy; diplomatic officials insisting on the need to exercise control with a sensitivity toward broader international concerns; and public remonstrations and sensationalistic media that highlighted both ineffective enforcement and inhumane cases of red tape. All participants complained about the obscure and inefficient procedures yet constantly reinforced them by insisting on rigorous adherence in the interest of their own immediate benefits or of greater long-term predictability. Endless contestation and compromises produced procedures that did not serve any one interest but became the very arena that shaped the possibility of further interaction, even as bureaucratization itself became the common nemesis and scapegoat for all.

• Asia as problem. The establishment of modern migration control entailed a systematic attack on nonofficial sources of identity and organization of migration. It was also an endless process of disciplining civil servants as well as the migrants themselves. But officials framed their explanations of the consistent failures of migration control as a fight not against international networks, failed regulations, and errant civil servants, but against the corruption of the Chinese state and culture. Thus, the divide between civilized and uncivilized was privileged as the main obstacle to global intercourse and rule of law.

• Migration control as ceremony. Complex and technical procedures almost never achieved their stated intention of ascertaining the truth and rights of each individual case. Quite the opposite, they even entrenched and facilitated the reproduction of fraud. Officials were aware of these shortcomings, but their reforms continued to reinforce precisely those procedures that generated fraud in the first place. This is because the main achievement of identification procedures was not to document identities but to produce them. Thus, the suppression of fraud and discovery of real identities was much less important than the process of compelling migrants to appropriate and continually reproduce new identities that were now entrenched within new cross-referenced networks of surveillance. This was not only a mechanical process, but a symbolic act of situating migrants within new social relations and hierarchies. As such, the procedures were increasingly effective the more they took on a ceremonial and even ritualized quality. Migrant procedure was a physical and symbolic orchestration of social relationships that situated the participants in relation to each other and to greater truths about rule of law and the nature of global order.

Part 4 looks at the global diffusion of these principles and practices during the early twentieth century. Even social movements that opposed immigration laws, such as the Chinese anti-American boycott of 1905 and Gandhi’s satyagraha movement in Africa, reinforced the general principles of migration control while criticizing only specific aspects. They helped internalize those principles through intense physical, intellectual, and spiritual mobilization, transforming the protection of national borders into an exercise of individual and collective self-discipline, purity, procedural egalitarianism, and national regeneration. Ultimately, the main objection against immigration laws was that they should not humiliate legal migrants or