ABSTRACT
We often view nineteenth-century America as the era of free immigration before twentieth-century legal regulations put into place racialized restrictions and national-origins quotas; however, public anxieties over the influx of foreigners and changing foreign policies, especially in regard to China, transformed the country into what historian Erika Lee calls a “gatekeeping nation” well before the century’s end. 1 In Ambrose Bierce’s satirical anti-Chinese weekly, the San Francisco Wasp, illustrator Solly H. Walter visualized this new America in a lurid cover image titled “Now Shut the Back Gate” (1888). A lanky Uncle Sam stands before a fortified Chinese Exclusion wall and wields the crude bat of “frontier vigilance” against Chinese immigrants snaking across the United States border with British Columbia (see Figure 16.1). President Theodore Roosevelt lent additional force to this redefinition of America as a gatekeeping nation when he directed Congress in his 1903 annual address “to devise some system by which undesirable immigrants shall be kept out entirely, while desirable immigrants are properly distributed throughout the country.” 2 In the following year, Congress indefinitely extended Chinese Exclusion in the United States and its recently acquired Pacific territories of Hawai’i and the Philippines, completing a system of racialized immigration restriction that had begun over a quarter of a century earlier. First forged in relation to nineteenth-century debates over the “Chinese Question,” Roosevelt’s call for selective and restricted immigration would come to define American immigration law over the course of the twentieth century. 3
