Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-Canadian Borderlands

Bibliographic Data

ID22669403
AuthorsSeema Sohi (University of Colorado Boulder, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume98
Issue2
Pages420-436
Publication date2011-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jar210
OpenAlexW1984622414
LanguageEN
Citations received15

On December 2, 1910, the SSMinnesota sailed into Seattle harbor carrying nineteen Asian Indian migrants from the Philippine islands who insisted that, because they had traveled from one part of the “United States” to another, they had a right to be admitted to the U.S. mainland. Immigration inspectors, increasingly anxious that Asian migrants would use the Philippines as a back door through which to gain entry to the U.S. mainland, immediately issued deportation orders but quickly learned that prohibiting entry to Indians from the Philippines would not be as simple as they expected. These migrants had not come from a foreign port, but from a U.S. territory where they had gained legal entry, and theirs were the first of a series of immigration challenges over the next three years in which Indian migrants sought to circumvent discriminatory immigration policies and practices at U.S. mainland ports by taking alternate routes across the American empire. Indian leaders used these immigration cases to highlight the contradictions of empire and to call for the overthrow of British rule in India. Meanwhile, U.S., Canadian, and British officials linked the political mobilization of Indians around these cases to earlier warnings that the Pacific Coast was becoming a center of sedition where Indians were challenging and exploiting restrictive immigration policies to advance radical agendas.1

Alien · China · Citizenship · Deportation · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Immigration · Immigration law · Mainland · Mainland China · Political science · Politics · Sedition · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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