New Federal Law Targets Chinese Residents
A harsh new congressional act forces Chinese laborers to prove their identity and secure certificates of residency or face deportation and hard labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A great deal of interest has been taken by all classes in the Chinese exclusion act recently passed by congress. The Post-Intelligencer has just received a copy of the act, which provides for extending the present laws on the subject for a period of ten years. It dictates that all Chinese convicted of being illegally in the country shall be returned to the country to which they claim allegiance. Any Chinese arrested under the act shall be adjudged unlawfully within the United States unless they can establish by affirmative proof their lawful right to remain. If convicted, the law provides for imprisonment at hard labor for up to one year, followed by deportation. All Chinese laborers now legally within the United States are required to procure from the collector of internal revenue a certificate of residence within one year. Failure to do so requires proof—verified by at least one credible white witness—that the individual was a resident at the time of the passage of the act. No charge is to be made for the certificate, but forging or altering one carries a fine of $1,000 or five years' imprisonment.
“Any Chinese arrested under the provisions of the act shall be adjudged unlawfully within the United States unless he can establish by affirmative proof to the satisfaction of the court his lawful right to remain.”
This reporting captures the climate of the 1892 Geary Act, which extended the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and introduced mandatory internal passport systems. It marks a period of profound institutionalized xenophobia that reshaped Seattle’s demographic and civic landscape for decades.
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