The Unjust Burden of the Geary Act
Chinese laborers in the United States face an expensive and discriminatory federal mandate to register for residency or risk immediate deportation.
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.
The preparations of the Chinese Six Companies to fight the Geary anti-Chinese act in the courts foreshadow a long contest, which is likely to make this law an expensive and perhaps practically inoperative enactment. Section 6 of the act of May 5, 1892, requires that all Chinese laborers residing in the United States at that date, and entitled to remain here, shall apply to the collector of internal revenue of their respective districts within one year for a certificate of residence. Any such laborer found without a certificate after that period may be arrested and taken before a United States judge, whose duty it shall be to order that he be deported from the United States. Furthermore, the act requires testimony of at least one white witness to prove lawful residence, and authorizes imprisonment for up to one year for those deemed not lawfully within the country. While the census of 1890 officially counted fewer than 107,000 Chinese in the country, the actual population is estimated at 125,000. To date, very few have complied with the registration law. If a large number of Chinese should not comply, it would cost millions to herd and maintain them while the constitutionality of the law is tested.
“If any large number of Chinese should not comply with the law it would cost millions to herd and maintain them while the constitutionality of the law was being tested.”
The Geary Act was a peak of state-sponsored exclusion, mirroring the systemic surveillance and criminalization of immigrant communities we see in modern deportation debates. It shows how the law was used not just to exclude, but to force individuals into impossible administrative traps designed to ensure their removal.
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