The Underground Path to Puget Sound
A look at the porous maritime border between Victoria and Washington Territory, where the business of smuggling Chinese laborers flourished despite federal exclusion laws.
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.
Correspondence from the New York Sun dated September 17, 1883, details the difficulty of enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act along the Washington border. With the Strait of Juan de Fuca easily crossed in small boats, and the San Juan archipelago providing ample cover, human smugglers—often white ferrymen or local Indigenous people—regularly brought laborers into the United States. Revenue officers admitted that catching and identifying the individuals was nearly impossible, as laborers would often testify that they were already residents. The Chinese colony in Victoria, finding little work, viewed British Columbia merely as a gateway to the more prosperous American cities like Seattle and Portland.
This article provides a stark look at the localized mechanisms of exclusion and the daily defiance of federal immigration policy in the Pacific Northwest. It highlights the hypocrisy of the era, where property owners and merchants lobbied for exclusion while secretly profiting from the labor and rent of the very people they sought to banish.
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