SCOTUS takes up AZ SB1070 this week.
Paul Kramer of Slate suggests they should deal with it.
The Case of the 22 Lewd Chinese Women
A crazy 19th-century case shows how the Supreme Court should deal with Arizona’s immigration law.
By Paul A. Kramer|Posted Monday, April 23, 2012, at 3:22 PM ET
Quote:
[...]
Laws like Arizona’s have become familiar as Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah have passed versions of immigration control. At first, these moves by the states were surprising because federal primacy over immigration policy had gone virtually undisputed over the previous 100 years. Go back further in time, however, and you see that American society has gone the way of state-based crackdowns on immigration before. About a century and a half ago, for example, California set out to seal its borders against unwelcome arrivals. As today, the state’s immigration code met legal challenges, and the resulting Supreme Court decision helped firmly establish federal authority over immigration. One critical case involved 22 Chinese women who were identified by a California official as “lewd”—i.e., prostitutes—and barred from entering the United States under state law. Its story shows how 19th-century Supreme Court justices came to disapprove mightily of state efforts to regulate immigration.
The Case of the 22 Chinese Women, as it became known, began at 1 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 24, 1874, when California’s commissioner of immigration, Rudolph Piotrowski (himself an immigrant, from Poland), boarded the American steamer Japan, recently docked at San Francisco harbor, and inspected its passengers. The ship had set out from Hong Kong, and nearly all of the 600 people aboard were Chinese. Finding 22 of the female passengers suspicious—because they were traveling without husbands or children and their replies to his questions about their domestic circumstances were “perfectly not satisfactory”—he commanded the ship’s master to pay a bond of $500 for each woman to disembark. When the master refused, Piotrowski ordered the women detained onboard and forcibly returned to Hong Kong on the ship’s next voyage. They were, he said, “lewd.”
[...]
The day after Piotrowski ordered the detention of the 22 women, someone—likely Chinese merchants—retained lawyers for them. At the four-day trial in San Francisco, the two sides grappled over state and federal power, the women’s rights, and about what a quick inspection through an interpreter could and could not tell you about an immigrant. The state argued that California had a right to protect itself against “pestilential immorality.” The women’s lawyers countered that their clients had certificates of transit and rights under the United States’ treaty with China, which guaranteed the “inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance.” Called to the witness stand, the women protested their innocence; many insisted they had husbands, some in China and some in the United States. When a woman named Ah Fook, who told the court she had traveled to San Francisco with her sister in search of sewing work, burst into tears, insisting on her “good intention,” the other women joined her, “making the room echo with their cries and screams.” The bewildered judge hurriedly left the bench and the women were temporarily removed from the chamber.
[...]
In his 1874 opinion, Justice Field, for his part, warned that the regulation of immigration by state-level authorities would inevitably lead to superficial profiling and the abuse of power. If states could take it upon themselves to deny immigrants the right to enter the country merely on suspicion of law-breaking or immorality, he prophesied, “a door will be opened to all sorts of oppression.” One hundred and thirty-eight years later, Arizona and a handful of other states have opened that door. It is now the Supreme Court’s job to close it.
long but interesting read
Login
Register
FAQ
