Racist Immigration Policies Haunt Chinese Mexican Americans
While most people celebrate their immigration heritage after three generations, Chinese Mexicans still have to fight for their identity, literally.
I remember visiting the historic immigration detention center on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay back in the late 1990s. A feature of the century-old wooden building was the Chinese poems carved into the walls by the detainees held at the facility. The beauty of the calligraphy and the quality of the carvings indicate the sophistication and the length of detention suffered by the individual imprisoned at the dilapidated wooden building.
One poem about a migrant being robbed, beaten, and attacked in the land of “Luzon” was especially intriguing. The term “Luzon” was the colloquial Cantonese term for Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. So why would a Chinese migrant detained at a Northern California immigration jail write about being persecuted in Mexico? Was he caught trying to cross the border? This is a conundrum that has perplexed me for many years.
Over the past weekend, I was finally able to solve this riddle. In doing research for an immigration case involving a Chinese Mexican family, I came across a book by Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho, “Chinese Mexicans,” who wrote about the expulsion of Chinese Mexicans from the states of Sonora and Sinaloa throughout the 1930s. It dawned on me that the person who carved the poem about his plight of being a migrant was not from China. Rather, he was a Chinese Mexican who was expelled by the racist governments of the United States and Mexico after everything was taken from him, just because of his race and country of origin. Sadly, the legacy of this ugly past haunts Chinese Mexicans to this day.
The story of my client’s family’s immigration experience would sound like a bad nightmare or a cruel joke if it weren’t true. The family has lived in the Western Hemisphere for close to a century. Yet to this day, they are harassed relentlessly by the immigration officials of the United States as a consequence of the ethnic persecution of the past. I shall explain. (Names of people and places have been changed to protect the confidentiality of individuals.)
Amado Ley’s grandfather Carlos first migrated to Mexico from Taishan, Guangdong province in China, in 1925. At that time, China was locked in a perpetual Civil War between the Nationalists, Communists, and the warlord factions that controlled vast fiefdoms within the country. Little is known about Carlos Ley except that he spent time between the states of Baja California and Sonora after his arrival. Like most sojourners of his generation, Carlos left his wife and children behind in China. Amado’s father was only four years old when Carlos left Guangdong for Mexico.
It was 50 years later until Carlos saw his son again. The separation was not by choice. We know that within a few years after Carlos arrived in Northern Mexico, a vibrant anti-Chinese movement took shape in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa, under the leadership of Plutardo Elias Calles, a populist right-wing politician who demonized the Chinese for stealing jobs, bringing drugs, and corrupting Mexican women. (sounds familiar?). Calles eventually became the president of the Mexican Republic in 1924, just one year before Carlos Ley arrived in Sonora. The anti-Chinese movement gained momentum in Mexico during the years of the Great Depression, as populist politicians made a scapegoat out of Chinese immigrants.
Anti-Chinese associations sprung up in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa. Mexican women who married Chinese men were deemed as race traitors and stripped of their Mexican citizenship. From 1931 through 1933, the states of Sinaloa and Sonora expelled more than 4500 Chinese Mexicans, along with their Mexican wives and mixed-race children, to the United States, where they were systematically deported back to China by Legacy INS under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The situation at the US-Mexico border was so dire that the legacy INS labeled it a crisis of Chinese Mexican refugees. In the process of expulsion, many Chinese Mexicans were beaten and robbed of their possessions. Instead of offering the Chinese Mexicans refugee protection, legacy INS systematically detained these migrants on Angel Island at the migrant processing Center before deporting them to China, a war-torn land on the cusp of full-scale war with the Japanese Empire.
The only way for Carlos Ley to avoid deportation by Mexican authorities is by assuming the identity of a native-born Mexican. Carlos lived alone in obscurity in Mexico until 1973, when his son José Ley was able to enter Mexico with a tourist visa from Hong Kong, a British colony at the time. José fled from Guangdong to Hong Kong during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of people were executed for political reasons. Famine was rampant, and young people such as José desperately tried to escape the horrors of 1970s China at all costs.
At the time of Jose Ley’s departure to Mexico, Amado was just six years old. Although half a century has passed, Mexico’s racist policies restricting Chinese immigration have changed little. To stay in Mexico and avoid being deported back to China, Jose Ley had to follow in his father Carlos’s footsteps by assuming the identity of a native-born Mexican. There was simply no legal means under which Jose Ley could immigrate to Mexico.
It was not until 1984 that Amado Ley was able to reunite with his father Jose in the city of Mexicali. Amado was already in his 20s when he obtained a visitor’s visa from the Mexican Embassy in Beijing. When he arrived in Mexico, he soon realized a cruel reality, Mexican immigration laws made it virtually impossible for anyone from China to legally immigrate to Mexico. Soon enough, Amado Ley followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by assuming the identity of a Chinese Mexican who was born in Mexico. For the next 25 years, Amado Ley lived as Hector Garcia Wong, a native-born Mexican citizen from Sinaloa.
Reprieve from Mexico’s restrictive immigration laws came in 2000 when Mexican Pres. Vincente Fox reformed the country’s immigration system. The Vincente Fox administration realized that without changing Mexico’s own draconian immigration policy against the Chinese and other “undesirable groups,” Mexico did not have the moral high ground to criticize the United States for implementing harsh immigration laws against its citizens, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, also known as IRAIIRA.
To remedy the injustice of Mexico’s racist past, Vincente Fox pardoned thousands of Chinese immigrants for assuming the identity of native-born Mexicans to avoid expulsion from the country. For the first time in his life, Amado obtained a Mexican passport and identification card using his legal name at birth as recorded in China.
Despite Mexico’s efforts to rectify its past discriminatory treatment of Chinese immigrants, the toxic legacy of decades of Mexico’s racist immigration policy lives on vicariously through the US Department of Homeland Security.
In 2016, Amado Ley’s US-born daughter Cathy filed a petition to immigrate her father to the United States as a parent of a United States citizen. The case immediately ran into trouble as soon as it was revealed that Amado Ley had previously traveled to the United States by using his assumed Mexican identity to obtain a tourist visa. The United States government continued to harass Amado even though the Mexican government had pardoned him for using the assumed identity to circumvent the country’s racist immigration policies to be united with his father.
Unsurprisingly, most US officials are ignorant of the racist history of the United States and Mexico and are thus oblivious to the hardship of their decisions on affected human beings. To make matters worse, under the Trump administration, any excuse to break the so-called chain migration (a.k.a. family unification) is a quick trigger to place the case in the “fraud detection” purgatory. Thus, until today, Amado Ley’s immigration application lingers on in the immigration system without an end in sight.
By refusing to acknowledge Amado’s true identity and the harm of Mexico’s racist past against the Chinese, the Department of Homeland Security is essentially prolonging the harm caused by Mexico’s racist immigration policies from the days of Plutarco Elias Calles.
Much to our chagrin, Amado’s situation has not improved under the Biden administration. The Department of Homeland Security continues to hold Amado’s immigration application in abeyance, essentially paying homage to the Chinese exclusion policies of both the United States and Mexico from the first half of the twentieth century.
The reaffirmation of Mexico’s racist immigration past by the Department of Homeland Security is a testament to the lack of both training and accountability across U.S. immigration agencies. More than 96 years have passed since Amado’s grandfather Carlos arrived in Sonora from Guangdong. Yet, the harm caused by decades of racist exclusion laws continues to prevent Amado Ley from obtaining legal status to this day. As long as the United States government continues to tolerate these types of harassment against immigrants based on racist immigration laws of the past, the motto “we are a nation of immigrants” rings hollow.
