At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. By Erika Lee. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 331 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2775-4. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5448-4.)

Abstract

This is a first-rate historical study of the experiences of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans during the exclusion era. Basing her work on a meticulous examination of more than six hundred cases from the immigration arrival files of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from 1884 to 1940 (which became available to researchers only in the late 1980s and were theretofore untapped by historians), other historical archives, and oral history accounts, Erika Lee presents the most detailed and comprehensive descriptions and analyses of all the dimensions and complexities of Chinese exclusion in American history from the 1880s to the 1940s. Lee not only reconstructs the history of the excluded—the Chinese strategies for entering the United States and for survival under the most difficult conditions, their struggle to maintain personal dignity and family cohesion while being forced to live under false identity by the exclusion laws, the long-term impact of such a distorted pattern of life on the Chinese American community, and the Chinese protests against the harsh laws and their efforts to fight for justice and fairness—but also provides a rich narrative and careful analyses of those who enforced the exclusion laws (the immigration inspectors and interrogators as well as other law enforcement officials), how their zealous anti-Chinese attitude was shaped by the then prevailing social Darwinism, how such an attitude became part of the institutional culture at the INS, and how rigid procedures of personnel hiring were established to ensure the perpetuation of that “institutionalized suspicion of all Chinese” (p. 72).