Shanghaied on the streets of Hoboken: Chinese exclusion and maritime regulation at Ellis Island

Abstract

Although largely overlooked in both maritime and immigration histories, the regulation of sailors has been linked to Chinese exclusion and immigration restriction since these laws were first introduced in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Restrictionists in Congress, immigration officials and maritime union representatives were especially interested in controlling Chinese and other Asian seamen, who were becoming a larger part of the maritime workforce during the same period that exclusion was being expanded. Immigration officials were concerned that customary freedoms, such as shore leave, allowed sailors to enter the United States illegally. Unions were concerned about maritime labour competition and saw Chinese exclusion as a means to limit such competition. Although Chinese seamen did not have a different status under maritime laws, they were barred from US residence by Chinese exclusion laws and were therefore treated more harshly than Europeans working on the same ships. As Chinese exclusion was extended to include almost all Asians during the early twentieth century, Japanese, Indian and other Asian sailors were subjected to these strict rules. Asian seamen contested these controls through their union representatives, through challenges to officers and by jumping ship. Their resistance was routinely described as mutiny. Although historians of Chinese exclusion have focused mostly on immigration and therefore on the western United States, New York was the busiest US shipping port during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it was the centre of these conflicts. This article shows how each time exclusion laws were expanded, they incorporated not only immigrants but also Chinese and other Asian sailors. The experiences of these sailors demonstrate the interconnections between racialised immigration and maritime labour regimes at the beginning of the twentieth century.