“indentured, bound by debt peonage, or otherwise enslaved by ‘custom.’ ” Even though more recent scholarship has moved away from conclusions that conflate “coolieism” with all Chinese labor, misperceptions about Chinese immigrants’ status and agency persist. Allusions to the allegedly sinister and secretive powers that Chinese labor bosses wielded to compel workers beyond the more universal pressures that were placed on individuals and families to satisfy debt obligations have prevailed in the historiography as well.54 I flip these scripts by showing that the actor most responsible for keeping Chinese servants in a state of bondage or employment-based dependency was the U.S. government itself, through the federal policies it enacted.
The political history of what motivated white laborers and politicians to press for the passage of a Chinese Restriction Act in 1882 has often come at the neglect, historian Erika Lee argues, of “the six decades of the exclusion era itself.”55 This has obscured the sharp conflicts that persisted over how to utilize as servants the Chinese migrants who remained in the United States or continued to arrive as temporarily admitted labor. The extent to which the Bureau of Immigration should have the discretionary authority to determine eligibility for entry, as opposed to vesting this power in federal courts governed by due process standards, was at the center of debates concerning Congress’s plenary power over immigration in the late nineteenth century. The landmark Supreme Court cases of Ekiu v. United States (1892) and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) vastly strengthened administrative officers’ sovereign power to determine whether immigrants had the right to be in the country, except in cases where errors in procedure could be clearly demonstrated. These decisions removed for all but a select few the grounds for habeas corpus appeal of their debarment or deportation, unless a blatant miscarriage of justice or “manifest wrong” could be proven.56 With the 1906 Supreme Court ruling in Ju Toy, immigration officials’ power to determine the validity of a potential entrant’s claim to birthright citizenship was upheld, and individual inspectors’ and supervisors’ decisions “in effect became public policy,” as Lee notes. When the bureau took measures to implement procedural uniformity and fairness in how it handled immigrant cases, it did so to preempt external critics who wanted to check the agency’s power.57 Governing the admission of servants created unique modes of governance in which productive forms of inclusion designed to favorably recognize the labor needs and interests of household employers had to be weighed against the threat that those same workers would become public charges, or, in the case of Chinese servants granted temporary admission under contract to a white employer, whether they would escape from the bonds of servitude and become unauthorized immigrants. These powers made the Bureau of Immigration a powerful broker of labor.
The geographic orientation of this book corresponds to the fluid labor market dynamics it analyzes. The brokers in this study specifically tried to defy spatial limitations on the supply of domestic laborers. Moments when brokers, whether in the form of private philanthropists or government agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau, took measures to collapse barriers to the placement of servants by offsetting the cost of their transportation receive special attention here. The ability to engineer movement represented a form of expertise that was both venerated and despised, and the production of knowledge on these practices developed in conjunction with the introduction of steamships, better railroad connections, and new methods for financing migration that were also heralded as ushering in a “modern” era of migration and immigration.58 The major ports of Atlantic and Pacific entry, New York and San Francisco, and the hub for black refugees during and after the Civil War, Washington, D.C., receive particular focus here as nodes of distribution that supplied markets.
Finally, this book is transnational in multiple ways, and heeds the charge that historians of migration need to be attentive to how mobility gets governed at the point of departure as well as at the point of reception. Throughout this book, I shed light on the ways in which the brokerage of service relations, like migrants themselves, straddled the territorial boundaries that defined the nation-state. Individuals like the white Methodist missionary to China Esther Baldwin, for instance, made the availability of domestic laborers for hire by American household consumers a matter of foreign relations. This book also takes on how domesticity itself became transnational and no longer a spatially fixed social relation of production. Servants had to be mobile actors befitting U.S. overseas expansion and imperial aspirations.
* * *
Beginning with immigration that took place in the decade following the Irish Famine, this book’s initial focus is on how relief efforts marked as humanitarian steered and compelled recipients of assistance into domestic service. Servitude was viewed as an ideal means by which to salvage the laboring capacity of women whose sudden autonomy became potentially burdensome to the American and British states. Chapter 1 follows the enterprising activities of Vere Foster, a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry who funded the emigration of approximately 1,250 Irish women from post-famine Ireland during the 1850s. Foster’s efforts serve as a case study that illuminates the ideologies of white settlerism and Anglophone imperial unity, and shows how they worked together in concert. Foster was convinced that the best way to govern rural Ireland’s surplus population and inadequate lands was to finance and coordinate the integration of young migrant women into wage labor positions as servants in the United States, in areas of the country where the supply of white female workers was inadequate. In order to assuage concerns about the moral and sexual dangers that free markets and migration posed to young Irish women, Foster endeavored to establish transatlantic networks of migration rooted in what he presented as racial and familial values of protection and mutuality. Chapter 2 turns its attention to the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved persons, classified as “contrabands” and refugees, were placed as domestic workers in northern households. The involvement of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) in the placement of refugees as servants prefigured the federal government’s expanded role as a broker of immigrant labor in the decades that followed, yet proved controversial. Designed to reduce government expenditures on the relief of refugees in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, the Freedmen’s Bureau’s financing of black servants’ migration was viewed with skepticism by detractors who claimed that it revived—under the thin veneer of “free” labor—a version of the slave trade. Due to insufficient federal funding, the reluctance of black refugees to relocate to uncertain job situations in the North, and constant questions about its efficacy, the Freedmen’s Bureau—after contracting thousands of women and children to service positions—was ultimately forced to disband this initiative.
By the late 1860s, middle-class employers in eastern cities had shifted their attention to the labor supply of Chinese immigrants in California, and the possible importation of male servants who were portrayed as invaluable assets to western homes. In this period, Democrats seized upon abolitionism and free labor ideology, which were previously associated with Republicans, to critique Chinese laborers as “coolies” and push for restriction.59 Chapter 3 argues that employers produced a version of Chinese servants’ difference that referenced how they were naturally submissive and mechanically efficient—and therefore ideal as domestics. Employers overlooked the more complicated structural dynamics that relegated Chinese immigrants to service work through racial discrimination and legal marginalization as migrants barred from naturalizing. In these contexts, this chapter also explores the doubts that surrounded Chinese restriction as a policy and how proponents of allowing Chinese immigrants to do work labeled menial and unworthy of citizenship linked the continued employment of Chinese servants to the Pacific Coast’s imperial advantages as the gateway to Asian labor supplies.
By 1882, federal immigration officials had assumed sole responsibility for determining who qualified as eligible to enter the United States. By the 1890s, they also wielded the power to deport immigrants—what legal historian Daniel Kanstroom has called “post-entry social control”—who violated the terms of their admission.60 Building on Kanstroom’s framework, chapter
