immigration officers and employment agents, first at Castle Garden and then at Ellis Island and the immigration station in Philadelphia, used the threat of barred entry and informal prohibitions on the release of unaccompanied female immigrants to compel these white women into taking jobs in domestic labor. Committed to the idea that young, white European women, when subjected to the right types of controls, remained a vital and privileged source of immigrants, officials devised and implemented practices and regulations that allowed for their foreign contract and for them to circumvent restrictions that would have otherwise prohibited their entry on the grounds that they were likely to become public charges.
Chapter 5 continues this thread, although it contends that in the context of Chinese servants exempted from the exclusion laws and granted temporary admission as laborers, officials implemented post-entry controls aimed at containment rather than protection. Following the passage of the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act, immigration officials brokered special arrangements that allowed white employers to continue to enter the country with Chinese servants in their employ, so long as they took out surety bonds that indemnified the government against the possibility that their Chinese servants might leave their service and remain in the United States on an unauthorized basis. How to gain access to foreign labor without having to dispense with the entitlements that would accompany more substantive or permanent incorporation has always made domestic work, along with agricultural labor, a salient area of concern for policymakers. The Chinese who entered as temporary laborers were governed as a legally captive supply of labor for select classes of imperialists working overseas—businessmen, military officials, and missionaries—and came to symbolize the compromise between the privileged, free mobility that imperial elites required, and, in a national setting, the need to shore up the sovereign boundaries of the nation against the permanent settlement of Asian laborers. In this respect, the temporary admission of Chinese servants and the bonded conditions that defined their stay offer examples of what I argue was an incipient guestworker program.61 Chinese immigrant servants who lived in the United States legally—as well as birthright American citizens of Chinese descent—were also subject to various requirements by immigration officials that reinforced these workers’ dependency on white employers. During exclusion, the testimony of white employers became a crucial factor in determining whether Chinese servants would be credentialed as authorized residents, even in cases where they claimed to be birthright American citizens. This was essential to avoiding deportation but also to being allowed to depart and reenter the United States.
Stymied by the refusal of “new” immigrant women from Eastern and Southern Europe to pursue work as domestic laborers at the turn of the century, middle-class employers reevaluated the fundamental utility of hired labor to the production of domesticity. Chapter 6 brings the book’s different narrative arcs together by engaging public and expert debates about whether domestic service could best be reformed and made modern through changes to labor relations in the home or whether Chinese and black workers’ alleged predisposition to servitude meant that looking for racialized sources of labor continued to be the best solution for “fixing” the occupation. Examining the start of the Great Migration, the 1917 Immigration Act, and the eventual passage of numerical restrictions on European immigration that the 1924 Immigration Act instituted, this chapter argues that the various exceptions built into immigration laws, which had exempted domestic servants from restrictions since the passage of the 1885 Foran Act, finally gave way to the conclusion that white women could no longer be counted on to do this work.
A basic but often overlooked question persists in the United States and other wealthy nations where service workers are drawn from the ranks of immigrants: under what terms and conditions are certain workers allowed to migrate in order to serve others? To not grapple with this question is to naturalize policies that, after 1924, have supplied middle-class households with labor in situations where servants, especially live-in ones, would not otherwise be procurable. The epilogue to this book touches on how U.S. internment of Japanese Americans and their supervised parole during World War II provided displaced persons for hire as servants. It also briefly explores the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, whose sponsorship requirements meant that European refugees could agree to work as live-in servants in exchange for asylum. More attention is devoted to the labor exceptions built into the 1965 Immigration Act, which provided Jamaican and other Caribbean women with a short-lived opportunity to enter the United States after taking advantage of immigration quota rankings that privileged domestic servants. Policies that continue to authorize migrant servants’ temporary admission into the United States, contingent on their performance of domestic service to the employers they entered with, also garner focus here. Finally, the epilogue concludes by discussing how household consumers have exploited domestic and care workers classified as undocumented—and how the absence of state action has enabled this social relation of production.
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The idea that the servitude of free laborers and free migrants had to be brokered challenges, on an epistemological level, how we view a past where liberty of contract allegedly triumphed against enslavement, indenture, and other forms of coercion that kept workers in a state of bondage. Accordingly, it is all the more important to delve into how intermediaries sought to justify interventions into labor markets and migratory processes, and to untangle why they presupposed the need to impose various controls. It is also essential, however, to keep in mind how servants’ actions and employers’ and brokers’ perceptions of workers’ agency influenced and obligated regulatory responses. As historian Walter Johnson has argued, historic agency is best understood in the nuanced circumstances in which it operated, and not through ahistorical maxims idealizing certain performances of liberal freedom. Independence and self-determination were not just ideological constructs of liberalism, but signifying concepts that whites used to maintain the exclusivity of their fitness for sovereign self-governance.62
Examples of this dialectic between resistance and control are myriad. When a white St. Alban’s employer wrote to the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1870 to complain that the two “black boys” whose rail fare he had paid absconded en route, we can assume that they were motivated to break their contracts by the lure of a better option that presented itself during their journey north. The Freedmen’s Bureau, eager to maintain its reputation as a broker, sent two black refugee women instead.63 When a correspondent for the New York Times reported from San Francisco in 1878 that Chinese servants demanded higher wages than their white counterparts, and that local employers were willing to pay the extra money, we can decipher that Chinese laborers were not the “coolies” that opponents made them out to be.64 Rather, they were savvy market actors who knew how to leverage the very racial difference that employers produced and validated. In 1902, when Marie von Rhein, a twenty-year-old German immigrant, broke an oral agreement that she had entered into with a prospective domestic employer while in transit from Bremen to New York, we can conclude that she had good reason to change her mind upon landing. William Williams, the commissioner of Ellis Island, tracked her down nonetheless, after accusing a missionary and broker from the Lutheran Emigrant Home of conspiring to steal her labor. Had she been permitted to freely enter the United States unaccompanied, as male immigrants were, the matter of whom she needed to be contracted to would have been evaded altogether.65
If freedom is to be populated with real meaning, the purposeful abdications of its underlying economic and political principles must be diligently exposed.
1
Liberating Free Labor
Vere Foster and Assisted Irish Emigration, 1850–1865
Introduction: Assistance, Relief, Control
Assisted emigration accounted for less than 4 percent of departures from Ireland during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the roughly 275,000 people who left the island after receiving financial aid from landlords, the British state, or private philanthropists deserve attention as cases that demonstrate how the redistribution
