Deportation - Torrie Hester

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appeal and efforts of the Ottoman authorities to establish a fuller membership in the community of nations played significant roles. To participate more equally in the comity of sovereign nations, the Ottoman sultanate had to recognize foreign states’ right to diplomatically “protect” their foreign nationals through the diplomatic appeals process. This explains, in part, why U.S. officials were using it to protect the Lubrowskys from the growing anti-Semitism in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the global legal regime had (at least) two levels: one of bilateral relations among “civilized” states and one that relegated China and the Ottoman Empire to a lower status. The maintenance of jurisdiction of emigrants abroad was central to both.

      Changing the Logic of the International Legal Regime

      By the time U.S. officials built the policy to deport people from the United States, many other nations and empires around the world either revised their immigrant removal policies or passed brand-new ones, too. In the wave of construction, people sometimes used the word “expulsion” interchangeably with “deportation.” Both words meant that someone was being removed from some place, but there were important differences that fundamentally changed the logic of the international legal regime. The newer policies, labeled “deportation” in this book, made the question of where to send a person central. Answering the question about the destination of a deportation required officials from a sending nation to confront another question: would the country on the receiving end agree to the deportation? Without answers to both, authorities could not carry out a deportation. In the case-by-case negotiations behind individual deportations that answered these questions, along with treaties and agreements to facilitate deportations, immigration officials and diplomats added a layer to the international legal regime.

      Through much of the nineteenth century, as several European countries help illustrate, nations operating immigrant removal policies did not necessarily tie the destination of removal to an immigrant’s country of citizenship. In 1793, for example, the British government expelled the French politician and diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. He had sought refuge from the French Revolution, and when Britain expelled him, he did not go to France but to the United States.67 Partly this choice of destination was humanitarian, a removal to France might have led to his death; it most certainly would have led to his prosecution. Yet, Tallyrand’s destination was part of a larger whole. Countries with formal removal policies expelled immigrants, but not necessarily to their countries of origin. Oftentimes, the immigrant could actually choose which border to leave from and where to go next. Throughout the nineteenth century, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands allowed expellees “a choice of border.”68 Expulsions were, then, largely unilateral—those on the receiving side were not involved in the process.

      German authorities were among the first in Europe to tie the destination of a removal to an immigrant’s country of origin. They did this in both the sending and receiving of immigrant removals. First Prussian and then the newly constituted German Reich expelled immigrants in the direction of their country of origin. German authorities, therefore, restricted the ability of a deportee to choose the border from which he or she would leave the country.69 The German state also closed its borders to the unauthorized expulsion of third-country immigrants along its western borders. It did so by increasing regulation at its borders and through a series of international treaties. In one treaty with Belgium, Germany agreed to receive German expellees from Belgium, but refused to allow Belgium to expel non-Germans into German territory without authorization. The treaty also contained provisions regulating the travel of third-party deportees; expellees who needed to travel through German territory on their return to their country of origin, like Russia, were allowed to do so only if they had enough money to pay for their transit.70 Each treaty added to the international legal regime.

      When Germany made the destination important to immigrant removals, it forced other countries to do the same. During the 1880s, Belgium continued to remove individuals to its borders based in large part on the immigrant’s choice of destination, but it had become more difficult in light of recent German policies and treaties. If, for example, Belgium wanted to expel a German, it could not do so until the German state acknowledged that the alien was a German. Soon the Belgian state signed treaties with other states structuring its ability to remove immigrants from its territory. Belgium and the Netherlands signed a bilateral agreement in 1888 stating that Dutch authorities agreed to allow Belgian authorities to expel Scandinavians and Northern Germans through their territory. French and Belgian authorities reached a similar agreement in 1896. In 1897, a British-Belgian agreement stipulated that each country had to accept its own poor migrants or give free passage to those immigrants through their territories.71 This regional system of treaties contributed to an emerging layer of the international legal regime facilitating deportations.

      Officials in the United States designed a deportation policy rather than an expulsion policy. The deportation process required international negotiations that could be complicated by the particulars of individual cases. The experiences of Lily Taquensk and Flora Gendron provide examples of the ways women’s marital status determined their citizenship and affected the destination of deportation. Under U.S. law, a husband’s citizenship determined a wife’s citizenship.72 Lily Taquensk had originally immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1903. A year later she moved to Canada and married a Canadian citizen.73 At some point between 1904 and 1908, she reentered the United States from Canada. It is not clear in the records why or if she came alone or with her husband. U.S. immigration officials arrested her on November 25, 1908, and ordered her deportation. As Canadian law, like U.S. law, made a woman’s citizenship derivative of her husband’s, they sent a request to Canadian immigration authorities for approval of the deportation. The case of Flora Gendron documents even more starkly the ways marriage determined a woman’s citizenship and the destination of a deportation. Flora had been born on U.S. soil, making her a U.S. citizen. She moved to Canada, where she married a Canadian citizen.74 At some time unspecified in the documents, she and her husband then moved to the United States and, in early 1915, to Mexico, where Gendron worked as a prostitute. After six months, the Gendrons planned to move to Cuba, where, according to immigration records, she intended to continue working as a prostitute. Immigration agents arrested Gendron in Florida as she made her way to Cuba. When determining where to deport her, U.S. officials noted her time in Mexico, but understood that Mexican authorities would not approve her deportation because she had no claims to legal residency in Mexico or Mexican citizenship. As in Taquensk’s case, U.S. immigration agents approached the Canadian authorities about deporting Gendron to Canada, because her marriage had ascriptively made her a Canadian.

      Countries on the receiving end of a deportation typically granted approval for U.S. deportations quickly, but, as both Lily Taquensk’s and Flora Gendron’s cases also document, the process could take weeks or even months. Canadian officials initially refused Gendron’s deportation on grounds that her birth on U.S. soil made her a U.S. citizen. U.S. officials disagreed, arguing Gendron’s marriage made her a Canadian citizen. Negotiations dragged on for five months, until late 1915, when the Canadians approved her deportation. All the while, Flora Gendron waited in departmental custody in the United States. When Canadian officials finally sent their approval to Washington, U.S. officials added her to a group of deportees, known as a deportation party, in Seattle and, after being transferred to the custody of several different agents, furnished her with a ticket to Toronto.75 In Taquensk’s case, five weeks passed before Canadian officials sent instructions for U.S. authorities to carry out the deportation. U.S. authorities deported her on January 2, 1909.76 Neither case file spells out why the approval process took so long, but most likely officials needed the weeks and months to confirm the women’s marriages with provincial and local bureaucracies that kept marriage records. Officials could have even have had to contact churches where the ceremonies took place. Whatever the case, Canadian officials eventually approved each deportation.

      U.S. officials answered the destination question differently for people of Chinese heritage than for immigrants of other racial and ethnic heritages. Under one of the earliest laws of Chinese exclusion in the United States, the 1888 Scott Act, people of Chinese heritage living in other nations—like Canada or Mexico—fell under the jurisdiction of Chinese exclusion. The destination of a deportation in cases involving immigrants of Chinese heritage

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