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of last residence. Congress repeated this in section 2 of the 1892 Geary Act, which stated,

      That any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent, when convicted and adjudged under any of said laws to be not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States, shall be removed from the United States to China, unless he or they shall make it appear to the justice, judge, or commissioner before whom he or they are tried that he or they are subjects or citizens of some other country, in which case he or they shall be removed from the United States to such country: Provided, That in any case where such other country of which such Chinese person shall claim to be a citizen or subject shall demand any tax as a condition of removal of such person to that country, he or she shall be removed to China.⁷⁷

      By 1911, U.S. immigration authorities attempted to change the default destination in some deportations of people of Chinese heritage. This change was driven by budgetary concerns (explained in the first chapter) and ways that immigration officials believed Chinese immigrants to be using deportation policy to their own ends. U.S. officials began to complain that some Chinese immigrants who were residents of Canada or Mexico seemed to be using Chinese exclusion as a way to secure passage to China on the U.S. dime; immigrant agents labeled them “free trippers.” To stop free trippers, U.S. officials tried to deport Chinese immigrants to the country they migrated from last. As they did so, U.S. officials changed the destination of deportation. During 1910, for example, when 185 Chinese were arrested at Nogales, Arizona, under Chinese exclusion laws, all of them were sent to China. In 1911, immigration inspectors arrested only two Chinese immigrants in Nogales. The supervising inspector of the Mexican border understood the different apprehension totals as a result of the changing policy in determining the destination. He wrote that the “decrease in the number of arrests … is unquestionably due to the fact that in former years a considerable number of Chinese intentionally crossed into the United States for the purpose of being arrested and returned to their native land at the Government’s expense.” Along the U.S.-Mexico border, this meant that Chinese immigrants who had crossed into the United States were often deported to Mexico. The result, as the supervising inspector saw it, was “that this procedure has broken up a pernicious practice and resulted in the saving of thousands of dollars to the government.”⁷⁸

      The need to secure the receiving country’s approval complicated U.S. officials’ efforts to carry out deportations of people of Asian heritage to Canada because, while Canada did not restrict Chinese workers as a race as the United States did, at least not until 1923, it did discriminate against Chinese immigrants by imposing a head tax. In 1911, U.S. immigration agents failed to get Canadian approval to deport a man named Yuen Pak Sune. In 1911, Yuen Pak Sune traveled from China to Vancouver, British Columbia, then took the train to Montreal, and crossed the border into the United States with a group of Chinese immigrants. Since Yuen Pak Sune was not staying in Canada, he did not pay the Canadian head tax. The first head tax was $50. The Canadian parliament raised it in 1900 to $100 and in 1903 to $500.⁷⁹ Upon Yuen’s crossing the border into the United States, U.S. immigration officers arrested Yuen for unlawful entry and placed him in custody in Boston, where the immigration commissioner ordered his deportation to Canada. While this was not a case of a “free tripper,” U.S. officials tried to cut down the costs of deportation by deporting him to Canada, rather than China. Canadian officials would approve deportations from the United States of people of Chinese heritage only if the deportee paid a head tax. Yuen, however, could not afford to pay the Canadian head tax and, consequently, Canadian officials refused to approve the deportation.⁸⁰ After the Canadians refused to permit Yuen’s deportation there, U.S. officials rearrested Yuen and processed him under Chinese exclusion laws. This jurisdictional switch allowed officials to deport him to China, despite the greater expense.⁸¹

      Another similar case involved Hen Lee. In 1916, U.S. immigration officials arrested Hen Lee and ordered his deportation to China. Hen, who had entered the United States from Canada, wanted to remain in North America. His lawyers argued that the particular provision of immigration law under which he had been ordered deported specifically stated that the deportee should be “removed to the country from whence he last came.” The court found that Hen’s appeal had merit and changed his deportation destination to Canada. But, Hen could not afford to pay the head tax and the Canadians would not let him in. Therefore, immigration officials rearrested Hen under Chinese exclusion laws and deported him to China.⁸²

      Since U.S. officials were also on the receiving end of deportations, they had to provide approval to countries trying to deport a U.S. citizen. Canadian lawmakers passed their first deportation law in 1906 and the list of deportable immigrants included “any person landed in Canada who, within two years, has become a charge upon public funds, whether municipal, provincial or federal, or an inmate of or a charge upon any charitable institution.” The Canadian government could also deport prostitutes and a certain class of Chinese immigrants.⁸³ In 1909, the Canadians wanted to deport a man named Nazair Chartier to the United States. Chartier was in a hospital for the mentally ill; in deporting him, Canadian officials wanted U.S. institutions to bear the cost of his hospitalization. A striking fact in this case was that Chartier was a Canadian citizen. The Canadians found him deportable because he had spent most of the previous ten years living in the United States. He had returned to Canada only the year before he fell ill. The Canadian government believed in this case that long-term residency trumped formal citizenship. U.S. officials refused to authorize the deportation and, in a theme examined in Chapter 6, prioritized Chartier’s formal citizenship, not his long-term residency. Chartier remained in Canada.⁸⁴

      When the Canadian government moved to deport Asian immigrants who had come from the United States, officials encountered systemic problems such as those U.S. authorities had experienced in trying to deport people of Chinese heritage. Hirokichi Yasui is a case in point. Yasui, a Japan-born lawful resident of the United States, went to Canada in 1920 to conduct business in Vancouver, British Columbia. But when he tried to return to the United States at Blaine, Washington, border patrol agents refused his readmission. (By this time, the anti-Asian shape of U.S. policy had been expanded past Chinese migrants to all people of Asian heritage.) As a result, Canada bore the cost of deporting him to Japan.⁸⁵ Canadian officials had dealt with similar cases before. For example, in 1912, the head of Canadian immigration sent out a memorandum to border agents, warning them to be careful about admitting immigrant railway workers from the United States, many of whom were Chinese. If these workers violated Canadian law, U.S. officials would not generally grant approval for their deportation to the United States, the country of their last lawful residence. Canada would then have to pay the greater expense of deporting the immigrant workers back to China.⁸⁶

      Deportations of U.S. citizens from Mexico to the United States sometimes involved other diplomatic communications than those used in deportations from the United States or deportations from Canada. In 1908, Mexican lawmakers revised the government’s power of immigrant removal that dated back to its original constitution in 1824.⁸⁷ Article 7 of the 1908 law stated, “when a foreigner shall have entered after this law shall have gone into effect and in violation of its provisions the government may order that he be sent back to the country whence he came if he shall not have resided in the Republic for more than three years.”⁸⁸ This Mexican law assigned jurisdiction to the minister of the interior and assigned the hearing of removal cases to three-member boards of immigration.⁸⁹ Soon after the Mexican Revolution, officials revised deportation policy again. In 1917, under Article 33 of the new Mexican constitution, a deportee need not be informed of the grounds for his or her deportation. This differed from U.S. or Canadian policies, where people knew the charges during the proceedings. As a U.S. consular official noted in 1922, however, it was “established policy” that “an American citizen ordered deported from Mexico be informed of the charges against him and be given an opportunity to defend himself against such charges, as well as ample time within which to arrange his affairs in case the deportation is carried out.”⁹⁰ Mexican officials, therefore, may not have always told a deportee of the grounds for removal at the time of his or her arrest, but they informed deportees of the grounds after a request by the U.S. State Department.

      When George Wilkins was deported from Mexico in 1925, he asked

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