Sue Fawn Chung - Miscounting the Chinese: Racial Bias in Homeland Security and in the 1892-1906 Census_9/17/2019

UC DAVIS HUMANITIES INSTITUTE TRANSDISCPLINARY RESEARCH CLUSTER AND THE AOKI CENTER FOR CRITICAL RACE AND NATION STUDIES Miscounting the Chinese: Racial Bias in Homeland Security and in the 1892-1906 Census Sue Fawn Chung Department of History University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV Anti-Chinese fervor was intensified by the leaders of the Bureau of Immigration (BI) after the passage of the Geary Act of 1892, an extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. BI became later INS, then Homeland Security. Congress established BI as an independent body in 1894, and President William McKinley appointed Terrence Powdery, an Irish Catholic labor lawyer and former head of the Knights of Labor to lead BI. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Frank F. Sargeant (d. 1908), who had close ties to Samuel Gompers, president of the AF of L. The two BI leaders devised numerous ways to reduce the number of Chinese in the United States, including a special 1905 census to separate legal from illegal Chinese immigrants. Their actions have strong implications on current government policies.