Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America

the ‘paper son’ ploy widely used by Chinese migrants to gain entry in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which destroyed immigration records. In addition, she explores other attempts to pass as citizens and, at times, as members of other immigrant groups, such as Mexicans or as naturalized citizens from Mexico. The manipulation of photography was ‘central to the evasion’ (68) of exclusion laws as Chinese and other migrants attempted to emphasize personal and familial status in their immigrant photographs in a ‘conscious counterrepresentation to popular stereotypes’ (48). Pegler-Gordon’s In Sight of America wrestles with a great deal of ambiguity and, as a result, inconsistency in the deployment of photographs for immigration enforcement. Everproliferating forms of identification – including certificates of entry, ‘internal passports’, passports with visas, tourist cards, quarantine cards, guest worker identifications and many others – were coupled with uneven implementation and then unique forms of fraud associated with each form of identification. At the end of the day, the reader may remain confused by the number of identification documents, the various laws and policies guiding their use, and their haphazard implementation over time. Such confusion reflects the complexity in the field of migration studies and the intricacy of US immigration policies, especially in this period, when federal authority was still being consolidated. None the less, the author demonstrates unequivocally the centrality of photography and visuality in immigration enforcement and how facilely this technology intersected with racial beliefs about immigrants. In Sight of America is thus an excellent demonstration of the tensions between immigration policy, its execution and the evasion of these restrictions, in a process in which both proponents and opponents of restriction maintained and exploited gaps in the nascent immigration regime to admit some and exclude others.