Immigration, Imperialism and the Legacies of Indian Exclusion

Sherally Munshi

Abstract. This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of
the history of Indian immigration to—and eventual exclusion from—the United States in the
early twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1917, federal legislators and immigration officials
proposed various measures for the for the express purpose of excluding “Hindu” immigrants.
For various reasons, these measures failed. But in 1917, another proposal, barring immigration
from an invented “Asiatic Barred Zone” was passed into law by an overwhelming majority. The
novelty of that law was that it restricted immigration not on the basis of identity—racial or
national—but on the basis of geographic origin.
The political and legislative maneuvers that culminated in Indian exclusion gave rise to
a distinctly modern formulations of the nation-state, territorial sovereignty, and the right to
exclude. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the United States imposed few restrictions on
immigration and generally honored the “inherent and inalienable rights of man to change his
home and allegiance.” But with the arrival of substantial numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and
then Indian laborers, those earlier commitments, broadly aligned with the “rights of man,”
were gradually supplanted by an emerging conception of territorial sovereignty, constituted in
part, by an absolute right to exclude.
To appreciate the continuing significance of the developments described, I argue, we
have to expand our framework of analysis, beyond that of the nation-state, to recognize the
international conditions that gave urgency to Indian exclusion—specifically, the upheavals of
world war and the decolonization of Asia and Africa. Indian immigrants in the United States,
many of them exiled leaders of the decolonization movement in India, recognized emerging
practices of immigrant exclusion to be continuous with earlier forms of imperial expansion.
They anticipated that the universalization of the emerging nation-state form would preserve the
distributional legacies of European imperialism.
The disappearance of Indian exclusion from historical memory is a powerful testament
to its persisting legacy. Its disappearance from political consciousness is revealing of the success
with which a naturalized conceptions of territorial assignment have served to legitimate the
restriction of international movement. Finally, if we are to seriously engage with the history of
Indian exclusion, then we are forced to confront the essential artificiality and arbitrariness of
current mechanisms for immigrant exclusion and selection, and address ourselves to the
fundamental political and ethical questions that those mechanisms disguise.

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Table of Contents

Introduction, 2
Part I. Indian Immigration to the Americas: A Brief Survey, 8
Part II. Exclusion from Canada, 13
Part III. Exclusion from the United States, 20
Part IV. Futures Past: Imagining Other Worlds, 32
Part V. Pasts Present: The Continuing Legacies of Indian Exclusion, 49

Introduction

In April of 1914, a few hundred men and women in Calcutta boarded a ship bound
for Vancouver, though British Canada had recently enacted a law that would prevent the ship’s
passengers from landing. As the ship, the Komagata Maru, steamed its way across the Pacific,
officials in Vancouver braced themselves for its arrival. For Canadian officials, this would be
the first refusal of its kind. When the Komagata Maru finally reached the harbor, on May 3,
immigration officers refused to allow the ship to dock. Vancouver police patrolled the waters
and the shores to ensure that no Indian passengers left the ship. After two months of political
brokering among officials throughout the British Empire, exhaustive legal challenges, and an
attempt to forcibly remove the ship and its passengers—an attempt which the passengers resisted
by hurling bricks—all but a few of the ships passengers, never having set foot on Canadian
ground, were forced to return to India.1 On their way back, the passengers vowed to put an
end to British imperialism and to establish a free and independent India.
Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian exile living in the United States—banned from returning to
India or England for his involvement in anti-colonial agitation—observed the unfolding of the
Komagata Maru affair from New York and wrote:
A shipload of Indians is not, superficially a matter of much importance, and
yet it is not impossible that if we could see the events of our time through the
eyes of the historian of 2014, we should find that quite the most significant
thing to be seen in the world today is the Komagata Maru, with its [376]
Hindus aboard, that lies at Victoria, British Columbia. It is a challenge

1
See Joan Jensen, Passage From India (1988); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement
Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (2011), 3-4, 47-49.

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Indian Exclusion 3

thrown down, not only to the British Empire, but to the claim of the white
man to possess the earth.2
Notwithstanding Rai’s prediction, on this hundredth anniversary of its journey, the Komagata
Maru has all but disappeared from political memory. If we are to look back, however, as I argue
in this Article, we would discover, as Rai anticipated, that the journey undertaken by the
passengers aboard the Komagata Maru played a significant, if under-appreciated role in the two
world-defining events of the twentieth century—the dissolution of empires and the invention of
nation-state borders. Historians have recognized that the Komagata Maru affair played a critical
role in galvanizing the transnational movement to end British imperialism in India. But what
is perhaps less appreciated is the exemplary role that the Komagata Maru affair played in closing
borders to exclude Indian migrants—not just from Canada, but eventually from the United
States and from white-settler territories across the globe. Thus, for Rai, the Indian passengers
aboard the Komagata Maru, in waging their challenge to Canadian immigration law, exposed a
line of continuity between forms of imperial expansion, which dominated in the nineteenth
century, and the practice of immigrant exclusion, emerging at the beginning of the twentieth.
Writing at the eve of the European world war, as decolonization movements in Asia and Africa
gained in momentum, and as the New World nations began closing their borders, Rai observed
that while the world was changing, what remained constant, in his view, was “the claim of the
white man to possess the earth.”3
In the same essay, Rai pronounced “the dread of the Asiatic is the dominant fact in
the world today, and it will largely govern the politics of the twentieth century.”4 In his
pronouncement, we hear the distinct echoes of W.E.B Du Bois’s more famous prophesy, one
that remains familiar to most students of American history and culture: “the problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”5⁠ Du Bois’ formulation of the color line is
often thought to have defined the movement for racial justice that would culminate in the civil
rights reforms of the 1960s. Those reforms, however, did not exhaust Du Bois’ vision of social
justice, nor did they fully embrace the global scope of Du Bois’ vision. Du Bois’ formulation of
the color line, before it appeared in the opening pages of his masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), was delivered before a congregation of artists and intellectuals convened at the first Pan-
African Congress in London in 1900. His speech, entitled, “To the Nations of the World,”
began with these words:

In the metropolis of the modern world, in this closing year of the nineteenth
century there has been assembled a congress of men and women of African
blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the
darker races of mankind. The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences…. are going

2
Lala Lajpat Rai, “Indians and Canada,” in The Story of My Life (1978), 40-41.
3
Id.
4
Id.
5
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Forethought,” The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Writings (1986), 359.

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 Munshi 4

to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of
sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern
civilization.6⁠

Du Bois, like many of his contemporaries, had come to the realization that the problems faced
by African Americans in the United States were connected to those faced by “the darker races”
in other parts of the world through histories of European imperialism—through histories of
slavery and colonization, forced migration and exploitation. Throughout his life, as he devoted
himself to championing his vision of postcolonial internationalism, Du Bois would maintain
that the race problems of the United States were but “a local phase of the world problem”:
“The color line belts the world.”7

The Congress of 1900 gathered primarily intellectuals of African descent, but it was
also attended by at least one representative of the early movement for decolonization and
national independence in India.8 Lajpat Rai was not among those in attendance at the London
conference, but he and Du Bois would later develop a friendship and sustain a long and
productive exchange.9 Rai’s anticipation that the “dread of the Asiatic” would define the
twentieth century, of course, plays upon Du Bois’ theme of the color line, but it brings into
focus a particular development: immigrant exclusion. Rai observed that, for centuries, the
European settler had travelled “far and wide [raising] his flag, usually the British flag, all over
the great waste places of the globe, brushing little people aside”—“there was no question of
asking leave of the natives.”10 But as soon as Asian immigrants began following Europeans to
the New World, they were shut out by borders. As Rai observed, “Wherever we look around
the Pacific and the Indian ocean—New Zealand, Australia, California, Canada, South Africa—
we see the English-speaking faces filled with disquiet raising their defensive walls higher and
higher.”11 For Rai, Asian exclusion was not merely an expression of racial aversion but part of a
common strategy for maintaining the material and distributional legacies of imperialism.

* * *

6
Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (1995),
639. See also Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of the
Black Internationalism (2003), 1.
7
Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” Collier’s Weekly (Oct. 20, 1906) 30, reprinted in David Levering
Lewis, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (1995), 42.
8
Dadabhai Naoroji, generally considered one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, was among the
45 participants at the Pan-African Congress held in London in 1900.
9
Du Bois and Lajpat Rai first became friends after Rai came to the United States in 1907. Rai’s The United
States of America: A Hindu’s Impression (1916) is informed by long discussions with W.E.B. Du Bois.
Similarly, Du Bois’ growing understanding of the independence movement in India, often reported in the
pages of The Crisis, which he editted. Du Bois also shared drafts of his 1928 novella, The Dark Princess,
imagining the romantic and revolutionary union of a black radical and Indian leader, who took the time to
read it, even while leading a boycott against British rulers in India. See David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois:
A Biography (2009), 492-3.
10
Rai, 42.
11
Id.

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Indian Exclusion 5

This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained examination of the
history of Indian immigration to—and eventual exclusion from—the United States in the first
half of the twentieth century. The history of Indian immigration during this period has only
recently begun to receive attention from scholars working in other fields, but, as of yet, it has
received almost no attention within legal scholarship.12 Legal scholars who have written about
immigration in the early twentieth century have devoted considerable attention to the history
of Chinese—and to a lesser extent, Japanese and Philippino—immigration and exclusion.13 But
insofar as the history of Indian exclusion appears in this scholarship, it is only as an echo or
repetition of these earlier forms of exclusion. This Article seeks to fill this gap within the
existing scholarship on immigration by offering a critical account of the specificity of Indian
exclusion and its persisting legacies.
Specifically, then, I argue that the political and legislative maneuvers that culminated
in Indian exclusion helped to shape a distinctly modern form of the nation-state, defined in
terms of demographic identity and territorial belonging. In the United States, this
reformulation of the nation-state began with the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. By closing
its borders to Chinese immigrants, the United States broke with its own established tradition.
Until then, the United States imposed few restrictions of immigration and generally honored
“the inherent and inalienable rights of man to change his home and allegiance.”14 But with the
arrival of substantial numbers of Chinese and Japanese laborers, beginning in the 1860s, those
earlier commitments to “the rights of man” were gradually supplanted with an emerging
discourse of the rights of the nation to defend its people and territory against the
“encroachment” of others.15 That discourse would become enshrined in the Chinese Exclusion
Cases, where the Supreme Court recognized, for the first time, that the right to exclude others
was the very definition of national independence and territorial sovereignty.

12
A few examples of recent monographs exploring histories of Indian migration to the United States in the
early twentieth century include Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global
Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (University of California Press 2011); Nayan Shah,
Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and Law in the North American West (University of California
Press 2012); and Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard
University Press 2013). While few legal scholars have turned their attention to this history, Ian Haney Lopez
and Leti Volpp have focused attention on the history of racial challenges to the naturalization of Indian
immigrants. See Ian Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York University Press
1996) and Leti Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship
Through Marriage.” UCLA Law Review, 53 (2005): 405‒483.
13
Some recent examples include Calavita, Kitty. “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and “Passing”:
Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts.” Law & Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1-40.
Abrams, Kerry. “Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law.” Columbia Law Review
105 (2005): 641-716; Emily Ryo, “Through the Back Door: Applying Theories of Legal Compliance to Illegal
Immigration During the Chinese Exclusion Era,” Law and Social Inquiry, Vo. 31 (2006), 109; Rose Cuison
Villazor, “Rediscovering Oyama v. California: At the Intersection of Race, Property, and Citizenship,”
Washington University Law Review 87 (2010); 978.
14
Chae Chan Ping, 130 U.S. 581, 592 (1889) (citing Burlingame Treaty).
15
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968) (specifically, her chapter “The Decline of the
Nation-state and the End of the Rights of Man”).

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The reformulation of the nation-state began with the legislative exclusion of Chinese
immigrants in the 1880s but it achieved finality and permanence with the exclusion of Indian
immigrants in the early twentieth century. After the United States closed its borders to
Chinese immigrants, shipping companies began to change their routes and fill their manifests
with immigrants from India. And almost as soon as Indian immigrants began settling in the
United States, they were resisted by exclusionists. By 1910, Congress had declared them to be
the “least desirable race of immigrants thus far admitted to the United States.”16 Over the next
decade, exclusionists urged Congress to enact a “Hindu” exclusion law modeled after the earlier
Chinese Exclusion Acts. Notwithstanding the determination of exclusionists, and for reasons
that I explore in this Article, their proposal to pass a Hindu Exclusion law never gained much
support in Congress. But in 1917, another proposal, barring immigration from an invented
“Asiatic Barred Zone” was quickly passed into law with an overwhelming majority. The novelty
of that law was that it restricted immigration not on the basis of identity—either racial or
national—but on the basis of geographic origin. Geography and emerging notions of territorial
belonging surfaced to legitimate—to provide literal “ground”—for forms of exclusion that were,
until then, without legal precedent or ethical foundation.
This new form of the nation-state, I argue, was developed through the experience of
excluding Asian immigrants not only from the United States but from white-settler dominions
across the British Empire—including South Africa, Australia, and Canada.17 Within the British
Empire, Indian migration to the white-settler dominions posed a very specific problem. Since
the late nineteenth-century, the British government had promised its white-settler dominions
greater rights to self-determination. Indian subjects, while they had not been granted the same
rights to self-determination, had been guaranteed “equal protection” within the Empire.18 As
Indians began emigrating to South Africa, Australia, and Canada, those countries began to
argue that their rights to self-determination amounted to nothing if they were not allowed to
exclude the newcomers from their territory. In other words, they began to argue that the right
to exclude Indian immigrants was itself constitutive of national self-determination and state
sovereignty. So as not to run afoul of the imperial promise of equal protection for Indian
subjects, the white-settler dominions, like the United States, devised immigration laws that
artfully disguised policies of racial exclusion through means that appeared race-neutral.
The disappearance of Indian exclusion from historical memory is perhaps the best
testament to its persisting legacy. The Chinese Exclusion Acts now appear to us as ugly
monuments to the history of racism and xenophobia at turn of the twentieth century, but the
discrete legal innovations that brought an end to Indian immigration, a few decades later,
remain a more permanent, if unremarkable feature of our legal landscape. Our blindness to
the particularity of Indian exclusion, as I have suggested is partly the intended effect of

16
Immigration Commission Report, 1910.
17
See Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (Columbia
University Press 2008); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s
Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge University Press 2008).
18
The Government of India Act of 1858.

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Indian Exclusion 7

invented notions of geographic and territorial belonging—the success with which Indian
exclusion has been erased from memory evidences the degree to which conceptions of
nationality and national borders have become natural or self-evident—rendering immigrant
exclusion, in turn, a natural or neutral phenomenon.
Our blindness to the particularity of Indian exclusion is also an effect of the
nationalist framework of American exceptionalism through which we continue to address
questions about immigration and citizenship, racial economies and inequality. Thus, I argue
that, in order to fully appreciate the legacies of Indian exclusion, we have to expand our
framework of analysis. We should do this, first, by abandoning the framework of American
exceptionalism which preserves the notion that, in its founding, the United States set itself
apart from Europe and its illiberal traditions, to establish the first nation of free peoples. As I
demonstrate below, through its exclusion of Indian immigrants, the United States rather
willingly drew itself back into alignment with the British empire—often through explicit
borrowings of legal tactics, sometimes through illicit exchange. For instance, after the United
States Supreme Court found that Indians were racially ineligible for naturalization, in 1923,
the British government sent U.S. officials a list of “deportable Indians”—exiled leaders of the
Indian independence movement—which American exclusionists used to denaturalize citizens of
Indian origin.19 By expanding our framework of analysis beyond the convention of national
borders, we begin to more fully appreciate the liberatory anti-imperial politics and racial
economies that gave rise to those borders, as well as the dynamics that those borders continue
to neutralize and contain.
Thus, in its broadest ambition, by recovering the history of Indian exclusion from the
United States, this Article seeks to reframe the way engage questions about immigration. If we
are to seriously engage with this history of exclusion, I argue, then we are forced to acknowledge
the essential arbitrariness and artificiality of the conventions that continue to ground
immigrant exclusion, preserve imperial legacies, and maintain global inequalities. My analysis
relies on the contributions of many scholars working on immigration law and history,20 the
theoretical insights of scholars working at the intersections of critical race studies and critical
geography,21 and the writings of a heterogeneous community of scholars and activists gathering
under the banner of “open borders.”22 And I am especially indebted to and energized by the

19
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923); British Intelligence files on Indian immigrants identified as
leaders of the independence movement are available at http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/bi_01.html.
20
Hiroshi Motomura, Mary Dudziak, Lucy Salyer, Estelle Lau, Rose Cuison Villazor, Christina Duffy Burnett,
and Emily Ryo, to name a few who I have not already named.
21
See e.g., Richard T. Ford, “The boundaries of race: Political geography in legal analysis,” in The Legal
Geographies Reader (eds. Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Richard T. Ford) (Blackwell, 2001), 87-104;
Sherene Razack, “When Place Becomes Race,” in Race, Space and Law: Unmapping a White-Settler Society
(ed. Sherene Razack) (Between the Lines Press, 2002); Douglas Massey, George Durand and Nolan J. Molone,
Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (Russel R. Sage
Foundation 2002); Leti Volpp, “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law,” Law, Culture, and Humanities
(2012); and Sheryll Chasin, Place Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America (Beacon Press 2014).
22
See e.g., Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press 2013); Brian Barry and
Robert E. Goodin (eds.), Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and Money
(continued next page)

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 Munshi 8

work of those who have begun to rescue from obscurity the remarkable histories of Indian
immigration to the United States by making those histories accessible through their collection
and digitization of archival materials.23
This Article consists of five parts. Part I begins with a brief introduction to the history
of Indian immigration to North America. Parts II and III include a discussion and analysis of
the legislative maneuvers that culminated in Indian exclusion from Canada in 1908 and from
the United States in 1917, respectively. This analysis reveals, first, just how unprecedented
immigration exclusion seemed to all those involved at the turn of the century; how naturalized
conceptions of geography would mask policies of racial exclusion; and how, in the course of
devising a mechanism to exclude Asian immigrants, both countries, began to redefine the
nation-state as a fixed relation between a “native” people, their land, and their government.
Part IV turns from the legislative history of exclusion to engage the writing of several Indians in
the United States in the early twentieth century. Many of these individuals came to the United
States as political exiles, already active in the decolonizing movement. They identified their
own movement for Indian Independence with the American Revolution, and considered the
United States a model for the decolonizing world. But for reasons that I explore, this initial
identification gave way disillusionment but also gave rise to alternative visions of a post-imperial
future. Part V concludes by taking up the normative questions obscured by naturalized
conceptions of territorial exclusion and gesturing towards an alternative set of norms that
might frame our current immigration law and policy.

Part I. Indian Immigration to the Americas: A Brief Survey

Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were few Indians living in the United
States. After the abolition of slavery from the British Empire, half a million Indian laborers
were transported to colonies in the British Caribbean, especially Guyana and Trinidad. A
much smaller number of Indians traveled colonial circuits to Canada and the United States as
soldiers, maritime workers, and merchants. By the time Indians began immigrating to the west
coasts of Canada and the United States, around 1905, white labor unions and anti-immigrant

(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Kieran Oberman, “Immigration as a Human Right,” in Migration
in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership, Eds Sarah Fine and Lea Ypi (Oxford University
Press 2014); Bryan Caplan, “Why Should we Restrict Immigration?” Cato Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter
2013), 3-24; Ilya Somin, “Open Borders Day,” The Voloch Conspiracy, at WashingtonPost.org (Mar. 16, 2014),
avaialable at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/03/16/open-borders-day/;
and generally “Open Borders: The Case,” http://openborders.info.
23
See e.g., the South Asian American Digital Archive, at http://www.saadigitalarchive.org; “Echoes of
Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965, Library of the University of California at Berkeley’s a
website devoted to the history of Bhagat Singh Thind, http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/index02.html; Vivek
Bald’s website associated with his book, Bengali Harlem, http://bengaliharlem.com.

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groups were well poised to resist their settlement, having resisted the settlement of Chinese and
Japanese immigrants before them. Notwithstanding the sensational reports of another Asian
invasion—this time, a “tide of turbans”—by the time Congress passed the Immigration Act of
1917, barring further immigration from a designated “Asiatic Barred Zone,” no more than
20,000 Indians had entered the United States.24 And by that time, many of them had already
left.

An Indian student in California, writing for the Calcutta-based Modern Review,

explained that Indians in the United States consist mainly of four types—swamis, Sikhs,
students, and spies.25 And, indeed, the arc of Indian immigration to and exclusion from the
United States and Canada might be told through those four types. Though swamis figured
prominently in the American imagination, the overwhelming majority of Indians living in the
United States at the time were Punjabi Sikhs, skilled farmers uprooted by famine and
disastrous colonial policy. Many had worked in Canada before migrating southward, across the
border, to Washington, Oregon, and California, where they found work on farms, factories,
and railways. Though lawmakers generally characterized Sikh laborers as unemployable and
unassimilable, one Indian-American writer described them as “thrifty and enterprising” and
noted that by 1918, more than 50,000 acres of rice land in California were owned and
operated by Sikh entrepreneurs.26

Almost as soon as Sikh laborers began migrating to the Pacific Northwest, they were
subject to violence. In one of the most publicized incidents, in Bellingham, Washington, in
1907, a mob of five hundred men broke into lumber mills, pulled Indians from their work,
robbed them of their possessions, and set fire to their bunk houses.27 Indians were forced to
the city jail, where police held them ostensibly for their own protection; others were driven to
the city limits or marched onto trains headed for Canada.28 Within ten days, a local newspaper
reported, the community of a few hundred Indians had been successfully purged, “wiped off
the map.”29 The same week, a crowd of over ten thousand in Vancouver protested the arrival of
the Monteagle, a ship carrying 914 Indians on board, declaring Canada to be for Canadians.
When the ship arrived a week later, a still angry mob filled the waterfront to block its landing.
Through the days of rioting in Bellingham and Vancouver, newspapers in the United States
and Canada emphasized the close relationship between white laborers in both countries. An

24
Herman Scheuffer, “The Tide of Turbans” (1910), available at
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/resources/aacr/pdf/documents-east-indian-tide-of-turbans-1910.pdf; Krishnalal
Shridharani, My India, My America (New York, 1941), 501.
25
Har Dayal, “India in America,” Modern Review, Vol. X, No. 1 (1911), available through the South Asian
Ameican Digital Archive (SAADA) at http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/item/20101216-153.
26
Shridharani, 501.
27
For a collection of newspaper clippings covering the Bellingham riots of 1907, see the Seattle Civil Rights
and Labor History Project, at http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/bham_intro.htm.
28
“Bellingham Sees the Last of the Hindus: Entire Colony is Wiped Off City Map, Last Leaving on this
Morning’s Owl Train,” The Revielle (Sept. 7, 1097), 1, available at
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/resources/AACR/documents/bellingham/main/9.htm
29
Id.

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 Munshi 10

editorial argued that, “in spite of political boundaries,” the shared threat posed by the
migration of Indian laborers made the residents of Canada and the Pacific Coast states
“practically one people.”30

A smaller group of immigrants came to the United States as students. Some came in
search of technical training; most others came as political exiles, already active in the campaign
to bring an end to British rule in India. A series of political events in the northern Indian
province of Bengal played a critical role in encouraging Indian students to flee the British
Empire and begin looking towards the United States. In July of 1905, the Viceroy of India,
George Curzon authorized the partition of Bengal, dividing the predominantly-Muslim west
from the predominantly-Hindu east, citing administrative efficiency as his reason.31 Indian
opponents, however, recognized the strategy as one of divide-and-conquer intended to divide
peoples bound by common history, language, and culture—and increasingly, anti-imperial
nationalism. Bengali students led the protest against partition, organizing boycotts, braving
police beatings, and—through their example—leading others in resisting British rule. Beginning
in October of 1905, British officials ordered teachers in India to identify students involved in
demonstrations; by April of the next year, more than three hundred students had been
suspended and barred from government occupation.

Many of these student-exiles traveled to England, Japan, and Germany to pursue their
education. Those who eventually came to the United States came with a strong sense of
solidarity with America and its ideals. For instance, one student writing for the Modern Review,
in an essay titled, “Why Indian Students Come to the United States,” explained “we came here
to imbibe thoughts of freedom from free people and teach the same when we go back to our
country to get rid of the universal oppressor.”32 Suhindra Bose, who would go on to become a
lecturer at the University of Iowa, explained that while “the Indian student before he arrives in
this country entertains a highly extravagant view of the American ideals, “the experience which
follows actual residence tends to wear off the poetry and the romance of American life.”33
Bose, in his political memoir, recalls an episode of what he euphemistically describes as
“assimilation” from his own college days. He returned to a cloak room to retrieve his turban,
the last “emblem of Indian nationality” to which he clung, only to find it “literally
assassinated—hacked and butchered into pieces.”34 Bose remains buoyant in his assessment of
the United States, framing the episode sportingly as the “enforced introduction to the plain,
and incidentally, ill-fitting, ugly American derby.”35

For other students, however, many of them from elite backgrounds, the early

30
Cited in Seema Sohi, “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S. –
Canadian Borderlands,” Journal of Am. History (Sept. 2011), 420, 426.
31
See Stanley A. Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (1962),
83-89.
32
Harnam Singh China, Modern Review, 1907.
33
Suhindra Bose, Fifteen Years in America (1920), 476.
34
Id. at 3.
35
Id.

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identification with American ideals quickly gave way to disenchantment and disillusionment.
Dhan Gopal Mukherji, for example, having found himself subject to the same humiliation,
violence, and discrimination as his laboring counterparts—he like other students spent
weekends and vacations working alongside other Indians in factories and fields or suffered the
same abuses as janitors and waiters—wrote, “I had drunk the dregs of Western Civilization. I
had found it had its vulgarity, its bitter indifference, its colossal frauds.”36

Among the first student-exiles to arrive in the United States, two would go on to
become leaders of the struggle for national independence in India—a struggle that was waged by
Indians outside of India. The first of these was Taraknath Das; the second, Har Dayal. Both
were brilliant young students chosen by the British to receive a university education as
preparation for joining the Indian civil service; both abandoned the opportunity to protest
against the British partition of Bengal.37

Das, having escaped arrest in Calcutta, fled to Japan, then Seattle, where he worked on
the railroads, before enrolling in the University of California at Berkeley. To support himself,
in the summer of 1906, he took a job as an interpreter for the United States Bureau of
Immigration. He was posted in Vancouver, where he was tasked with ensuring that no Indians
disembarking in Canada planned to enter the United States. Instead, he began coaching the
immigrants surreptitiously, in the waiting rooms, hallways, staircases.38 Through his experience
as an interpreter and representative of Indian immigrants at the Canadian border, Das gained
intimate knowledge of the extreme precariousness of Indians abroad. Indians were more
vulnerable than their Chinese and Japanese predecessors in that, while the government of
China and Japan advocated on behalf of their nationals abroad, Indian immigrants—though
they were subjects of the British Empire—could not count on the support of the British
government. (On the contrary, the British government sent spies to follow them.) Thus, well
ahead of Hannah Arendt’s formulation, Das seemed to recognize that the condition that he
and other doubly-displaced minorities faced, in the emerging world order of nation-states, was
one of political abandonment.39 As such, for Das, the experience of immigrant exclusion from
Canada and the United States clarified the urgency of wresting national independence and
state sovereignty for Indians.

Soon after the anti-Indian riots in Bellingham and Vancouver, Das joined the newly
formed Hindustan Association. The next year, in 1908, he launched the first issue of The Free
Hindustan, in which he urged Indians in both Canada and the United States to resist exclusion.
If Canada excluded Indians, so would the United States. He also warned that Canadian
exclusion would undermine British rule in India: “The foundation of the British Empire is

36
Dhan Gopal Mukjherji, Caste and Outcast (ed. Gordon Chang, Purnima Mankekar, and Akhil Gupta)
(2002),193.
37
See Tapan Mukherjee, Taraknath Das: Life and Letters of a Revolutionary (1998); Emily Brown, Har Dayal:
Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (1975); South Asian American Digital Archive.
38
See South Asian American Digital Archive.
39
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), 177.

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undermined on the very day when the legislative body unjustly supports measures, owing to
which the natives of Hindustan cannot go freely to other parts of the British Empire.”40 Das’
publication brought him within the surveillance of British officials in Canada; and Canadian
officials succeed in urging the United States to remove him from his position with the Bureau
of Immigration. Das then returned to the United States, organizing Indian students at the
University of Washington, in Seattle, then at the University of California at Berkeley. When
Canadian officials prevented him from circulating The Free Hindustan in Canada, Das persisted
in getting his message across by joining forces with leaders of the Irish Home Rule movement
in the United States, borrowing the offices of the Gaelic American.41

Har Dayal received a scholarship to complete his university education at Oxford, but
after his first year, having become more interested in the politics of Indian exiles living in
London, abandoned it in 1908, convinced that “educational policy and methods had been
designed to … perpetuate the political bondage of Hindus.”42 He drifted from Paris to Algeria
to Boston before eventually settling in northern California. He quickly befriended radicalized
students at Stanford and Berkeley and, with the assistance of a wealthy Indian rancher,
established a scholarship to fund students committed to ending British rule in India. In 1912,
Dayal extended his organizing efforts beyond the community of Indian students in California,
to reach out to Indian laborers in Washington and Oregon.

In 1913, Har Dayal helped to found the Ghadar Party, an organization founded by an
unlikely coalition of radicalized students and laborers in California and for the explicit purpose
of staging a rebellion against British imperialism. With a few thousand dollars, raised by party
members, Dayal bought a building in San Francisco to establish a newspaper, called Ghadar—
“revolt” in Punjabi. Dayal printed twenty-five thousand copies a week, in Punjabi, and
circulated them in California and Oregon, Canada and India. The clear exhortation was for
Indians to return home to start a revolution against the British empire.

With the start of the world war, Ghadarites recognized their opportunity. More
surprisingly for contemporary readers, perhaps, the German government also recognized their
opportunity. The German government, through their consular officials in the United States,
offered to lend their support to the Indian revolutionaries. The German government
supported the Ghadarites not because they had any real opposition to imperialism, but because
it could weaken its British enemy by supporting rebellions brewing in its colonies around the
world. British surveillance agents—who had been surveilling the speech, movement, and
activities of Indian students in the United States for nearly a decade—helped to foil the plot. In
1917, several dozen men and women, of multiple nationalities, were eventually arrested for
their involvement with what has become known as the Hindu-German Conspiracy. The
ensuing trial—at the time, one of the most expensive in American history—concluded with the
conviction of twenty-nine defendants, found guilty of waging war against an American ally, in

40
The Free Hindustan, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1908), 1.
41
See Jensen, 168; See Mukherjee generally.
42
Lala Lajpat Rai, Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement (1917).

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Indian Exclusion 13

violation of neutrality law.43 By the time the United States entered the world war, nearly eight
thousand Indians left the United States and Canada to return to India to stage an armed revolt
against British rule.

Part II. Exclusion from British Canada

A. An Imperial Quandary
Indian immigration to Canada exposed a tear at the seams of British imperial
government. It exposed the untenable distinction between the white-settler dominions—
Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand—and the imperial colonies of Africa and
Asia. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth-century, the white settler dominions
had been extended greater rights to self-representation and self-government. But India, recently
transferred from company to crown rule in 1858—after the violent suppression of the first
clamoring for independence—had not been extended the same privilege. Instead, in a
proclamation issued that year, Queen Victoria promised Indians that, because they were not yet
entitled to self-government, were especially entitled to “equal and impartial protection” from
the British government. Indians were citizens of the British Empire, and, as such, were
guaranteed the same rights as other citizens, including the right to travel and to resettle within
any of the British territories. Thus the conflict: Canada may have wanted to exercise its right to
self-government by excluding Indian immigrants, but it could not have done so without
offending the Queen’s promise to her Indian subjects. As such, as one Indian observer wrote,
Indian immigration to Canada presented the Empire with a test: “There will either be one
standard, or two, within the Empire of British subjects, interests and privileges. If the latter,
then it must be based on race privileges or race superiority. Hence India is looking to Canada
most anxiously as to her own present and future status.”44
Since the abolition of slavery from the British Empire in 1833, roughly half a million
Indians had been transported to colonies as indentured laborers. Until the early twentieth
century, the mass migration of indentured laborers, from India to other colonies, was largely
overseen and administered by the imperial government. In 1883, the British government
passed the Indian Emigration Act XXI to regulate the conditions under which Indian laborers
could travel “to labour for hire in some country beyond the limits of India.”45 Though the
regulation of “free” subjects—distinguished from enslaved subjects—was generally recognized to
have “no foundation in existing law,” the break from established legal precedent was

43
Neutrality Act of 1794.
44
Nand Singh Sihra, quoted in Jensen, 163.
45
Indian Emigration Act XXI of 1833; For a discussion, see Radhika Viyas Mongai, “Race, Nationality,
Mobility: A History of the Passport,” in Public Culture 11(3): 527-556.

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 Munshi 14

understood to be a “humanitarian” necessity for the protection of Indian subjects.46 The

Indian Emigration Act did nothing, however, to interfere with the scattered and less frequent
travel of Indians who moved through the British empire outside and independent of the state-
monitored system of indentured migration. It was this pattern of voluntary or “free” migration
of a few Indian laborers to the white-settler dominions that precipitated a crisis for the British
empire at the turn of the century.
South Africa and Australia had rehearsed policies of Indian exclusion before Canada.
Unlike other white-settler colonies, South Africa was unique in having a population of both
indentured and “free” Indian immigrants. Indian nationalists generally opposed the system of
indentured migration, but restrictions on “free” migration especially enraged Indian opponents
of imperial rule.47 In 1896, Harry Escombe, Prime Minister of the Colony of Natal, introduced
a mechanism for exclusion, which he had discovered in his study of America’s dealing with its
race problems in the South and immigrant problems in the North—the literacy test.48 Prime
Minister Escombe had modeled his proposed immigration reform on the Immigration
Restriction Act of 1896, passed with the support of anti-immigrant groups who resisted recent
arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe.49 Introducing his proposed reform, the South
African Prime Minister explained that “the great Republic of America has found it necessary to
have recourse to that restriction, and I may say generally that the Bill that I now have the honor
to submit to this Assembly is founded on the American Act. But it goes further.”50 The
American law required that new arrivals be able to read or write in their own language, but the
Natal legislation, “to meet the requirements of Natal in connection with India,” prescribed that
applicants must be able to read or write in a European language.51
The American law was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland, who thought the law
offended the prevailing tradition of welcoming others, but the “Natal compromise” was
nonetheless held up for emulation by the British imperial government. Before a number of
colonial leaders gathered to honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain recommended the Natal compromise as a way for white-settler colonies to
prevent an influx of “aliens” without offending “the traditions of the Empire, which make no
distinction in favor of, or against, race or color.”52 He continued,
It is not because a man is of a different color from ourselves that he is
necessarily an undesirable immigrant, but it is because he is dirty, or he is

46
See Mongia, 532.
47
See Id. 537; See also Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in
the British Self-Governing Colonies, 1830-1910 (1976), and Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying
Australia and California, 1850-1901 (1979).
48
See Lake and Reynolds, 131.
49
Id.
50
See Marilyn Lake, “From Mississippi to Melbourne via Natal: the Invention of the Literacy Test as a
Technology for Racial Exclusion,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (eds. Ann
Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds.) (2006).
51
Id.
52
Id.

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Indian Exclusion 15

immoral, or he is a pauper or he has some other objection which can be

defined in an Act of Parliament, and by which exclusion can be managed with
regard to all those whom you really desire to exclude.53

Soon after, one of the first laws passed by the newly formed commonwealth of Australia
adopted a similar literacy test in its Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901.54 Mohandas Gandhi,
even after a decade of conflict with white settlers of South Africa, had maintained in his faith
in the imperial promise of racial equality. But he did not fail to point out to Prime Minister
Chamberlain that “the Natal Act was passed with the deliberate intention of applying it almost
exclusively to the Indians.”55 Gandhi and others saw through these thinly veiled strategies of
racial exclusion and with the rhetoric of universalism and inclusion that obfuscated practices of
differentiation and discrimination. Gandhi expressed his frustration with the government’s
dissembling: “we do not know where we are or what we are to do.”56

B. Canada’s Solution
In 1906, with the arrival of two thousand men in Vancouver, Canadian officials grew
increasingly worried that the presence of Indians, resisted by anti-immigrant groups, would
undermine national integrity. In 1907, the riots in Bellingham, Washington had caused
another 400 Indians to cross the border to Canada “seeking the protection of the British
Crown.”57 Canadians then found themselves in the still more confounding situation of
extending asylum to fellow citizens of empire, on the one hand, and devising a racial restriction
to immigration, on the other. British officials conveyed that they would tolerate a suitably
disguised mechanism of exclusion, but a literacy test, like the one adopted in Natal, would no
longer be tolerated, given the way it had enraged Indian nationalists in South Africa and
elsewhere.
Canadian officials then began scrambling to find a legal solution—one that would
effectively exclude Indians from Canadian territory, but without appearing to run afoul of
Britain’s promise of equal protection for its Indian subjects. First, Canadian officials tried to
exclude Indians by exploiting the available “humanitarian” framework for regulating labor
migration. In 1906, the Governor General of Canada sent a memorandum to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies in London suggesting that the recent arrivals from Indian must have
“doubtless come under misrepresentation as they are not suited to the climate, and there is not
sufficient field for their employment. Many [are] in danger of becoming public charge and thus

53
See Lake and Reynolds, 132.
54
See Markus, xi.
55
Cited in Lake and Reynolds, 132.
56
Id.
57
Lord Grey, Governor General to Canada to Secretary of State for India (Sept. 24, 1907), cited in Mongia,
538.

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 Munshi 16

subject to deportation under law of Canada.”58 The Governor General continued, “transfer of
any people from a tropical climate to a northern one… must of necessity result in much
physical suffering and danger to health.”59
The Governor General’s reasoning is striking in so many ways—not all of which I will
discuss here. It is worth highlighting that while the Governor General does not make explicit
reference to race as the reason for restricting Indian migration, but instead invokes climactic
incompatibility as (humanitarian) ground for exclusion. We recognize in his reasoning an
attempt to disguise a policy of racial exclusion in terms of territorial belonging, assuming there
is exists a natural relationship between white settlers and the Canadian environment.
Curiously—though not coincidentally—exclusionists in California, in their own scramble to
exclude immigrants a few years later, would repeat the very same arguments. In 1910,
Congressman Julius Kahn sent a letter to the Commissioner General of Immigration, Daniel
Keefe, suggesting climactic incompatibility as a reason to exclude Indians: “It must be
remembered… that they come from a tropical country and from what I hear they cannot stand
the rigors of a northern climate and on that account are bound to become burdens upon the
communities to which they go.”60 What the Congressman heard about Indians, he seemed to
have heard from exclusionists in Canada, who seemed to make the same mistake in describing
the immigrants’ native region of Punjab as “tropical.” And whatever the climatological rigors
the Indians encountered in California, “northern climate” does not quite describe the Imperial
Valley, in which most Punjabi workers settled.
After the London office rejected the climactic reasoning offered to justify Indian
exclusion, in 1907, the Government of Canada suggested the implementation of a passport
regime, requiring that Indians leaving India obtain passports, which in turn, were required for
entry in Canada. This recommendation is striking in its resemblance to the “Gentleman’s
Agreement” of the same year, through which Japanese and American officials would restrict the
emigration of Japanese laborers through the issuance of passports. The Viceroy of India
rejected the passport regime, acknowledging the “conciliatory attitude” with which Canadian
officials “approached this difficult question,” but concluded that any restriction on emigration
from India was both “opposed to our accepted policy” and likely to inflame “public feeling in
India.”61
Finally, in 1908, Canadian officials landed upon a winning strategy—a law that would
limit travel to those who “come from [their] country of birth or citizenship by continuous
journey.” The “continuous journey” provision, as it came to be known, was not discriminatory
on its face, but in practice prevented everyone travelling from India from entering the country.
At the time, there was no direct transit from India to Canada—the only routes offered by

58
Telegram forwarded from Secretary of State, London, to Viceroy of India (Nov. 19, 1906), cited in Mongia,
at 534.
59
Id.
60
Cited in Karl Douglas Hoover, The Hindu-German Conspiracy in California in 1913-1918 (Dissertation,
University of California at Berkeley, 1990), 34.
61
Cited in Mongia, 536-7.

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Indian Exclusion 17

shipping companies included stops in Asia. As such, it was literally impossible for anyone in
India to satisfy the “continuous journey provision.” But the special brilliance of the law was
not only that it prevented Indians in India from entering Canada but that it also blocked the
small but especially despised minority of “re-immigrants,” laborers who had completed their
terms of indenture in other parts of the Empire, from entering Canada. The “continuous
journey” provision, together with a law requiring that Indians arrive with at least $200 (to
ensure that they would not later become public charges) effectively put an end to Indian
immigration to Canada. In 1907 and 1908, a few thousand Indian immigrants entered the
country; between 1909 and 1913, only 27 Indian immigrants entered the country—all of these,
as returning residents.62

C. The Komagata Maru Affair

Indians in other parts of the world protested the Canadian law and demanded its
repeal. But these protesters were met with condescension, disregard, or were referred back to
the language of the law, which had so ingeniously disguised its own purpose and effects. But in
April of 1914, a few hundred men and women in Calcutta boarded a ship bound for
Vancouver with the express purpose of challenging the “continuous journey” provision. The
ship, the Komagata Maru, had been chartered by Gurdit Singh, a wealthy labor contractor in
Singapore, who had already challenged laws in other parts of the Empire. The ship made
several stops in Asia—in Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama—picking up several other Indians
along the way. When the ship finally reached Vancouver in May, Canadian officials hoped to
find a reason to turn it away without invoking the continuous journey rule, but the ship’s
papers were in order, everyone on board had been vaccinated and paid their tax. At the
quarantine station, Gurdit Singh made his case to reporters: “We are British citizens and we
have a right to visit any part of the Empire. We are determined to make this a test case and if
we are refused entry into your country, the matter will not end there.”63 Immigration officials
would not allow the ship to dock or its passengers to disembark.
For three months, the Komagata Maru remained anchored in the harbor while Gurdit
Singh and others negotiated with Canadian officials and exhausted all legal appeals. Singh had
wanted the passengers to apply for a writ of habeas corpus rather than appear before the
Immigration Board of Inquiry. His application for writ of habeas corpus was eventually
brought before a carefully selected judge, sympathetic to exclusionists, who, predictably, refused
the application. The case proceeded to a court of appeals. In a unanimous vote, the court of
appeals decided that it had no jurisdiction to intervene. Canadian officials could proceed with
legal deportation.64 Officials ordered the ship captain to leave the harbor, but the passengers

62
See generally Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and
Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (2011); and Komagata Maru, Continuing the Journey, at
http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/4453.
63
Quote from newspaper interview, cited Jensen, 132.
64
See Rai, “Indians in Canada,” 39.

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mutinied, throwing bricks and coal at police and militia as they attempted to climb aboard. A
standoff continued for three days, before a navy ship was called in to escort the Komagata Maru
out to sea. Thousands of Canadians crowded the shore and stood on rooftops to watch.65
William Hopkinson, an officer of the Calcutta Police Department, dispatched to
monitor the activities of Indian students living abroad—an agent of emerging British
surveillance network—warned British authorities on three continents that the Komagata Maru
affair was part of a larger “conspiracy headed by educated Indians living in the United States.”66
One historian suggests that while Hopkinson may heave exaggerated the role of Indians living
in the United States, members of the energized Ghadar Party did not miss the opportunity to
approach the passengers while docked in Vancouver. As the Komagata Maru made its journey
back to India, it spread the message of Ghadar—literally, mutiny—to Indians dispersed
throughout the British Empire.67
In India, the returning passengers were immediately apprehended by police, under the
authority of the newly enacted Ingress of India Ordinance, a wartime emergency power that
allowed for the entering subversives (radicalized returnees) to be arrested and detained without
trial. Several passengers resisted, eighteen were shot, twenty-eight fled, and most of the others
were arrested. As news of the Komagata Maru affair reached the American west coast—and with
Britain having declared war against Germany—leaders of the Ghadar movement amplified their
calls for immediate and armed rebellion.

D. New World Borders

To sum up briefly, by plotting the clumsy, indirect, and even shamefaced manner
through which Canadian officials eventually succeeded in excluding Indian immigrants, I have
attempted to illustrate just how extraordinary the practice of restricting “free” or voluntary
migration seemed to officials involved at the turn of the century. The restriction of voluntary
migration was, with limited exception, without precedent. Territorial expansion and mass
migration—of white settlers as well as “colored” workers, indentured as well as “free”—were
regular features of the European empire-state through the nineteenth century. Du Bois put it
ironically: “Europe has done more to break down national barriers than any preceding
culture.”68 New barriers would have to be invented to control the problem of what Radhika
Mongia has described as “raced migration”—the phenomenon of voluntary migration of non-
white peoples to Europe and the white-settler dominions beginning at the turn of the twentieth
century.
In her writing on the emergence of the modern passport system, Mongia observes that

65
Jensen, 135; see also newspaper clippings at http://komagatamarujourney.ca/node/10812.
66
Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to
Overthrow the British Empire, (2011), 48.
67
Ramnath, 47-60.
68
Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1997).

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Indian Exclusion 19

the very “idea and materiality” of the modern nation, conceived in terms of demographic
integrity and territorial priority, takes shape not prior to but within the context of raced
migration.69 Indeed, it was the arrival of the Indians aboard the Komagata Maru—demanding
their equal right to movement and entry—that finally persuaded the British government to
allow Canada to exercise more control over immigration. Frank Oliver, Minister of the
Interior, very clearly framed the policy of Hindu exclusion as an assertion of national
sovereignty:
The immigration law as it stands is a declaration on the part of this country
that Canada is a mistress of her own house and takes the authority and
responsibility of deciding who shall be admitted to citizenship and the
privileges and rights of citizenship within her borders… This is not a labor
question; it is not a racial question; it is a question of national dominance and
national existence… [The Komagata Maru incident] is an organized movement
for the purpose of establishing as a principle the right that the people of
India, and not the people of Canada, shall have the say as to who may be
accepted as citizens of Canada.70
The outbreak of world war and the acceleration of decolonization movements perhaps lent
credibility to the idea that the presence of these immigrants seriously threatened “national
existence.” To be sure, the war supplied exclusionists with the rhetoric and reason of “national
security,” which, as many contemporary critics observe, remains a powerful justification for
immigration regulation, border control, and racial surveillance.
The Indians aboard the Komagata Maru did not come as enemies, but claiming
equality. As Lala Lajpat Rai observed, the journey made by those Indians threw down a
challenge “not only to the British Empire, but to the claim of the white man to possess the
earth”:
It differs by its direct and explicit demand, from all other attempts of the
colored man to go where he is not wanted. The Hindus do not come as
supplicants, but as claimants. They knock at the gate of Canada and ask for
admission as a right of the British citizen to access any part of the British
Empire. And British Canada has shut the gate in their face and declared that
the British Empire will not allow the colored man to make his home within
its borders. It does this on the most frankly material ground…71

In Rai’s view, contrary to the Canadian Minister’s assertions, though framed in terms of
national security, the exclusion of Indian immigrants was continuous with the racial economy
of imperialism: “Everywhere [the white man] proceeded upon the assumption that [he] was

69
Mongia, 528.
70
Cited in Mongia, 550.
71
Rai, 42.

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born to possess the earth and that the coloured man was born to be his hewer of wood and
drawer of water, used if he needed him and thrown aside if he did not.”72
Rai’s observations anticipate the ways in which national boundaries and immigration
restriction would preserve the racial economy of imperialism after the dissolution of empire.
National boundaries would provide a spatial solution to the problem that decolonization might
have unleashed upon the new world order—raced migration or the free movement of peoples
from poor states to rich states. That is, as empires began to crumble into nation-states, as
imperial hierarchies began to dissolve into the supposed equality among independent nation-
states, the emerging international regime, within which every nation-state enjoyed the freedom
to exclude others from its territory, would play a critical role in preserving the distributional
legacies of European imperialism. As Lala Lajpat Rai and other witnesses to the events of their
time observed, national independence—defined as the right to self-rule in one’s territory—was
hardly compensation for the material crimes of imperialism—generally the transfer of wealth
from the colonies to Europe. The emerging international legal order, premised on an abstract
equality among sovereign states, within which states exercised exclusive control over migration,
as Lai anticipated, would continue to play a role in descending the legacies of imperialism.73

Part III. Exclusion From the United States

A. An American Ambivalence
As in Canada, officials in the United States who were committed to the policy of
Indian exclusion were also constrained to design laws of apparently neutral applicability. What
I hope to convey in telling the story of Indian Exclusion from the United States is the way
conceptions of territoriality would come to surface as the natural ground for immigration
restriction. That territoriality would provide definitive ground for exclusion seems an almost
unremarkable fact in the present world, but this was hardly the case in the United States until
relatively recently.
As in Canada, the drive to exclude Indians was propelled primarily by white labor
organizations who were committed to preserving economic opportunities for “native” white
Americans. The U.S. Congress was not constrained by imperial guarantees of equal protection,
but was concerned that discriminatory legislation would intensify already troubled diplomatic
relations with China and Japan. And many Americans viewed practices of immigrant exclusion
as inconsistent with venerated tradition. The exclusion of Indian immigrants in particular was
further confounded by competing classificatory regimes—Indian immigrants were
distinguishable from Chinese and Japanese immigrants in that they were considered to be “of

72
Rai, 42-3.
73
See also, Ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (2009).

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Indian Exclusion 21

the same Aryan stock” as European Americans.74 Moreover, as one exclusionist worried, “being
subjects of Great Britain, they possess an undisputable right of entry to the United States.”75
Indeed, as I show here, the “Hindu Question” in the United States confronted the
United States with its own particular ambivalence with respect to histories of Anglo
imperialism. Indian immigration challenged the myth of American exceptionalism: young
Indian nationalists were drawn to the United States, in part, because they identified their own
movement against British imperialism with the American Revolution.76 On the other hand, as
disenchanted Indian writers observed, through its exclusion of and discrimination against
Asian immigrants, the United States seemed to draw itself back into the Anglo fraternity of
white-settler dominions. And finally, as the United States overcame its reluctance and entered
the world war, as an ally of the British Empire, anti-imperial radicals from India, who had
previously received sympathy and refuge, suddenly become suspicious persons—potential
enemies of the United States. Indeed, after the United States entered the world war, in 1917, a
few dozen Indians were among the first arrested for violating neutrality laws.

B. Chinese Exclusion
Until the late nineteenth century, the United States imposed few restrictions on
immigration and generally honored “the inherent and inalienable rights of man to change his
home and allegiance.”77 But the nation’s longstanding commitment to freedom of migration
was eventually strained by the mass migration of laborers from China and Japan.
When Chinese immigrants first arrived on the west coast of the United States, in the
mid-nineteenth century, they were easily absorbed into the national economy as laborers—“as
domestic servants, and in various kinds of outdoor work, [they] proved to be exceedingly
useful.”78 But as their numbers increased, and as “competition between them and our people”
increased, states passed laws restricting their capacity to own land and compete in certain
occupations.79 Then, their very presence seemed to threaten the life of the nation—not only
because it precipitated “deep and bitter” social conflict, but because it seemed to disrupt the
natural order. On the west coast, the presence of Chinese immigrants, competing with white
Americans for resources at the closing frontier, augured ecological crisis of Malthusian
proportions. The Supreme Court, in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), expressed its
sympathy with the anxious vision of the future projected by the western states:

74
See e.g. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
75
Herman Scheffaur, “The Tide of Turbans” (1910).
76
I will return to this imagined solidarity between Indian nationalists and American revolutionaries in Part IV.
77
Chae Chan Ping, 130 U.S. 581 (1889) (citing Burlingame Treaty of 1868).
78
Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581, 594 (1889).
79
For a discussion of such restrictions, see Ronald Tataki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of
Asian Americans (1998) 202-207; Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and
Culture (1994), 48.

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 Munshi 22

As they grew in numbers each year the people of the west coast saw, or
believed they saw, in the facility of immigration, and in the crowded millions
of China, where population presses upon the means of subsistence, great
danger that at no distant day that portion of our country would be overrun by
them, unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration.80
It was the naturalized priority of “our people,” articulated as an attachment and claim to
territory, that immigration restrictions were introduced to preserve.
As is well known, the first federal laws imposing racial restrictions on immigration
were directed at Asian immigrants.81 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred entry of
Chinese laborers, and subsequent revisions imposed further restrictions on re-entry and
residency.82 In Chae Chan Ping, a Chinese resident in the United States argued that certain
provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring his re-entry, violated the terms of an existing
treaty between China and the United States. The Supreme Court acknowledged as much, but
held that Congress was not bound by the terms of the treaty, insofar as “treaties were of no
greater obligation than acts of Congress.”83 The Court went on to announce that Congress
could not waive by treaty its “absolute” power to exclude aliens from the United States, as the
right to exclude others is itself constitutive of state sovereignty:
That the government of the United States, through the action of the
legislative department, can exclude aliens from its territory is a proposition
which we do not think open to controversy. Jurisdiction over its own territory
to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its
independence. If it could not exclude aliens it would be to that extent subject
to the control of another power.84
In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), Justice Horace Gray, writing for the Court amplified
the doctrine, asserting that every nation has the “absolute and unqualified” right to exclude or
deport foreigners as it sees fit:

80
Id. at 595.
81
The Page Act of 1875, the first federal law restricting immigration, limited migration from “China, Japan, or
any Oriental country” to those travelling freely and voluntarily. Act of Mar. 3, 1875 (Page Law), ch. 141, 18
Stat. 477 (repealed 1974). The express purpose of the law was to prevent trafficking in coolie labor and
prostitution. But as historians observe, while the law had almost no effect in limiting the entry of male
laborers, it was rigorously enforced to prevent Asian women from entering the country, rendering them
presumptive prostitutes. The intended effect was to prevent the settlement of Asian communities and a
second-generation of Asian Americans invested with birthright citizenship. Lawmakers hoped that, without
wives and families, male laborers would eventually return to their native countries. See Kerry Abrams,
Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law, 105 Columbia Law Review 641, 677
(2005).
82
See Fong Yue Ting v. U.S., 149 U.S. 698 (1898) (providing an extended summary of Chinese Exclusion
Acts).
83
Chae Chan Ping, at 600.
84
Id. at 604.

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Indian Exclusion 23

What [a nation] owes to itself, the care of its own safety, give it this right; in
and virtue of its natural liberty; it becomes to a nation to judge whether its
circumstances… justify the admission of the foreigner. Every society has the
undoubtable right to determine who shall compose its members; and it is
exercised by all nations, both in peace and war.85

In the Court’s view, Congress’ unqualified authority to exclude foreigners was

premised on a notion of territorial sovereignty, conferring on the state rights and obligations to
protect the welfare and security of its population. Strikingly, the Court insisted on
characterizing Chinese immigration as an aggression. “[Chinese] immigration was in numbers
approaching he character of an Oriental invasion, and was a menace to our civilization.” That the
Chinese government itself harbored no hostility against the United States was irrelevant—“the
presence of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, [is] dangerous to its
peace and security.”86 It was against this shared threat, posed by the foreigner, that Americans
were unified—and through their government: “For national purposes, embracing our relations
with foreign nations, we are but one people, one nation, one power. To preserve its
independence…. it is the highest duty of every nation, and to attain these ends nearly all other
considerations are to be subordinated.”87

C. “Hindu” Exclusion
As Indians began immigrating to the United States in larger numbers beginning in
1907, Congressmen from California were determined to seek legislation that would similarly
exclude Indian immigrants. One Senator from California told reporters, “We don’t want these
Hindus… they should be barred out just as the Chinese are excluded. When Congress meets, I
expect to take the matter up and will do my best to protect the Pacific coast from the brown
horde…”88 At the time, however, Congressional opinion was considerably divided. The
introduction of several anti-Japanese bills in California—including a bill requiring segregated
schooling—had led the United States into a diplomatic conflict with Japan. A full-blown crisis
was averted with the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907: President Theodore Roosevelt asked
California to withhold from enacting anti-Japanese legislation; in turn, the United States and
Japan agreed upon a passport scheme through which Japan would restrict the issuance of
passports while Congress passed legislation allowing the President to exclude anyone traveling
from Japan without a passport.
In the meantime, Congress attempted to placate Congressmen from California by
establishing an immigration commission. In 1910, the immigration commission published an

85
Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698, 706. (1893
86
Id. at 606.
87
Id.
88
Senator Frank Flint, quoted in Bellingham Herald (Sept. 30, 1907), 1, cited in Jensen,

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 Munshi 24

exhaustive report, in forty-two volumes, surveying the patterns and effects of “new
immigration” to the United States, including a section on “Hindu Immigration.”89 The
commission concluded that Hindus were almost “universally regarded as the least desirable race
of immigrants thus far admitted to the United States.”90 The commission concluded its report
by recommending that a literacy test be adopted to exclude the least desirable immigrants, but
the literacy test—having been recommended but vetoed once before—failed to gain traction in
Congress.91
The recommendation only frustrated exclusionists. John Raker, a newly-elected
Representative from California railed at the Commission recommendation:
The real object and intent and promise was that there should be real exclusion
of Asiatic laborers. This bill is not within the terms of that promise… If the
committee [members] desire to have a real literacy test, so far as it applies to the
Hindus and to those others of Asia, they should have placed in that conference
the amendment offered in relation to excluding those who are unable to read
in any European language, the same as is the law now in Cape Colony and
Australia.92
In 1910, Raker took up the cause of Hindu exclusion more aggressively by proposing two bills:
one simply excluding all Asians; another requiring the registration, thumb printing, and
photographing of all Asian laborers, and deportation of any found without documentation.93
Representative Raker’s bills did not garner much support in Congress, but the Immigration
Bureau and the Labor Department generally favored the idea of Indian exclusion. President
Howard Taft’s administration considered entering into an informal “gentleman’s agreement”
with the British government, as his predecessor had done with the Japanese government.
Under the terms of this imagined gentleman’s agreement, the British government would pass a
law requiring Indians to carry passports—as the Japanese had done—and the United States
would refuse to admit any Indian traveling without a passport. That South Africa and
Australia, among other colonies had already enacted measured to exclude Indians,
administrators supposed, the British government might not oppose such a pact. In fact, for
reasons suggested in the previous section, the British government was reluctant to further

89
House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hindu Immigration, pp. 49-50; available at
http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/item/20120113-581
90
Id.
91
In 1896, Congress passed an immigration law requiring that anyone seeking entry to the United States be
able to demonstrate literacy by reading 40 words in any language. The law, designed to restrict immigration
from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Asia, had the broad support of legislators from the northeast as
well as the west coast. But in 1897, the law was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland, who described the
literacy test as “a radical departure from our national policy relating to immigration,” which, in his view,
“welcomed all who came to us from other lands, except for those whose moral and physical condition or
history threatened danger to our national welfare or safety.”
92
Congressional Record, House of Representatives (Jan. 30, 1913) 2292
93
The second of these bills would have amounted to extending the Geary Act of 1892—which required the
registration and issuance of documentation to Chinese immigrants—to cover Japanese and Indian immigrants.

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Indian Exclusion 25

implicate itself in discriminating among its subjects.

D. Executive and Administrative Exclusion

While Congress resisted enacting new legislation restricting Indian immigration, the
Bureau of Immigration had already adopted a practice of especially “drastic application” of
existing laws—including medical exams, polygamy bans, and limits on those “likely to become a
public charge”—to exclude nearly half of all Indians seeking to enter the United States.94
Exclusionists were particularly delighted by the discovery that several Indian men inspected at
Angel Island were found to be carrying hookworm, considered to be a “dangerous, contagious
disease.”95 At a Congressional hearing on Hindu immigration, Immigration Commissioner
Anthony Caminetti explained—in a sinister echo of Du Bois’ observation of the color line—
“hookworm practically belts the globe.”96 The immigration Commissioner then acknowledged
that since 1909, it was “the general policy of the Immigration Service to exclude Hindus.” That
year, immigration officials excluded 331 Indian immigrants, allowing only 337 to enter. In
1911, 517 gained entry, while 862 were excluded; and over the next five years, immigration
inspectors admitted fewer than 600 Indians to the United States.97
Soon, Indian immigrants began circumventing the aggressive screening administered at
western ports by entering the United States through its newly acquired territories—mainly the
Philippines. Indians entered the American Philippines without much scrutiny and were able to
establish U.S. residency within a few months. In December of 1910, the hundred or so Indians
sailing to Seattle from the Philippines aboard the SS Minnesota confronted the United States
with its own version of an imperial quandary: what would be the status of the newly acquired
territories and its inhabitants? 98

94
See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of
California Press, 2001).
95
See “Hookworm is More Potent Than Laws,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 4, 1910; “Uncle Sam to Stop
Hindu Immigration, Hookworm Discovery at Angel Island Takes on Alarming Aspect,” San Francisco
Chronicle, Sept. 30, 1910; “Hindoo Immigrants Have Hookworm Disease; Hookworm to Stop Hindoo
Invasion,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 29, 1910.
96
In November of 1913, Immigration Commissioner Anthony Caminetti circulated to immigration inspectors
a report showing that hookworm afflicts peoples living in countries lying in the southern part of the globe,
including India, southern China, the Philippines, Egypt, Samoa, Mexico, Central America, the West Indies,
and Puerto Rico. In South Africa and the southern United States, the presence of the disease is attributed to
the importation of Africans during the slave trade. See Hearing on Hindu Immigration, House of
Representatives, Sixty-Third Congress, Second Section (Feb. 13, 1914), 65.
97
See Seema Sohi, “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-
Canadian Borderlands,” in The Journal of American History (Sept. 2011). The (mistaken) discovery that
Indians were prone to hookworm yielded to immigration officials great discretion to categorically exclude
Indians.
98
This is the question the Supreme Court addressed, in various iterations, in what are collectively referred to as
the Insular Cases. See Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy
of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (2001).

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 Munshi 26

The immigrants aboard the SS Minnesota were detained in Seattle. After a hearing, an
immigration inspector ordered that 77 of the men to be deported—on grounds that they were
likely to become public charges. Several of these filed habeas corpus petitions, arguing that
they had been deported without a fair trial. The federal court declined to review the matter,
deferring to Congress’ absolute authority to determine which aliens should be admitted, under
what circumstances, and by what process.99 The real question posed by the immigrants,
however, was not one of admission but deportation—under the existing law, the immigrants
had already been admitted in the Philippines and were therefore already within the United
States.

Soon after the SS Minnesota episode, another group of thirty-five Indians arrived in San
Francisco. They too were deported, but refused to leave quietly, enlisting the support of
Indians in Vancouver, who organized protests against exclusionary policies in both Canada and
the United States. After the election of President Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Wilson’s
Commissioner of Immigration, Anthony Caminetti, implemented a new set of rules requiring a
second examination for Indian immigrants traveling to the mainland from the Philippines,
momentarily stemming that particular stream of immigration. Almost as soon as he did,
Commissioner Caminetti learned that Indians had begun sailing to Cuba and Panama with
plans to enter the United States from its southern ports.100

In 1913, another group of thirteen Indians arrived in San Francisco. They had sailed
on the SS Persia from Manila. This particular journey was reported because it brought the
largest number of steerage passengers from Asia to the United States—nearly 300 passengers
were packed into the [space between main deck and cargohold. Newspapers reported that most
were Filipino laborers headed for the sugar plantations of Hawaii; a large number consisted of
“Japanese picture brides;” thirteen were Hindu. Each of these men came with certificates
showing they had been “inspected and registered, and [would] be admitted into the United
States.” The very next day, another ship, SS Korea, carrying another ten Indian laborers arrived.
The Bureau of Immigration sought to deport these men, arguing that there was no
demand for their labor, owing to “strong prejudice against them,” and as such, likely to become
public charges. But the immigrants refused to leave quietly. They enlisted the support of
Indians in the United States who hired attorneys, posted bond, and collected affidavits showing
that, contrary to the government’s assertions, there was substantial demand for immigrant
labor.
The immigrants filed a habeas corpus petition, and a federal judge in northern
California agreed to give them a hearing. The immigrants argued that, having been admitted to
the United States in the Philippines, they were no more subject to immigration restrictions
than anyone travelling from “New York to New Orleans having passed at Ellis Island.”101

99
See Ex Parte Moola Singh, 207 F. 780, 782 (W.D. Wash. 1913).
100
For remarkable narratives about networks fo Muslim peddlers who entered the United States through New
Orleans between the 1880s and 1920s, see Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Stories of South Asian
America (Harvard University Press, 2013).
101
See SAADA

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Indian Exclusion 27

Caminetti arrived from Washington to join local immigration authorities. He defended the
decision to deport the Indians, arguing that their admittance in the Philippines did not
guarantee their admissibility on the mainland—though the Indians were employable in the
Philippines, labor conditions and racial attitudes on the west coast rendered them likely to
become public charges on the mainland. Judge Dooling, reluctant to allow the government to
deport Hindus en mass—effectively, as a racial group—gave the Bureau of Immigration three
weeks to further substantiate its claims. He recommended that the Bureau develop separate
charges for each of immigrants as individuals.
In the end, Judge Dooling ruled in favor of the government, accepting Caminetti’s
claim that racial hostility towards Hindus on the west coast rendered the immigrants likely to
become public charges. But he remained perturbed by the implications of his decision, which
granted immigration authorities the power to exclude Indian laborers as a racial group.102 As
he wrote, “Let there be no delusion that this power, once conceded, can be used only in the
case of Hindoos. It is equally applicable to every other race…. It is a vast power, and one which,
upon the argument of this case, I was very unwilling to believe was lodged in any executive
power of the government.”103 The Indian immigrants, facing deportation, appealed the
decision, but it was upheld by the Ninth Circuit.
Before Judge Dooling had reached his decision, Caminetti implemented a new set of
rules requiring a second examination for Indian immigrants traveling to the mainland from the
Philippines, momentarily stemming that particular stream of immigration. Almost as soon as
he did, Commissioner Caminetti learned that Indians had begun sailing to Cuba and Panama
with plans to enter the United States from its southern ports.104 At a Congressional hearing in
February of 1914, Commissioner Caminetti explained that his office was doing everything
within its power to exclude Indian immigrants. “Now the question is up to Congress… and
within its power to pass a bill of some kind to reach this question, and then it will be settled
once and for all. But the condition is urgent.”105

E. From Racial to Geographic Exclusion

As anxieties about the coming “tide of turbans” continued to rise, Commissioner

Caminetti and others in the Wilson administration were becoming wary of defending an
implicit policy of Indian exclusion without clear legal authority. Immigration officials wanted
definitive legislative exclusion.106 President Wilson, casting his glance at Canada and other
British dominions, asked “Can we, who are not connected by government ties or obligations

102
In Re Rhagat Singh, 906 Fed. 700, 702 (N.D. Cal 1913) (“The finding that [the Hindu immigrants] were likely
to become public charges is based in reality, however much the immigration officers may disclaim the fact,
upon the general showing and implied finding that there is a prejudice against the Hindoo.”)
103
San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 7, 1913, 3.
104
For remarkable narratives about networks fo Muslim peddlers who entered the United States through New
Orleans between the 1880s and 1920s, see Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Stories of South Asian America
(Harvard University Press, 2013).
105
Hearing, p. 97.
106
House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hindu Immigration, p. 68, available at
http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/item/20120113-581

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with the Hindus, afford to do less for our people and country than those who are bound by a
common citizenship under the Imperial Government?”107 At one of a series of immigration
committee hearings, in 1914, Caminetti offered a report on Canada’s continuous journey
provision, assuring members of its exclusionary purpose. At the same time, he began
corresponding with a British intelligence agent in Canada, William Hopkinson. Hopkinson
provided Caminetti with information about naturalization proceedings and law enforcement in
Canada; Caminetti, in turn, agreed to provide Hopkinson with information on the activities of
Indian nationalists in California.

In 1916, Congressman Raker reintroduced to Congress versions of his Hindu

Exclusion bill. But it was another bill, introduced by Congressman Denver S. Church, also
from California, that eventually gained enough support to pass into law in 1917.108 That law
restricted immigration not on the basis of identity—defined either in terms of race or
nationality—but on the basis of geographic origin. As proponents of the law explained, the only
substantial difference between two bills was the avoidance of the word “Hindu.” As versions of
the bill moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate, as one Congressman
explained, “The Senate said, ‘we do not like that wording… excluding Hindus and other
persons. We are going to put the matter in another form which will not be offensive to
anybody.’”109 Another assured, “Of course, the great body of the population from which that
formidable immigration is coming is in British India. Objection was made to that form of
words by the State Department. They told the committee that that form of words would be
extremely offensive to Japan… Therefore instead of describing the excluded persons as
‘Hindus,’ the committee took the same people within geographic lines and excluded them.110

Congressman Church’s proposed law would exclude anyone born within a

geographically designated “Asiatic Barred Zone.” The Asiatic Barred Zone was defined in terms
of geographic coordinates, its borders delineated by meridians and parallels, lines of longitude
and latitude.111 The barred zone covered the inhabitants of the swath of land stretching from
Arabia and Afghanistan, across China, British India, French Indo-China, to the Central Asian
portions of the Russian empire, in the north, and the Polynesian Islands, most of them claimed
as European colonies. The perimeters of the Asiatic Barred Zone were carefully drawn to
exclude Japan, with which the United States had already reached its “gentleman’s agreement,”
in 1907. More awkwardly, large parts of China was left out of the barred zone, but exclusion of
anyone coming from China had already been established through the Chinese Exclusion Acts

107
Wilson to James Clark, 20 January 1914, file 53640, NA, RG 85; Cited in Jensen, 154.
108
Immigration Act of 1917, H.R. 10384, Pub.L. 301, 39 Stat. 874 (Feb. 5 1917)
109
Senator Gardner, Congressional Record, Senate (Jan. 12, 1917), 1291.
110
Senator Lodge, Congressional Record, Senate (Dec. 12, 1916), 221.
111
Sec. 3 specified, “the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission to the U.S… persons who
are natives of islands not possessed by the United States adjacent to the Continent of Asia, situated south of
the 20th parallel latitude north, west of the 160th meridian of longitude east from Greenwich, and north of the
10th parallel of latitude south, or who are natives of any country, province, or dependency, situated on the
Continent of Asia west of the 110th meridian of longitude east from Greenwich and south of the 50th parallel
of latitude north.”

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Indian Exclusion 29

of the 1880s. Guam and the American Philippines, because they were “owned by the United
States,” were defined out of the barred zone, but the 1917 Act also prohibited natives of the
barred zone from entering the United States through its territories.

Before the law was finally enacted, it was met with frustration and genuine confusion
by exclusionists in the House and Senate. A Representative from Wyoming complained that
the proposed legislation “is not at all to the point because it would exclude men geographically
and not racially.”112 He added:

What we desire is not to exclude men by reason of their geographic location

but to exclude certain races… Gentlemen appeal to us in the name of
patriotism and attempt to veil and make uncertain what, as a matter of fact, is
the intent of the legislation. I, for one, am in favor of making the
declarations clear and unmistakable…. We do not desire Mongolian
immigration… If we declare in plain language our purpose and intent [n]o one
can be offended.113

Others worried that geographic barred zone was underinclusive in that it did not exclude
Africans or was overinclusive in that would bar white people living in Asia, Australia, and parts
of Russia.114 Exclusionists complained that geographic designation were both too crude a
mechanism to sort between desirable and undesirable immigrants:

You do not follow the lines that mark the division of races. You follow the
parallels and meridians drawn on the map of the surface of the earth, utterly
disregarding the lines of countries or the lines of races. It is as arbitrary a thing as
though you were to draw two parallel lines across the United States and say that
the people within those lines should have certain rights and the people outside
should have certain other rights…. The trouble is that instead of drawing this bill
to exclude men because of character and blood, or even by countries, you exclude
them in accordance with parallels of latitude and degrees of longitude.115

Representative Raker, the force behind Hindu exclusion, sought to placate his fellow
Congressmen men by pointing up the relative advantage of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. While
it was always his purpose to exclude “Hindus… by name,” he found that, given international
circumstances, by recasting exclusion in geographic terms, by “glossing it over, making it
smooth so that it may be swallowed without naming anyone,” Congress had taken “another
ground that will make it stronger… and we ought to make our laws sufficiently strong so as to

112
Congressional Record, House of Representative (Feb. 3, 1914), 160.
113
Id.
114
Senator Reed remakred, “As I judge, from my eye, the inhabitants of over one half of Russia are going to be
cut off from coming to the United States. I fail to grasp the logic. If we want to exclude the Tartar race, let us
exclude it. If we want to exclude the Mongolian, let us exclude him. If we want to exclude the African, let us be
big enough to exclude him… Why not face the matter as men and pass a bill that will really protect the
citizenship of the United States?” Congressional Record, Senate (Dec. 11, 1916) p. 160.
115
Senator Reed, Congressional Record, Senate (Dec. 11, 1916), 160.

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 Munshi 30

prohibit and exclude all Asiatic laborers now so that there will be no question in the future.”116

The law did not explicitly name Indians, as earlier bills had, but the immediate effect
of the law was to exclude immigrants of Indian origin.117 But more importantly, as Raker
anticipated, the law established a permanent shift in the way we think about and regulate
immigration.

From Bill S. 237 Illustrating Asiatic Barred Zone (1945)

E. Grounding Immigrant Exclusion

What this story illuminates is the way that conceptions of geographic origin and
territoriality would surface to provide legal ground for emerging forms of immigrant exclusion
that were largely without legal precedent or moral justification. The series of legal and political
maneuvers that eventually culminated in Indian exclusion should reveal to us that law-makers
found conceptions of geography and territory to be an effective cover for forms of immigrant
exclusion that were obviously and consensually racially-motivated. The legal and political
ingenuity that led to the creation of the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” powerfully shifted the ground
from exclusion from racialized bodies to the more apparently natural and neutral relation
between peoples and places.

116
Representative John Raker, Congressional Record, House of Representatives (Jan. 16, 1917), 1492-3.
117
The law was applied to exclude a person of Indian descent born in the West Indies; it was applied to prevent
Indians who had established residency in the United States from re-entering the country; while “white” persons
traveling from the barred zone were admitted “illegally.” See Jensen, 161.

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Indian Exclusion 31

But as I have suggested here, there is nothing natural or neutral about the conception
of territorial belonging that securely grounds our contemporary immigration regime. As I have
argued, these were relatively recent inventions, forged in the context of Asian exclusion. A
close reading of the Chinese Exclusion cases reveals, first, that through a selective and
anachronistic reading of international legal treatises, the Supreme Court abandoned the long-
established principle of free-migration to shore up the claim that the right to exclude foreigners
had always been constitutive of national independence and state sovereignty. The Court
characterized the right of territorial exclusion as a primordial right. But the eternal character of
the claim further disguises its novelty. Second, the Chinese Exclusion cases themselves would
invest Congress with the extraordinary authority to exercise exclusive and unchecked control
over immigrant selection and entry.
Thus, I have argued that the arrival of Asian immigrants at the turn of the twentieth
century precipitated a distinctly new formulation of the nation-state. After generations of
relatively unrestricted migration from Europe, the United States began to close its borders.
With the arrival of the new immigrant, the old immigrant became “native.” And it is the
relation between the “native” and his imperiled homeland that the federal government has
continuously enlarged itself to protect.118 The mass migration of Chinese immigrants in
particular led not only to the vast expansion of an emerging immigration bureaucracy, but to
distinctly new conceptions of territorial sovereignty and the correlative right to exclude, which
remain the foundations of our immigration law and policy today. This development, of course,
begins with the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese immigrants, but it achieves a permanence
with the exclusion of Indian immigrants at the turn of the century.
Indeed, the disappearance of Indian exclusion from national memory is the testament
of its persisting legacy. Our forgetting of the decade-long stumble that culminated in the
passage of the “Asiatic Barred Zone” attests to the success with which conceptions of territorial
assignment have become completely naturalized, rendering invisible the complex racial and
economic histories and dynamics that they neutralize and contain. The Chinese Exclusion
Acts now appear to us as monuments of the racial hostility directed at Chinese immigrants at
the turn of the century, but the discrete legal innovations that brought an end to Indian
immigration remain a more permanent, if unremarkable, feature of the contemporary legal
landscape.

118
Consider, for instance, the current administration’s characterization of the recent arrival of refugees from
Central America—mostly women and children: at a recent hearing, as part of her successful opposition to a
bond request by an El Salvadoran mother and her child, who are in detention, argued that the current “mass
migration” has been “recognized as a national security threat by the [attorney general].” The claim is based on
an earlier case, Matter of D-J., 23 I&N Dec. 572 (A.G. 2003), in which the government denied bond to detained
Haitians, calling the immediate “influx” of Haitian immigrants a “threat to the national security.” See John
Stanton, “Government Declares Undocumented Immigrant Child, Mother a ‘National Security Threat,’ at
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/government-declares-undocumented-immigrant-child-mother-a-
na#36qo9qi.

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Part 4. Futures Past: Imagining Other Worlds

A. The Reflections of Immigrant Writers

Exclusion tends to dominate legal and historical narratives about Asian immigration
the United States in the early twentieth century. One problem with such narratives is that a
few acts of Congress come to overshadow the myriad actions, expressions, and aspirations of
the thousands who came to the United States—many of them with more expansive notions of
freedom, democracy, and the American past and future than most Congressmen themselves
could imagine. Another problem with narratives that culminate in legislative exclusion is that
they tend to reify the apparent givenness of the nation-state in its current configuration,
effacing the contingencies that gave rise to its creation. Moreover, such narratives efface the
world setting of migration, rendering discontinuous the complex relations between various
parts of the world. Instead, prevailing narratives of exclusion seem to unfold against the
backdrop of the modern map, in which the world is rendered an inherently fragmented place,
divided into blocks of color designating different countries, in which different peoples are
naturally rooted in their proper place.202 Stasis is the implicit norm, threatened by movement,
though the long history of humankind is not a history of nations but of migration. Narratives
of exclusion thus render the nation-state a relative constant through history, permanent and
immovable, resistant to the creative actions and political agency of individuals and collectivities.
In this Part, I seek to complicate prevailing narratives of Asian exclusion by turning
our attention towards the aspirations of a set of Indian immigrant who lived and wrote in the
United States in the early twentieth century. We might begin by recognizing that migration is
itself a political act, an act of self-determination, and an expression of individual freedom. Lisa
Lowe uses the phrase “immigrant acts” in to designate not only the actions of legislators but
also the political challenge posed by the mere presence of Asian immigrants.203 Indeed,
indifference towards the experience, the aspirations, and expression of individual immigrants
tends to reinforce the assumption that inclusion is the natural or desired conclusion of every
story of migration, that every immigrant comes to the United States “an American in waiting,”
already dreaming the American dream.204 But the journeys made by the first waves of Indian

202
See Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (1997),
33.
203
In her seminal work, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), Lowe writes, “by insisting on
‘immigrant acts’ as contradictions and therefore as dialectical and critical, I also mean to emphasize that while
immigration has been the locus of legal and political restrictions of Asians as the ‘other’ in America,
immigration has simultaneously been the site of the emergence of critical negations of the nation-state for
which those legislations are the expression. If the law is the apparatus that binds and seals the universality of
the political body of the nation, then the ‘immigrant’ produced by the law as margin and threat to that
symbolic whole, is precisely the generative site for the critique of that universality.”
204
See e.g. Hiroshi Motomora, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the
United States; but see Bonnie Honig, Democray and the Foreigner (2001).

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immigrants to the United States unsettles this assumption about immigrants’ desires. By the
time Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, barring further immigration from Asia,
many Indians in the United States began to leave. Among the 20,000 who entered the United
States, several thousand left with the start of the world war, anxious for the opportunity to
return to a free and independent India, where they hoped to participate in the realization of an
alternative dream.205
In the sections that follow, I turn from the legal innovations that ended Indian
immigration to the United States to engage the writings of several Indians who lived in or
traveled to the United States in the early twentieth century—Krishnalal Shridharani, Suhendra
Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, and Dhan Gopal Mukherji. I engage these writers not because
they supplement the public record of Indian exclusion with accounts of personal humiliation.
Many of the writers I examine did suffer varieties of humiliation—ranging from racial insult, to
government surveillance, to physical exclusion at the border—but they were not primarily
concerned with memorializing those experiences. Instead, these writers compel our attention
because they were critical observers and creative thinkers who sought to engage American
audiences in their project of imagining a post-imperial world order. As I explain below, many
of the first students who came to the United States strongly identified with the United States
and especially its declaration of Independence from colonial England. They recommended
that India and other parts of the colonized world should follow the “glorious example” of the
United States—a model postcolony. This initial identification gradually gave way to a
disillusionment, but it also gave rise to alternative visions of freedom that were neither
reducible to nor exhausted by the grant of national sovereignty. Moreover, these observers
began to anticipate that the emerging international system of nation-states—based on a mutual
right of immigrant exclusion—would preserve the asymmetries of imperialism. Thus, they
projected alternative visions of the nation, immigration, and the terms of coexistence in a
postimperial world.

A. The “Glorious Example” of the United States

Many of the first students to come to the United States from India were moved by a
strong sense of identification. Many of them were political exiles, already active in the
movement to end British imperialism. As one student wrote, in an essay entitled, “Why India
Sends Students to America,” published in the Modern Review in 1907, “we came here to imbibe
thoughts from free people and teach the same when we go back to our country to get rid of the
tyranny of the rule of the universal oppressor.”206 The Indian students who wrote for
periodicals like the Calcutta-based Modern Review saw themselves as students of American ideas
and institutions. They eagerly reported their observations so that their conationalists at home
might also learn from America’s example. Even Lala Lajpat Rai, who recognized Canada to be
a part of the same imperial formation he and others resisted, looked far more admiringly upon

205
See Krishnalal Shridharani, My India, My America (1941), 501.
206
Harnam Singh China, Modern Review, 1907.

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the United States. In his Preface to The United States of America, a survey of American history
and political institutions, published in Calcutta in 1916, Rai suggested that “the problems
India faces are those that the United States has faced; India can learn from American
experience.”207
In his memoir, My India, My America, published in New York in 1941, Krishnalal
Shridharani, echoed earlier writers by comparing the movement for Indian Independence with
the American Revolution. As he wrote, “America’s forefathers fought for their country’s
independence. My father fought for ours and so will my son if need be. America’s forefathers
fought against the British and we Indians are fighting against the British now.”208
While the writing of an earlier generation consisted mainly of translations of
“America” for the benefit of Indians at home, Shridharani wrote primarily to rehabilitate the
idea of “India” for waried Americans. Writing after the end of the first world war, the closing
of Canadian and United States borders, and the exodus of radicalized Ghadarites,
Shridharani’s My India, My America, as the title conveys, strained to synthesize and reconcile his
experience of both his native and adoptive homes. His purpose, beyond rehabilitating the
image of India and the nationalist movement, was to project a sympathy and solidarity between
the two nations. By the time of his writing, the Indian nationalist movement had evolved. It
was no longer a fringe movement of stateless radicals dispersed across continents. Now, under
the charismatic leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, with his emphasis on non-violence and self-
reform, and Jawarlal Nehru, with his secular liberal orientation, the movement for national
independence in India had gained in both popular momentum and international prestige.
Comparing the Indian nationalist movement to the American Revolution, Shridharani assured
American readers, “we feel we are doing nothing mischievous. We have the glorious example of
the United States.”209
Shridharani then went on to suggest that the “bonds between America and India are
more numerous than most Americans realize.”210 It is the difficulty in naming and narrating
those “bonds” that I want to focus on here. Shridharani traced these bonds to the American
Revolutionary war: The British General, Charles Cornwallis, after fighting American
revolutionaries in 1777, was dispatched to India, “to try his hand at other rebels;” and the
“British Tea” that Bostoners boycotted was actually produced in India, “under a system that
demanded not only Indian sweat but Indian blood.” He explained that the contemporary
Indian boycott of British-imported cotton and salt were themselves “based on the American
doctrine of ‘no taxation without representation.’”211 Then he went on to suggest that the
“golden chain of coincidence with which history has linked the two great nations,” can be
traced all the way back to America’s “discovery.” As he wrote,

We Hindus take a pardonable pride in the fact that had it not been for us

207
Rai, United States of America (1916), __.
208
Shridharani, 500.
209
Id.
210
Id.
211
Id.

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‘undiscovered’ Indians, America would not have been the same America from
1492 on. It was Columbus’ eagerness to find out what we were doing and
how much money we were making that gave him the idea of sailing the seas in
the first place. He came and went in the New World, thinking all the time
that he was looking at India ‘beyond the Ganges.’212

What is startling about the “pardonable pride” that Shridharani describes—the supposed pride
that Indians take in inciting the journey that led Columbus to “discover” the United States—is
the total elision of that other “Indian,” the indigenous American. Though Indians were not
subject to the same genocidal violence as indigenous Americans, at least within the structure of
the analogy that Shridharani so methodically developed, Indians found themselves in a
position much closer to the indigenous Americans than the descendants of the white-settlers,
with whom Shridharani so readily identified. What Shridharani described as a “chain of
coincidence,” was not so much a coincidence as a mapping error—one that did not slow the
course of imperial conquest, but widened its sphere.

The confusion that underwrites Shridharani’s analogy, comparing Indian

decolonization with the American Revolution is, in part, the confusion between the different
forms of colonialism that evolved within the British Empire. To identify the United States as
an “example” for India or the rest of the colonized world is to confuse the experience of settler
colonists in the New World with the experience of the colonized in Asia and Africa. What
distinguished the settler colonies of the New World from the colonies of Africa and Asia is that
the settler colonies were able to establish sovereignty over indigenous populations—through
genocide and displacement. In the United States, for instance, after “pacifying” the indigenous
population, settler colonists were able to establish political, social, and economic institutions
which they eventually preferred to maintain for their exclusive benefit. Colonialism took a very
different course in Asia and Africa, where colonists were far outnumbered by natives, and thus
remained dependent on the metropolitan authority for military support. Aziz Rana, in his The
Two Faces of American Freedom (2009), argues that the conceptions of sovereignty, freedom, and
equality associated with the founding of the United States were shaped by the very particular
experience of settler colonialism. The abstract principles we tend to associate with the
American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence have come to eclipse our
understanding of the particular historical conditions that gave rise to them.

Returning to Shridharani, then, to identify the United States as an “example” for the
colonized world is to embrace an incomplete and abstract idea of “America” that effaces its own
colonial past—and present. To date the founding of the United States at its Declaration of
Independence from Britain is to disavow earlier and contemporary histories of colonial
settlement, native dispossession and genocide, the enslavement of Africans, and expansion
across the continent and overseas that propelled the United States—with greater force than
pronouncement—to its position as leader of the free world by the early twentieth century.

212
Id. at 499.

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Thus, Shridharani’s and others’ identification of the United States as a model

postcolony is curious for the ways in which it participates in the fallacies of American
exceptionalism—particularly the idea that, in establishing its independence from Britain, the
United States made a radical and permanent break with the European past. The kind of
exchange that Shridharani and other writers imagined themselves to broker between India and
the United States was often framed as one between the world’s “oldest civilization” and its
“newest.” In its brand newness, the United States is imagined to have been born outside and
innocent of European imperialism. Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, an otherwise perceptive
critic of American life, often invoked this overdrawn distinction between imperial Europe and
revolutionary America. In his speeches on nationalism, delivered before American audiences
in 1917, Tagore argued that Europe had exhausted its credibility as a world leader. By contrast,
he told Americans,

Freedom of your history from all unclean entanglements, fits you in your
career of holding the banner of civilization of the future. All the great nations
of Europe have their victims in other parts of the world. This not only
deadens their moral sympathy but also their intellectual sympathy, which is so
necessary for the understanding of the races which are different from one’s
own. Englishmen can never truly understand India… This attitude of apathy
and contempt is natural where the relationship is abnormal and founded
upon national selfishness and pride. But your history has been disinterested…
untrammelled by the grasping miserliness of a past.”213

This view of the United States, which mistakes isolation for benign “disinterest,” strangely
overlooks histories that had hardened American feeling towards its indigenous population; it
takes for granted the forced transfer and subjugation of African slaves; and it ignores the
patterns of exclusion through which the United States, at the time, strained to maintain both
its distinct character and complexion.

B. Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Failed Internationalism

The failure to connect what many African-American intellectuals described as “internal

colonialism” in the United States with the histories of colonialism in Asia and Africa would
define and limit the aspirations of the decolonizing movement.214 Suhendra Bose, for instance,
opens his memoir, Fifteen Years in America (1920), by noting, “It is almost superfluous to
observe that a new epoch is opening for mankind which will emphasize world unity rather than
world division.”215 But almost immediately after announcing the tremendous opening before
mankind, Bose, like others, recommends that

213
Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917), 125-6.
214
See e.g. Robert Blauner, Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt (1969).
215
Suhindra Bose, Fifteen Years in America (1920), iii.

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In this historic epoch, the rising of India, as indeed the rest of the world must
turn to the United States for support and inspiration. Hindustan should
know and study America—the people, the government, the scientific progress,
the educational development, the gospel of energism of the New World.216

Here, the immediate turn from announcing the end of European imperialism to
recommending that the colonized world follow the United States’ example is surprising, I want
to suggest, for the way it collapses the open-endedness of the future into a repetition of an
American past. The “world unity” projected here is one of a proliferation of new nations,
modeled after the example of the United States. This is the modular nationalism of Benedict
Anderson, through which the nation-state is spread from Europe and the United States
throughout the former colonies through study, repetition, and reproduction.217
W.E.B. Du Bois offered a striking counterpoint to this vision. Du Bois, writing
around the same time, regarded the ascendance of the United States to the position of world
leader and political example not with admiration or even resignation but with incredulity and
outrage. As he wrote,

No nation is less fitted for this role. For more than two centuries, America
has marched proudly in the van of human hatred—making bonfires of human
flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions
more than a matter of dislike—rather a great religion, a world-cry… Instead of
standing as a great example as the success of democracy and the possibility of
human brotherhood, America has taken her place as an awful example of the
pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are
concerned.218

Du Bois’ repudiation of the American example was informed by his more critical
understanding of the American past and present; his repudiation of the American example also
freed him to embrace the instability of the present and the possibility of forging an alternative
future. In his essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” addressed to the “Darker People” of the world,
Du Bois saw the world war and the liberatory movements in the colonies as the opening
towards a new set of affiliations and a genuinely egalitarian world order. He wrote, for
instance, “in the awful cataclysms of World War, where from beating, slandering and
murdering us, the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each other, we of Darker People
looked on in mild amaze.”219 Here, a new political configuration, “we of Darker People,” is
conjured not through the shared experience of past suffering, but in the present and
simultaneous affirmation of possibility—amazement. For Du Bois, the world wars brought

216
Id.
217
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983); see also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993).
218
W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1920), 50.
219
Id.

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down old hierarchies of difference and gave urgency to embracing equality in the present. Not
the deferred equality of developmental nationalism, nor the abstract and formal equality of
liberal internationalism, but an equality among strangers in the present, brought together by
their shared witness of world events and affirmation of possibility.
Historians have written of a productive period of third world solidarity, of the kind
anticipated by Du Bois, in the period after the end of imperialism and the passage of civil rights
legislation in the United States. These historians write, for instance, of the friendship between
Paul Robeson and Jawarlal Nehru and of Bayard Rustin’s visit to Gandhi’s ashram. Krishnalal
Shridharani, who I introduced above, is said to have had a “dynamic impact” on the
development of the civil rights movement in the late 1940s in that, while black radicals and
pacifists had already taken notice of Gandhian practices of nonviolent resistance, Shridharani’s
War Without Violence (1939) had become standard reading for members of the pioneering civil
rights organization, Fellowship for Reconciliation.220 Though Shridharani himself became
linked with an extraordinary group of activists who themselves connected the decolonization
movements in Asia and Africa with the campaign for racial equality in the United States, these
were not the “bonds” Shridharani attempted to delineate in his My India, My America. By
identifying his cause not with that of the nation’s minorities, but with the American revolution,
Shridharani and others seemed to forgo the visionary internationalism championed by Du Bois
to embrace as their ideal, independence in the form of nation-statehood modeled by the
United States.

C. Inequality after Independence

By 1934, when his Mother America was published, Suhendra Bose was less admiring of
the American example, less reserved in his criticism of the United States. Over the course of
the first half of the twentieth century, for Bose and perhaps others like him, initial
identification with the United States was strained by three developments: first, the United
States’ ascent as an imperial power with acquisition of territories after the end of the Spanish-
American war; second, the United States’ entry into the world war as ally to imperial Britain;
and third, the unmistakable resemblance in the response to Indian immigration in the United
States and the white-settler dominions of the British Empire.
Before turning to Bose’s reflection on each of these developments, it is worth
observing that his book was itself framed as a rejoinder to the unflattering representation of
Indians popularized by the book Mother India, written by the American author, Katherine
Mayo. In her book, Mayo provided an extended cataloguing of the sexual customs and habits

220
See Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and Indians (2008), __. Bayard Rustin was
among those introduced to Shridharani’s War Without Violence and is often credited with introducing Martin
Luther King, Jr. to the ideas and practices of Ghandian resistance. Rustin organized one of the first Freedom
Rides, in 1947, to test a Supreme Court ruling banning discrimination on interstate travel. Rustin traveled to
India the next year and visited Gandhi’s ashram. He and Martin Luther King, Jr. later founded the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, which was itself committed to practices of non-violent resistance.

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Indian Exclusion 39

of Indians which, in her view, disqualified Indians from self-rule. The book was popular
among American and British readers, and became a unifying cause for Indian nationalists
across three continents.221
Mayo herself was a journalist who, before publishing Mother India, had written books
on criminal policing in New Jersey and American rule in the Philippines.222 Though historians
have since concluded that Mayo collaborated heavily with British pro-imperial propagandists,
Mayo herself insisted that her purpose was domestic.223 She described herself as “an ordinary
American seeking to test facts to lay before her own people”—who, in her view, had become too
caught up in the “India craze” for commercial spiritualism and imports. In Mother India, she
claimed to reveal “the truth about the sex life, child marriages, hygiene, cruelty, religious
customs of one-sixth of the world’s populations.” She argued that India’s sexual culture
rendered Indians unfit to govern themselves; but further cautioned that the unrestricted
circulation of Indian bodies around the world posed a world health risk: “whenever India’s real
public health risk becomes known… all the civilized countries of the world will turn to the
League of Nations and demand protection against her.”224 Mayo developed the trope of the
diseased Indian body—already used to prevent entry of Indians at the border—to describe India
as the site of dangerous cultural and political practices that threatened to infect and destabilize
the world order. Mayo recommended a twinned policy of immigrant exclusion and imperial
containment, drawing a domestic discourse of immigration together with the international
question of decolonization.225
Framed loosely as a rejoinder to Mayo’s rude assessment of Indian culture, Bose
devoted considerable attention to criticizing what he called America’s “self-righteous air.” As
he wrote, “the material success of America, remarkable as it is, cannot be everything.
Moreover, it is being overshadowed by moral and spiritual bankruptcy. Internal disorders,
racial differences, and religious hatreds are on the increase. Tolerance, the truest mark of
democracy and of civilization, is almost lost sight of.”226 Citing the “horrors of lynching” and
the hypocrisy with which a nation of foreigners now detests other foreigners, Bose asserted that
there was “something wrong in the character of the American” and called for moral reflection

221
Gandhi published a response from India, famously dismissing the book as a “drain inspector’s report.”
Sarojini Naidu, feminist, nationalist, poet, and at the time, President of the Indian Nationalist Congress,
toured the United States to restore the image of the nationalist movement in India. Rabindranath Tagore
received a celebrity’s welcome in 1917, when he delivered chastising speeches on American nationalism before
massive crowds in twenty-five cities, but on his second visit, in 1929, after being harrassed by American officials
t the Canadian border, Tagore blamed his humiliation on Mayo’s influence. He said in an interview, “I
suppose you realize that the publication of this book has done more in poisoning our mutual relationship than
anything in recent happenings. It has the same effect as your immigration regulations in creating a barrier.”
Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (1998), 284.
222
Mrinalini Sinha, “Introduction,” Selections from Mother India, (Kali for Women, 1998).
223
Id.
224
Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927), book jacket.
225
Asha Nadkarni, “‘World Menace’: National Reproduction and Public Health in Katherine Mayo’s Mother
India,” American Quarterly, 60 (2008).
226
Bose, 69.

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and renewal.227
Bose’s survey of life in America included critical accounts of its rule in two of its newly
acquired territories—Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He recognized in both places, the
confluence an older form of European territorial imperialism and an emergent form of
American corporate imperialism. He acknowledged, for instance, that Puerto Ricans exercised
“a larger degree of self-government” under American rule than they had under Spanish rule.
But Bose also expressed his sympathy with Puerto Rican nationalists, who told him “We have
gained nothing with American citizenship. We continue to be an exploited colony, a sugar
factory of American bankers.”228
Bose was more critical of American rule in the Philippines, which he related to the
European scramble for Africa. As he explained, government and corporate interests had
aligned themselves to transform the Philippines into a rubber plantation: the United States
consumed more than two-thirds of world’s rubber; most of the world’s rubber was produced in
English and Dutch colonies (most brutally in Congo); by producing its “own” rubber in the
Philippines, the United States could free itself from foreign dependency. As Bose wrote, the
United States had turned the Philippines into a “cattle ranch for the benefit of American
investors.”229 At the same time, he recognized American rule in the Philippines to be consistent
with a broader tradition of preserving “white supremacy in the East,” citing the convergence of
British and American interests in maintaining a naval presence in the Pacific, to rival that of
Japan.
Bose also recognized that the white-settler dominions of the British Empire—Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—had adopted a common response to Indian
immigration. Though he was not directly critical of the United States, which by then had
barred further immigration from all of Asia, his American audiences had to recognize that,
through its exclusion of Asian immigrants, the United States had drawn itself into this Anglo-
Fraternity of settler states. Bose recounted his meeting with the Prime Minister of Australia,
William M. Hughes, on his tour of the United States. Hughes defended, as Bose put it, “the
white Australian policy… that Australia should bar all Asians… and become exclusively a white
man’s land.”230 Before Canada and the United States, Australia had devised its own
immigration laws of apparently general applicability to exclude Asians—in fact, both countries
had looked to Australia in their search for models. In his conversation with Bose, Hughes
defended his country’s notorious literacy test, boasting that the law “scrupulously avoids giving
offense to the national pride of other nations. It is not directed against any particular group or
country.”231 Bose described the law as a farce and deception: “While the law does not
specifically mention any race, color, or country, it excludes all but whites.”232
Prime Minister Hughes, acknowledging the Queen’s guarantee of equality and

227
Id.
228
Id. at 230.
229
Id. at 234.
230
Id. at 282.
231
Id.
232
Id.

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protection to Indian subjects, suggested to Bose that, since India was “an integral part of the
empire,” it had “in theory, the same right to exclude Australians as Australians had to exclude
Indians. The right to exclude is unchallengeable.” Hughes then went on to assert, in language
echoing the Supreme Court’s assertions in the Chinese Exclusion cases:

No right is more clearly inherent in a free nation than to determine who shall
come into their own country. To deny the right would leave nothing of
liberty but the shriveled husk. It is the right of every free man to say who shall
come into his home, what is inherent in the free man must belong to the
nation. A partnership in the free British Commonwealth does not involve
the abrogation of the birthright.233

Bose asked wryly, “will not a mutually exclusive policy knock the bottom out of the empire?”
Moreover, he observed, Australia itself was the unwelcome “intrusion of European civilization
into Asia.”234 Bose’s retort suggested how obviously problematic claims to an “inherent” right
to exclude sounded within the context of British imperialism. But it went further to show that
claims of mutual exclusion—in the context of imperialism but also in the context of the
emerging international legal order—gave the appearance of formal equivalence while masking
real inequalities.
For Bose, it was precisely this sort of dissembling—the simultaneous assurance of
formal equality, mutuality, and reciprocity, on the one hand, and refusal to acknowledge real
inequality, on the other—that had become the focus of his criticism. If, in his earlier writing,
Bose recommended to Indians the example of the American Revolution, by 1935, after reciting
passages of the Declaration of Independence, decried “in reality, America… [is] only a
democracy on paper, a shadow.” His frustrations with the dissimulations of Anglo-American
liberalism are captured by the rhetorical inversions that appear throughout his text:

White man’s burden is an illusion, the brown man’s, a reality.

Yellow peril? It does not exist! The White peril? It s a reality!

And if, in his earlier writing, Bose anticipated that the world war and end of empire would give
rise to a “world unity” among free and independent nations, by 1935, he had grown
pessimistic. He described the League of Nations as a “holding company” for the imperial
nations, and asserted that there would be no meaningful sovereignty, independence, or equality
for peoples in the colonized world without a thorough dismantling of existing forms of imperial
power:

The international justice, at least in respect to the Orient, is as yet a

catchword of the old game of European diplomacy… So long as at the

233
Id. at 344.
234
Id.

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modern conception of the state is tacitly based on the principle of war, is it

not a ghastly futility to assume that maudlin sentimentality, that a few flabby,
pious, poetic, pacifist phrases will right wrongs and save mankind?235

Bose anticipated that, without demilitarization or material redistribution, the emerging

international order would preserve the legacies of imperialism.

D. A World of “No Nations”

The Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, developed the most thorough-going critique
of the emerging nation-state form and called for an ethical revolution, in which the colonized
world—the world of “no nations”—would play a leading role. In 1916, only a few months
before the United States entered the world war, Tagore embarked on an extended tour of
India, Japan, and the United States, delivering lectures on nationalism. Tagore himself never
lived in the United States, but he visited on a few occasions, while his son was enrolled in the
University of Illinois, beginning in 1912. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913—
the first non-European to receive the honor—Tagore had become an immediate celebrity in the
United States, delivering lectures on spiritualism before massive audiences. But in 1917,
alarmed by the nationalist fervor then spreading through India, horrified by the example of
militarized industrialization set by Japan, and having sharpened his criticism of the European
and American political forms being imposed on the rest of the world, Tagore then began
speaking very directly about contemporary world events.
In his view, the modern nation-state was a disastrous form of human organization, one
that Europe evolved partly through the experience of colonial expansion, and one that the
colonized people of the world—those who he addressed as “we of no nations”—should not
emulate. Though, in the present, we often take for granted that the end of colonialism would
give rise to the current system of nation-states, at the time of Tagore’s writing, that unfolding of
world history seemed far from inevitable. He advised Indians that opposition to imperialism
should not express itself in nationalism. Nor was territorial sovereignty, or the creation of a
sovereign nation-state, a solution to the world problem of imperialism. Rather than emulate
foreign forms, Tagore urged his Indian audiences to fashion a post-imperial future out of the
best materials of its own past. And in doing so, rather than consign itself to the repetition of a
European past, India would have a critical role to play in the unfolding of human progress.
Dismissive of both nationalism and the emerging international legal order, Tagore wrote that
neither “the self-idolatry of national worship” nor the “colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism”
is the goal of human history.236 In his view, India had recognized its own task to be that of the
accommodation of social difference, on the one hand, and “the spiritual recognition of unity”
on the other. Thus, with independence immanent, Tagore believed that India had as much to

235
Id. at __.
236
Tagore, Nationalism, 5

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lose as it had to gain. Rather than abandon its history to embrace what he called “the Nation
of the West”—which he described as “organized selfishness”—India should seek to extend its
universalist ideals to lead the world in realizing a more genuinely post-imperial future.
In his lectures, Tagore elaborated an ethical critique of nationalism, a mode of human
organization which he distinguished from what he called “society.” The nation, in his view, was
not an organic community, bound by common language or experience, but an entirely modern
abstraction, invented to promote the narrowing of common interest to political aggrandizement
and economic efficiency. He described the nation as only the “political and economic union of
a people… that aspect a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical
purpose.”237 Nationalism is the “organized self-interest of a whole people, where it is least
human and least spiritual.”238
Society, by contrast, “has no ulterior purpose. It is an end to itself. It is a spontaneous
expression of man as a social being.” Society consisted of the natural capacity for cooperation
that develops out of mutual regard for difference and diversity.239 Society proliferated forms of
belonging and affiliation that were not easily reduced to nationalism. On the contrary, in his
view, nationalism tended to destroy “human personality,” turning individuals into
“automatons.” Nationalism deadened moral instincts. In Tagore’s view, the special sickness of
modern nationalism was not only that it harnessed the base “instincts of self-aggrandizement of
a people,” but elevated it to a virtue—“making the cult of self-seeking exult in its naked
shamelessness.”240 Nationalism dissolved the “living bonds of society” and replaced them with
an attachment to an abstraction, one that would supply both the premise and alibi for the
inhuman treatment of others:

When we are fully human, we cannot fly at one another’s throats; our
instincts of social life, our traditions or moral ideals stand in the way. If you
want me to take to butchering human beings, you must break up that
wholeness of my humanity through some discipline which makes my will
dead, my thoughts numb, my movements automatic, and then from the
dissolution of the complex personal man will come out that abstraction, that
destructive force, which has no relation to human truth, and therefore can
easily be brutal or mechanical.241

Tagore argued that nationalism and the modern nation-state tended to dehumanize
people both on both sides of national boundaries. In pursuing power and efficiency, the
modern nation-state turned life into an “applied science,” and treated people as machinery.

237
Id. at 9
238
Id.
239
For one American legal scholar’s recent engagement with Tagore, see Martha Nussbaum: Why Love Matters
for Justice (2013).
240
Id. at 129.
241
Id.

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 Munshi 44

Writing a few decades later, Hannah Arendt leveled a similar critique of nationalism.242 But
while Tagore was most concerned with mechanization and loss of spiritual life, Arendt was
concerned that nationalism also ground down the differences between individuals by
demanding a high degree of social and cultural conformity. Those who would not assimilate
could be expelled.
Both Tagore and Arendt observed that while the nation-state form demanded
disciplining of those within its borders, it bred more pernicious disdain for others living outside
political boundaries. Arendt observed that the emerging system of nation-states gave rise to an
entirely new form of social abandonment in the condition of statelessness. While expulsions or
the forced migration of individuals or groups of peoples was not entirely new to history, the
general refusal of nation-states to accommodate migrants was. As Arendt wrote,

what is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of

finding a new one. Suddenly, there was no place on earth where migrants
could go without the severest restrictions, no country where they would be
assimilated, no territory where they could found a new community of their
own.243

In other words, with the universalization of the modern form of nation-statehood—based on a

right of exclusion, sanctioned indifference towards non-nationals, and abandonment of
traditions of accommodation and asylum—the emerging international legal order would
continuously produce massive numbers of stateless persons.
While Arendt’s critique of the nation-state focused on the problem of political
abandonment, Tagore’s focused on the problem of economic exploitation. Just as Arendt
argued that emerging system of nation-states would not answer the “minority question” that
troubled Europe, Tagore argued that the emerging system of sovereign nation-states would not
put an end to the forms of economic exploitation unleashed by imperialism. As he explained,
“the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and center of Western nationalism.” The
implicit design of the emerging order of nation-states promoted competition rather than
cooperation. In their pursuit of self-interest and political power, European nation-states had
turned the rest of the world into its killing fields and “hunting grounds.” He compared the
nation-state to “a pack of predatory creatures that must have its victims… [I]t cannot bear to see
its hunting grounds converted into cultivated fields.”244 He asked his Indian audiences why
they should embrace nationalism when “what we see in practice is that every nation that has
prospered [materially] has does so through its career of selfishness either in commercial
adventures or in foreign possessions or both.”245 A world organized around the competing self-
interests of nations was bound to create misery: “interminable economic war is waged… for
greed of wealth and power can never have a limit… They go on breeding jealous and suspicion

242
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1968).
243
Id. at 293.
244
Id. at 21.
245
‘The Nation’ in Modern Review, No. 22, Vol. 22 (1917).

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Indian Exclusion 45

to the end—an end which comes through sudden catastrophic or spiritual rebirth.”246
A critical aspect of Tagore’s critique of the modern nation-state was directed at the role
that national boundaries played in circumscribing our sense of political and ethical obligation.
Colonialism had been characterized by a universalism predicated on difference—through which
colonizing powers asserted the universality of Enlightenment values while organizing their
interests in the colonies according to a very different set of values. To paraphrase one observer,
British colonialism had been characterized by the rule of democracy at home and tyranny
abroad.247 As Tagore observed, the emerging form of nationalism did little to reimagine the
conditions of coexistence. Writing perhaps of the American example, Tagore said of
nationalism, “by this device, the people which loves freedom perpetuates slavery in a large
portion of the world.”248 Tagore argued that a world organized around the self-interests of
nations was bound to perpetuate misery. “[G]reed of wealth and power can never have a limit…
They go on breeding jealousy and suspicion to the end—an end which comes through sudden
catastrophic or spiritual rebirth.”249
Thus, Tagore’s critique of nationalism was coupled with a call, particularly to peoples
of the colonized world to imagine a radically alternative post-imperial future, one that was not
merely a repetition of European pasts. He expressed a deep skepticism about the liberating
potential of Western modernity, reminding his Indian audiences, “we have for over a century
been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot, choked by dust… We agreed to
acknowledge this chariot drive was progress, and that progress was civilization. If we ever
ventured to ask ‘progress towards what… and for whom? It was considered to be peculiarly
Oriental.” Thus, he sought to affirm the history and social life of Indians and others of “no
nations.” Though a powerful figure in the movement to end imperial rule in India, Tagore
parted ways with other leaders, nationalists who he said had been blinded by the “dust storm of
modern history” and narrowed their vision of independence to the borrowed notion of
territorial sovereignty. Tagore argued that independence was not a negative freedom—freedom
from interference—but interdependence, the capacity to pursue social cooperation.250
In Tagore’s view, the goals of human history was the realization of the essential unity
of mankind. Nationalism and the nation-state system impeded the unfolding of an immanent
universality because it was structured in discontinuity. Tagore’s ethical critique of nationalism
included a spatial and geographic dimension. He acknowledged that “during the evolution of
the nation [in Europe], the moral culture of brotherhood was limited by geographic
boundaries, because those boundaries were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of

246
Tagore, Nationalism, at 11-12.
247
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia (1922), available at
https://archive.org/stream/futurismofyounga00sarkrich/futurismofyounga00sarkrich_djvu.txt
248
Tagore, Nationalism at 111.
249
Id. at 11-12.
250
He wrote, “One may imagine that an individual who succeeds in disassociating himself from his fellows
attains real freedom, inasmuch as all ties of relationship implied obligations to others. But we know that, in
the human world only a perfect arrangement interdependence gives rise to freedom. The most individualistic
of human beings who owe no responsibility are the savages who failed to attain their fullness. The history of
the grown of freedom is the history of the perfection of human relationship.”

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 Munshi 46

tradition, divested of the qualities of real obstacles.”251 New forms of travel and
communication were not a problem, as exclusionists perceived, but an opportunity to close
distance and overcome “geographic segregation.” Tagore was generally distrustful of modernity,
but he recognized the peculiar irony and anachronism that characterized notions of territorial
sovereignty: territorial boundaries were resurrected at precisely the moment that technology
promised to liberate us from them.
Tagore urged his audiences in India that India has an important role to play in the
unfolding of world history. Rather than repeat the mistakes of others, India should create a
new future by extending the ideals it evolved in its own past. Specifically, he argued that India
had long developed practices for accommodating difference and diversity from which the world
could now learn. From the beginning of its history, India’s “problem” has been the “race
problem:” very different peoples, with different religions and customs, had invaded India or
sought refuge. As Tagore wrote, “This fact has been and still continues to be the most
important one in our history. [India’s] mission has been like that of a hostess to provide proper
accommodation for numerous guests… This fact has been and still continues to be the most
important one in our history… It is our mission to face it and prove our humanity in dealing
with it in the fullest truth.”252 Tagore’s vision of universal accommodation meant making
room even for British colonists. He insisted that the history of India does not belong to any
one people but “to a process of creation;” “now at last has come the turn of the English to
become true to this history and bring [their] tribute… and we have neither the right nor the
power to exclude this people from the building of the destiny of India.”253 It was a mistake, in
his view, to think of post-colonial independence in terms of territorial sovereignty. “The true
India is an idea and not a mere geographical fact.” As, such, India would realize what he called
its destiny if it learned to accommodate rather than expel even its European colonizers. Thus
Tagore maintained, “I am not for thrusting off Western civilization and becoming segregated in
our independence. Let us have deep association…”254
Tagore celebrated what he thought to be distinct about India (and Hinduism
perhaps)—its tradition of hospitality and integration of diversity—but he also acknowledged the
failings of the caste system. With the caste system, a practice of regulating social difference,
India had made “grave errors in setting up the boundary walls too rigidly, in perpetuating her
classifications of inferiority…” But rather than abandon the experiment of hosting plurality,
India should strive to improve it. And he thought India’s tolerance of difference far preferable
to the intolerance of modern nationalism. Tagore contrasted India’s pluralism with the
monism of European nations and Japan. And he had harsher words for white-settler nations:
“In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the
original population. Even in the present age, this spirit of extermination is making itself
manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who were themselves aliens in the

251
Id. at 101
252
Id. at 4.
253
Id. at 7.
254
Id. at 109.

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Indian Exclusion 47

land they now occupy.”255

Tagore invited his American audiences to participate in the non-national post-imperial
future that he imagined. Like other writers I have introduced in this section, Tagore
recognized a deep affinity between India and the United States. As he wrote, “a parallelism
exists between India and the United States—the parallelism of welding together into one body
various races.” But in making the comparison, Tagore refused the usual nativist projection of
the United States, as a monolithic people, racially and culturally homogeneous. Instead, he
recognized the United States to be, like India, a vast experiment in human integration: “So the
time has come when man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact [of human diversity]…
Man will have to exert all his power of love and clarity of vision to make another great moral
adjustment which will comprehend the whole world of men and not merely fractional groups
of nationality.”256 If its record of imperialism had disqualified Europe from meaningfully
participating in the unfolding of his universal vision, Tagore reserved optimism for the United
States. “If it is given at all to the West to struggle out of these tangles of the lower slopes to the
spiritual summit of humanity, than I cannot but think that it is the special mission of America
to fulfill this hope of God and man. You are the country of expectation, desiring of something
else than what is.”257 Thus, the America he recognized was an America yet to come.

F. Homelessness and Hospitality

Finally, I want to conclude this Part by briefly turning to the writing of Dhan Gopal
Mukherji whose Caste and Outcaste, published in 1923, presents a counterpoint to the writing
of his contemporaries in the United States and introduces altered framework for thinking
about the nation and migration. Unlike the writings of others I have introduced here,
Mukherji’s memoir was far less concerned with reflecting on world events—though he travelled
the same path that many of his contemporaries travelled. After the Partition of Bengal, like
other educated young men, he travelled to Japan and Germany before ending up in Berkeley.
But Mukherji conceived of his journey not as a quest for a new homeland—either real or
conceptual. Instead, he came to think of his journey as a spiritual quest, undertaken in the
tradition of Hindu ascetics who leave home and gradually relinquish material attachments in
their pursuit of personal purification and enlightenment.258 The first half of Mukherji’s
narrative, recalling his childhood in India, is filled with his encounters with the wandering holy
men who would come to his parents’ home, begging for alms. At the age of fourteen, he left
home to join one of them for a period of two years, traveling constantly and depending on the
charity of others. He was especially moved by the words of one ascetic who described life as a
condition of “vagrancy.”
Mukherji must have been well aware that the idea that homelessness was a desirable

255
Id. at 115.
256
Id. at __
257
Id. at __.
258
See Purnima Mankekar and Ahkil Gupta, “Afterword,” Dhan Gopal Mukjerji, Caste and Outcaste (2002),
237.

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material and spiritual condition would have been completely foreign to his American readers,
for whom homelessness was probably understood to be, in every sense, a failure. And yet, this
disorienting regard for homelessness would have challenged his readers—as it should challenge
us—to examine the assumptions that underlie our contemporary thinking about both the
nation and immigration. Mukherji himself was repelled by the nationalism of the Indian
students he encountered on the west coast—his biographers place him the University of
California at Berkeley at the same time as Har Dayal and Taraknath Das, eventual leaders of
the Ghadar movement. Just as the idea of homelessness, in Mukherji’s narrative, reads as a
repudiation of the militant nationalism seizing some of his Indian contemporaries, it also reads
as implicit challenge to the nativism taking hold in the United States at the time—nativism
being a form of attachment that allows us to justify the exclusion of all others.
For Mukherji, the condition of homelessness is also the occasion for hospitality. His
journey, like the journeys of so many travelers, is punctuated by encounters with strangers who
can either exploit his vulnerability or extend their generosity. Mukherji tells a story of how he
became an indebted laborer while traveling by ship from Japan to the west coast of the United
States. Hungry and penniless, he saw members of the ship’s crew distributing what appeared to
be free food. After helping himself and thanking the crew, Mukherji learned that he had
incurred a debt. Unable to pay the debt, he had to sign on for the voyage as a contract
laborer.259 This initial account of immigrant exploitation is repeated over and over: to support
his study, Mukherji took employment as a cook or butler in one home after another, gradually
despairing at his realization that “employers could be immoral.”260
But Mukherji’s narrative also records a tradition of hospitality. He writes, for instance,
of a black woman with whom he worked in a sorority kitchen. When she noticed the holes in
his shoes, she insisted that he borrow money. “She gave me five dollars on the spot and…
drove me out with the warning that unless I came back with a new pair of shoes, I would not
work in her kitchen… Later on when I had the money to pay back, [she] would not take it.”261
This is an illustration of what philosophers describe as hospitality—the act of extending
protection and shelter to another without any expectation of recompense.262 The scene recalls
earlier scenes from Mukherji’s childhood, when he saw his parents extending the same care to
the strangers who arrived at their door. In the resonance between these scenes of hospitality,
then and now, here and there, emerges an alternative norm of reciprocity. Rather than the
reciprocity of mutual exclusion, which has come to define national sovereignty and to limit
each nation’s obligations towards the stranger, Mukherji’s narrative recalls an alternative
tradition of reciprocity in the ethic of hospitality.
Struggling to support himself and impatient with book learning, for a while, Mukherji
dropped out of school altogether to live among vagabonds and anarchists in Berkeley.
Extending his experiments in homelessness, Mukherji drifted towards the margins of society in

259
See Gordon H. Chang, “Introduction,” Dhan Gopal Mukherji, Caste and Outcaste (2002)
260
Id. at 145.
261
Id. at 152.
262
See e.g. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present) (trans. Anne
Dufourmantelle)(2000).

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search of genuine hospitality, surrendering himself entirely to the generosity among strangers—
which he found occasionally. From his vagabond days, he recounted a conversation with a
“famous” anarchist who summed up the difference between Mukherji’s home and adoptive
countries in terms of their different treatment of homelessness: “In your country you have
exalted beggary by making it a religious affair, but in our country we have reduced beggary to
such a crime that even thieves think they are disgraced if they beg.”263 In other words, rather
than receive those in need as incitement to duty, as occasion to practice our capacity for
kindness, we turn his need into a crime.

Part 5. Pasts Present: The Legacies of Indian Exclusion

Thus far, I have argued that the ingenuity that would allow legislators to exclude
immigrants from an invented “Asiatic Barred Zone” also gave rise to a form of territorial
nationalism which remains the settled foundation of immigration law and policy today. As I
have shown, observers at the time, including leaders of the decolonization movement,
recognized the emerging norm of immigrant exclusion to extend the legacies of imperial
expansion—allowing European empire-states and their white-settler progeny to preserve the
spoils of an economic world system that redounded primarily to their own advantage. In the
first half of the twentieth century, as European empire-states finally abandoned their claim to
their colonial possessions, they also generalized norms of territorial nationalism that would
keep colonial inhabitants in their place. When colonized peoples were finally granted
independence, in the form of territorial sovereignty, they were also denied that one
foundational freedom—the freedom of movement.264 And rather than genuine equality,
decolonization yielded the contemporary international system of nation-states, in which formal
equality consisted in the mutual right to exclude—a right that would allow the richest countries
to exclude others from their territory, and consign the world’s poorest to live out their lives in
the countries of birth.
In the sections that follow, I offer a brief overview of significant changes in U.S.
Immigration law since 1917. Over the past century, U.S. Immigration law has undergone
significant changes—contracting and expanding avenues for legal immigration, which
continuously refining mechanisms of immigrant selection—but the underlying assumption that
national sovereignty includes the right to exclude others remains entrenched and largely
unchallenged. Even as the current immigration regime has grown infinitely more complex,
nationality or a person’s place of birth plays an outsized role in determining whether he or she
will be able to enter the country legally.
I conclude by suggesting that the history of Indian exclusion from the United States
forces us to critically reexamine the norm of territorial exclusion that grounds our

263
Mukherji, 158.
264
See Joseph Carens, “Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective,” in Free Movement: Ethical
Issues in the Migration of People and Money (eds. Brian Barry and Robert E. Goodin) (1992).

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 Munshi 50

contemporary immigration law and policy, as well as the historical circumstances and
international conditions that gave rise to it. Katherine Mayo warned that the liberation of
colonized peoples would pose a “menace” to the civilized “world”—national boundaries were
the solution. If we recognize that the globalization of national boundaries consigns people to
poverty, or conditions of statelessness, or otherwise thwarts aspirations to live freely or better
oneself, then we ought to confront ourselves with the question anew: who do we admit or deny
the freedom to live among us, and on what grounds?

A. The Generalization of Territorially-Defined Restriction

The Asiatic Barred Zone Act introduced a territorial designation to mask a form of
racial exclusion. Since 1917, Congress would expand the practice of regulating immigration on
the basis of an immigrant’s place of birth, eventually universalizing the practice of sorting
immigrants primarily in terms of the nationality or country of origin.
The practice was first extended to Europe in 1921, with the passage of the Emergency
Quota Act. That law established the first numerical restriction on overall immigration to the
United States, marking an end of open migration from Europe.265 It also restricted
immigration, for the first time, on the basis of national origin. The law restricted the total
number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States, to roughly 355,000 per year, and
established a quota for immigration from each European country at 3 percent of the number of
foreign-born persons from that country recorded in the 1910 census. The “emergency” that the
law was enacted to address was the anticipated arrival of “hordes” of impoverished peoples
fleeing Europe after the first world war, including hundreds of thousands of “Polish subjects of
the Hebrew race,” Italians “small in stature and low in intelligence,” and others susceptible to
socialist ideas.266
The numerical restrictions and national-origins quota, introduced as an emergency
measure, became a permanent feature of the immigration system in 1924, with the passage of
the Johnson-Reed Act.267 That law extended the territorial-classification of peoples, introduced
by the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, by dividing the world into three parts—Europe, Asia, and the
Western Hemisphere—migration from each of which would be regulated by a different set of
rules. The Johnson-Reed Act retained the numerical limits and quotas on European
immigration implemented a few years earlier, but further restricted the total number of
immigrants allowed from Europe to 155,000 per year, and adjusted the national origins
formula to admit 2 percent per country, based on the 1890 census. The national origins
formula was pegged to the 1890 census to preserve the ethnic make-up of European
immigration to the before greater numbers of eastern and southern Europeans began to arrive.
The law continued to exclude Asian immigrants by barring from entry any “alien ineligible to

265
Immigration Act, H.R. 4075; Pub.L. 67-5; 42 Stat. 5. (May 21, 1921).
266
See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004), 20, citing
“Temporary Suspension of Immigrants,” House Report 1109, 66th Congress, 3d Session (Washington, DC:
GPO: 1920), appendix A.
267
Immigration Act (May 26, 1924).

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citizenship.”268 Finally, the law placed no numerical limits or quotas on immigration from
Mexico, Canada, or anywhere else within the Americas. The restriction of immigration from
Europe and Asia left a demand for agricultural labor in California; Mexican workers were
better tolerated there, and in Texas, because natives in those states did not expect Mexicans to
settle permanently. Moreover, Congressmen generally opposed restricting immigration for
foreign policy reasons, as they were vaguely committed to Pan-Americanism and averse to
drawing distinctions between their southern and northern neighbors.269
While the geographically-based restrictive policies of the Johnson-Reed Act would
remain in place until the 1950s, the intervening years—world war, decolonization, and shifts in
American foreign policy—brought an incremental dismantling of Asian Exclusion. Congress
lifted the ban on Chinese immigration and naturalization in 1943, when China became an
official ally of the United States during the second world war. But it also established a quota of
105 immigrants per year—substantially lower than that imposed on immigration from European
countries.270 Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Indians living in the United States campaigned to
reverse policies restricting Indian immigration and naturalization, but Congress remained
steadfast. Only in 1946, after the second world war had ended and when thousands of
American soldiers, still stationed in British India, were met with disillusioned protestors, did
Congress begin to relax its stance. In an attempt to diffuse the antagonism, Congress passed
the Luce-Celler Act, which lifted the general bar against immigration from India and the
Philippines, but allowed only a nominal 100 persons to immigrate from each country in each
year. The Act came on the eve of both countries’ independence from colonial rule, affirming
what most Indians nationalists had expected, that the rights of Indian nationals abroad would
only begin to gain the respect of other countries after India gained national independence.271
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 consolidated earlier, piecemeal
legislation into a comprehensive immigration statute. The McCarran-Walter Act, as it was
called, abolished the racial bar against “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” but retained the
national origins quota, for immigration from Europe, and established a more restrictive quota

268
Section 13 of the Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and, after the
Civil War, persons of “African nativity or descent.” In a pair of cases decided in 1922 and 1923, the Supreme
Court held that immigrants from Japan and India were not eligible for naturalization. Immigrants from
Mexico were not excluded on grounds of racial ineligibility for citizenship, as they had been designated “white”
under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848). If in earlier years, at least some Congressmen,
the status of Indian immigrants was confounded by their citizenship within the British empire, the Johnson-
Reed Act expressly provided that “for purposes of this Act, nationality shall be determined by the country of
birth,” treating as separate the colonies and dependencies of imperial nations.
269
See Patrick D. Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over Whiteness,
(2012), 55
270
Magnuson Act, __.
271
See Jensen, 279. Indeed, the vulnerability of peoples who could not claim a national government of their
own, as Arendt argued, was evidenced not only by the million living in refugee camps at the end of the world
wars but that they were refused entry almost anywhere they turned. During the second world war, the United
States did very little to assist refugees fleeing fascist violence in Europe. See Arendt, 272. President Franklin
D. Roosevelt granted special non-quota admission to prominent persons; after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the
Roosevelt administration granted visa extensions to the 15,000 Jewish refugees and exiles already present in the
United Stats, but did nothing to open its doors for those wishing to flee Europe. See Ngai, 235.

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for immigrants from a designated “Asia Pacific Triangle.” The quota for immigrants from
countries in Asia retained a lingering racialism in that, for Asians, nationality was not defined
by place of birth or current nationality, but ancestry—such that a person of Chinese ancestry
born in Mexico was considered Chinese for purposes of administering the quota.272
While the McCarran-Walter act abolished the racial bar to immigration, it introduced
a new mechanism for sorting between more or less desirable immigrants. The law narrowed
the immigrant stream within each country quota by introducing a system of “preference”
categories, which required that one half of each country’s quota be reserved for persons with
high-valued skills. The introduction of occupational preference categories was significant in
that, as one observer put it, “[T]he country could select the alien instead of the alien selecting
the country.”273 Thus, as immigration policy started to become less sensitive to racial
differences, it became more discriminating with respect to perceived “value,” recognized in
narrowly economic terms. Thus the law also reoriented the nationalism that had guided
immigration law and policy from a cultural nationalism—aimed primarily at preserving a
particular racial or ethnic composition—towards an economic nationalism—aimed at
maximizing national wealth and efficiency, in part, by absorbing the world’s most high-valued
workers.
The law was most controversial, however, for introducing another form of
discrimination—against “subversives.” A product of the Cold War, the law expanded the power
of the federal government to exclude, deport, and detain aliens whose views threatened
national security. Congress passed the law over the veto of President Harry S. Truman, but the
law remained controversial—mainly for its preservation of the national origins quota—and
galvanized a broad coalition of liberals, ethnic minorities, and employer groups who pressed for
immigration reform.
Finally, in 1965, Congress passed a set of reforms which would provide the foundation
for the immigration policies that remain in effect today. The Immigration Act of 1965, also
called the Hart-Celler Act, raised the annual limit on overall immigration, abolished the
national origins formula, and revised preference categories to ease entry for certain immediate
family members. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at a ceremony
staged at the foot of the statue of liberty, announcing that, with the abolition of the national
origins quota, the law “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American
Nation.”274 He explained that the new law “says simply that from this day forth, those wishing
to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close
relationship to those already here.”275
The Hart-Celler Act replaced the national origins quota with a new quota system,
marking a general shift towards an immigration policy based on the principle of formal equality
among nation-states. The law did retain, however, the hemispheric approach to restricting
immigration. The law placed an overall limit of 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere, with a

272
See Immigration Act, Section __.
273
Cited in Ngai, __.
274
Cited in Ngai, 259.
275
Id.

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limit of 20,000 from each country. And it brought an end to the policy of relatively
unrestricted immigration from within the Americas by imposing an overall limit of 120,000
from within the Western Hemisphere, without country limits. In 1976, the law was amended
to extend the 20,000 per-county limit to the Western Hemisphere.
The new regime, though based on a principle of formal equality among foreign
countries, would affect immigration from different parts of the world differently, generally
promoting greater inclusion of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, while severely
restricting immigration from the Western Hemisphere. The abolition of the national origins
formula, which had long been used to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe,
finally allowed immigrants from all European countries to enter in equal numbers.276
The law also created greater opportunities for migration from Asia and Africa. Of
course, since 1965, the number of Asians entering the country has grown dramatically. The
population of Asian Americans has grown from less than 1.2 million in 1965 to 10.9 million in
2000.277 A significant portion of new Asian immigrants entered under the occupational
preference categories. In 1969, immigrants entering as professionals comprised 45 percent of
all immigrants from India, 42 percent of immigrants from the Philippines, 23 percent of
immigrants from South Korea, and 21 percent of immigrants from China. In successive years,
the rate of occupational migrants has fallen, as the rate of family migration has increased. By
1971, the number of Asians immigrating to the United States exceeded the number of
Europeans, raising alarm among at least some natives. In response to some of these concerns,
in 1990, Congress passed a law introducing the diversity lottery program, through which
55,000 immigrant visas would be made available annually to immigrants from countries
“adversely affected” by the existing immigration scheme—countries sending fewer than 50,000
immigrants in the past five years.278 The law was initially intended to favor immigrants from
Ireland and Italy, but has increasingly redounded to the benefit of immigrants from African
countries.279
While opening the door to new immigration, especially from Asia, the Hart-Celler Act
had an immediately especially destructive impact on existing patterns of immigration from
Latin America, and especially Mexico. The new restriction on immigration from within the
Western Hemisphere, while it established a formal equality between the two halves of the
globe, as a practical matter, it introduced restrictions on immigration from Mexico, suddenly
transforming long established patterns of mutually beneficial exchange into the contemporary
crisis of “illegal immigration.” The 1965 law ended the Bracero program, which had allowed

276
Though, as some restrictionists observed, the law promoted a ‘naturally-operating national origins system’
insofar as preference categories favored the admission of immediate relatives of those already present; the
remaining preference categories were highly selective.
277
See Aristide Zolberg, A Nation By Design (2006), __.
278
For this year’s lottery, natives of the following high-sending countries are ineligible: Bangladesh, Brazil,
Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica,
Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its
dependent territories, and Vietnam. See Instructions for the 2015 Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV-
2015)". U.S. Department of State.
279
Id.

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 Munshi 54

tens of thousands of workers to enter the country every year—as many as 400,000 in the late
1950s. The number of temporary work permits available to Mexican migrants dropped to less
than 8,000 in 1967 and to less than 2,000 a decade later. Yet, demand for Mexican labor in
the United States remained unabated. Tens of thousands of migrants continued to enter (but
also to leave) the country without authorization. Border apprehensions began to rise
immediately.
* * *
The Immigration Act of 1965 has been broadly heralded as one of the great
achievements of the civil rights era. Like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the
Immigration Act brought an end to the least tolerable forms of racial and ethnic
discrimination. Immediately after its passage, dozens of ethnic, religious, and labor
organizations congratulated President Lyndon Johnson for finally abolishing the long-
controversial national origins quota, and commended his administration for “finally
establishing an immigration policy consistent with our national philosophy that all men are
entitled to equal opportunity regardless of race or place of birth.”280 But as I have begun to
show, the current immigration regime, even as it has grown more flexible and more complex,
does not yet extend equality of opportunity to all men and women regardless of their place of
birth. On the contrary, current immigration law and policy, although based on the principle of
formal equality among nation-states, continues to participate in the reproduction of global
inequalities. In the remaining pages, I cannot provide an exhaustive account of the role
immigration laws play in reproducing inequality. Instead, I will limit myself to noting just
some of the ways in which place of birth continue to delimit equality of opportunity within our
current immigration law.
First, the preservation of numerical limits on overall immigration as well as limits on
immigration from each country tends to skew the immigrant selection process to favor persons
from low-sending countries over persons from high-sending countries. The Immigration Act of
1990 substantially raised the numerical limits on overall immigration, and introduced
flexibilities to avoid separation of immediate family members, but retains per-country limits on
family-sponsored and employment-based immigration. Countries with high immigration rates
become “oversubscribed” if the number of otherwise qualified applicants exceeds the number
allocated to each country. At present, he countries with the longest waiting lists for family-
sponsored and employment-based visas are Mexico, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, China,
and the Dominican Republic.281
The diversity lottery program provides an important route of access to immigrants who
do not have established familial ties in the United States or cannot satisfy occupational
preferences. But, by design, the diversity lottery program proves an additional route of access

280
Cited in Ngai, 260.
281
For instance, anyone from Mexico or the Philippines seeking an F4 visa, designated for brothers and sisters
of adult U.S. citizens, is likely to wait roughly 18 or 23 years, respectively. Skilled workers and professionals
from India and China seeking to enter with employment-visas are likely to wait 11 years. See Visa Bulletin,
United States Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, July 2014 at
http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/bulletin/2014/visa-bulletin-for-june-2014.html

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only to immigrants from low-sending countries. Immigrants from countries that have sent
more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years are ineligible.282
As a practical matter, then, an individual without ties to the United States, or a set of desirable
skills may benefit from the diversity lottery program if he or she was born in Ukraine, but not
Haiti. Moreover, because diversity visas are distributed among six geographic regions,
immigrants from certain parts of the world may fare better in the annual lottery than
immigrants from other regions. In 2014, the vast majority of diversity visas were allocated to
immigrants from Africa and Europe; smaller portions were allocated to immigrants from the
higher-sending regions of Asia, Oceania, South American, and the Caribbean.283
Second, occupational preferences obviously discriminate between the rich and the
poor within each country. As such, occupational preferences tend to intensify global inequality
by allowing already rich states to absorb the few most-educated and high-skilled individuals
from across the world, while excluding masses of the world’s poor. That our selection policies
should favor those who are already best endowed now seems beyond controversy. That we
should select those who will advance our economic self-interest is expressed in recently
proposed immigration reforms, including the DREAM Act and STEM Jobs Act. In 1965,
President Johnson announced that the immigration policy was consistent with the tradition
that “values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.”284 But the elitism that
we now mistake for tradition was precisely what made the literacy test, as mechanism for
immigrant selection, so controversial in the early twentieth century.285 Through the early
twentieth century, immigration to the United States from Europe consisted overwhelmingly of
low-skilled workers.
Finally, since the 1980s, the United States has made refugee resettlement a regular
feature of its immigration law, but the number refugees admitted each is also limited by
region.286 Under the terms of the Refugee Act of 1980, each year, the President, in consultation
with Congress, determines the numerical ceiling for refugee admissions. The total limit is
further broken down into limits for each region.287 At present, an estimated 51 million

282
Id.
283
Under the NACARA program, 5,000 up to 5,000 diversity visas are allocated to a defined class of asylum
seekers from Central America and former countries of the Soviet bloc.
284
Cited in Ngai, 259.
285
For instance, opposing the proposed literacy test, one Representative maintained “it is against the borad
spirit which has always been opposed to class distinctions,” Representative Calder, Congressional Record,
House of Representatives (Dec. 17, 1912), 813; another said, “I believe it unAmerican and an unjust restriction
upon the worthy poor,” Representative Moore, Congressional Record, House of Representatives (Jan. 30,
1913) 2239.
286
In 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act to allow certain refugees fleeing Europe to resettle in
the United States. That law expired in 1952. The following year, Congress passed the Refugee Relief Act,
which provided 205,000 nonquota visas for immigrants fleeing communist countries. The 1980 Refugee Act
broadened the definition of refugees to accord with the international definition in the Convention and
Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees.
287
For Fiscal Year 2013, the President set the worldwide refugee ceiling at 70,000, and the regional allocation
was as follows: 31,000 from Near East/South Asia; 17,000 from East Asia; 12,000 from Africa; 5,000 from
Latin America/Caribbean; 2,000 from Europe and Central Asia; with an unallocated reserve of 3,000. See Visa
Bulletin, United States Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, July 2014.

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 Munshi 56

individuals have been displaced by conflict, violence, or persecution. Roughly 18 million are
refugees who have crossed international borders; another 33 million are internally displaced,
within the borders of their home countries. In 2013, roughly 11 million people were newly
displaced—the highest number on record. More than half of the newly displaced came from
three countries—Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia.288 The countries currently hosting the
greatest number of refugees are Pakistan (1.62 million), Iran (857,000), and Lebanon
(856,500). The overwhelming majority of refugees—eighty-five percent—worldwide are currently
hosted by poor countries.289 In 2013, the United States resettled the highest number of
refugees, roughly 66,200, followed by Australia, Canada, and Sweden.290 But of the world’s
millions of refugees, fewer than 100,000 were resettled. In the United States, public discussion
about our obligations to relieve the suffering and homelessness of millions with whom we share
the planet too seldom moves beyond the regional redistribution of small numbers.

B. Imagining Otherwise

As critics anticipated over a hundred years ago, the closing of national boundaries has
played a significant role in preserving and even intensifying inequalities between rich and poor
countries. This inequality, in turn, has made the pressure to move across national boundaries
greater than any other time in human history. But since the end of formal empire, rather than
lead the world in imagining more equitable terms of coexistence and interdependence, the
United States has devoted more and more of its resources to fortifying its border. If, as I have
argued, the history of Indian exclusion from the United States forces us to critically reexamine
the norm of territorial exclusion that grounds our contemporary immigration law and policy,
then, in this final section, I want to conclude by gesturing towards an alternative framework to
guide our immigration law and policy—one that is informed both by the history that gave rise to
the present as well as the aspirations of an earlier generation of critics.
In the first instance, we should abandon the notion that the world is composed of
nation-states that are free and equal in their independence, and, as Tagore suggested, recognize
that we are better served if we recognize freedom to inhere in our interdependence and in our
mutual longing and capacity to create conditions for cooperation. To be clear, by identifying
interdependence rather than independence as our shared condition, I am not offering a
metaphysical observation (neither was Tagore, I believe), but a plainly material observation: we
share the earth and its limited resources; that peoples across nations are interdependent is
evidenced by the simple fact that, even as the rich close their borders, the poor continue to

288
Rougly 2.56 million of the newly displaced have crom Afghanistan; 2.47 million, from Syria; and 1.12
million, from Somalia. See UNHCR Report, Global Trends 2013, at http://www.unhcr.org/5399a14f9.html.
289
Pakistan currently hosts roughly 1.62 million refugees; Iran, 857,000 refugees; and Lebanon, 856,500. See
id.
290
In 2013 Australia resettled 13,200 refugees but, as of December 2013, was also holding more than 6,000
refugrees in closed detention centers. Canada resettled 12,000 refugees; Sweden, 1,900 refugees.
See id; see also Refugee Week (Australia), Statistics at a Glance,
http://www.refugeeweek.org.au/resources/stats.php

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come.
Nearly every economist who writes on the subject recognizes that the primary force
currently driving people across national boundaries is the widening income disparity between
rich and poor countries. At the turn of the twentieth century, a person born in Ireland could
expect to double his income by moving to the United States; a person born in Sweden could
quadruple his income by moving.291 The disparity in wages between sending and receiving
countries today is far greater than it was during the period of unrestricted migration. The
average person in Guatemala could earn six times more in the United States for doing the same
work that he would at home. Many others in the world could earn 10 times more by moving to
the United States. Where the gap in wages is both enormous and spreading, the pressures to
move are, Lant Pritchett puts it, “irresistible.”292 Citing the fundamental economic principle
that “differences create trade,” economists recognize other disparities, including demographic
differences, that will only continue to intensify pressures on migration.293 Since the second
world war, real and political barriers to the flow of capital, goods, and ideas have largely been
dropped but barriers against the flow of labor migrants (as well as refugees) have become more
intensely fortified.
Millions of people living in poorer countries would move to better themselves, but
they do not because they are prevented from doing so. While I have emphasized that
territorially-based restrictions on immigration emerged as a ‘naturalized’ conception, its
impossible to ignore that, in the present, the territorial boundaries of rich countries are
increasingly maintained by force. The United States currently spends $18 billion a year on
border enforcement—more money than it spends on all other federal criminal law agencies
combined.294 Since the mid-1990s, the United States has invested billions in building and
maintaining a series of fences between the United States and Mexico, in an effort to stem the
flow of unauthorized migrants. While the number of border apprehensions has fallen since the
United States began fortifying its border, most observers attribute the decrease to economic
forces rather than intensified enforcement. And while fences, agents, and drones do little to
address the economic forces that push people across borders, they make the journey longer and
harder, introducing more hazard to those migrants who are most desperate to cross. Since
1995, U.S. Border Patrol has recovered the bodies of nearly 6,000 people who have died trying

291
Lant Pritchett, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility (2006).
292
Id. 14-27.
293
For instance, a second irresistible force compelling migration, now more than ever, is the continued demand
for low-skill labor in rich countries. Though, within immigration debates, considerably more attention is
devoted to our supposed need to attract high-skilled workers, the Department of Labor identifies the
occupational categories with the largest absolute projected growth to be caregivers, salespersons, food service
workers, secretaries, and janitors—all of which require less skill. Third, economists anticipate that demographic
shifts in rich and poor countries will further increase demand for low-skilled labor: birth-rates in rich countries,
especially Japan and Europe, have fallen much faster than those in poorer neighboring countries. The number
people of working age in Italy, for example, is forecast to shrink from 39 million to 26 million in the next forty
years, while the number of working-age people in Egypt will expand from 40 million to 83 million. See
Pritchett, 32.
294
Migration Policy Institute, Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable
Machinery (2013).

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to cross the border. And yet, people continue to make the journey. One critic has argued,
“even if, at a huge cost, the U.S. built a wall along its vast border with Mexico, deployed an
armada to patrol its shores, searched every arriving vehicle and vessel, denied visas altogether to
people from developing countries, and enforced stringent internal checks on people’s right to
remain here, migrants would get through.” And that is because people will move, even at the
risk of personal loss, if moving would allow them to meaningfully improve their lives.
Thus, rather than exhaust any more resources, creativity, or moral credibility on
fortifying the artifice of independence, the United States would do better to reorient its
immigration policies to acknowledge our interdependence and to address the shared
circumstances that create pressures on migration, particularly labor migration. Rather than
pursue immigrant selection policies that are guided by a narrowed conception of economic self-
interest, we might pursue immigration policies that advance mutual interest. For instance,
rather than give preference to a relatively small number of high-skilled workers, economists
suggest that by admitting a greater number of low-skilled workers, the United States would be
no worse off while improving conditions for a greater number of poor people in poor
countries. These economists cite the history of low-skilled migration from Europe to the
United States in the early twentieth century for their example.295 Some economists estimate
that unrestricted migration would double global income.296 But short of opening borders, even
a marginal relaxation of border restrictions would bring greater benefit to migrants and their
sending-countries. A recent World Bank study estimates that an expansion of world labor
mobility by 3 percent, or 16 million people, would result in a flow of $300 billion to poor
countries—more than four times the amount that rich states transfer to poor countries in the
form of official development assistance.297 Moreover, the residents of rich countries would also
benefit by an estimated $50 billion.
An implicit set of corollaries, of course, is that we might abandon the notion that our
political ethical obligations are circumscribed by national borders to embrace a broader ethic of
hospitality. Here, too, the proposition is not merely philosophical but rooted in our shared
inheritance. As one contemporary writer puts it,

the immigrant is not someone who turns up out of the blue, but… someone
set by History on the path that leads to my house (my country), to a place
where he will be received as a guest. He’s not an adventurer, a vagabond, or a
potential usurper. The whole significance of immigration lies in the fact that
the immigrant is expected. The Other is on his way.298

295
Philippe Legrain cites a study showing that the migration of one in six Swedes between 1870 to 1910
“relieved pressure on the land, drove up the productivity and wages of those who remained, and helped
catapult Sweden from grinding rural poverty to prosperity within 50 years.”
296
See e.g. Michael Clemens, Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk,” Center for
Global Development, Working Paper (2011), available at:
http://www.cgdev.org/files/1425376_file_Clemens_Economics_and_Emigration_FINAL.pdf
297
See Pritchett, 3.
298
Tahar Ben Jalloun, French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants (trans. Barbara Bray) (1999),
6.

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Conclusion

I have argued in this Article that the legislative and political maneuvers that
culminated in the exclusion of Indian immigrants from the United States in the early twentieth
century gave rise to a distinctly modern conception of territorial nationalism, one that would
provide justification for what, at the time, seemed an unprecedented restriction on the freedom
of movement and an embarrassing departure from venerated tradition. The disappearance of
the history of Indian Exclusion attests to its persisting legacy—while Chinese Exclusion now
appears to us an ugly monument to nativism at the turn of the century, the discrete legal
innovations that brought an end to Indian immigration remain a permanent, if unremarkable
feature of our legal landscape. Our blindness to the legacies of Indian exclusion is itself an
effect of the nationalist framework of exceptionalism through which we continue to address
questions about immigration. By expanding our framework of analysis, beyond the convention
of national borders, we begin to more fully appreciate the international circumstances that gave
rise to those same borders, namely the European world war and decolonization movements of
Asia and Africa. Finally, I have offered the relections of an earlier generation of Indian
immigrants in the United States to remind ourselves both of the histories that have given rise
to our present world and to project an alternative vision of coexistence and cooperation in a
post-imperial world.

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