Geary Act - Reaction

Reaction

Within a few months of the implementing the Act, Chinese in the U.S. began organizing to resist the enforcement of the law. The heads of the Six Companies, the San Francisco branch of The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, proclaimed that the Chinese in the U.S. ought not register, but rather contribute to a fund for hiring of lawyers to fight the law on the ground of unconstitutionality. The effort was overwhelmingly successful (only 3,169 of the estimated 110,000 Chinese in the country had registered by the April 1893 deadline), yet newspaper coverage of the protest reported Chinese as being slaves to doing whatever The Six Companies told them to do.

Resistance came from outside the West of the country as well. The Chinese Equal Rights League in New York and Brooklyn pleaded that its members to help their fellow countrymen, and enrolled some 150 English-speaking Chinese merchants and professionals in New York. Its leaders argued that by making Chinese immigrants pay the “illegal costs and expenses” of enforcing the law, the bill imposed taxation without representation. The Chinese Equal Rights League was able to gain much support from whites on the East Coast, as on September 22, 1892, more than one thousand U.S. citizens joined some two hundred Chinese merchants and laborers at Cooper Union in Manhattan to protest the Geary Act.

Several Chinese that refused to register for their certificate of residence brought suit that, upon appeal, was brought before the Supreme Court in Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Among some of the questions brought before the Court was whether the Act violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China, whether hard labor and deportation constituted cruel and unusual punishment and thus violated the Eighth Amendment, whether the Act violated Fifth and Sixth Amendments protections by permitting imprisonment with hard labor without prior indictment or jury trial, whether the act violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against the taking of property or liberty without due process, among other issues. The Court’s 5 to 3 decision, delivered by Justice Horace Gray, ruled that the if the U.S. as a sovereign nation had the power to exclude any person or any race it wished, it also must be able to deport any person or race it wished, and thus upheld the Geary Act.

Upon hearing the decision, the Chinese Consulate, the Six Companies, and many Chinese in the U.S. stated that they refused to pay their way back to China if deported, thus leaving the U.S. government financially responsible. The Chinese Government also informed the U.S. that if it acted on the law, it would end all relations – diplomatic and economic – with the U.S. Additionally, since Congress did not write any provisions granting money to pay for, and thus enforce, deportations, the Act as was rendered moot until it was amended through the McCreary amendment (named after the senator who proposed it) to appease the Chinese government, but did so only by providing an additional six months for Chinese to register for the residency certificates. Even with the amendment, Congress only appropriated several hundred thousand dollars to the law’s enforcement.