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The final act of February 5, 1917, omitted all reference to aliens ineligible to citizenship and enacted the "Barred zone" clause which excludes aliens within certain degrees of latitude and longitude on continental Asia, as well as from the islands of southern Asia. The act is so drawn as not to apply either to China or Japan, immigration from which is regulated by other means, but to India, Siam, Indo-China, Afghanistan, and parts of Russian Turkestan and Arabia. But it does not apply to Turkey, Persia, Siberia, and a part of Arabia.1

The most vigorous protest against discrimination by Japan was made on April 10, 1924, by Ambassador Hanihara in his note to Secretary of State Hughes.2

THE UNITED STATES AND DISCRIMINATION

The United States has also stood for the principle of nondiscrimination, as far as its own interests are concerned, not only in commerce as evidenced by its insistence on the open door policy, but also in matters of race and nationality.

In 1882 Spain passed a law prohibiting the landing of foreign negroes in Cuba, unless on condition of depositing $1,000. Mr. Frelinghuysen stated that if any such requirement would be exacted against an American citizen in Cuba, the State Department would remonstrate against it "as imposing a race discrimination not foreseen by treaty, or recognizable under the amended Constitution." When Russia withheld a certain license from an American Jew in 1873, Mr. Fish, Secretary of State, declared that this action "on account, as is understood, of his being a Hebrew of foreign birth," seemed to be in direct violation of the treaty, the purpose of which was to place all citizens of the United States in Russia "on the same footing as native Russians."

When the expulsion of two American Jews from Palestine was reported in 1885, Mr. Bayard, Secretary of State, declared that friendship and comity entitled the United States "to ask and expect that no race or class distinction shall be made as

139 Stat., 876.

2Cf. Appendix IX.

J. B. Moore, Digest of International Law, IV, pp. 109, 113.

regards American citizens abroad, and this Government cannot acquiesce in any such proscriptive measures which compel its citizens to abandon Turkey solely on account of their religious proclivities."

A more vigorous protest still was made by John Hay, Secretary of State of the United States, in 1902, against discriminatory treatment of Jews in Rumania. In a note of August 11, he declared "The political disabilities of the Jews in Rumania, their exclusion from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their civil rights, involving as they do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present purpose as the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a bread winner in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are prohibited from owning land or even from cultivating it as common laborers. . . .'

As a result of the agitation over the discriminatory treatment of Jews by Russia, the House of Representatives adopted the following resolution on December 13, 1911, by a vote of 301-1 (87 not voting):

House Joint Resolution 166, providing for the termination of the treaty of 1832 between the United States and Russia.

Resolved, etc., that the people of the United States assert as a fundamental principle that the rights of its citizens shall not be impaired at home or abroad because of race or religion; that the Government of the United States concludes its treaties for the equal protection of all classes of its citizens, without regard to race or religion; that the Government of the United States will not be a party to any treaty which discriminates, or which by one of the parties thereto is so construed as to discriminate, between American citizens on the ground of race or religion; that the Government of Russia has violated the treaty between the United States and Russia, concluded at Saint Petersburg, December 18, 1832, refusing to honor American passports duly issued to American citizens, on account of race and religion; that in the judgment of the Congress said treaty for the reasons aforesaid, ought to be terminated at the earliest possible time; that for the aforesaid reasons the said treaty is hereby declared to be terminated and of no further force and effect from the expiration of one year after the date of notification to the Government of Russia of the terms of this resolution, and that to this end the J. B. Moore, Digest of International Law, IV, p. 130. 2Foreign Relations of the United States, 1902, pp. 42, 44.

President is hereby charged with the duty of communicating such notice to the Government of Russia.1

President Taft, through the State Department, hastened to terminate the treaty of 1832 before this resolution, which he thought Russia might consider offensive, could be adopted by the Senate. As a result the Senate substituted a more mild resolution which "ratified" the termination of the treaty by the President.

As far as treatment of Japanese in the United States is concerned, President Roosevelt protested against the passage of an exclusion law, against the San Francisco school ordinance, and against anti-Japanese measures introduced into the California legislature in 1907. In the 1909 California legislature about 17 anti-Japanese measures were introduced but dropped at the intervention of President Roosevelt."

In his Autobiography President Roosevelt declared that exclusion was "fundamentally a sound and proper attitude, an attitude which must be insisted upon, and yet which can be insisted upon in such a manner and with such courtesy and such sense of mutual fairness and reciprocal obligation and respect as not to give any just cause of offense to Asiatic peoples."

In a letter to Hon. William Kent of February 4, 1909, Roosevelt expressed himself in favor of a reciprocal arrangement between Japan and the United States which would keep American laborers out of Japan and Japanese laborers out of the United States."

The assurances of President Taft that the treaty of 1911 would 148 Congressional Record, Pt. I, pp. 311, 353. It is interesting to note that the California legislature passed a resolution advocating such action because of Russia's discrimination against the Jews. Ibid., p. 534.

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1911, p. 695; W. H. Taft, The Presidency (1916), pp. 112-114.

Resolution of December 21, 1911, 37 U.S. Stat. 627. Cf. H. Rept. No. 179, 62d Cong., 2d sess., "The Abrogation of the Russian Treaty," December 12, 1911, H. Rept. Vol. I for an interesting discussion as to the differing constructions of this treaty.

R. L. Buell, The Development of the Anti-Japanese Agitation in the United States, cited.

"Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913), p. 416.

Ibid., p. 411.

"Printed in "Japanese Immigration and Colonization," brief prepared by V. S. McClatchy (1921), S. Doc. 55, 67th Cong., 1st sess., p. 62.

continue exclusion prevented the California legislature from passing an anti-Japanese land law in 1911. In 1913 President Wilson protested against the proposed land law, declaring “Invidious discrimination will inevitably draw in question the treaty obligations of the Government of the United States. I register my very earnest and respectful protest against discrimination in this case." He sent Secretary of State Bryan to Sacramento to confer with the legislature-but without the desired result. In 1916 the American State Department brought its influence to bear against the proposed bill excluding aliens ineligible to citizenship. In April, 1919, Secretary of State Lansing wired from the Paris Peace Conference that "it would be particularly unfortunate" to have anti-Japanese legislation passed by the California legislature at that time. Just before the adoption of the 1920 land law in California, Acting Secretary of State Davis said, . . . "No outcome of the California movement will be acceptable to the country at large that does not accord with existing and applicable provisions of law and, what is equally important, with the national instinct of justice."

Finally, on February 8, 1924, Secretary of State Hughes protested against the enactment of a discriminatory exclusion measure.1

1F. Hichborn, Story of the California Legislature, 1911, pp. 341–343.

Ibid., 1913, p. 246.

'Hearings on S. 2576, Japanese Immigration, March, 1924, p. 131.

Cf. Appendix VI. Mr. Hughes wrote a similar letter to Senator Colt, in February, 1924, New York Times, February 21, 1924, and to Congressman Frothingham, April 7, 1924, Congressional Record, April 8, 1924, p. 6059. Cf. also Appendix VII.

IV. THE JAPANESE EXCLUSION LAW OF 1924

In March, 1924, the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization reported an immigration bill (H. R. 7995), section 12 (b) of which provided that "no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States unless such alien (1) is admissible as a nonquota immigrant under the provisions of subdivisions (b), (d), or (g) of section 4; or (2) is the wife or unmarried child under 18 years of age of an immigrant admissible under such subdivision (d), and is accompanying or following to join him; or (3) is not an immigrant as defined in section 3." These exceptions would admit persons returning from a temporary visit abroad, merchants, ministers and university professors, and bona fide students. Despite previous protests of Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes and Ambassador Hanihara, the House adopted the immigration bill containing this exclusion clause on April 12, 1924, by a vote of 323-71 (37 not voting).1 No specific vote was taken, however, on the exclusion clause, and Representative Burton of Ohio was the only one to protest against it.2

On April 10, 1924, Secretary Hughes addressed a letter to Senator Colt, chairman of the Senate Committee on Immigration, enclosing a note from the Japanese Ambassador,3 in which the latter asserted that the passage of the exclusion bill would have "grave consequences" upon the "otherwise happy and mutually advantageous relations between Japan and the United States." Following the original suggestion of Secretary Hughes, the Senate Committee had proposed to except from the quota provisions of the bill (S. 2576) "an alien entitled to enter the United States under the provisions of a treaty or an agreement relating solely to immigration." The Gentlemen's Agreement would therefore be continued, while the quota would be applied also to the Japanese, admitting only 146 a year. On April 8, Senator Reed of Pennsylvania, the author of the Senate bill, 'Congressional Record, April 12, 1924, p. 6450. Ibid., p. 6441.

'See Appendix, IX.

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