Gatekeeping in the Tropics
US Immigration Policy and the Cuban Connection
Twenty-five years ago, when the ship Golden Venture ran aground off the Rockaway peninsula of Queens, New York, nearly three hundred smuggled Chinese migrants jumped into the frigid waters and attempted to reach shore. The incident, coupled with haunting media images of malnourished bodies, led to a government crackdown on illegal immigration and change in asylum procedures. Within a short time, however, smugglers developed alternate routes by small boats from Caribbean islands or by airplane using fraudulent documentation. More recently, US officials expressed concern that Chinese contract workers who come to the Caribbean for construction projects may find their way north through these ports, in addition to the more well-traveled Mexico route.1 A long view of US immigration policy and law, however, reveals that the circum-Caribbean has long provided alternate gateways for international migrants seeking to enter to the United States.
From 1882, when Chinese laborers were banned from entering the United States, to 1924 and beyond, when the gates further closed on all Asians as well as southern and eastern Europeans, potential immigrants from these restricted groups diverted their paths elsewhere in the hemisphere. A cornerstone of US policy therefore focused on preventing other hemispheric nations with seemingly more porous boundaries, such as Canada, Mexico, and Cuba, from serving as “back doors” through which nonwhite and politically and culturally undesirable migrants could gain entry.
The use of neighboring countries as stepping stones to the United States—an unintended consequence of the immigration restrictions—shaped policies and practices well beyond US borders.2 US gatekeeping strategies in the hemisphere entailed influencing immigration policy and policing its land borders shared with Canada and Mexico. Additionally, US officials confronted a web of bustling ports, jagged, unguarded coastlines, and sparsely inhabited islands that formed a murky, porous boundary surrounding its “American lake” to the south. By the early twentieth century, Latin American and Caribbean nations generally agreed to support the immigration laws of the United States, in part motivated by a desire to uphold their own sovereignty by retaining their northern neighbor as ally and business partner.3 Immigration officials’ experiences with widespread smuggling by land and sea contributed to the beginnings of a more general shift in policy, one that eventually became embodied in the preferences for certain occupational categories and the leveling of the quota system in the 1965 immigration act.
This chapter examines US domestic immigration policy and the movement of people to, within, and from the Caribbean region as a dynamic, intertwined process. The island of Cuba, ninety miles from the Florida Keys, has played a unique role in US immigration law and policy, due to geographical proximity, business and cultural ties, and shifting geopolitics. In particular, Chinese and Eastern European Jewish migrations to Cuba in the early twentieth century can be used to examine US attempts to control the policy of other hemispheric nations as well as the limits of its power to enforce effective gatekeeping.
Tropical Gatekeeping in the “American Lake”
Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared the closing of the Western Hemisphere to further colonization by European powers, the young American republic positioned itself to dictate hemispheric policy, albeit without military muscle behind its claims. However, defeat of Spain in 1898 secured the US position, resulting in the occupation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. In 1904 what became known as the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine enabled the United States to assume the role of international police power in Latin America and the Caribbean to ensure repayment of European debt and political stability, thus protecting North American economic and strategic interests. For the next three decades, the United States intervened in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama, taking control of the canal in 1904. The greater Caribbean became known as an “American lake” marked by economic investment, political and cultural influence, and military interventions during the first few decades of the twentieth century.
Protection of these interests and support from the region became key factors in debates on whom to accept as immigrants. In the months before the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, when a bill that would extend immigration quotas to Latin American and Caribbean nations was under consideration, hemispheric neighbors of the United States let their disapproval be known. Such a measure, wrote the Salvadorian representative, appeared to depart from the premise that “the relations of the United States with its sister republics are above all inspired by the strong ties of interest which are born of neighborhood.”4 Cuban Ambassador Cosme de la Torriente wrote to the US Secretary of State declaring that restrictions on Cuba “might affect the commercial relations of the two countries and would greatly hamper the coming to the United States of thousands of Cuban citizens who are not immigrants.”5 The landmark Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants of any nationality to 2 percent of its total population recorded in the 1890 census. The selection of 1890 as a base year effectively reduced the share of quotas for southern and eastern Europeans while maintaining preference for settlement of northern and western Europeans. In the interest of diplomacy and US business goals, the act exempted independent republics in the Western Hemisphere from the immigration quota system. This benefit extended to the Caribbean islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, while the colonial British West Indies remained under the generous quotas established for Britain.
The circum-Caribbean region, as an early site of globalization, colonization, enslavement, and migration of peoples from Europe, Africa, and Asia, is well suited to a case study on the reverberation of law and policy across borders and cultures. Since the demise of African slavery over the span of the nineteenth century, the plantation system and export economies of recently independent republics and European colonial possessions attracted migrants, both from within the Caribbean and beyond. From 1870 to 1930 large numbers of West Indian men and women left home in search of better opportunities and resources. Most Caribbean migrants moved within the region—according to the needs of US labor interests as well as their own social networks—from Barbados to the Panama Canal Zone, from Haiti and Jamaica to Cuba, and from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic and distant Hawai‘i. Circulating alongside the working-class descendants of enslaved Africans in the region were Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Spanish, Canary Islanders, Italians, Germans, and others, forming “an ethnic mosaic of peoples and languages stretching from the eastern Caribbean into northern South America, a pattern created by cumulative, planter-sponsored in-migrations of people from throughout the world.”6 Interwoven among them were groups restricted by law from entering the United States. As migrants from Asia and Europe circulated in the Americas, so did discourses of dangerous or subversive aliens approaching US shores.
Extending Chinese Exclusion in Cuba
Even before formal exclusion from the United States, Chinese were migrating to and settling throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. From 1847 to 1874, planters and industrialists in the Spanish colony of Cuba and recently independent Peru recruited about 250,000 Chinese indentured laborers, known as “coolies,” for work primarily in the sugar industry. The system of indentured labor received international attention for its abuses and ended by the 1880s. Havana’s Barrio Chino and smaller towns across the island became important nodes for laborers, artisans, and peddlers, as well as transnational Chinese merchants from California and Mexico. By the early twentieth century, the Chinese population had become largely urban and commercial, with small businesses established across the island. In addition to Chinese, Cuba relied on neighboring black West Indians (Haitians and Jamaicans) to fuel the sugar economy. The largest numbers of immigrants, however, came from Spain and the Canary Islands, as Cuba continually attempted to whiten the population.
With the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, the Chinese had become the first group excluded on purely racial or national terms. The closing of the gates to working-class Chinese diverted potential migrants, from San Francisco south of the border to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean. The attempts to prevent Chinese from using the “back doors” of Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean or other loopholes led to the development of modern bureaucratic and legal immigration and deportation systems.7
From 1899 to 1902 the US military government in Cuba laid the foundation for a political system that would support American interests, including its own immigration laws. The Platt Amendment of 1901, a condition for withdrawal of troops, assured the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs in order to defend “a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Cuba had little choice but to comply with US policies. Just five days before the end of the US occupation government, on May 15, 1902, Military Governor Leonard Wood issued Order No. 155 of the Headquarters Division of Cuba. This document applied the immigration laws of the United States to Cuba, and, with modifications, it served as the official basis of Cuba’s immigration policy through the first half of the twentieth century. Sections 7 and 8 excluded the Chinese, with the exception of those classified as merchants, students, diplomats, and tourists. Furthermore, the law prohibited the entry of contract laborers from any nation.8
Although the origins of anti-Chinese policies in Cuba can be found partly in this US-imposed legislation, it also stemmed from a deeply ingrained ideology among white political and intellectual elites concerning the ideal composition of a progressive and prosperous nation. Cuba looked to other Latin American countries attempting to reconcile their indigenous and African colonial heritage as models for a civilized nation, “whitened” through European immigration. The US-imposed Chinese exclusion policy in Cuba resonated with this vision, one that had been articulated by Creole elites since the early nineteenth century. The Cuban government followed with the passage of a 1906 law that allocated funding for a massive project to settle Canary Islanders and Northern Europeans.
As new immigration restrictions followed during the first few decades of the twentieth century, Chinese diplomats and merchants in Cuba continually pressed for the repeal of the 1902 ban on Chinese entry. To be placed on an equal footing with other foreigners was aligned with a rising nationalism in China and among diasporic communities and furthermore would facilitate the mobility of transnational merchants.9 In 1909, when a Chinese diplomatic representative petitioned for lifting restrictions on Chinese entry, Cuban Commissioner of Immigration F. E. Menocal responded with a lengthy memorandum discussing economic competition, morality and hygiene, and racial difference. Significantly, he also offered diplomatic justifications for continued restrictions. His arguments demonstrate intimate knowledge of US immigration policy and a desire to use it as a model for Cuba. The Platt Amendment as a condition for independence also compelled Cuba to placate the United States in international and domestic policy. “Cuba,” Menocal suggested, “should obtain laws that are, inasmuch as possible, homogenous with the American laws.” On a practical level, if Cuban ports were open to Chinese immigration, the United States would surely retaliate against Cuba “every time that the Chinese come to the island as the next stop to the American coast.” Menocal recommended an even more rigorous enforcement of the existing anti-Chinese law, acknowledging the high numbers of Chinese who entered falsely as merchants or students.10
These exclusionary immigration policies encountered opposition from Cuban and American sugar magnates, who pushed for cheap, imported labor from China and the West Indies (especially Haiti and Jamaica). In August 1917, at the outset of World War I, sugar companies won a major round in Cuban immigration policy debates with the temporary relaxation of the ban on Chinese laborers. American business interests succeeded not only in altering Cuban immigration policy (and, by default, US immigration policy), but also in making a dent in the gatekeeping abilities of the US government. Although Chinese had previously entered Cuba surreptitiously or with false documents, official records indicate that more than seventeen thousand Chinese landed between 1917 and 1924, many attracted by labor opportunities and encouraged by networks of relatives and fellow villagers, but others intending to use the island as a springboard to the United States.11 Chinese migration to Cuba continued until the 1959 Cuban revolution, its ebb and flow linked more to social networks and economic and political conditions than to effective enforcement of immigration policy.
Jewish Immigrants and “Hotel Cuba”
If anti-Asian legislation in the United States since the nineteenth century diverted Chinese and Japanese migrants south, political and economic conditions in the interwar period propelled large numbers of Europeans to migrate to the Americas. With the new quota restrictions of the 1920s, southern and eastern European migration to Latin America and the Caribbean also increased, among them tens of thousands of Jewish people to Cuba.12 Beginning in the early twentieth century, Sephardic Jews from Turkey and Syria had come to Cuba for political motivations. Sephardic Jews spoke Ladino, similar to Spanish, which made settlement in Cuba attractive. They became peddlers and small merchants, known for catering to lower social classes and supplying credit for consumer goods. By 1926, an estimated fifteen hundred had settled in Havana with another twenty-five hundred spread throughout Cuba.13
Mass Jewish migration to Cuba, however, began with Eastern Europeans fleeing political and religious repression, most after the dislocations of World War I.14 The choice of Cuba stemmed from the passage of the US Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which drastically reduced the number of entries from each country to 3 percent of its population as recorded by the 1910 census. The act left open a loophole, though, as it permitted a change in legal status for residents of exempt nations in the Western Hemisphere. Jews from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary learned that after residing in Cuba for a year, they could enter the United States under the exemption for Cubans. In December 1921 six migrants made the passage to Cuba, and over the next few months thousands more followed in their footsteps by staying on the island for a year before entering the United States.15 By the following spring, though, the mandatory period of residence increased to five years.
Eastern European immigrants did not intend to settle in Cuba; rather, they chose the island as a temporary stopover, a stepping stone to US shores necessitated by the passage of new immigration restrictions. Financial assistance from Jewish organizations as well as relatives and friends in the United States encouraged this immigration. However, after a drop in the price of sugar and collapse of the Cuban economy in 1921, charitable organizations began discouraging Jewish immigration to Cuba. Still, seven thousand eastern European Jews made their way to Cuba between 1921 and 1924, taking advantage of the provision for access to the United States.16
In June 1923, after the second complete year of the emergency quota act, the US Commissioner of Immigration issued a report on “the growing tendency of inadmissible European aliens to attempt to enter the country surreptitiously, which in turn appears to have led to increased activities on the part of professional smugglers engaged in the business of assisting such aliens to enter over the land and water boundaries.”17 Through this clandestine immigration, the Jewish population in Cuba remained in a constant state of flux; most who had arrived between 1920 and 1923 were no longer in Cuba by 1925. According to data based on the 1,835 immigrants who registered for assistance with the Jewish Committee for Cuba, 85 percent were male, 65 percent were single, and 62 percent were between fifteen and twenty-nine years old in 1925. Of the males, half were unskilled and 20 percent were skilled, while merchants, professionals, students, and farmers made up the rest.18 Life for the Ashkenazic Jews from eastern Europe was marked by poverty and difficulty adjusting to a different language, culture, and tropical climate. Peddling and working for other Jews in clothing factories, many just got by.19
The stiffening of US immigration law in 1924 made this young, transient migration flow more permanent. The 1924 law referred to birthplace rather than residence in an effort to prevent undesirables from legally using other hemispheric nations as a quick springboard to the United States. The US Consul in Cuba estimated fifteen thousand immigrants waiting in Cuba at the time of the publication of 1924 law.20 Due to the new restriction, thousands of eastern European immigrants ended up staying in Cuba longer than anticipated or permanently; others chose a clandestine route north. In just a short time, the population of Jewish immigrants in Cuba changed drastically. A 1925 report by Harry Viteles estimated five thousand eastern European Jews in Cuba, with four thousand of them coming in 1924 alone. The investigator took note of a decrease in the number of immigrants during the second half of 1924, which he attributed in part to the new US immigration law that no longer made it possible for those remaining for one year in Cuba to enter the United States. He also credited the work of Jewish welfare organizations in the United States and abroad in deterring potential immigrants from coming to Cuba. The Joint Distribution Committee aimed to provide enough aid to alleviate the conditions, but not to make Cuba attractive as a destination for settlement. The 1925 report recommended even more propaganda to prevent further Jewish immigration to Cuba, as “difficulties of adaptation and acclimation are too great to make it desirable to select Cuba as a possible country for colonization for those Jews who cannot remain in Europe and yet cannot be admitted into the US or other countries.”21
Despite the warnings, eastern European Jews continued to come to Cuba as a back door to its northern neighbor (around four thousand between 1925 and 1935).22 What had begun as a temporary stay in “Hotel Cuba” turned into a more permanent settlement with the closing of US borders. As the Cuban economy recovered from the sugar crisis, many Eastern European Jews settled into Cuban society, becoming peddlers, craftsmen, and manufacturers of inexpensive shoes and clothing.23 A 1927 New York Times article commented: “Now that they have had to give up all hope of entering the United States, these immigrants are learning Spanish and are preparing to become Cuban citizens. … The little Yosels are becoming Josés, the Marushas become Marias, the boys and girls are becoming as completely Cubanized as they would have become Americanized if it were not for the law.”
Diplomacy and Policing in the Caribbean after 1924
Like the earlier Chinese exclusion act, the effects of the 1924 immigration act rippled throughout the hemisphere, including the Caribbean islands. After 1924, US hemispheric gatekeeping strategies took two forms. A diplomatic approach attempted to influence immigration policy and practice among exempt Latin American and Caribbean nations, especially nearby Cuba, which continued to serve as a stepping stone to its northern neighbor. A parallel strategy took place not in high-level meetings between US consular officials and their Cuban counterparts but on docks, at sea, and along the coastline of Florida, as immigration officials attempted to capture smugglers and their contraband. While US authorities kept Chinese on their radar, they increasingly demonstrated concern about the entry of “undesirable” and politically radical Europeans.24
Attempts by Europeans to enter the United States by way of Gulf Coast shores began with the first quota act of 1921. In 1922 the US Commissioner of Immigration described a new phenomenon of those not subject to “special exclusion legislation” (as the Chinese were) risking a “roundabout, expensive, and somewhat uncertain method of reaching their objective—the United States” and linked it directly with the change in the 1921 quota act. An inspector in Jacksonville reported that in addition to Chinese, there were continual attempts to smuggle Europeans from the West Indies, and especially Cuba, as “a great many aliens during the past 12 months migrated to Cuba on the assumption that when they had lived there one year they would be exempt from the quota act.” With the new requirement of a five-year residency period, Europeans were no longer willing to wait.25 The US Commissioner of Immigration described smuggling between Cuba and the Florida coastline as “having assumed alarming proportions” and sent two officials to each place for a special investigation into the situation. He recommended increased financial resources and cooperation with other government officials to effectively meet the challenges posed by the smuggling machinery: “The forces of the other side are well organized and financed; the Government’s should be, else its efforts will be pitiably weak and ineffective.”26
In 1922 the US Commissioner of Immigration reported thirty thousand Chinese in Cuba, many of whom had entered with the intention of “making their way to near-by inaccessible and unguarded points on the Florida coast and entering surreptitiously.” The report painted a dismal portrait of unemployed Chinese in Cuba and of Havana as a hub for “smuggling of aliens of all classes, narcotics, and whisky to points on the Florida coast, and even to points on our coast line more distant, as far north as New York and west as far as New Orleans.” Boats in Havana and other harbors were easily available and could carry from twenty to forty or fifty people. “Chinese aliens are willing to pay anywhere from $500 to $1,000 to be smuggled across and into the United States, and aliens of other nationalities from $100 to $200.”27 The well-organized networks extended from south China ports to the Havana harbor and other Cuban towns. Immigration scandals throughout the 1920s involved not only labor recruiters and smugglers but also prominent Chinese transnational merchants and community leaders, as well as representatives of the Cuban and Chinese governments (up until 1924 the Chinese government assumed responsibility for certifying nonlaborers as qualified to immigrate).28 In addition to the Chinese, the investigators also focused on the new flows of thousands of Europeans through Cuba (some continuing on to Mexico to cross by land).
Almost a year after the passage of the 1924 act, the New York Times featured an article on the international industry that had sprung up around the smuggling of substances and migrants, focusing on new problems that had arisen from the quota system. Secretary J. J. Davis of the Department of Labor reported: “They are huddled in the dark holds of smugglers’ vessels which ply from the islands of the Caribbean Sea with illicit rum and vile narcotic drugs. They steal across our vast expanse of land border; they come by railroad, automobile and airplane.” The report described interlacing smuggling rings coordinated by heads who “manage with one hand the army of runners who round up the aliens in the slum and immigrant districts of Havana, and with the other the transportation facilities, as well as the receiving machinery in the States.” The sophisticated industry included sliding fee scales for different categories of passage and of migrants. Women could cross from the Florida Straits as “wives” of officers on freight and passenger ships from Cuba for fees of $450 to $500, which included rail transportation into the US interior. Passage by schooner was the least expensive, for $100 to $180. This kind of transport, in which within a few hours “fast motorboats small enough to operate from out-of-the-way points on the Cuban coast … dive into remote landings along the serried coast of Florida,” could easily go undetected by US Coast Guard. With ten or twenty migrants per boat, it could be a profitable business, but it carried high risk. Smugglers received the highest fees—from $700 to $1,000—for Chinese “because of the ease with which they can be spotted.” If searched, smugglers were known to abandon the migrants in their charge, as in the case where inspectors discovered the body of a Chinese in the furnace.29
People seeking to migrate waited for opportunities on the multitude of large steamships circumnavigating Caribbean and American ports. In May 1928 immigration officials discovered stowaways on three ships from the Caribbean in a week. In one instance, inspectors found eight stowaways underneath the engine room floor gratings of the United Fruit Company ship Manaqui when it docked on the East River of New York City after stops in ports in Colombia, Panama, and Jamaica. The migrants—four Spaniards, three Syrians, and one Portuguese (all from restricted groups)—had been hidden for twelve days, yet they appeared to be hydrated and well fed. Inspectors routinely searched all ships from these Caribbean ports of South and Central America.30
Besides the dark underside of the smuggling business, the May 1925 report detailed the unintended effect of the new immigration policy in overwhelming consular offices abroad. The State Department’s “remote control” function in screening potential immigrants before their arrival in the United States became more efficient by the 1920s.31 Still, deciding who could come in under the family provisions clause proved time-consuming and generated long waiting lists. Wives of men who had become citizens and their children under age eighteen were permitted to enter as nonquota immigrants. Deportations were also cumbersome and costly. One investigator estimated the number of migrants smuggled through Cuba alone to be ten thousand annually.
US government officials’ assessment of the situation indicated disagreement with the basic premise of exempting hemispheric nations from the quota system, a stance that arose from the increased problems of smuggling and stowaways since the passage of the 1924 act. The labor secretary advocated that New World countries should fall under the quota rule in order to simplify the administration of the law. Both the labor secretary and Commissioner General of Immigration W. W. Husband thought that the occupational needs of the nation should be the paramount criteria for admission, rather than a “first come, first served” policy for granting visas. As he put it, “A shoe string peddler bound for the crowded east side of New York gets a visa if he applies first, even though it means denying a splendid stonecutter the right to emigrate to Vermont, where his work would fill a real need.”32 This kind of preferred status for particular occupational categories and the equalization of the quota system eventually became embodied in the 1965 immigration act.
In the meantime, US officials who were charged with upholding the quota act regarded the new influxes of Europeans as a threat and at a diplomatic level attempted to mold Cuba’s immigration policy in order to prevent clandestine entry. In general, Cuban officials demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with their American counterparts in stemming the tide of smuggled immigrants. An examination of diplomatic correspondence, however, reveals Cuba’s ability to negotiate agreements that coincided with its own shifting interests and ideology, even while under the constraints of the Platt Amendment.
In the case of the Chinese, after the sugar boom of the early 1920s, Cuba returned to a US-style race-based immigration policy. Since 1902, Chinese diplomats had pressed for a more general ban on contract labor, one that did not single out Chinese and would not affect the coming and going of Chinese transnational merchants. In return, the Chinese government promised to regulate emigration from south China ports. Despite these efforts, in May 1924 Cuba issued its most restrictive anti-Chinese policy to date—a ban on all Chinese except members of the diplomatic service.33
However, Cuba was not willing to issue an outright ban on European migrants whose intention may have been to continue to the United States. The Cuban government generally maintained an open-door immigration policy toward non-Chinese through the administration of President Gerardo Machado from 1925 to 1933. While the Cuban government collaborated with US authorities in suppressing contraband immigration and regulating naturalization, it did not cede to all US demands, especially the directive to distinguish between temporary and permanent migrants. Rather, Cuba’s longstanding position as an immigrant-receiving nation shifted with the fluctuations in the sugar industry beginning in the mid-1920s, the global economic crisis of the 1930s, and related nativist movements.34
An example of Cuba’s insistence on upholding its own immigration policies can be found during the extensive negotiations in 1925 for treaties with the United States on consular rights, extradition, and smuggling.35 In February US Secretary of State Charles Hughes wrote to Enoch Crowder, the ambassador in Cuba, to alert him to the extensive smuggling operations from Cuba of “intoxicating liquors” as well as “narcotics, aliens and goods subject to the payment of customs charges in the United States.” He proposed an agreement with Cuba similar to one signed in 1924 by the United States and Canada. The state department wanted Cuban authorities to exercise more stringent surveillance over clearances of vessels and their cargoes.36
As Margalit Bejarano notes, US representatives in Havana began to delineate two kinds of immigrants in Cuba: those such as Spanish, Haitians, and Jamaicans attracted by economic pull factors in the sugar industry, and those mostly from eastern Europe and the Middle East who chose Cuba as a temporary destination in order to evade the US quota laws. In March 1925 the American ambassador echoed popular Cuban discourse with his positive view of Spaniards, the largest group of foreigners in Cuba who were thought to assimilate well and contribute to the island’s economic and cultural life. Migrants from the second group, however, were viewed as a threat to US immigration policy.37
In 1925 a new problem related to the US quota act crossed the radar of Cuban immigration officials. United States authorities had denied entry to five foreigners coming through Mexico (four Italians and one Portuguese) but allowed them to purchase a ticket aboard the Chalmette from New Orleans to Cuba. Cuban immigration officials admitted the five, who arrived within the boundaries of Cuban law. Yet the case brought to the surface the critical question of how to proceed should this trend continue and highlights the circular nature of hemispheric migration in the era of exclusion. The Cuban Commissioner of Immigration recommended that the US government not permit such foreigners to embark for Cuba, since they were likely only choosing the island with the intention of re-entering the United States clandestinely. In November the Cuban Secretary of the Treasury submitted a report to the Cuban president recommending that existing Cuban immigration law be revised to address cases of those who had been turned away from the United States.38
It took some time for the United States to gain Cuba’s help in supporting its immigration law. Negotiations stalled during the administrative transition that brought Cuban President Gerardo Machado to power in May 1925. Throughout the following fall, as the US ambassador was urged to expedite the treaty with Cuba on smuggling, points of difference emerged on issues such as terminology and translation.39 But in one substantive area Cuba prioritized its own immigration policy toward Europeans. On November 3, 1925, US Ambassador Enoch Crowder wrote to the Secretary of State: “In general I think that the Cuban Government has shown a sincere spirit of good-will in the negotiations, but I am not certain that all of their proposals will be entirely suitable to conditions prevailing in the United States.” Crowder emphasized that the first twelve articles of the Cuban draft corresponded to provisions of the American draft. The sticking point was article 5 of the US draft “to the effect that the High Contracting Parties would agree to refuse admission to aliens seeking entry into their territory when there was reason to suspect that such aliens were endeavoring to enter said territory for the purpose of subsequently effecting unlawful entry into the territory of the other High Contracting Party.”40 This point is significant, as it demonstrates Cuba’s unwillingness to refuse entry based solely on an individual’s intent to enter the United States or to differentiate between temporary as opposed to permanent immigrant status.
In negotiations for a treaty to prevent smuggling, Cuban representatives also insisted on reciprocity with regard to the right to board, inspect, and confiscate goods on Cuban ships—a right that the United States initially was unwilling to grant. A legal adviser to the Cuban government defended Cuba’s stance by evoking legendary independence patriot José Martí’s words on the nation’s need for dignity and respect within the international community. United States officials ultimately conceded to Cuba on key points in a set of treaties signed in 1926. The treaty for the suppression of smuggling signed on March 11, 1926, covered alcohol, drugs, general goods subject to customs tax, as well as illegal aliens.41 The extended discussions and points of compromise leading to the treaty reveal how smaller Latin American and Caribbean governments successfully negotiated with the United States, even as they remained under the constraints of the northern neighbor’s economic and political influence.
Nativist Movements and World War II
In the 1930s, growing nativist and labor movements, global depression, and continued struggles for sovereignty in the face of US domination led to an increase in restrictive immigration measures across Latin America and the Caribbean. Official government discourse in both the United States and Cuba equated immigrants, and eastern Europeans in particular, with political subversion. During the rule of President Gerardo Machado, labor organizations were suppressed, and several immigrants with links to the Cuban Communist Party (founded in 1925)—among them Chinese and Jews—were imprisoned or deported.42
Nativist labor legislation went hand in hand with more restrictive immigration policy in Cuba. Given the ties between Cuba and the United States, the New York Times reported on a bill under consideration by the Cuban congress in 1931 to curb immigration. The bill proposed unrestricted Spanish and Dominican entry (Spanish-speaking Dominicans were desired as seasonal laborers for the sugar industry). Entries from Haiti, British Jamaica, and French Martinique would be limited to only ten per year, while Germans, Belgians, French, Dutch, English, Italians, Swiss, and Japanese would be capped at two hundred. The Cuban government had recorded 75,593 immigrants by the end of 1930 and emphasized that thousands of all nationalities who had failed to enter the United States were now unemployed on the island.43
The tighter immigration restrictions of the 1930s, based on Cuba’s social and economic needs, coincided with US interests. The US Consul General in Havana confidentially reported that a $200 deposit requirement for immigrants resulted from his extensive consultation with the Cuban immigration commissioner, in an effort to deter those who upon arrival in Cuba marry US citizens or solicit US visas. Cuban congress debated several proposals for limiting or suspending immigration, including the imposition of quotas and even the suspension of all immigration for two years. Although none of these were enacted, they reflect the mobilization of Cuban society in defense of native workers and previewed the stricter labor and immigration laws after the revolutionary government of 1933. Under the shortlived populist administration in Cuba, the passage of the Nationalization of Labor law in 1933 required 50 percent of all workers in agricultural, industrial, and commercial enterprises to be Cuban-born. Many immigrants responded to the economic depression by returning to Spain, China, and elsewhere. Others applied for citizenship, especially after the 50 percent quota encompassed naturalized citizens in a 1936 adjustment to the labor law. The law also reinforced the occupational role of immigrants such as Chinese and Jews as small entrepreneurs. A 1937 law required immigrants entering Cuba to deposit a bond of $500, and visas would be granted only to immigrant settlers who would contribute in a positive manner to the nation’s development.44
The Second World War brought shifts in international alignments and adjustments to immigration policies and practices in the hemisphere. Nazi persecution led to another wave of Jewish immigration to Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, among them wartime refugees and postwar survivors. Oppressed European Jewish populations began to emigrate in large numbers beginning in 1933. They encountered obstacles not only from immigration quotas but also in the form of a literacy test for potential emigrants older than sixteen. Some US consular officials in Havana worked within the bureaucratic machinery to ensure that refugees cleared these hurdles. Niles W. Bond, who served as a consular officer from 1939 to 1940, recalls a woman who was unable to read the standard literacy examination cards in Yiddish or Hebrew supplied by the office. Yet the migrant insisted that she could read. Bond’s secretary (an Irish woman who happened to know Yiddish) procured a Yiddish Jewish newspaper from the immigrant neighborhood in Havana. The woman proceeded to read the newspaper (material that was more familiar to her than the Shakespearean and Biblical quotations on the cards), and Bond certified her as being able to read. When a Miami official later declared her illiterate, Bond defended her case so that she could remain in the United States.45
Jewish organizations in the United States continued to lobby other countries that could serve as a safe haven. The Joint Distribution Committee in New York formed the Jewish Relief Committee in Havana to aid war refugees. Cuba admitted them on a tourist visa, thus bypassing existing immigration restrictions. The US consulate in Havana made use of visas under the quota allocated to Germans. From 1937 until the end of the war, most Jews entering Cuba came from Germany and Poland. (About seven thousand total from twenty-five countries registered with the Joint Distribution Committee, and another thousand came from the United States as tourists to obtain visas from the US Consul in Havana). During the war, the overwhelming majority of these refugees remigrated to the United States (and a small number to Mexico).46
As occurred elsewhere in the region, the visible presence of German Jewish war refugees in Cuba generated anti-Semitism among different sectors of the population. Spanish merchants and other influential groups in Cuba demanded an end to the immigration. At the July 1938 Conference of Evian, Cuba declared that it would assist with the refugees, but only in accordance with existing legislation and while maintaining the national interest. Almost a year after the Evian conference, the shift in Cuba from welcoming haven to gatekeeper of undesirables dramatically played out on the world stage when the ship St. Louis was turned away from the port of Havana. It wandered Caribbean waters for several days before departing back to Europe on June 6, 1939, with more than nine hundred passengers. United States and Cuban authorities signaled a message that their respective immigration laws were not to be compromised, even to offer a safe haven. However, with the new presidency of Fulgencio Batista in 1940, the Cuban administration overlooked immigration policy and issued visas to large numbers of European Jews fleeing persecution.47
The Path to 1965 and the Primacy of Politics
Over the course of the twentieth century, Latin American and Caribbean nations sought to assert and defend their sovereignty in the shadow of the colossal power to the north. Immigration gatekeeping became one way to define modern national identities, even while acquiescing to US policies. Elliott Young’s comment about hemispheric nations in the early twentieth century can aptly be applied to the Americas today: “Politicians, journalists, and intellectuals increasingly began to equate the strength of a nation with its ability to manage its borders against a seemingly ever-changing and always threatening enemy: the illegal alien.”48 In the years surrounding the passage of the US Immigration Act of 1924, government reports were dominated by two groups—Chinese and eastern Europeans—who used Cuba as a back door to US shores. The intricate networks of Chinese in port cities across the Americas demonstrate the historical roots and routes of transnational clandestine border crossing by land and sea since the passage of the 1882 exclusion act. And the unprecedented waves of Europeans to Cuba in the decades after 1924 challenge modern-day politicized assumptions about illegality as a recent phenomenon that only involves migrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean.49
Like the United States, Cuba in the early twentieth century was an immigrant-receiving and gatekeeping nation. Taking cues from its northern neighbor, Cuba generally supported US immigration policies. After all, Cubans did not want to risk losing the benefit of traveling freely to the United States, whether it be for work, school, investment, tourism, or shopping. However, Cuba’s acceptance of US directives was neither complete nor unquestioned. The relatively marginal consequence of US policy on halting undesirable immigration to Cuba was further subverted by rampant smuggling operations, ineffective border control, corruption, and organizing within migrant communities.
As David FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín demonstrate in chapter 4 of this volume, debates since 1924 on quota exemptions reveal the shifting geopolitical factors that underlay the eventual passage of the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. World War II proved to be a turning point in hemispheric immigration history, as US policy met with domestic and international challenges. In the 1930s and 1940s, several Latin American countries ended restrictions on immigration of particular national and racial groups. Cuba, which in 1902 had accepted the US-mandated Chinese exclusion policy, overturned it in 1942. The United States did not repeal it until the following year, in 1943, and, even then, with a quota of only 105. The across-the-board removal of race-based restrictions among Latin America and Caribbean nations began decades before the shift in US policy. Latin American immigrant-receiving countries (such as Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico) came to the consensus that gatekeeping policy should be consistent with principles of equality governing modern nations.50
In the Cold War context, strategic relations with other nations in the Americas remained paramount. As in 1924, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act upheld the concept that immigration quotas were incompatible with good-neighbor foreign policy objectives. Debates about quotas for Western Hemisphere nations during the 1950s and 1960s reveal resistance to admission of people from Latin America and the Caribbean into the United States. Liberals argued that the establishment of a uniform global policy would put these nations on an equal footing with others. Sociologists and demographers reported an increase in population in the region, and conservatives warned of US borders being inundated by migrants from the south should the nonquota policy remain. The New York Times editorialized that immigrant quotas could serve as a safeguard, noting Britain’s recently erected barriers against Caribbean migration as something to emulate. Quotas would also limit the immigration of Asians residing in Latin America and the Caribbean, which by midcentury was substantial.51
In the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the US welcomed the largely white, upper- and middle-class Cubans fleeing communism. Ironically, among these refugees were the same Chinese and Jews (or their Cuban-born children) who had been denied entry to the United States after the 1924 immigration act.52 Under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, Cubans seeking to enter the United States who reached a port of entry—by any means—and passed an inspection could apply for legal permanent residence. Cubans thereby held special status under US immigration law. Agreements between the United States and Cuba in 1994 and 1995 modified the Cuban Adjustment Act to establish what became known as the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, under which Cubans intercepted at sea were returned to the island, but those who reached land were permitted to stay.
Even with the dismantling of the nation-based quota system in 1965, the persistence of migrant routes and practices attests to the limits of law and policy. As they did in the early twentieth century, migrants from around the world continue to use Caribbean port cities as back doors to the United States or Canada. President Barack Obama’s December 17, 2014, announcement on the normalization of relations with Cuba met with euphoric, if cautious, celebration on the island. It also generated a spike in unauthorized Cuban emigration among those who feared a reversal of their preferential immigration status. In fiscal year 2014, 24,278 Cubans entered the United States through ports of entry, followed by 43,159 in fiscal year 2015 (a 78 percent increase) and 56,406 in fiscal year 2016 (a 31 percent increase). As they had in the past, Cuban migrants attempted to reach US borders by sea— many on makeshift rafts—or by land in a roundabout way through Central America and Mexico. Others flew to Ecuador, which permitted Cuban entry without a visa. As Central American nations attempt to halt this flow, however, some Cubans became stranded.53 On January 12, 2017, during the last days of his administration, President Obama announced the end of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy as part of a continued path toward normalization of US-Cuba relations. While the long-term effects of this reversal remain to be seen, it immediately resulted in the returning of Cuban nationals from hemispheric countries and a reduction in the number of Cubans attempting the risky journey to US shores.54
Such shifts in migration patterns—whether stemming from the restrictive quota acts almost a century ago, the government crackdown after the 1993 Golden Venture incident, or the ongoing changes in US policy toward Cubans—all attest to the interconnections between US law and international migrant practice and the necessity of adopting a hemispheric frame for understanding the reverberations of immigration policy and reform.
Notes
1. Ashley Dunn, “After Crackdown, Smugglers of Chinese Find New Routes,” New York Times, November 1, 1994; Anthony M. Destefano, “1993 Ship Grounding Affected Immigration Policy,” Newsday, June 1, 2013, www.newsday.com; Jacqueline Mazza, “Chinese Migration to Latin America and the Caribbean,” The Dialogue, October 2016, 8; Inter-American Dialogue, www.thedialogue.org.
2. For an in-depth analysis of immigration policies across the Americas, see David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3. The decision to accept US policy came when it aligned with Latin American nations’ own interests. Elliott Young points out that after 1882, when the United States solicited Mexico’s assistance in preventing Chinese from crossing the southern border into US territory, Mexico rejected the treaty on the basis of its own 1857 constitution that upheld the right of immigration, emigration, and transit: “the absolute freedom of movement into, through, and out of the country regardless of race or nationality.” In the 1920s and 1930s, however, Chinese exclusion and expulsion resonated with a Mexican revolutionary mestizo national identity. Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 99–101.
4. Letter from Héctor David Castro to US Secretary of State, January 4, 1924. US Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS], 1924 (US GPO, 1924), 1:212.
5. Letter from Cosme de la Torriente to US Secretary of State, January 14, 1924, FRUS, 1924, 1:212–13.
6. Bonham C. Richardson, “Caribbean Migrations, 1838–1985,” in The Modern Caribbean, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 208–9; Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
7. Robert Chao Romero, “Transnational Chinese Immigrant Smuggling to the United States via Mexico and Cuba, 1882–1916,” Amerasia Journal 30, no. 3 (2004): 1–16; Erika Lee, “Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 235–56; Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the US-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); Young, Alien Nation.
8. Duvon Clough Corbitt, “Immigration in Cuba,” Hispanic American Historical Review 22, no. 2 (1942): 280–308.
9. For a comparison of efforts by Chinese elites in Cuba, Peru, and Mexico to bolster their status as foreign residents, see Kathleen López, “In Search of Legitimacy: Chinese Immigrants and Latin American Nation Building,” in Immigration and National Identities in Latin America 1850–1950, ed. Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 182–204.
10. Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Secretaría de la Presidencia, leg. 121, exp. 83 (1909–1921).
11. Numerous records from US immigration officials deal with the clandestine entry of Chinese and others in the decades leading up to 1924. See, for example, United States National Archives, RG 85 Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Segregated Chinese Records, box 3, folder 309, entry 135, Chinese Smuggling File, 1914–ca. 1921.
12. For a comprehensive treatment of the effect of the quota restrictions on Jews seeking to come to the United States, see Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). A small number of American Jews with capital settled in Cuba for commercial opportunities before 1898 (numbering up to 150 by World War I and 300 by the Cuban Revolution of 1959). They generally distanced themselves from the later waves of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s. Sender M. Kaplan, Raúl Moncarz, and Julio Steinberg, “Jewish Emigrants to Cuba: 1898–1960,” International Migration 28, no. 3 (1990): 295–310.
13. Margalit Bejarano, “The Jewish Community of Cuba: Between Continuity and Extinction,” Jewish Political Studies Review 3, nos. 1–2 (1991): 115–40, esp. 120.
14. For overviews of the different groups of Jewish migrants to Cuba, see Kaplan, Moncarz, and Steinberg, “Jewish Emigrants to Cuba,” and Bejarano, “Jewish Community of Cuba.” For an in-depth ethno-history of Jewish immigrants in Cuba, see Robert Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).
15. “Barred Here, Jews Settle Cuba Colony,” New York Times, February 20, 1927.
16. Harry Viteles, Report on the Status of the Jewish Immigrants in Cuba (New York: Joint Distribution Committee, 1925), 5–6.
17. Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration (1923), 1.
18. Viteles, Report on the Status.
19. Levine, Tropical Diaspora.
20. Bejarano, “La inmigración a Cuba y la política migratoria de los EE.UU. (1902– 1933).” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 4, no. 2 (1993).
21. Viteles, Report on the Status, 41–46, 5–6.
22. Kaplan, Moncarz, and Steinberg, “Jewish Emigrants to Cuba,” 299.
23. Bejarano, “Jewish Community of Cuba,” 121–22.
24. FitzGerald and Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses, 202–10.
25. A joint resolution extended the quota act to two years from June 30, 1922, and increased to five years the time “to acquire exemption in contiguous and neighboring countries and adjacent islands.”
26. Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC: GPO, 1922), 15–17. That year, among the 4,366 deportees were 411 Chinese, 214 Hebrew, 373 Southern Italian, 113 Japanese, and 879 Mexican.
27. Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report (1922), 15–16.
28. Miriam Herrera Jerez and Mario Castillo Santana, De la memoria a la vida pública: Identidades, espacios y jerarquías de los chinos en La Habana republicana (1902–1968) (Havana: Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, 2003).
29. “Immigration Law Evaded by Smugglers of Aliens,” New York Times, May 17, 1925.
30. “‘Land Ho!’ Is Mirage for Eight Stowaways,” New York Times, May 10, 1928.
31. For changes over time in the regulation of immigration from abroad, see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Elliott Young’s chapter 1 in this volume.
32. “Immigration Law Evaded by Smugglers of Aliens,” New York Times, May 17, 1925.
33. FitzGerald and Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses, 202.
34. Bejarano, “La inmigración a Cuba,” 1993.
35. For negotiations between the United States and Cuba on these issues, see FRUS 1925, 2:14–31.
36. The US ambassador in Mexico City was directed to conclude a similar treaty with Mexico. By July 1925 Mexico and the United States agreed upon a draft that the Secretary of State considered “more advantageous” than the Canadian treaty. US Secretary of State to Enoch Crowder, February 2, 1925, FRUS 1925, 2:16–17.
37. Bejarano, “La inmigración a Cuba,” 1993.
38. Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Secretaría de la Presidencia, leg. 115, exp. 106 (1925).
39. Apparently, Cuba stalled the smuggling treaties until the United States considered Cuban wishes regarding the consular treaties as well as a proposal for an agreement on “false indications of Cuban origin” that would restrict usage in the United States of the words “Cuba” “Habana” “Vuelta Abajo” and “any other geographical term of the Republic of Cuba.” Enoch Crowder to US Secretary of State, January 15, 1926; Joseph C. Grew to Enoch Crowder, January 29, 1926. FRUS, 1926, vol. 2:37.
40. FRUS, 1925, 2:29.
41. FRUS, 1926, vol. 2:23–27. Similar agreements to prevent alcohol smuggling with Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Panama, and the Netherlands included the clause that the Cuban representatives rejected. Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution, trans. Russ Davidson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 23.
42. Among them were Fabio Grobart, who became a key figure in Cuba’s communist movement when he returned, and José Wong, who ran an underground Chinese communist newspaper and was murdered in jail.
43. “Cuba Plans a Curb on the Influx of Aliens,” New York Times, July 5, 1931.
44. Bejarano, “La inmigración a Cuba,” 1993; Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), ch. 7.
45. Charles Stuart Kennedy and Niles W. Bond, Interview with Niles W. Bond, 1998, “Manuscript/Mixed Material,” retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000114.
46. Kaplan, Moncarz, and Steinberg, “Jewish Emigrants to Cuba,” 301. Besides offering legal assistance and moral support, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee administered financial assistance of $20 monthly per couple and $5 for each dependent.
47. Ibid., 302. In neighboring Dominican Republic, dictator Rafael Trujillo tempered US-influenced exclusion of Asians and welcomed Jews during World War II. Jewish and later Japanese settlement coincided with Trujillo’s plans for promoting a positive public image while continuing to “whiten” and “Europeanize” the Dominican nation, especially in the wake of the 1937 massacre of Haitians and people of Haitian descent on the border. While Trujillo declared he would admit one hundred thousand Jews, only about seven hundred settled in Sosúa. Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
48. Young, Alien Nation, 131.
49. Libby Garland notes that Jews and other Europeans ultimately became delinked from assumptions about illegal immigration, in part through the political efforts of Jewish American citizens. Garland, After They Closed the Gates.
50. FitzGerald and Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses and this volume.
51. Mae N. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 254–58.
52. Levine, Tropical Diaspora; Caroline Bettinger-López, Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home, and History in Miami (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000); López, Chinese Cubans, ch. 8.
53. Jens Manuel Krogstad, “Surge in Cuban Immigration to US Continued through 2016,” Pew Research Center (January 13, 2017), www.pewresearch.org.
54. In a public statement harking back to the Cold War era, on June 17, 2017, President Donald Trump announced the reversal of some of these policy changes; however, embassies remain open and the “wet foot, dry foot” policy has not been reinstated. The longstanding economic embargo remains in effect.