1. 1. The immigration bureau later discovered that Sun’s paperwork was fraudulent; but after 1912, his political prominence enabled him to enter the United States. File 9995, Sun Yat-sen, Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1884–1944, RG 85, NARA in San Francisco. The admission of Sun in 1904 involves a debate about United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the seminal 1898 case that granted birthright citizenship to anyone born in American territory, regardless of his or her race. H.H. North, the US commissioner in San Francisco, argued that the last time Sun set foot on American soil (in 1896), he was admitted as a Chinese subject with a “Section 6” certificate issued in Shanghai proving his status as a student. To North, this record meant that Sun had “waived his right and became a subject of China.” The department rejected North’s reasoning on the basis that Sun did not acquire US citizenship until Hawaii became a US territory in 1900; the fact that he entered the US with a Chinese certificate did not constitute a renunciation, because in 1896, “he could not renounce something which he did not have.” See letter from H. H. North to Charles Mehan, April 15, 1904, and letter from Lawrence Murray to H.H. North, April 28, 1904. In 1936, Wong Sam Ark, a leader of the Chee Kung Tong Society, or the Chinese Freemasons (which is not affiliated with American Freemasonry) in San Francisco, wrote a pamphlet protesting Sun’s abandonment of old allies in Chinese America, in which he boasted his contribution in rescuing Sun during the 1904 crisis. He mentioned employing a San Francisco lawyer, who pulled strings with his connections in Washington to make Sun’s admission possible. Wong Sam Ark was an acquaintance of Stidger’s. See Sande Huang. Hong Men Ge Ming Shi [黄三德《洪门革命史 》] (Unidentified Publisher, 1936); Letter from O. P. Stidger to Wong Sam Ark, July 15, 1943. Idwal Jones Papers, the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
2. 2. File 9995, Sun Yat-sen, Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1884–1944, RG 85, NARA in San Francisco; Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” The American Historical Review, 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 395.
3. 3. See, for instance, Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Gabriel Chin, “Chae Chan Ping and Fong Yue Ting: The Origins of Plenary Power,” in Immigration Stories, ed. David A. Martin and Peter Schuck (New York: Foundation Press, 2005), 7–30.
4. 4. Historians have examined the role of intermediaries between the state and Chinese immigrants, such as migration brokers, smugglers, transportation companies, and interpreters, but they have generally found these intermediaries to have stood on the opposite of the state’s side. See Todd Stevens, “Brokers Between Worlds: Chinese Merchants and Legal Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1852–1925” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.–Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Shira Morag Levine, “A Vital Question of Self-Preservation: Chinese Wives, Merchants, and American Citizens Caught in the 1924 Immigration Act,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 9 (2013): 121–52; Mae M. Ngai, “‘A Slight Knowledge of the Barbarian Language’: Chinese Interpreters in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American Ethnic History 30, no. 2 (2011): 5–32.
5. 5. President Theodore Roosevelt’s call for reforms in the immigration and diplomatic bureaucracy after 1905 was part of a broader campaign of civil service reforms supported by the Progressives in the 1900s and early 1910s. The introduction of legalistic methods to the immigration bureaucracy also corresponded with the Progressive scholarship and application of administrative justice, such as the work of Frank J. Goodnow and Woodrow Wilson. The culmination of Progressive Era professionalism in the state’s racial management efforts can be found in the work of the Dillingham Commission, which provided intellectual backing for the Johnson-Reed Act. See Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 179–216; also, see Kathrine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).