On July 11, 1924, the Lincoln reached Angel Island, the desolate and remote location of the infamous immigration station in California. Aboard the ship were nine Chinese wives, hopeful that they would soon reunite with their spouses who had preceded them to the United States. Until then, despite harsh immigration laws, many Chinese women had been admitted to the country because they were married to noncitizen merchants or to American citizens. Building on coverture principles that a man’s care and comfort were so important that his wife’s status should follow his, Chinese husbands had often argued successfully that their right to reunite with their families took precedence over existing immigration laws, which excluded Chinese immigrants because of their race. It was these laws, they contended, that had forced many Chinese migrants into transnational marriages in the first place. Despite these precedents, the immigration officers who inspected the women on the Lincoln rejected them all, regardless of their age, education, and class.

The officials argued that, under the recently passed Immigration Act of 1924, immigrants ineligible for citizenship—namely, most Asian migrants—could no longer enter the country.Footnote ¹ The act had gone into effect on July 1, 1924, after the Lincoln had already left for California.Footnote ² As the detained women considered what to do next, officers of the San Francisco-based Oriental Steamship Company contacted their colleagues in Hong Kong to urge them not to “accept Chinese wives of natives or citizens or family of merchants unless they are coming [to the] United States of America [for a] temporary stay not exceeding 6 months.”Footnote ³ The communication arrived too late. Another ship, the Shinyo Maru, had already arrived at Angel Island with a second group of Chinese wives who believed they would be admitted to the United States because of their marital status. They too were denied entry.Footnote ⁴

The Immigration Act of 1924 posed new challenges for the Chinese women who had just landed at Angel Island, their husbands, and their lawyers. The act simultaneously excluded most immigrants who were ineligible for naturalization and exempted all immigrant wives of U.S. citizens from the restrictionist immigration regime it created. However, the act did not clarify whether the exemption applied to Chinese wives. Many of the immigration laws passed between 1882 and 1924 were often written as if not all immigrants had families, producing many ambiguities. Chinese women existed at the intersection of this exemption and restriction, necessitating judicial clarification: did their status as wives of U.S. citizens prevail, or should they be regarded as individuals ineligible for citizenship? In trying to answer this question, judges struggled with conflicting demands of racial exclusion and gender privilege. Their rulings make it clear that gender norms both reinforced and challenged racial categories in immigration law, profoundly impacting the formation of Chinese American families for decades to come. Ultimately, the stories of the Chinese wives who arrived on the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru in 1925 show how Wong Kim Ark—the 1892 Supreme Court case that ruled that, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil are American citizens—was not only about citizenship. It also had significant ramifications for family formation, a development that nativists found unsettling because it made it possible for Chinese laborers to have families on U.S. soil and grow their communities.

All the Chinese wives on board of the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru immediately appealed the immigration officials’ decisions. Many of them did so through their husbands. Ten months after their arrival, the women became plaintiffs in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle. They argued that their families had a right to reunite. In their rulings, the Supreme Court justices decided that noncitizen Chinese merchants could reunite with their wives from China because of an existing treaty with China, while American citizens of Chinese ancestry could not. In other words, Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle accorded more rights to noncitizens than to citizens, regardless of the hardship that the family separation would cause.Footnote ⁵ This unusual decision stemmed from anxieties over Wong Kim Ark because it had confirmed that birthright citizenship applied to all immigrant parents, including Chinese immigrants, but it also reflected class-based biases. Wong Kim Ark frustrated lawmakers and judges because, despite the existing immigration laws restricting Chinese mobility, they felt powerless to limit the birth of citizen children to working-class Chinese parents who already resided in the United States.Footnote ⁶ Hence, the repeated efforts of Congress and the Supreme Court to limit family reunification for Chinese laborers.

Despite losing their first appeal, the Chinese wives who had arrived on the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru, their husbands, and the American lawyers who represented them had good reasons to remain optimistic. Chinese men and women had a long history of successfully challenging exclusion on family reunification grounds. Court cases between 1898 and 1925 show that Chinese husbands, who usually filed on behalf of their wives, often won admission on this basis, though class and status played a critical role in which migrants could reunite with their family and which could not. Chinese laborers seeking to reunite with their families hardly ever won. Many judges believed that these men did not have a right to reunite with their spouses because they did not belong to one of the exempted categories under existing immigration policy.Footnote ⁷ Their rulings capture racist fears of allowing working-class Chinese women into the country who could in turn have children on U.S. soil. By contrast, Chinese merchants, who were exempted from many of the immigration restrictions imposed on Chinese laborers, were more successful in sending for their wives, as were Chinese Americans. Even when presiding over similar cases, judges across the country reached contradictory rulings until the 1899 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Gue Lim. This ruling reinforced prevailing class assumptions about which Chinese immigrants could reunite with their families. It permitted merchants to send for their wives because they belonged to an exempted category under Chinese exclusion laws. Following the Gue Lim ruling, immigration officials administratively granted second-generation Chinese Americans the same privilege since they were American citizens by birth.Footnote ⁸ Yet, Chinese wives’ ability to enter the United States remained precarious even after Gue Lim because they could not become American citizens under U.S. naturalization law. Family reunion for Chinese immigrants impinged on classed and gendered expectations about what an acceptable married couple looked like. Even the mere suspicion of prostitution undermined Chinese husbands’ coverture rights arguments. Judges were more likely to side with the husband if the woman appeared to be a “proper wife.” The ratification of the Immigration Act of 1924 then represented a renewed effort to rebuke these court precedents and deny Chinese Americans the opportunity to reunite with their families if they were of working-class origin.

For four months, as their cases made their way through the courts, the Chinese wives on the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru remained detained on Angel Island under bleak and desolate conditions, often with devastating consequences. One of them, eighteen-year-old Yee Shee, arrived at Angel Island eight months pregnant and, despite the inadequacy of the facilities, was released only when she was close to giving birth. Another, Soto Shee, attempted suicide after she was not allowed to leave the island to attend the funeral of her seven-month-old son who had died during detention. She was pregnant as well. Eventually, authorities let her reunite with her citizen husband, and she gave birth to a daughter. Hoping for a better future in the United States, Shee named her child May Ho (“America Good”).Footnote ⁹

The question at the heart of their cases was whether the exemption of citizens’ wives in the Immigration Act of 1924 included Chinese wives since the law banned anyone ineligible to naturalize from entering the country. Through their lawyers, the women on the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru argued that they should be allowed into the country to reunite with their families despite Chinese migrants’ inability to naturalize. They also noted that denying these families the ability to reunite would profoundly affect the ability of Chinese communities to thrive in the United States, since anti-miscegenation laws forbade Chinese men from marrying outside their community.Footnote ¹⁰ The government’s brief, by contrast, justified excluding these Chinese wives because their inability to assimilate posed a threat to American society. Similar to the arguments made in Wong Kim Ark, the government lawyers attributed the propensity of Chinese migrants to marry only other Chinese migrants to their unwillingness to assimilate, ignoring the anti-miscegenation laws that limited their marriage options. Drawing from a similar case in Massachusetts, the California district court ruled that, although Congress did not intend to prevent the entry of Chinese wives of merchants and citizens, the Chinese wives should be deported because they had not acquired the documentation required by the Immigration Act of 1924 (which, again, immigration authorities began implementing after they had already departed China).Footnote ¹¹

Undeterred, the women brought their case to the Ninth Circuit court in the hopes of a hearing, but the judges declined to rule and sought guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court. The circuit court wanted clarification about the grounds on which immigration officials should deny admission to the Chinese wives: was it because they did not have the documentation exempting them from exclusion? Or was it because they were barred from entering the country since they could not naturalize? While the justices of the Supreme Court deliberated, the authorities released the plaintiffs on bail after four months of detention. As the women and their families waited for the Supreme Court to decide, they were cautiously optimistic but remained quite anxious because of the unpredictability of judges’ decisions in the past. The Supreme Court justices issued its much-awaited rulings on May 12, 1925. The rulings denied entry to Chinese wives of U.S. citizens in Chang Chan v. Nagle, but they granted it to Chinese wives of noncitizen merchants in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle. In the opinion of the Supreme Court justices, the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens could not be admitted into the country because “taken in their ordinary sense the words of the statute plainly exclude petitioners’ wives.” The justices also rejected the request of the women’s lawyers to interpret the law in a way that avoided family separation.Footnote ¹² Chang Chan v. Nagle thus overruled Tsoi Sim v. United States, a 1902 ruling by the Ninth Circuit which had decided that citizens’ immigrant wives should be admissible to avoid “injustice, oppression, or an absurd consequence.”Footnote ¹³ In issuing their ruling for Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle, by contrast, the justices argued that merchants’ wives had a right to enter the country under the Angell Treaty stipulated with China in 1880 because it explicitly prohibited any restrictions by the United States government on Chinese merchants’ movement.Footnote ¹⁴ The treaty gave mobility rights to more elite Chinese women and their noncitizen elite husbands but denied those same rights to working-class Chinese women and their working-class U.S. citizen husbands.Footnote ¹⁵ Similar to what happened to Japanese brides after the Gentlemen’s Agreement earlier in the century, the court used gendered and class-based stereotypes of immigrant women to differentiate among the Chinese wives on board of the Lincoln and Shinyo Maru. By deeming the wives of American citizens of Chinese descent deportable because of their class status, the justices further legitimized long-held stereotypes about their perceived unassimilability and the threat they posed to the nation because of their class background.Footnote ¹⁶

The Supreme Court’s rulings notwithstanding, all the other Chinese wives involved in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle remained in the country. Only one decided to return home believing she was too old to adjust to life in the United States. Until Congress revised the Immigration Act of 1924 in 1930 to allow them to legally remain in the country because of their marital status, many of the women avoided removal because local immigration officials repeatedly stayed their orders of deportation. After the ruling, Chinese activists and their supporters successfully lobbied policymakers to amend the Immigration Act of 1924 to grant all Chinese women who had married U.S. citizens prior to the passage of the law to reunite with their husbands.Footnote ¹⁷ Its supporters argued that the amendment was necessary because of “the deplorably unnatural conditions and the indefensible situation resulting from the omission” of Chinese wives.Footnote ¹⁸ While the amendment was significantly narrower than what Chinese American advocates and their allies had initially hoped for, it nonetheless provided an important opportunity for some families to reunite and demonstrated how Chinese activists could shape the law. At the same time, it highlighted the uncertainty about which body represented the ultimate authority over immigration matters—the Supreme Court, Congress, or the immigration bureaucracy—and how that authority could be challenged or asserted.

Ultimately, Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle show how judges across the country sought to disentangle class, racial exclusion, and gender privilege. They also echo policymakers’ concerns over assimilation, miscegenation, and birthright citizenship. The prosecution’s arguments echoed much of the xenophobic language from Wong Kim Ark, namely that Chinese migrants’ United States-born children would exert undue influence over U.S. politics, compete for jobs, and alter the racial makeup of American society. These concerns directly related to efforts to bar families from reuniting, especially when the families included American citizens. For many critics of immigration, limiting the number of children Chinese parents from a working-class background could have in the United States represented a major priority.

Considering the racist immigration laws in place and the violent xenophobic attacks targeting Chinese migrants already in the country, it is remarkable that Chinese families were able to reunite at all. By 1898, the existing immigration laws had made it clear that married migrants and migrants with skills had a better chance of being admitted, even in a climate hostile to immigration. These changes profoundly reshaped Chinese migrants’ choices. They linked migration patterns to marriage and family status and connected certain rights associated with family and marriage only to certain Chinese migrants. As the families in Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle and Chang Chan v. Nagle went to court to establish their right to reunite, these men and women also sought the answer to a core question that is still under debate today: Whose families belong together?