Mosaic - Paper Sons and Daughters
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the US. The Exclusion Act was the first and only immigration law in US history to exclude a specific racial or nationality group by name.
During the long period of exclusion from 1882 to 1943, Chinese immigrants took advantage of loopholes in the law to continue migrating to the US. The most common method was to falsely claim that the immigrant belonged to one of the classes exempt from exclusion under the Act, such as a merchant or a child of a native-born citizen.
A Chinese merchant or an American-born Chinese would create fictitious children, or ‘paper sons’ and ‘paper daughters,’ whom they claimed were born in China. Then they would sell the fictitious identities to prospective immigrants. The price of the paper identity was often based on the age of the immigrant - $100 per year of age.
The ‘paper’ identity scheme was used ever more widely after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, as all of the city’s birth records were destroyed. This enabled any Chinese to claim native-born citizenship and create identities of ‘paper children’ for sale.
By 1910, when Angel Island Immigration Station opened, immigration officials suspected the use of false identities and scrutinized the Chinese immigrants heavily. Chinese immigrants were frequently detained and subject to lengthy interrogations.
In 1956, in an effort to clear up the backlog of paper son cases and end the practice, the US Immigration and Naturalization Services established the Confession Program, which granted amnesty to ‘paper sons and daughters,’ providing protection from deportation and granting of legal status to those who confessed to their illegal entry.
The program wreaked havoc in the Chinese community as those who confessed were asked to provide the names of other illegal immigrants, and the government used the opportunity to go after Chinese who were pro-Communist.
In the end, 11,336 people confessed to being paper sons or paper daughters, but an additional 19,124 people were exposed in the process.
Read the stories of paper son Lit Ng and paper daughter Fannie Quock Quan.
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Photo Caption: A coaching book belonging to Fong Horn and his brother, from 1922. According to the Fong family, “It was a study book filled with details of a Fong village and all its inhabitants. The location of the houses and the Catholic mission and school were carefully sketched and labeled… The two paper Fong brothers [spent] their month on board the S.S. Nanking quietly memorizing the contents of the study book.”