To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing

to my mother were more unusual than most because she had been born in the United States. She was to assert birth in China and marriage to my father, the son of a purported U.S. native. A claim to U.S. citizenship by my mother would likely result in serious delay; records in Scranton would have to be obtained and a call for my mother’s alienated brothers on the eastern seaboard to come testify would have been probable. So when my mother was called in for interrogation a week after arriving at Angel Island, she was questioned for about thirty minutes and was deemed admissible as the spouse of a citizen.

      Growing up in Superior, I also had a sense of the gender imbalance that plagued the Chinese American community for decades after the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws. I grew up in a small house attached to my mother’s small grocery store. The store and house were on the poorest street in Pinal County, a rural part of south-central Arizona. The store consisted of three small aisles of food, a small butcher area, and an area with dry goods—shoes, fabric, hurricane lamps, and the like. The small second floor of the back storeroom contained six narrow rooms with little headroom that we used for storage. As a child, I learned that during the 1920s and 1930s these rooms were actually used as sleeping quarters by men who came from China without their wives to work for my father. They cooked and ate in one of the slightly larger rooms of the musty, dank second floor.

      Two of the men who worked for my father were an uncle and a cousin whom I grew up knowing. They were Geen Hong Go (Uncle Art) and Cherng Goo Cherng (Uncle Charlie). Having entered the United States with false papers, they were always introduced to the townspeople as my father’s brothers. Although both had lived in the United States since the 1920s or 1930s, their wives and children did not join them until the early 1960s. Uncle Charlie’s wife (Cherng Goo) was my father’s sister. But because of my family’s disordered history, she immigrated as my father’s sister-in-law.

      The memory of my aunt Cherng Goo’s arrival is a stark reminder of the effects of years of exclusion. As a kid, I wanted to be a basketball star. So when my parents told me that my aunt had been a champion basketball player in her youth, I was beside myself with excitement. I practiced diligently for weeks in anticipation of our first encounter, expecting a great shooting and dribbling display from her upon her arrival. But by the time her metaphorical boat came in, she was an elderly woman whose basketball-playing days had long since passed. We had all been victimized by the exclusion laws.

      My immigration memories span a continuum from my family to my clients. A distant older cousin fled to Mexico after being indicted for selling false green cards. My mother underwent intensive preparation to testify at an immigration hearing on behalf of another relative. Years later, when I practiced in Chinatown, I met hundreds of clients who had similar stories of false papers and family histories to gain entry into the United States during the exclusionary era. Throughout my life, and especially after I became a lawyer, I have often marveled at the ingenious schemes my ancestors and other Chinese devised to thwart the immigration policymaker “ghosts,” as they were called. For decades, the authorities were determined to exclude the “Yellow Peril,” yet many Chinese were able to overcome the racist laws by inventing families, occupations, backgrounds, and birth certificates destroyed in earthquakes.

      Over the years, the questions related to immigration directed to my parents’ generation did not rekindle fond memories. The historical prejudices codified against my uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers resulted in pain. They were forced to lie and to cheat because of the oppressive racial biases of others. Thus, my veneration for their creative schemes inevitably turns to anger after the sobering realization that, despite the anecdotal successes of many in evading discriminatory immigration policies, my ancestors unnecessarily bore tremendous hardships.

      Most of my Chinese cases have pertained to visa matters. But over the years I have represented several hundred clients—of myriad nationalities—in deportation proceedings. In the late 1970s, part of my function as a legal services attorney was to provide public defender-type representation to aliens who had been arrested by the INS in the San Francisco region. I visited the detention branch on a daily basis to interview detainees, and cooperated with the Immigration Court when they needed an attorney to provide representation. Nationals of Canada, Nigeria, the Philippines, Iran, Ireland, Great Britain, and other parts of Europe were often in the detention area. In fact, every month or so I would encounter young European tourists in their twenties who turned themselves in for deportation because they had run out of spending money. I recall a Caucasian man who was born in China to Portuguese parents, who was being deported to Portugal even though he had never lived there. And there was a Greek client who immigrated at the age of three, but was being deported at the age of twenty-seven for possession of marijuana. In the 1980s, I represented many Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States, including one Nicaraguan whose case became a precedent-setting decision in the Supreme Court. I also helped to represent a black South African who was granted asylum because of apartheid.

      But over the years, most of those I have represented in deportation proceedings have been Mexican nationals. Representing Mexicans in deportation proceedings always came naturally. The vast majority of my Mexican clients reminded me of neighbors, friends, and grocery store customers from Superior. They were gracious, honest, hardworking, friendly, grateful, and committed to their families. They appreciated my limited Spanish-speaking ability.

      I recall introducing my wife, a Chinese American raised in San Francisco Chinatown, to a Mexican family I was representing shortly after our marriage in 1976. The family had been subjected to a harrowing, abusive raid by INS agents at 5 a.m. one morning, and I needed to get a better idea of what had transpired by visiting them at their home in San Jose, California. So on a Sunday afternoon, my wife and I drove to San Jose to call on the family. My wife had had little contact with Mexicans—or any Latinos for that matter—growing up. She was aware of my legal work conceptually, but had never met any of my clients. Over the course of the afternoon, as she experienced my clients’ warmth, generosity, and hospitality, my wife became their strongest advocate for resisting deportation. How in the world, she asked, could they be hurting anyone; and why in the world would the INS want to deport such a decent family? After a struggle that took almost a decade, I was able to obtain lawful permanent residence status for the entire family.

      Most of my clients have been Mexican because Mexicans have long been the focus of INS enforcement priorities. Of the 1,327,259 deportable aliens located by the INS in 1993, 95.6 percent (1,269,294) were Mexican nationals,¹ in spite of the fact that by all estimates Mexicans make up less than half of the undocumented population in the United States. So anyone willing to represent low-income immigrants as I have over the years will naturally have a caseload that is substantially Mexican.

      Take the case of Rodolfo Martinez Padilla.² Rodolfo was a client of the Immigration Law Clinic which I directed at the Stanford Law School. In the fall of 1993, with the assistance of students enrolled in the clinic, Rodolfo, who was in deportation proceedings, succeeded in having those proceedings suspended and was granted lawful permanent resident status. To qualify, Rodolfo had to establish continuous physical presence in the United States for at least seven years, good moral character, and extreme hardship if deportation had been ordered.³

      I first met Rodolfo in 1987, and found his work record, his worldview, and his attitudes about the United States typical of the thousands of immigrants—especially Mexicans—I have represented, been consulted about, or grew up with in Superior. His story and those of other Mexican immigrants are important because much of the current debate over immigration is about Mexican immigration.

      Rodolfo’s family and circumstances surrounding his migration to the United States are not unusual. Born in 1963 in a small town in the state of Michoacan in northern Mexico, Rodolfo, accompanied by his uncles, first crossed the border at the age of ten. He returned to Mexico but came back to the United States in 1979 with his parents and siblings. Since then they have lived in the East Palo Alto/Redwood City area, which is about thirty miles south of San Francisco. Rodolfo attended one year of public high school in 1980. His entire immediate family—his father, mother, two older brothers, one older sister, two younger sisters, and a younger