Immigration Article of the Day: Two Family Trees – One Real, One Paper: The Legacy of the ‘Paper Family’ & the Immigration Debate by Julie Lim
Two Family Trees – One Real, One Paper: The Legacy of the ‘Paper Family’ & the Immigration Debate by Julie Lim, CUNY School of Law August 20, 2015
Abstract: For almost a century, significant numbers of Chinese immigrants avoided the race-based restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act and later ethnic quotas by becoming “paper sons” and “paper families.” Becoming a “paper son” or “paper daughter” meant claiming to be the “children” of Chinese-American U.S. citizens with inaccurate or fabricated documentation. Sometimes this consisted of simply claiming that a grandfather was a father. Other cases involved creating a fictitious family with names of a particular village in China.
This article will discuss the development of the “paper son” in response to the discriminatory restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the National Origins Quota Act of 1924, which excluded more immigrants based on ethnicity, until 1965 when the immigration laws moved away from the quota system. Such racial restrictions and the intense desire of Chinese immigrants to come to the United States – sometimes to reunite separated families – led to the creation of a complex system to defy the immigration laws. The legacy of the “paper son” has greatly impacted Chinese immigrants and their descendants and also provides larger lessons for the current debate over immigration laws and practices that continue to create incentives for immigrants to evade restrictions both legally and illegally.
KJ