I once lectured to an undergraduate class about how the United States excluded lesbian and gay immigrants until 1990, and a student inquired, “How would the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) know if someone was gay, anyway?” The question could have been the expression of a democratic belief that there was nothing particularly distinctive about lesbians and gay men. But it could equally have been a homophobic query, implying that the INS could not know if someone was lesbian or gayunlessthe individual revealed the fact—flaunted it, as the homophobes like to say. In that case, following the...

This chapter overviews major laws and policies and describes how they produced and regulated women’s sexuality, under the federal immigration control system. However, federal immigration control was fully institutionalized only in 1891. Between 1875 and 1890, the federal government operated in partnership with individual states to manage the flow of immigration. In this time period, changes not only led to full federal control but also gave rise to strategies for regulating women’s sexuality that became incorporated into the federal system. Therefore, the chapter first describes major changes that occurred in immigration control between 1875 and 1890. Second, it analyzes how...

The Page Law of 1875 established “the policy of direct federal regulation of immigration by prohibiting for the first time the entry of undesirable immigrants.”¹ Immigrants designated as undesirable were those who could be classified as convicts, contract laborers, and Asian women coming to work in prostitution. The provisions regarding convicts and contract laborers had little effect at the time.² But the vigorously enforced bar on Asian women coming to work in prostitution had a noticeable effect on the ability of Chinese women to immigrate and served as a harbinger of multiple forms of sexuality based immigration exclusions.³ The fact...

Between 1907 and 1908 Japan and the United States negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which regulated Japanese immigration to the United States for the years to come. In response to anti-Japanese agitation, the agreement terminated the migration of all Japanese laborers to the United States. But it allowed Japanese men who were already resident in the United States to send for wives. Consequently, from 1908 to 1920, wives comprised a substantial proportion of Japanese migration to the United States. Most of the wives were picture brides, a term that referred to the practice whereby men sent photographs of themselves to Japan,...

While returning by taxicab from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, on 6 January 1960, Sara Harb Quiroz was stopped for questioning by an immigration-service agent. Quiroz was not a newcomer to the United States. She had acquired permanent U.S. residency in July 1954, at the age of twenty, and lived in El Paso where she worked as a domestic. We do not know why she traveled to Juarez on that particular occasion. But her parents and her nine-year-old daughter lived there. Other familial, economic, and social ties also drew the residents of El Paso to Juarez.

Documentation that explains...

Previous chapters have examined how standard immigration procedures construct female sexualities and use those constructions to police women’s admission to the United States. This chapter focuses on two other major systems for managing migration into the United States: the refugee/asylum system and the Border Patrol. These two systems have undergone significant growth and transformation in the last quarter century. Not insignificantly, those years have also been marked by the emergence of mass migration and the globalization of capital, goods, technologies, information, and services on such a scale that some scholars have proclaimed the death of the nation-state. In this chapter,...

A search for scholarship that theorized the connections between lesbian/gay and immigration issues initially droveEntry Denied. But as I began researching the histories of lesbian and gay immigrants, the Proposition 187 campaign swept California like a sandstorm. Designed to deny basic services to undocumented immigrants, the campaign provided an occasion to refashion racial, gender, sexual, class, and nationality hierarchies of every kind. Proposition 187 supporters continually circulated exaggerated representations of uncontrolled childbearing by undocumented Latinas that was supposedly destroying the state. This image, and the devastating legislation that resulted, made clear that public anxieties about sexuality and immigration were...