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Once the United States had passed its laws trying to restrict Chinese entry in 1882 and began enforcing these laws,
Chinese still were determined to come to the United States to try to take advantage of better economic opportunities here
which contrasted sharply with the devastation and wide-spread poverty in China, and they figured out alternative routes.
The easiest, at an early point, was to go to places like Canada
and also Mexico, which shared these extensive land borders with the United States.
And, if you think about the logic of illegal immigration, in fact,
the first illegal immigrants in the United States were Chinese because they were the first ones to face restriction.
And, up until the problem of Chinese illegal entry, the United States really had not policed its border with Mexico.
Mexican mobility across that shared border really did not become seen as a problem until the 1920s and 1930s,
but the immigration bureaucracy's attention started being drawn to the southern border
because they realized that many Chinese were circumventing the Chinese Exclusion Laws by crossing from the south.
There is a pneumonograph by the scholar Anna Pegley Gordon,
who examines the immigration station at El Paso and she notes that
that immigration station did not gain more resources, gain more staffing until the central immigration bureaucracy
realized that border was the place at which many Chinese were crossing.
And, one of the strategies that Chinese did, since the law targeted Chinese as a race,
was to disguise themselves as Mexicans and, so, they would put on sombreros,
they would hide their queues under their hats, they would wear ponchos and walk across the border.
And, this was very confounding for immigration authorities because they assumed that race could be visually labeled,
that you could identify somebody just by looking at them, what race they are and, therefore,
know who had to be targeted for exclusion and that Chinese could disguise themselves.
And, if you think about it, many Chinese and Mexicans could be interchangeable,
was a big problem for the immigration bureau.
And, many Chinese managed to cross into the United States in this way.