My paper will examine Chinese marriage cases in the late 19"' and early 20th century as a way to explore the fault lines of both race and gender in immigration law. The Chinese American community during the 19th century was overwhelmingly male only 4% of legal Chinese residents were female in 1880. While the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act ended open immigration, Chinese merchants, teachers and native-born citizens could travel back and forth to China. Chinese marriage cases arose from the desire of these exempt classes to bring their wives from China to the United States.

Chinese marriage cases presented judges with the vexing problem of balancing racially based immigration restrictions with Chinese men's arguments for their rights as husbands. For the most part, the women in these cases could not be admitted of their own accord - they were not members of an exempt class or citizens themselves. Chinese women were perpetual aliens, prohibited by statue from becoming citizens by naturalization or marriage. The first part of this paper examines the evolution of Chinese men's claims to family unification and the unusual power that husbandom exercised in the legal culture, qualifying and "distorting" apparently obvious policies. The second part of my paper will focus on husbands' less successful attempts to exempt their wives from immigration laws that mandated deportation for certain classes of undesirable aliens. Of special interest are regulations concerning prostitution, which exposed the degree to which the rights of alien women rested on an image of a dutiful wife.

These series of cases suggest that accounts of marriage, citizenship and i . immigration restrictions have neglected the impact on communities of immigrants who were prohibited from becoming naturalized citizens. While coverture represented gender subordination for many wives in the late I 19th century, husbands' rights were a bulwark against an immigration regime increasingly bent on separating Chinese American families.