Race, Repression, and Indian Anti-colonialism across the American and British Empires

During the early twentieth century, Indian migrants from the Philippines began arriving at immigration stations in Seattle and San Francisco insisting that, because they had traveled from one part of the “United States” to another, they had a right to be admitted to the U.S. mainland. Their journeys across the Pacific were deliberate attempts to circumvent discriminatory immigration policies and practices at U.S. mainland ports. By taking alternate routes across the American empire, these migrants, and the North American-based Indian leaders who mobilized on their behalf, situated their demands for entry to broader claims of imperial injustice and American exclusion and used these cases to further calls for the overthrow of British rule in India and to voice their opposition to racially restrictive immigration policies in the United States and across the white Pacific. In response, U.S and British officials linked the political mobilization of Indians around these immigration cases to earlier warnings that the North American Pacific Coast was becoming a center of sedition where Indians were challenging and exploiting restrictive immigration policies to advance radical agendas. As I will discuss, this particular moment of South Asian American history, linked to the imperial histories of colonial India and North America, illuminates new understandings of borders and borderlands history. I will discuss how Indian transnational anticolonial resistance was densely intertwined with transnational anti-Asian and antiradical practices to demonstrate that U.S. antiradicalism and Indian exclusion went hand in hand and were used to justify political repression and exclusion in both the United States and India.