floating in the Pacific. When the U.S. Coast Guard reached the vessel, the East Wood was
floundering approximately 1,500 miles from Hawai‘i. Because the Coast Guard intercepted the
East Wood, the U.S. federal government was responsible for determining what to do with it and
its passengers. The passengers were attempting to reach the United States, so they could request
asylum in the country. The U.S. federal government, adamant this would not occur, instead
transferred the Chinese asylum seekers to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which was a
Freely Associated State of the United States yet excluded from U.S. immigration law. There,
U.S. officials could detain the Chinese in U.S. military facilities and more easily return them to
their country of origin.
This paper examines this and other cases to describe how and why the U.S. federal
government relied on places within the U.S. empire to exclude Chinese asylum seekers during
the 1990s. It argues that the federal government created an archipelagic network of detention
sites by enforcing the “partial sovereignty” of various Pacific islands. These islands included
unincorporated territories, commonwealths, and freely associated states; as part of the U.S.
empire, they had different legal relationships to the United States and were variously subject to
U.S. immigration law. By infringing upon the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and ostensibly
sovereign states, U.S. immigration officials and military personnel gained an increased capability
to forcibly transfer Chinese asylum seekers around the Pacific to restrict their access to asylum.
Ultimately, while the U.S. empire’s geographic breadth could have facilitated the Chinese
migrants’ access to asylum, its legal breadth facilitated the U.S. federal government’s restrictive
immigration policies and curtailed the Chinese right to seek and successfully obtain asylum.