Between Empires: Legal Ambiguity and Racial Classification of Taiwanese Migrants in Prewar America, 1900–41

This study traces the transpacific and transimperial migration of individuals traveling from Taiwan—then a colony of the Japanese empire—to the United States from the early twentieth century to the eve of U.S. participation in World War II. Long overlooked in scholarship due to its small scale—approximately fifty individuals before 1945—this presentation argues that Taiwanese migration reveals how the U.S., Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Chinese empires negotiated imperial sovereignty through migratory regulation and racialized discourse. Within this contested legal geography of the Pacific, Taiwan occupied a uniquely liminal position: although Taiwanese subjects acquired Japanese nationality after the island’s annexation in 1895, their prior subjugation under the Qing empire continued to mark them as racially Chinese, rendering them subject to the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This presentation therefore examines how the transpacific migration regime regulating Taiwanese mobility was constructed across three interconnected levels: first, at the imperial level, by analyzing how Japanese and U.S. authorities interpreted the applicability of the Chinese Exclusion Act to Taiwanese subjects; second, at the administrative level, by tracing how restrictive immigration laws produced uneven terrains of race, class, and gender for aspiring travelers; and finally, at the individual level, by examining how Taiwanese migrants navigated transpacific legal and bureaucratic infrastructures.