Slate (April 2012)
This essay discusses present-day anti-immigration laws through California’s 19th-century struggle with the federal government over immigration. When, in August 1874, 22 Chinese women were barred from landing at San Francisco by a California official who identified them as “lewd and debauched”—undesirable immigrants under state law—they took the case to the Supreme Court. Its 1876 decision, Chy Lung v. Freeman, asserted federal primacy over immigration while condemning officials’ superficial profiling of immigrants, establishing a durable precedent.