paper son

…vocations or as the “paper sons” and “paper daughters” of Chinese Americans. The immigration authorities’ rigorous efforts to expose fraud resulted in protracted, exhaustive interrogations and related interviews of corroborating parties that sometimes kept the immigrants captive on the island for weeks or months. Boards of Special Inquiry grilled…

…that of the so-called “paper son” system, in which young Chinese males attempted to enter the United States with purchased identity papers for fictional sons of U.S. citizens (people of Chinese descent who had falsely established the identities of those “sons”). Thus, Chinese exclusion was not only an institution…