“This is like really putting a puzzle together,” she said, “and every piece that you find you want to find the next piece and the next piece and the next piece.”
Perhaps most exciting to researchers is that the files, which they will be able to see at the regional archives in San Bruno, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, contain the original documents. Some include artifacts like wallets, 45-rpm records and detailed maps that prospective immigrants drew by hand at the border to prove claims about where they came from.
“The bottom line is that you want as many original documents as possible,” said Schelly Talalay Dardashti, who writes Tracing the Tribe, a Jewish genealogy blog. “Each time something is written down, there is a chance of something getting screwed up. Each time a document is transcribed, mistakes will be made.”
Still, for many among a generation of immigrants who dodged the Chinese Exclusion Act by inventing their heritage or spinning elaborate tales of lost documentation, the accessibility is alarming. The exclusion act was repealed in 1943, but fears of deportation ran rampant in the 1950s, when, in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, McCarthyism tore Chinese immigrant families and communities apart.
Scarred by a period of what they recall as institutionalized racism, many aging immigrants refuse to discuss the Alien Files. They are afraid, they say, that lies told by young immigrants so many years ago and recorded in the files then could result in deportation now.
But officials of the Homeland Security Department say the files will be used for historical purposes, not law enforcement. Further, records will not be released until the immigrant in question has died or turned 100, and the names of the living will be redacted.
The files and immigration agents “have always been seen as the enemy,” said Jennie Lew, spokeswoman for a coalition that pushed for the new agreement. “We’re trying to make this the silver lining of years of discrimination.”
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