In 1917, Gen. John Pershing had a problem. And it wasn’t the guy he had been ordered to hunt down.
Tasked with capturing Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Pershing had crossed into Mexico to end the Mexican revolutionary’s border raids on U.S. communities. And yet, Villa had evaded Pershing and the might of the U.S. Army.
At the onset of the so-called Punitive Expedition, Pershing solved a lack of manpower by using Chinese immigrants living in Mexico to provide labor and services to the Army as it pursued Villa. They did hot, dirty, hard work to keep the caissons rolling along. Chinese workers cleared 400 miles of Mexican land ahead of the Army. They set up makeshift mercantiles — what some have considered the first PX — for soldiers. They cooked, laundered clothes and carted clean, potable water for troops.
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About 30,000 Chinese immigrants lived in Mexico at the time and were commonly subjected to racially based violence and persecution. Those who aided the Army understandably feared additional retribution if they stayed in Mexico after the campaign.
As the Army withdrew from Mexico, 527 Chinese refugees followed, seeking protection. Not only did Pershing feel obligated to them, he had explicitly promised to help them. And that was the problem.
Because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 forbid nationals from immigrating or seeking asylum, Pershing had promised them something he couldn’t give. That didn’t stop him, though, from trying to make good.
Pershing requested special permission to bring the Chinese refugees across the border with him, writing to an immigration inspector, “As I have promised them protection, I very much desire to carry out my word.”
When they were finally allowed into the country — only because of Pershing’s advocacy and his plan to send them back to Mexico once the situation became safer — the Chinese refugees were held in a guarded encampment by the Army.
The plight of “Pershing’s Chinese,” as the group was nicknamed, soon caught national attention. They were trapped in a legal no-man’s land: admitted to the United States but not allowed to stay and not able to be sent back to Mexico. Legal and political maneuvering ensued. Pershing stepped in again, suggesting the group could provide the Army services as cooks and servants as they had done on the Punitive Expedition. Their employment would allow them to stay inside the U.S., at least temporarily. Eventually, they were moved to San Antonio and, after clearing land themselves, were held at Fort Sam Houston, Camp Wilson and Kelly Field.
And then, the U.S. entered World War I. The refugees’ labor was in demand as the Army scrambled to swell its ranks for a new kind of mechanized warfare. Working menial jobs that were grossly undercompensated, the Chinese refugees again did hot, dirty, hard work at Army posts across the South, with one estimate suggesting their work freed up 1,000 Americans to fill other jobs for the war effort.
After the armistice, the future of “Pershing’s Chinese” was up for debate for a second time. That meant more political and legal jockeying, more uncertainty for the refugees and more public debate hinging on stereotypes that ranged from the uninformed to vilely racist.
Now one of the most popular figures in post-WWI America, Pershing leveraged his power, petitioning Congress to end the immigration saga that had dragged out for years. In his 1921 letter to Congress, he requested that “if relief cannot be extended [to] these deserving men administratively, a joint resolution should be passed by Congress giving them the privilege of registration.” Congress did just that, passing Public Resolution 29 that allowed the refugees to stay in the U.S. as permanent residents.
More than 20 years passed after Pershing’s letter before Congress finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, bringing closure to the men who helped the Army at their own personal expense. Chinese immigrants were now legally allowed to apply for citizenship, and nearly all of “Pershing’s Chinese” did.
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