Chapter 6 focuses on the British Straits Settlements and the Malay States. At the edge of the imperial frontier, where Chinese organizations and their attendant customs had long held sway, British laws and institutions struggled to gain a foothold. From its precarious state in the early 1870s, in the course of a few decades, Britain’s toehold on the Malay Peninsula would solidify in the Straits Settlements and extend to encompass the Malay States. The rapid extension of state control over labor transformed one of the empire’s most strategically vital cities and some of its most inaccessible and unruly territory from, or so British officials would claim, locales of lawless immorality to models of civilized behavior, orderly governance, and stable prosperity. As the overseer-state struggled to establish its political supremacy against highly resilient cultural and economic systems established previously by the Chinese Secret Societies and kongsi, its success or failure hinged increasingly on its ontological power to define moral governance and just rule. In this sense, British colonial authority in the Straits Settlements was synonymous with regulation of the Chinese workforce.

The case study examines the construction of the Imperial Pacific casino in Saipan, a US commonwealth in the Western Pacific, by Chinese firms employing Chinese workers. The focus is on the serious labor abuses that transpired and the legal and other consequences faced by the companies as a result. The case sheds light on the structure and operations of these Chinese construction projects, including the layers of subcontracting and how efforts to maximize speed and minimize costs resulted in numerous violations of local laws. The case also examines what actions the abused Chinese workers on such projects may take to enforce their rights and address their mistreatment. The case study therefore provides a useful tool to consider the issues involved in hiring and supervising contractors, such as cost, contract provisions, subcontracting, monitoring, and liability. The case also provides a platform to explore what legal, advocacy, and other tools workers and their advocates can use when legal violations and labor abuses occur. Additionally, this case study provides a uniquely detailed account of the events that transpired in Saipan because the author served as a lawyer representing the abused workers in a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to forced labor.

This volume, part of the Feminist Judgment Series, shows how feminist legal theory along with critical race theory and intersectional modes of critique might transform immigration law. Here, a diverse collection of scholars and lawyers bring critical feminist, race and intersectional insights to Supreme Court opinions that deal with the source of the power to regulate immigration, state and local regulation of immigration, citizenship law, racial discrimination, employment law, access to public education, the rights of criminal defendants, the detention of noncitizens, and more. Feminist reasoning values the perspectives of outsiders, exposes the deep-rooted bias in the legal opinions of courts, and illuminates the effects of ostensibly neutral policies that create and maintain oppression and hierarchy. One by one, the chapters in this book reimagine the norms that drive immigration policies and practices. In place of discrimination and subordination, the authors here demand welcome and equality. Where current law omits the voice and stories of noncitizens, the authors here center their lives and experiences. Collectively, they reveal how a feminist vision of immigration law could center a commitment to equality and justice and foster a country where diverse newcomers readily flourish with dignity.

Chinese labor was indispensable in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad (1881-1885), but their contemporary memorialization largely frames them in terms of national history. This approach obscures how their lives unfolded in a transnational lifeworld that was formed by the intersecting forces of capitalism, settler colonialism, nationalism, and racialization. This chapter revisits this history as a problem of literary representation by exploring how contemporary texts construct the Chinese railroad worker as what Georg Lukacs called a typical character, a formal device through which to grasp and represent a complex, dynamic social totality. This chapter then turns to a selection of fictional texts by Paul Yee in order to track how this figure enables the author to make sense of the heterogeneous forces that shaped Chinese migration to Canada. While his children’s story “Spirits of the Railway” accords symbolic recognition to Chinese workers who died during the building of the CPR, his young adult novella Blood and Iron explores the intersection between racial capitalism and kinship. Finally, his novel A Superior Man questions the ideology of nation-building by emphasizing transnational migrant routes and relationships between Chinese and indigenous peoples.