Introduction
HOW DO THE A-FILES REFLECT DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES OF LEGAL IMMIGRATION?
Among its many collections of government records, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has one that offers an exceptionally revealing glimpse into the lives of hundreds of thousands of migrants who came to the country over the course of more than a century. Known as the Alien Files, or A-files, they contain a range of records relating to people who wanted to settle in the United States. Prompted by the Alien Registration Act of 1940, the U.S. government began by the mid-1940s to systematize its record-keeping regarding newcomers to the country, relying on A-files to collect an individual’s documentation related to processes like naturalization, asylum, and even deportation. The documents compiled in an individual’s A-file, ranging from employment records and church memberships to identification photos and government forms, reflect the complex legal and administrative apparatus that governed the state’s admission or rejection of particular groups at specific historical moments.
The A-files are government records, but they also offer a more personal image of their subjects. In order to prove that they were suitable for legal status, migrants might, for instance, submit a letter from an employer, records from a civic association, even their school registrations from decades earlier. In the A-files, one sees the laborious work migrants undertook to prove they met the government’s exacting and often shifting standards for legal status. And, crucially for scholars and others interested in excavating more layered and nuanced understandings of immigrants’ experiences, each person’s A-file is not just an encounter with the government rendered in official forms. It is also a lightly sketched biography, outlining the rough contours of a person’s work, family and community ties. To be sure, the A-files do not show complete lives, but what they do reveal is a roadmap for further research that can be used to construct a fuller picture of an immigrant’s life and show how their individual experience reflected a wide range of pathways through and around the state’s requirements for legal status.
Here, as an example of what can be done using these records, we have examined A-files for two migrants. The documents they contain fill in portraits of these individuals. They also provide a glimpse into an immigration process distorted in particular ways by geopolitics, race, and economic conditions.
One A-file we examined for this project belongs to “George” Yuke Kee Lee who, in 1922 at age sixteen, departed from his hometown of Mui Yun of “Kwangtung” (Guangdong) Province to join his uncle in the United States. The other is for Teresa Reyes Trujillo, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when she was three years-old, brought by her parents in 1910 just before the Mexican Revolution. With the collected materials we’ve brought together for this project, we hope to demonstrate the richly textured stories that can be teased out from the A-files. The collected items, some drawn directly from A-files and others representing research sparked by evidence and omissions from the A-files, together demonstrate that the A-files are an invaluable resource for deeper understanding of immigrants’ lives.