It is sufficient that I should call the earnest attention of Congress to
the circumstance that the statute makes no provision whatever for the
somewhat numerous class of Chinese persons who, retaining their Chinese
subjection in some countries other than China, desire to come from such
countries to the United States.
Chinese merchants have trading operations of magnitude throughout the
world. They do not become citizens or subjects of the country where they
may temporarily reside and trade; they continue to be subjects of China,
and to them the explicit exemption of the treaty applies. Yet if such a
Chinese subject, the head of a mercantile house at Hongkong or Yokohama
or Honolulu or Havana or Colon, desires to come from any of these places
to the United States, he is met with the requirement that he must
produce a certificate, in prescribed form and in the English tongue,
issued by the Chinese Government. If there be at the foreign place of
his residence no representative of the Chinese Government competent to
issue a certificate in the prescribed form, he can obtain none, and is
under the provisions of the present law unjustly debarred from entry
into the United States. His usual Chinese passport will not suffice,
for it is not in the form which the act prescribes shall be the sole
permissible evidence of his right to land. And he can obtain no such
certificate from the Government of his place of residence, because he
is not a subject or citizen thereof "at the time," or at any time.
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