© 2006 American Bar Foundation.

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Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLSILaw & Social Inquiry0897-6546© 2006 American Bar Foundation.winter 2006311Original Article

EditorsLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY

The 2005 LSI Graduate Student Paper Prize

The Editors of

Law & Social Inquiry

are pleased to take this opportunity tohonor Emily Ryo as the winner of the journal’s 2005 Graduate StudentEssay Competition. Her winning essay, published in this issue, is entitled“Through the Back Door: Applying Theories of Legal Compliance to IllegalImmigration During the Chinese Exclusion Era.”

Emily Ryo has a JD from Harvard Law School and is currently com-pleting her PhD in Sociology at Stanford University. Her article contributesin important and original ways to a field of research that has attracted majorattention from historians, legal historians, sociologists and others over thelast decade. First, Ryo traces the history of Chinese migrants’ illegal entrythrough surreptitious border crossing. Historians and others have taken noteof deceptive entry through the fabrication of “legal” identities, notably thephenomenon of “paper sons” and (much more rare) “paper daughters”—thatis, migrants posing as the son of a Chinese U.S. citizen or Chinese merchant,categories of Chinese who continued to be eligible for entry under the exclu-sion laws. But little notice has been given to the origins of the phenomenonof “illegal immigration” as it is presented to us today. Ryo underlines border-crossing’s considerable importance for the Chinese, in that it accounted forapproximately twice as many cases of illegal immigration as misrepresentationof identity.

Refocusing scholarly research to ensure serious attention to thisneglected phenomenon is in itself a valuable and important contribution.But Ryo goes on to consider the reasons for the persistent refusal of Chineseimmigrants to obey U.S. immigration laws. In this way her essay adds valuablyto work on legal compliance. Ryo shows that we cannot be content withinstrumental explanations of variation in compliance. For instance, Chineseimmigrants did not trade off compliance against an overriding impulse toseek work in a kind of Maslowian hierarchy of decision making. Rather, theirlack of compliance with immigration laws should also be understood as arejection per se of the laws’ legitimacy. Ryo’s comprehensive archival research

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provides considerable evidence for the conclusion that Chinese immigrantsthought that U.S. laws were racist and hence unworthy of compliance.

Grounded here in the Chinese case, such conclusions suggest an impor-tant course for research on illegal immigration. One can hypothesize thatthe more U.S. immigration policy appears to be targeted at particular groups(for example, Mexicans, Arabs, Africans) the more likely they are to be per-ceived as discriminatory and illegitimate by the groups affected, the less likelythose groups are to comply, and hence the greater their pressure on Immi-gration Service enforcement resources. This carries clear implications for fed-eral government strategy in attempting to control immigration flows fromLatin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. More generally, Ryo’s essayoffers a further step in the examination of immigration law as the expression(and enforcement) of a sovereign claim of control over territory, and of clan-destine entry as a statement rejecting that claim.

The Editors