At the end of the nineteenth century, the international legal regime was largely built out of the jurisdiction nations retained over their emigrants while they traveled abroad. There were two key variants of this jurisdiction. The international appeal represented one. The other was more imperialist and it imposed restrictions on the ability of many nations and empires located in Asia and the Middle East to carry out deportations. Both jurisdictions were forms of extraterritoriality. U.S. officials would use both to protect American citizens from removal. A nation or empire’s place within the interstate community affected the reach and degree of both forms of extraterritoriality. When the U.S. federal government got into the business of deporting people from the United States, because of its place within the comity (or community) of nations, they found their policy structured by the international appeal.
By the early years of the twentieth century, national-level policy makers deemed the destination of an immigrant removal more important than it had ever been, and officials on the receiving end increasingly had to approve a deportation. Immigrant removals, once largely unilateral, were now increasingly bilateral. This convergence in national policies led immigration officials and diplomats to negotiate agreements and protocols. In these, along with many countries, U.S. officials made important additions to the international legal regime. As they did, officials changed the logic of the international regime, making it function less as a resource for emigrants abroad and more for nation-states to police sovereign soil. In the process, the international legal regime became even more elemental to carrying out deportations.
The International Appeals Process and the Ties of Male Citizens
Constant Golly’s deportation was one of at least 447 deportations of U.S. citizens ordered in Germany and Austria-Hungary between 1868 and 1903. All of these cases involved young men, most of whom were in Europe to visit family or attend school. Some were there for business.3 Men like Golly sometimes requested that U.S. diplomats intervene to halt their removal so that they could continue living abroad as U.S. citizens. Unlike a domestic appeals process, like the ones in operation in the United States examined in Chapter 1, the international appeal was a soft process that involved reciprocal diplomatic power, legal rhetoric, appeals to treaties, and sometimes even threats. Chinese officials tried to use the international appeal to protect some Chinese immigrants in the United States from deportation because all nations with sovereignty could use the international appeal. But, as it turned out, they could not all use it equally.
Using the international appeal in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the late nineteenth century turned out mostly to involve U.S. diplomats’ protection of the citizenship of Americans abroad. They did so, for example, in the face of German citizenship laws that were seemingly making U.S. citizens into Germans. The German and Austro-Hungarian governments, of course, understood it quite differently.4 At the heart of such interventions was one question: were they Americans or not? This question was intimately tied to another: did these men, all of whom claimed U.S. citizenship, owe military service to either Austria-Hungary or Germany?5 Answering these questions was complicated because it was sometimes unclear where one citizenship status ended and another began.6 As German or Austro-Hungarian and U.S. officials puzzled out the cases, their efforts contributed to what sociologist David Cook Martin has referred to as “a scramble for citizens.” In this age of mass migration, government officials worked to preserve ties with their emigrants abroad, sometimes doing so in competition or conflict with officials from countries of immigration.7 As the cases involving deportations from Germany and Austria-Hungary help illustrate, use of the international appeal protected immigrants from deportation and fostered positive ties between emigrants and their country of origin. It did so by serving as a resource that some emigrants accessed while outside their country of citizenship.8
The ability of U.S. officials to intervene in German or Austro-Hungarian cases like Golly’s was rooted in international law of the nineteenth century that mandated channels for emigrant-sending states to look out for their emigrants. “All civilized states,” Edwin M. Borchard, a professor of law at Yale University, stated in 1915, “must yield some share of their absolute liberty of action and that their rights must be reconciled with the reciprocal rights of other states.” He continued, “Among these mutual concessions, the one of present interest is the fact that the territorial sovereignty or jurisdiction of a state has to be reconciled with the right of other states to protect their nationals abroad, an outgrowth of principle and practice, rather than the subject of formal written admission.”9 This meant that if the Germans wanted to remove an immigrant, then the emigrant-sending state could have something to say in the process. This amounted to an international appeal.
The 447 military cases in which U.S. officials used the international appeal originated in the second half of the nineteenth century, when diplomats from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the United States faced the fact that some men were using “flexible citizenship” to avoid military service.10 One U.S. consular officer, Bartlett Tripp, wrote in 1894: “It is an undeniable fact that hundreds of young Austro-Hungarian citizens approaching the age of military service emigrate to America, and, remaining there just long enough to acquire citizenship, return again to their native country to permanently reside, resuming their former citizenship and allegiance to the Government in everything but its military laws.”11 He continued, “Many of these returned pseudo-Americans are loud in their defiance of the military power, and openly and shamelessly boast of their smartness in being able to enjoy all of the privileges of a government without being obliged to share its burdens or responsibilities.” Their actions, Tripp alleged, did great harm. “The example of these ‘Americans’ before the young men of the country, to say nothing of their teachings and boastful assertions of immunity,” Tripp noted, “is pernicious, and against public order and ready obedience on the part of the citizens to the necessarily harsh enforcement of the military laws of this Government.”12
U.S. officials publicly supported some of the deportations that German and Austro-Hungarian authorities pursued as a means of dealing with the flexible use of citizenship. A country had the right “to bar its doors against obnoxious citizens of other nations for reasons which to itself may seem sufficient,” Tripp acknowledged, “without cause of complaint on the part of the nation whose citizen is thus debarred.”13 Indeed, the U.S. government already “assumed the right in the case of China.”14 In the case of Constant Golly, which opened this chapter, the consular agents handling the case soon dropped his defense. They found that Golly was using his U.S. citizenship to avoid military service, while intending to live permanently in Germany. U.S. authorities did not object when the Germans deported him.15
U.S. officials, however, felt that in general the Germans and Austro-Hungarians were too aggressive with their expulsions, and they set out to stop some through international appeal. The first step in protecting some of the U.S. citizens, especially naturalized citizens, from deportation in the military cases was for U.S. officials to convince the German or Austro-Hungarian officials that they were innocent of deliberate evasion of military service, with age of migration a key factor. If a person immigrated to the United States before he was drafted, and especially if he had immigrated at a young age with his family, the U.S. consulate defended the naturalized American. An 1889 statement from one U.S. consular officer in defense of Hugo Klamer, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Austria, captures this argument clearly. This official wrote, “[T]he assertion is hardly maintainable that a boy who emigrates at the age of fourteen years, who resides twelve years uninterruptedly in the United States and acquires American citizenship during his residence there, and then returns to his old home for the purpose of a visit, and is compelled by circumstances to prolong his visit, but declares under oath that he intends to return to the United States at an early day, has emigrated for the purpose of evading military service.”16 U.S. officials,