Late 19th-Century Legalese

The history of legal writing has been a long struggle toward comprehensibility. Or at least, that's what it seems like. The ironic part is that legal writing is specifically designed to eliminate loopholes and force a single interpretation of the text. If every law had a million interpretations like a Shakespeare play, the world would be a more chaotic, but rhyming place.

Check it out:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States. (Sec.1)

This section is a perfect example, not only containing the simple rule about excluding the Chinese, but absolutely precisely when they had to be here to be exempt from the law. While it makes the whole thing more difficult to parse, it also tells you exactly who is allowed to stay and who has to go.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, though, takes things almost to the level of parody. The law assumes that the bulk of Chinese immigration is going to come via ships, and in fact the longest section, 4, is all about how that works. This was before planes, after all, and that land bridge that used to link North America and Asia has been gone for 10,000 years.

Still after the intense language and wrangling over exactly what hoops the Chinese would have to jump through to get here (see Sections 3 and 4), it was like someone raised their hand and was like, "What if they come from Canada or Mexico?" So there are these hastily added on sections that more or less say "What we said about ships, we also mean about horses, or donkeys, or trains, or whatever."

Here's a bit of Section 5, which says more or less exactly that:

That any Chinese laborer mentioned in section four of this act being in the United States, and desiring to depart from the United States by land, shall have the right to demand and receive, free of charge or cost, a certificate of identification similar to that provided for in section four of this act to be issued to such Chinese laborers as may desire to leave the United States by water. (Sec.5)

The most bizarre, though, is in Section 15, where it defines Chinese laborers. It says they mean both skilled and unskilled laborers. Which...if they didn't define laborer more than that, wouldn't we assume they meant skilled and unskilled? Aren't there only two kinds?

But then it becomes truly funny when it's also, "and miners too." Miners are definitely laborers. No one has ever been mining and then says, "How relaxing was that, Janice? Next year, we should bring the kids. Really relax with all this mining we're doing." No, that's labor.

But because one of the major markets the Chinese immigrant labor force was coming into was mining, it was mentioned in the law.