ates as
teachers, students, merchants, or from curiosity, together with their
body and household servants, * * * shall be allowed to go and come of
their own free will and accord, and shall be accorded all the rights,
privileges, immunities, and exemptions which are accorded to the
citizens and subjects of the most favored nation.

Section 6 of the amended Chinese immigration act of 1884 purports to
secure this treaty right to the exempted classes named by means of
prescribed certificates of their status, which certificates shall be the
_prima facie_ and the sole permissible evidence to establish a
right of entry into the United States. But it provides in terms for the
issuance of certificates in two cases only:

(_a_) Chinese subjects departing from a port of China; and

(_b_) Chinese persons (_i.e._, of the Chinese race) who may at
the time be subjects of some foreign government other than China, and
who may depart for the United States from the ports of such other
foreign government.

A statute is certainly most unusual which, purporting to execute the
provisions of a treaty with China in respect of Chinese subjects, enacts
strict formalities as regards the subjects of other governments than
that of China.

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 pas