President Taft’s 1909 Inaugural Address Emphasized Immigration and “Sanctuary Cities”

If we are looking for closure soon on our immigration problems, consider this shocker: President William Howard Taft told the nation in 1909 that we have a  problem with “Asiatic immigrants” and that certain cities and states were interfering with federal enforcement of immigration laws. 

Here, he is referring to a reverse problem from today-- cities that offered sanctuary to thugs and racist politicians who harmed immigrants. His probable focus was a 1906 ordinance by San Francisco that forbade Chinese, Korean, and Japanese students from attending public schools. The order nearly triggered a war with China. Some leaders in China viewed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (which happened several months before the school ban) as divine retribution for anti-Chinese attitudes in California, and helped to tamp down their feelings about going to war. 

The rest of this post consists of two paragraphs from his speech:

“The admission of Asiatic immigrants who cannot be amalgamated with our population has been made the subject either of prohibitory clauses in our treaties and statutes or of strict administrative regulation secured by diplomatic negotiation. I sincerely hope that we may continue to minimize the evils likely to arise from such immigration without unnecessary friction and by mutual concessions between self-respecting governments. Meantime we must take every precaution to prevent, or failing that, to punish outbursts of race feeling among our people against foreigners of whatever nationality who have by our grant a treaty right to pursue lawful business here and to be protected against lawless assault or injury.

This leads me to point out a serious defect in the present federal jurisdiction, which ought to be remedied at once. Having assured to other countries by treaty the protection of our laws for such of their subjects or citizens as we permit to come within our jurisdiction, we now leave to a state or a city, not under the control of the Federal Government, the duty of performing our international obligations in this respect. By proper legislation we may, and ought to, place in the hands of the Federal Executive the means of enforcing the treaty rights of such aliens in the courts of the Federal Government. It puts our Government in a pusillanimous position to make definite engagements to protect aliens and then to excuse the failure to perform those engagements by an explanation that the duty to keep them is in States or cities, not within our control. If we would promise we must put ourselves in a position to perform our promise. We cannot permit the possible failure of justice, due to local prejudice in any State or municipal government, to expose us to the risk of a war which might be avoided if federal jurisdiction was asserted by suitable legislation by Congress and carried out by proper proceedings instituted by the Executive in the courts of the National Government.

SOURCE: 

William Howard Taft, March 4, 1909: Inaugural Address, available in http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25830