The Constitutional Rights Of Aliens.

New York Times 100 years ago today, June 8, 1913:
    The principles laid down by the Supreme Court in the Chinese Laundry case of Yick Wo vs. Hopkins do not seem to sustain the representation which Japan has made to our Government that the new alien land laws of California violate the Fourteenth Amendment of our Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment is one of the series intended to secure to the negro race all the civil rights enjoyed by the white race. It requires that "all persons who are naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; it further declares that no State shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." In the Laundry case referred to the Supreme Court declared the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to be "universal in their application to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality; and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws." The questions arising in the case, therefore, involved "the rights of every citizen of the United States equally with those of the strangers and aliens who now invoke the jurisdiction of the court."
    But the court ruled that in this case the equal protection of the laws had been denied to the complainant. The City of San Francisco had adopted an ordinance for the regulation of the laundry business, giving to the Board of Supervisors the right to issue licenses. It appeared that licenses were withheld from Chinese applicants, while under the same conditions they were freely issued to others. The court held that this administration of the ordinance was "so unequal and oppressive as to amount to a practical denial by the State of that equal protection of the laws which is secured to the petitioners and to all other persons by the broad and benign provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment." The discriminations were unjust and Illegal.
    Since the new alien land laws will not go into operation until the first of August, it is impossible as yet to say whether they will be administered in the manner of the laundry ordinance. Discrimination within the prohibition of the Fourteenth Amendment does not appear in the terms of the law, though avowedly it is intended to prevent leases of agricultural lands to the Japanese. The law provides that aliens eligible to citizenship may acquire and hold lands as citizens do, but that "all other aliens are limited to the specific rights conferred upon them by existing treaties." Our treaty with Japan does not extend to Japanese the right to lease agricultural lands. Under its terms they have liberty "to own or lease and occupy houses, manufactories, warehouses, and shops," and "to lease land for residential and commercial purposes." It might be inferred that there was here an express intention to exclude leases of agricultural lands from the scope of the treaty. The Japanese Government has evidently modified its conclusion that the California laws violate the terms of the treaty, for it is understood that in the latest note from Tokio it is asserted only that they violate the "spirit" of the convention.
    Rights which the treaty does not grant might, it would seem, be conferred, withheld, or regulated by the State of California without setting up such oppressive discriminations or such inequality in the application of the law as the court found in the Laundry case to be a violation of the
    Fourteenth Amendment. It is to be noted that while that amendment was adopted to confer equal civil rights on persons of the colored race, yet laws providing for the separation of the white and colored races in schools and public conveyances in the Southern States have been held to be constitutional.