HELD FOR BOND

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 16 September 1924, Page 5

HELD FOR BOND

IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS

TOURISTS HARSHLY TREATED. CONFINED IN DIRTY BUILDING

(by TELEGRAPH —PRESS ASSOCIATION ) mi r «. AUCKLAND, Sept. 15. Ihe difficulties experienced by recent arrivals at Sap Francisco by the Maunganui from New Zealand owing 'to the operation of the new immigration regulations in the United States are graphi?‘?*vT^ e ' SC i * n a letter written to the Herald by Mrs Beryl Caton, of Devonport. “My mother,' my son' and myself, states Mrs • Caton' “left by Maunganui with passports vised }>v the. American Consul ‘at Auckland, who assured both ourselves and the Union Company that we' would have no difficulty and would be permitted to land. Judge our dismay when, on arrival' at-" tean Francisco, we found that under the I^ W n aliens* in transit through the States must put up a 500 dollar bond or face deportation. “In cases of passengers proceeding direct .to- England or abroad without stopping over in the States the officials, an the circumstances, waived the provisions of the Act, but everyone who announced their intention of remaining for a time in the States, and all passengers booked through to Canada only were held up for the bond. In my case it was necessary to get wi touch with my husband in Los Angeles and to wait for. him to put up the bond there, which could not be done immediately, as we arrived on a Sunday. “About sixteen of us were taken aqross San Francisco Bay in a small tug where our baggage wa.s watersoaked and ourselves drenched with spray, and dumped on Angel Island. Here we found ourselves herded in close confinement in a barracks-like building, hot, unventila’ted, and dirty, about 60 Chinese women and children, without privacy or .privileges of any kind. The olace was abommabH dirty, and the only fresh air to be had was in an unsheltered runway covered both at the sides and the top with stout meshed wire like a cage at a zoo, where the Chinese spat out food, lumps of fruit, peelings and what not just wherever they happened to be. “The meals were • served in a hot sour-smelling room, hung with ancient fly-papers, on tables covered with none too clean American cloth, with cutlery of blackened tin and the eoarest and commonest of "china and enainelware The unappetising food was cold : by the time we were herded down there, and though the Chinese did not dine in the same room, a number of Spanish and •South American people did, and their table habits were far from inviting, to put it mildly. ‘‘We were not permitted out of doors, and. even friends who came from San r rancisco to. see us were compelled to wait a. couple of hours till the authorities thought fit to permit us to see them. It was only after the San Francisco papers, waich were very indignant over this .fresh menace to. the tourist traffic, had given considerable publicity to our cases that an attempt was made to ameliorate the conditions bv transferring the women and children >o a hospital building. Fortuuavelv l.had made friends on the • essel, who were able, by using their influence and guaranteeing our good faith, to gain an early hearing before the commission ns. and secure our release on the second day of. detention.

“The remainder of the passengers,” continued Mrs Caton, “remained under detention, and so far as I can ascertain are still there. The officials themselves . were uniformly courteous, but they are bound by the rules and conditions of the place, which is run not for whites but for Asiatics. About 30 passengers of the Tahiti, who arrived four weeks before we did, were released from Angel Island on the day before the Maunganui arrived. They were finally released because the Tahiti had left New Zealand before the new Act came into force. It took Washington four weeks to come to that generous decision, and frcip my brief two days’ sojourn I would not willingly spend four weeks on Angel Island to gain admittance to paradise itself.”