Mr. Blaine to Mr. Pung.
Washington, May 27, 1890.
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of the 24th (23d) instant, in which you bring to the notice of the Department the text of an order said to have been passed by the board of supervisors of the city and county of San Francisco in March last, designating the location and the district in which Chinese shall reside and carry on business within the corporate limits. You invoke the intervention of the Government of the United States against the execution of this ordinance, referring, in this relation, to the treaty between China and the United States of 1880, the third article of which is as follows:
If Chinese laborers, or Chinese of any other class, now either permanently or temporarily residing in the territory of the United States, meet with ill treatment at the hands of any other persons, the Government of the United States will exert all its power to devise measures for their protection and to secure to them the same rights, privileges, immunities, and exemptions as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation, and to which they are entitled by treaty.
I have referred a copy of your note to the Attorney-General for his consideration. Meanwhile, I may ask your attention to the sixth article of the Constitution of the United States, which places treaties on the same juridical basis as laws and makes them the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding. By the second section of the third article the judicial power of the United States is made to extend to all cases arising under the treaties. Under these provisions, and the statutes of the United States passed to give them effect, it is believed that the Chinese who are said to have been arrested under the order in question may, in an application to the courts for release from imprisonment or detention, speedily obtain a decision as to their rights and the legality of the order. If the Department be correct in this belief, there does not appear to be any occasion to invoke the stipulation of the third article of the immigration treaty of 1880, by which the Government of the United States undertakes to “exert all its power to devise measures” for the protection of the Chinese and to secure them in their rights, since such measures are already in existence and clearly available.
Accept, etc.,