This message comes from 48 hours with the 48 hours post-mortem podcast.

Host Anne Marie Green joins producers and correspondents to discuss key evidence, dead ends,

and stranger than fiction twists they faced in the field.

Listen on your favorite podcast app.

In 1903, a reporter named Pulteney Bigelow stumbled across a story in upstate New York.

The part of New York, that is, right along the Canadian border.

A rural town in Franklin County called Malone, where he starts talking with locals.

And they tell him, this route from Canada into northern New York has become this sort of

vastly underreported secret passage of illegal entry into the United States for Chinese migrants.

Like, why is that a pathway? Is it easier to get into Canada at that time?

Yeah, it's a super intentional choice.

So this is about 20 years after the U.S. passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars Chinese

laborers basically entirely from legal immigration to the United States.

So for many Chinese migrants who are still looking for a path in, this is one of their

best options.

Wow, interesting.

They take a boat to Vancouver. They take a train across the entire length of Canada.

They stop over in Montreal, where there are Chinese communities that coach them, that help

them cross the border. And then they cross this just incredibly rural, isolated sort of path into northern New York.

That takes us back to the reporter, Pulteney Bigelow, who starts asking around.

And people in Malone tell him, go look at the county jail.

He arrives at the county jail, and the county jail is filled, is packed to the brim with Chinese migrants.

...