harassment. As Erika Lee describes, because the Act required all Chinese to possess the certificates, the entire Chinese community in the U.S. – including immigrants and residents who were supposed to be exempt from the exclusionary laws – was exposed to the same level of constraint and inquiry governing Chinese laborers. This unprecedented level of inquiry was motivated by the prejudiced view that it was, as Senator Geary said, "impossible to identify [one] Chinaman [from another]". No other immigrant group were required to hold documents proving their lawful residence until 1928, when 'immigrant identification cards' were first issued to any new immigrant arriving for permanent residence. These were replaced by green cards, officially called Alien Registration Receipt Cards, after 1940. Such "gatekeeping" in Lee's characterization was rooted in "a western American desire to sustain white supremacy in a multiracial West". Reaction The Los Angeles Herald strongly supported the Act and its certification provision, stating in an editorial that "nearly all civilized nations have had until lately a very rigid system of passports in which a very exact personal description of the bearer formed a part." Within a few months of the implementing the Act, Chinese in the U.S. began organizing to resist the enforcement of the law. The heads of the Six Companies, the San Francisco branch of The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, proclaimed that the Chinese in the U.S. ought not register, but rather contribute to a fund for hiring of lawyers to fight the law on the ground of unconstitutionality. The effort was overwhelmingly successful (only 3,169 of the estimated 110,000 Chinese in the country had registered by the April 1893 deadline), yet newspaper coverage of the protest reported Chinese as being slaves to doing whatever The Six Companies told them to do. Resistance came from outside the West of the country as well. The Chinese Equal Rights League in New York and Brooklyn pleaded that its members to help their fellow countrymen, and enrolled some 150 English-speaking Chinese merchants and professionals in New York. Its leaders argued that by making Chinese immigrants pay the "illegal costs and expenses" of enforcing the law, the bill imposed taxation without representation. The Chinese Equal Rights League was able to gain much support from whites on the East Coast, as on September 22, 1892, more than one thousand U.S. citizens joined some two hundred Chinese merchants and laborers at Cooper Union