Henderson v. Mayor of New York, 92 U.S. 259 (1876), was decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the court held that New York's imposition of a tax per passenger arriving by ship was an invalid state regulation of foreign commerce.
Since 1824, the state of New York had required that every vessel arriving in the port of New York provide a sworn report to the mayor of any passengers from other countries and states. The law further required the payment of a bond for expenses that could arise resulting from accident, sickness or poverty of the passenger.[1] The report of passenger information was upheld by the Supreme Court in Mayor of New York v. Miln (1837) as a legitimate exercise of the state police power. Justice Joseph Story dissented from that decision.[2]
In the Passenger Cases (1849), the Supreme Court struck down state taxes based on the number of incoming immigrants on board or disembarking from a ship because it was an unconstitutional regulation of foreign commerce. To get around this, some states designed similar taxes to appear like more-palatable exercises of their police powers.[3]
At the time of this case, the steamship companies that brought passengers to the United States were taxed for every healthy passenger that made it into the country. They included this fee in the ticket price but considered it a burden on their business. Without the tax, they reasoned they could sell more tickets.[4]
The lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York by two British brothers whose steamship company the Henderson Brothers ran a vessel between Glasgow and New York. The Circuit Court upheld the New York laws. The brothers brought the case to the Supreme Court alleging that the state law infringed upon an exclusive Congressional power over foreign commerce.[4]
Supreme Court
Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall's decision in Gibbons v. Ogden the Court asserted the supremacy of the Constitution: "In every such case the act of Congress or the treaty is supreme; and the laws of the State, though enacted in the exercise of powers not controverted, must yield to it." Chief Justice Roger Taney preferred a narrower commerce clause than Gibbons. The Taney Court's decision in Cooley v. Board of Wardens authored by Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis was a compromise position articulating a doctrine of partial federal exclusivity. In Cooley Justice Curtis said the power to regulate commerce was exclusive to Congress when "subjects of this power are in their nature national, or admit only of one uniform system, or plan of regulation". States could exercise their police powers when the subject matter was local but not when it was national.[5][6][7][8]
Despite the similarity of the tax provisions in the Passenger Cases there was no majority opinion for that case and Justice Miller based the decision on the more persuasive reasoning of Cooley.[9]
Subsequent developments
Unlike the Passenger Cases, states did not try to avoid the conclusion that Henderson prevented them from regulating foreign commerce and immigration. Because the federal government typically had not been in the business of regulating immigration except with regards to regulating the care due to boat passengers, the United States reverted to that open border policy.[3]
This left the states with immigration issues that state officials considered burdens, such as expenses related to immigrants who arrived sick or destitute. The money raised with the tax of healthy passengers at issue in Henderson had been justified on paper as a way to recoup costs related to caring for those infirm passengers. Once states could not tax the incoming immigrants based on their health status, states levied taxes against their citizens. This was one factor that created political will for the Page Act of 1875, the first national policy of immigration restrictions.[3]
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