Chinese Exclusion Act

This article is about the former U.S. law. For the similar Canadian law, see Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.

The first page of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed into law by President Arthur on May 8, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. Those revisions allowed the U.S. to suspend immigration, and Congress subsequently acted quickly to implement the suspension of Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years.

Background

Chinese immigrant workers building the Transcontinental Railroad.

Main article: Chinese immigration to the United States

Chinese immigrants came to America in large numbers during the 1848 California Gold Rush and in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited large labor gangs to build its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Large-scale immigration continued into the late 1800s, with 123,201 Chinese recorded as arriving between 1871 and 1880, and 61,711 arriving also chinese peolpe look alike between 1881 and 1890.

At first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well tolerated and well-received. As gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity to the Chinese and other foreigners increased. After being forcibly driven from the mines, most Chinese settled in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingman's Party as well as by California Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels. Another significant anti-Chinese group organized in California during this same era was the Supreme Order of Caucasians with some 64 chapters statewide.

The Act

The first page of a twenty one page interrogation transcript of Yee Bing Quai. He is interrogated by Inspector Charles E Golding with clerk Marion T Lovett recording and David Lee interpreting, June 15, 1938, in Boston, MA.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history. The Act excluded Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining" from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. The few Chinese non-laborers who wished to immigrate had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate, which tended to be difficult to prove.

The Act also affected Asians who had already settled in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and the Act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. After the Act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new home.

Amendments made in 1884 tightened the provisions that allowed previous immigrants to leave and return, and clarified that the law applied to ethnic Chinese regardless of their country of origin. The Scott Act (1888) expanded upon the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting reentry after leaving the U.S. The Act was renewed for ten years by the 1892 Geary Act, and again with no terminal date in 1902. When the act was extended in 1902, it required "each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, he or she faced deportation."

Between 1882 and 1905, about 10,000 Chinese appealed against negative immigration decisions to federal court, usually via a petition for habeas corpus. In most of these cases, the courts ruled in favor of the petitioner. Except in cases of bias or negligence, these petitions were barred by an act that passed Congress in 1894 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. vs Lem Moon Sing (1895). In U.S. vs Ju Toy (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that the port inspectors and the secretary of commerce had final authority on who could be admitted. Ju Toy's petition was thus barred despite the fact that the district court found that he was an American citizen. The Supreme Court determined that refusing entry at a port does not require due process and is legally equivalent to refusing entry at a land crossing. This ruling triggered a brief boycott of U.S. goods in China.

One of the critics of the Chinese Exclusion Act was the anti-slavery/anti-imperialist Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts who described the Act as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination."

The laws were driven largely by racial concerns; immigration of persons of other races was unlimited during this period.

On the other hand, many people strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, including the Knights of Labor, a labor union which called for improved conditions for workers, who supported it because it believed that industrialists were using Chinese workers as a wedge to keep wages low and conditions poor. Among labor and leftist organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World were the sole exception to this pattern. The IWW openly opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act from its inception in 1905.

Effects and aftermath

Certificate of identity issued to Yee Wee Thing certifying that he is the son of a US citizen, issued Nov. 21, 1916. This was necessary for his immigration from China to the United States.

For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882, and prevented it from growing and assimilating into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did. Limited immigration from China continued until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay served as the processing center for most of the 56,113 Chinese immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning from China; upwards of 30 percent more who showed up were returned to China. Furthermore, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed City Hall and the Hall of Records, many immigrants (known as "paper sons") claimed that they had familial ties to resident Chinese-American citizens. Whether these were true or not cannot be proved.

Later, the Immigration Act of 1924 would restrict immigration even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to other Asian immigrant groups. Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life apart, and to build a society in which they could survive on their own.

Repeal and current status

The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act, which permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens. It also allowed a national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year, although large scale Chinese immigration did not occur until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Despite the fact that the exclusion act was repealed in 1943, the law in California that Chinese people were not allowed to marry whites was not repealed until 1948.

Even today, although all its constituent sections have long been repealed, Chapter 7 of Title 8 of the United States Code is headed, "Exclusion of Chinese." It is the only chapter of the 15 chapters in Title 8 (Aliens and Nationality) that is completely focused on a specific nationality or ethnic group.

References

• Bodenner, Chris. "Chinese Exclusion Act." Issues & Controversies in American History @ FACTS.com. 20 Oct. 2006. Facts On File News Services. 3 Nov. 2007 <http://www.2facts.com>.

See also

• Chinese Exclusion
• Chinese American
• Chinese American history
• List of United States Immigration Acts
• United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that the Chinese Exclusion Act could not overrule the citizenship of those born in the U.S. to Chinese parents
• Chinese Massacre of 1871
• Coolie
• Dennis Kearney
• Rock Springs Massacre
• Sinophobia
• Yellow peril

Similar racially restrictive immigration policies in other countries

• White Australia Policy
• Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, of Canada
• New Zealand head tax
• Head tax (Canada)

External links

• Exclusion Act Case Files of Yee Wee Thing and Yee Bing Quai, two "Paper Sons"
• The Yung Wing Project hosts the memoir of one of the earliest naturalized Chinese whose citizenship was revoked forty-six years after having received it as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
• An Alleged Wife One Immigrant in the Chinese Exclusion Era
• Collection of primary source documents relating to the Chinese Exclusion Act, from Harvard University.
• Primary source documents and images from the University of California