Alien Land Acts

Historical Context

The Alien Land Acts emerged at a time in U.S. history when questions over citizenship, property ownership, and slots in the labor market were being hotly contested along racial and national lines. This was the era of manifest destiny when Europeans and European Americans were migrating to what is now the U.S. West with the sense that it was the United States's destiny to own these territories. It was a time not only of rapid U.S. land acquisition but also of a racialized vision of U.S. civilization that was designed for the benefit of European descendants. Native Americans and Mexicans were already living on the land that would become the western and southwestern United States, and slavery of African Americans had contributed to the creation of European wealth in the United States. Nevertheless, these groups were excluded from the class of “true Americans” and from the entitlements that followed.

One manifestation of this way of thinking was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which preserved the right of naturalized citizenship for “free White persons” only. Although it was created to settle questions of property ownership and citizenship rights in the context of slavery, this act formed the basis for later immigration laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924. This law was created to settle emerging immigration debates by developing a national origins quota system that disproportionately favored Whites; the same act enforced the exclusion of persons ineligible for citizenship. Although the wording of the law was held to be nondiscriminatory because it did not specifically target Asians for exclusion, the impact of the law had this specifically racial implication.

Public support for such immigration laws was strong, and in the U.S. West this support took place in an environment of strong anti-Asian sentiment. In 1882, the United States passed the only law in its history targeting one particular nationality—the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. At the time, the Chinese were widely viewed as a degenerate uncivilized population. They were the targets of mass resentment among European descendants in the western states due to the visibility of Chinese laborers in the rail and mining industries.

Although the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred immigration from China until 1965, it had the result of increasing immigration from other Asian nations, particularly Japan. Although popular support for a similar Japanese exclusion act was strong, U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations and the development of Japan as an imperial world power meant that such an act never passed.

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