Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which halted immigration from China for 10 years and barred the Chinese from U.S. citizenship, was the first legislation in U.S. history to restrict immigration by race or nationality. The act exempted travelers, teachers, students, merchants, and American-born Chinese from the overall exclusion. The law was the first to restrict immigration by an ethnic group, and the first of multiple legislative, executive, and judicial acts imposing what many scholars regard as racist limits, including exclusions or quotas for Japanese and all other Asians.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was a foretaste of the immigration restriction laws of the 1920s that eventuated in the National Origins Act of 1929, which capped immigration at 150,000 a year and excluded Asians entirely.

In response to the Gold Rush, Chinese came to California. By 1870 the population of California included 8.6 percent Chinese, and Chinese were a fourth of the workforce. The pull was the demand on the West Coast for workers in mining, timber, canning, and railroad construction. Additionally, the Chinese owners of laundries, restaurants, and small factories in the United States wanted Chinese workers. Construction of the Central Pacific railroad from 1864 to 1869 also depended on Chinese labor.

Almost from the time of their arrival, Chinese encountered discrimination in cities and mining camps. California enacted the Foreign Miners’ Tax in 1850. Levies as high as $20 a month targeted the small number of Chinese.

Still the Chinese came, pushed by events in China. Foreign and domestic wars and religious and political rebellions caused 30 million Chinese fatalities and a virtual collapse of the Chinese economy.

The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 allowed free immigration between China and the United States. By 1868 the west was home to 100,000 Chinese, but the United States wanted more Chinese workers and promised to protect Chinese citizens in America. Not long after the Burlingame Treaty, California went into a recession. Unemployed Californians looked to scapegoat the Chinese in their midst.

But the Chinese survived, persevered, and prospered, creating San Francisco's Chinatown governed by the Six Companies (Tongs) from the 1860s. Their difference and their prosperity provoked already-racist whites: the Chinese were heathen and seemed impossible to assimilate, so they had to be stopped. Anti-Chinese stereotypes were based on white superiority and an erroneous belief that the Chinese were stealing American jobs.

White unionists and newspapers fanned the flames of violence, and China was slow to respond, not establishing an embassy in Washington, D.C., and a consular office in San Francisco until 1878. By then, hundreds of Chinese cases were pending, 300 Chinese were in jail, and Congress was debating Chinese exclusion. The Chinese ambassador told the secretary of state that exclusion violated the Burlingame Treaty. President Rutherford Hayes vetoed the exclusion bill but sought to renegotiate the Chinese treaty in 1880. The Angell Treaty authorized the United States to suspend, limit, and regulate Chinese immigration but not to prohibit it.

In 1882 Senator John F. Miller (R-CA) proposed a 20-year suspension of Chinese immigration, with deportation and imprisonment as penalties. He also sought to block federal and state naturalization. President Chester Arthur vetoed the bill due to the 20-year provision. Congress passed it with a 10-year ban, and Arthur signed it. Non-laborer Chinese who sought to come to the United States had to have a Chinese certificate of eligibility to emigrate and had to prove that they were not laborers.

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