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Chinese Exclusion Act

The Immigration Act of 1882, popularly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, was the first major and the only federal legislation that banned immigrants explicitly based on a specific nationality. It represented one of the darkest moments in the history of U.S. race policy, set the precedent for later restriction against immigration of other races and nationalities, and started a new era in which the country became a gate-keeping nation.

The Act

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882. The act lasted for 10 years and was extended for another 10 years by the 1892 Geary Act. The basic exclusion law prohibited Chinese laborers, who were defined excludable as “both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining” (Chinese Exclusion Act), from entering the United States; subsequent amendments to the law prevented Chinese laborers who left the United States from returning. Later measures limited the access of the Chinese to bail bonds, required that they carry identification certificates or face deportation, and restricted the categories of persons who could enter to teachers, students, diplomats, and tourists. In 1902, Congress closed the gate to Chinese immigrants entirely by making the Geary Act extension permanent.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act, which permitted a quota of 105 Chinese immigrants annually. Various factors contributed to the repeal, such as the quieted anti-Chinese sentiment, the establishment of quota systems for immigrants of other nationalities who had rapidly increased in the United States, and the political consideration that the United States and China were allies in World War II.

Causes and Effects

Many scholars explain the exclusion laws as a product of the widespread anti-Chinese movement in California in the second half of the 19th century. The Chinese had constituted a significant minority on the West Coast since the mid-19th century. Initially, they labored in the gold mines, where they were more adept than White American miners at finding gold. As a result, the Chinese encountered hostility and were gradually forced to leave the field and move to urban areas such as San Francisco, where they continued to perform some of the dirtiest and hardest work. Americans in the West persisted in their stereotyping the Chinese as degraded, exotic, dangerous, and, outrageously, competitors of jobs and wages. California Senator John F. Miller, who introduced the bill to bar Chinese immigrants, argued that the Chinese workers were “machine-like… of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron.” Therefore, restricting the influx of Chinese into the United States through federal legislation became one of the goals of organized labor in the West. In other words, the exclusion was the result of a grassroots anti-Chinese sentiment. Other scholars argued that the exclusion should be blamed by top-down politics rather than bottom-up movement, explaining that national politicians manipulated the White workers to gain electoral advantage. Still others adopted a “national racism thesis” that focused on anti-Chinese racism in early American national culture.

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