Chinese exclusion act

« From Chinese exclusion act to American Chinese community today »

The Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration law passed on 6 may 1882 that prevented Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration law that excluded an entire ethnic group. It also excluded Chinese nationals from eligibility for United States citizenship. The initial version of the act prevented certain kinds of Chinese laborers from entering the United States, reserving immigration rights only for merchants, officials, teachers, and travelers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur.

This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. For the first time, Federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 destroyed all but pre-existing Chinese communities for nearly six decades. While it failed to actually end Chinese migration, it simultaneously barred Chinese people in the United States from naturalization and encouraged continued abuse of Chinese workers.

Before exclusion came several attempts at limiting Chinese migration, 99% of California voters, an 1879 ballot showed, were against Chinese migration. Chinese workers suffered organized political opposition. Dennis Kearney of the Workingmen’s Party of California and Daniel Cronin of the Washington Territory’s Knights of Labor, being a leaders, exploited existing Sinophobia to position the anti-Chinese movement as “peaceful” advocacy for workers rights.

We are therefore witnessing the evidence of the blatant and widespread racism faced by Chinese immigrants, can be found in an often overlooked passage in Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson where he contrasts Chinese people with blacks by proclaiming that “the Chinese race is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States.”

In 1875 Congress passed the Page Act, which limited the migration of Chinese women. It makes severe consequences for Chinese women. It concerns the conditions of marriages that have been regulated by the Congress.The Chinese Exclusion Act has distinctly harsh consequences for Chinese women because of the way marriage was regulated by Congress through immigration law. In her article Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship through Marriage Professor Leti Volpp describes the process through which women who were American citizens by birth lost citizenship due to the interaction of the Chinese Exclusion Act and a law passed in 1907 by Congress which states that “any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband. this law was devastating for women. Chinese because it resulted in the loss of citizenship of women of all races through marriage.

In 1882, Congress passed the “Chinese Restriction Act,” now known as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to preventing new workers from entering and barring existing residents from naturalization, the Act further crystallized distinctions between citizens and aliens, stoking existing racism, economic anxiety, and

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