A closer look

Chinese Exclusion and Racial Gatekeeping in the United States

How did nineteenth-century reactions to Chinese immigrants shape U.S. immigration policies into the twenty-first century?

by Pennee Bender, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Chinese Immigrants Help Build the United States

Chinese people have emigrated to the Americas since the sixteenth century, with small Chinese communities forming in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew significantly larger numbers of Chinese immigrants starting with 325 in 1849 and reaching 20,026 three years later. The dream of mining gold spurred Chinese migration, but economic and social conditions along with foreign intervention in China helped to maintain a steady flow of immigrants to the United States. Only a small number of those seeking gold found enough to support themselves and their families in China, so most found other work across the western states or opened small businesses. In 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad recruited over 12,000 Chinese workers to build the western stretch of the transcontinental railroad: they comprised 90 percent of the workforce blasting through rockface, clearing forests, and laying the rails for a train route through the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains. With the completion of the railroad, Chinese workers found work in other industries across the country; they established Chinatowns in a number of urban centers, which provided cultural support and survival while also restricting economic options for Chinese immigrants. Most of the mid-nineteenth century Chinese immigrants were men who intended to return home after working abroad. A small number of women did immigrate, but in China women were seen as “inside people,” whose primary role as daughters, wives, and mothers was in service of male lines.

Chinese Immigrants Face Racism and Discrimination

In 1868, the United States signed the Burlingame-Seward Treaty, which sanctioned and protected Chinese immigration through articles that promised the Chinese the right to free immigration and travel within the United States and allowed for the protection of Chinese citizens in the United States Despite the treaty and the essential labor performed by the Chinese railroad workers, Chinese immigrants faced exploitative working conditions, racial discrimination, and brutal attacks in cities and mining towns across the West. As early as 1852, California imposed a foreign miners’ tax that was directed mostly at Chinese miners. Then in 1879, California denied Chinese immigrants the right to vote and barred them from public employment. With the rise in unemployment during the 1873–1878 depression, a growing anti-Chinese movement emerged among western labor leaders and politicians, who blamed Chinese workers for being paid depressed wages and for rising unemployment. Although Chinese immigrants represented only 4.3 percent of all immigrants arriving in the 1870s, they were singled out as being incompatible with the American way of life. Labor unions and the press portrayed this small immigrant group as posing an outsize economic threat to white workers. Racist and stereotyped images portraying Chinese people as immoral, disease-ridden, opium-addicted, and detrimental to white workers became common in newspapers and magazines.

During the 1870s and 1880s, anti-Chinese violence was rampant: a mob lynched seventeen Chinese in Los Angeles; in Rock Springs, Wyoming, white miners massacred twenty-eight Chinese miners, wounded fifteen, drove hundreds out of town, and destroyed their homes; in Tacoma, Washington, an armed mob forced the entire Chinese population out of their homes and looted their businesses. One scholar has enumerated over two hundred acts of anti-Chinese violence in California alone from 1849 to 1906.

In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. immigration law to exclude immigrants based on race. Other laws followed that severely restricted Chinese and Asian immigration and prevented Chinese residents in the United States from becoming citizens through naturalization. With the Exclusion Act, historian Erika Lee has argued, “the U.S. stopped being a nation of immigrants that welcomed foreigners without restrictions, borders, or gates and became a gatekeeping nation based on race, class, and gender.” The Exclusion Act was expanded in 1888 when Congress passed the Scott Act, which made reentry to the United States after a visit to China impossible, even for long-term legal residents. Chinese immigrants prior to 1882 had been allowed return visits, but the Scott Act revoked this right and trapped twenty thousand holders of laborer return certificates outside of the United States. In 1892, with the Geary Act, Congress renewed exclusion for ten years, in 1902 exclusion was extended to the U.S. territories of Hawaii and the Philippines, and in 1904 Congress extended the Exclusion Act indefinitely.

Chinese American Resistance to Violence and Discrimination

Chinese immigrants resisted the legal, rhetorical, and physical attacks on them in a variety of ways. Chinese diplomats and merchant groups helped support legal battles to obtain restitution for physical attacks, confronted zealous enforcement of the Exclusion Act, and mounted a Supreme Court challenge to the 1892 Geary Act. Chinese in the United States wrote letters to politicians, editorials, and magazine articles to counter the racist views, and used diplomatic channels to defend their rights. They organized protests and a boycott of American goods in China and developed transnational networks to evade the law. Although the Exclusion Act was a significant deterrent to Chinese immigration, an estimated three hundred thousand Chinese were able to enter the United States from 1882 to 1943 because of Chinese immigrants’ struggle for legal and political rights. Chinese communities continued to grow and provide services and refuge for immigrants. They also served as a model for other Asian immigrants; South Asians and Japanese groups developed similar strategies to resist restrictive immigration.

Policing the Borders Becomes Institutionalized

The era of Chinese exclusion left a deep imprint on U.S. immigration policy and shaped the lives of all immigrants to the United States for generations. To maintain the Exclusion Act, the U.S. government established a new system of policing the borders as well as investigating and imprisoning immigrants. Prior to the creation of the federal Commissioner of Immigration in 1891, the U.S. Customs Service established a system with trained inspectors and interpreters to process Chinese immigrants and enforce the new federal laws on the state level. They also developed a system for identifying and tracking immigrants by requiring all Chinese residing in the United States to carry “certificates of identity” and “certificates of residence.” In 1910, the U.S. Immigration Service opened Angel Island in San Francisco Bay to detain, investigate, and process Chinese and other Asians immigrants. In contrast to Ellis Island, Angel Island became a symbol of U.S. oppression of Chinese immigrants, with long periods of detentions] and intense cross-examinations. The Chinese Exclusion Act paved the way for restrictions of other Asians, especially the Japanese and South Asians who faced similar accusations of being unassimilable and of undermining white workers.

Reflection Questions

Why was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 a turning point in U.S. history?

How did Denis Kearney and others use fearmongering and racism to call for Chinese exclusion?

How is the Statue of Liberty referenced in the primary sources and how does the statue as a symbol of the United States relate to Chinese immigration?

How did Chinese immigrants respond to the Chinese Exclusion Act?

Why does the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 matter today?

Additional Reading

Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Temple University Press, 1994).

Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Voices from the Gold Rush to the Present (University of California Press, 2006).

Related Chapters

Progress and Poverty: Industrial Capitalism in the Gilded Age, 1877-1893