Asian Exclusion Laws

A bit of history on Asian Exclusion Laws

Introduction

The discovery of gold, a rice shortage, and the recruitment of Asian labor led to the initiation of noticeable Asian migration in the nineteenth century, that in turn triggered a backlash against that migration. Examining the impetus and development of exclusion laws directed first at Chinese and eventually at all Asian immigrants reveals a sordid tale of racism and xenophobia that demonstrates the extremes to which the nation would go to keep out groups that simply did not fit into the prevailing image of community and true Americans.

Resistance to Chinese Laborers

Early on, the Chinese were officially welcomed in the United States. The simultaneous opening of both China and the American West, along with the discovery of gold in 1848, led to a growing demand for and a ready supply of Chinese labor. Chinese were actively recruited to fill needs in railroad construction, laundries, and domestic service.
By 1882, about 300,000 Chinese had entered and worked on the West Coast.

However, nativist sentiment eventual took hold, spurred by racial prejudice and economic competition. By 1853, anti-Chinese local ordinances and editorials were common throughout the West Coast.
Eventually, the Sinophobic sentiment prevailed, and any favorable views about the Chinese were overrun by a series of laws that first limited and then entirely excluded Chinese from the United States. By the end of the Civil War, Chinese immigrants were judged unworthy of citizenship. In amending the Nationality Act of 1790, that had limited citizenship through naturalization to “free white persons” (specifically excluding African Americans and Native Americans), Congress in 1870 extended the right to naturalize to aliens of African descent. But Chinese were deliberately denied that right because of their “undesirable qualities.”

The 1870 denial of the opportunity to naturalize was the first congressional step toward excluding Chinese and the first such limitation based on national origin beyond the subordination of African Americans. Five years later in 1875, responding to law-enforcement claims that Chinese women were being imported for prostitution, Congress passed legislation prohibiting their importation for immoral purposes. The overzealous enforcement of the statute, commonly referred to as the Page Law, effectively barred Chinese women and further worsened an already imbalanced sex ration among Chinese.

Responding to continued anti-Chinese clamor, the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882 was enacted. The law excluded laborers for ten years, and effectively slammed the door on all Chinese immigration. It did permit a small quota for teachers, students, and merchants.

Legislation in 1904 extended Chinese exclusion indefinitely, marking the culmination of a thirty-five-year series of laws that, beginning with the 1870 naturalization act specifically barring Chinese, limited and then excluded Chinese immigrants.

The Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan
The early history of Japanese immigration differs considerably from that of the Chinese mainly because of the strength of the restored Meiji government. Unlike the decaying Chinese Qing dynasty (that fell in 1911), the Japanese government was able to negotiate mutually beneficial emigration treaties with the United States and to enforce its own emigration laws.

The Japanese opening to the West commenced with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and four U.S. naval ships in Tokyo Bay in 1854. Perry forced the Japanese to sign the Treaty of Peace and Amity, in which Japan agreed to open its doors to foreign trade. Not coincidentally, the first appreciable numbers of Japanese entered at the height of the Chinese exclusion movement. Agricultural labor demands, particularly in Hawaii and California, led to increased efforts to attract Japanese workers after the exclusion of the Chinese. In 1884, two years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese government yielded to internal pressures to permit laborers to emigrate to work on Hawaiian sugar plantations.

Like the initial wave of Chinese immigrants, Japanese laborers were at first warmly received by employers. By 1894, Japan and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to open travel, each promising the other’s citizens liberty to enter, travel, and reside in the receiving country.

At the turn of the century, unfavorable sentiment toward the Japanese laborers grew as they began to migrate to the western United States. After Hawaii was annexed in 1898, the Japanese were able to use it as a stepping stone to the mainland, where the majority engaged in agricultural work. Economic competition with white farm workers soon erupted.

After Japan’s crushing victories over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, policymakers viewed exclusion as a means of controlling a potential enemy. Many Americans had regarded Japan as an eager student at the knee of the United States. But when the Japanese Navy defeated its Russian counterpart, American observers realized how powerful the “yellow” nation had become. America was so concerned about geo-political change that President Theodore Roosevelt helped negotiate the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and ceded Korea to Japan as a protectorate.

Japanese laborers were eventually restricted but not in conventional legislative fashion. Japan’s emergence as a major world power meant that the United States could not restrict Japanese immigration in the heavy-handed, self-serving fashion with which it had curtailed Chinese immigration. To do so would have offended an increasingly assertive Japan when the United States was concerned about keeping an open door to Japanese markets. To minimize potential disharmony between the two nations while retaining the initiative to control immigration, President Roosevelt negotiated an informal agreement with Japan. Under the terms of the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement reached in 1907 and 1908, the Japanese government refrained from issuing travel documents to laborers destined for the United States. In exchange for this severe but voluntary limitation, Japanese wives and children could be reunited with their husbands and fathers in the United States, and San Francisco would be pressured into rescinding a school segregation order.

Japanese immigrants unsuccessfully sought citizenship through naturalization as well. In Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), one Japanese immigrant took his claim to the Supreme Court, arguing that he should be regarded a “free white person” under the naturalization laws.

The Entry of Filipinos and Asian Indians
At the turn of the century, the United States was beginning its relationship with the Philippines as it was changing its view toward Japan. After the U.S. victory over Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, President McKinley concluded that the people of the Philippines, then a Spanish colony, were “unfit for self-government” and that “there was nothing left for [the United States] to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.

Ironically, the fact that the Philippines became U.S. colony meant that Filipinos automatically became noncitizen nationals of the United States. They could travel in and out of the United States without regard to immigration laws and were not subject to exclusion or deportation. When appreciable numbers migrated after World War I (when Chinese and Japanese workers could no longer be recruited), exclusionary efforts against them begin.

The advent of the twentieth century witnessed the entry of other Asians, such as Asian Indians, but in small numbers. Even though those seeking trade were among some of the earliest migrants to the United States, Indians had insignificant contacts with this country during the nineteenth century. Eventually, more migrated, primarily to California, and most found agricultural jobs.

Like the Chinese and Japanese before them, many Asian Indians fought for acceptance. Some sought to have laws discriminating against them overturned by the courts. Lower federal courts had granted them the right to naturalize on the grounds that they were Caucasians and thus eligible “white persons” under the citizenship laws of 1790 and 1870. But in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court reversed this racial stance, deciding that Indians, like Japanese, would no longer be considered white persons, and were therefore ineligible to become naturalized citizens.

Congress responded to continued anti-Asian clamor by passing the Act of February 5, 1917, that (including provisions aimed at southern and eastern Europeans) created the “Asiatic barred zone” by extending the Chinese exclusion laws to all other Asians. The zone covered South Asia from Arabia to Indochina, as well as the adjacent islands. It included India, Burma, Thailand, the Malay States, the East Indian Islands, Asiatic Russia, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Arabia and Afghanistan. Only Filipinos and Guamanians, under U.S. jurisdiction at the time, were not included.

The 1924 Exclusion of Asians Ineligible for Citizenship
The reactionary, isolationist political climate that followed World War I, manifested in the Red Scare of 1919-20, led to even greater exclusionist demands. The landmark Immigration Act of 1924, opposed by only six senators, once again took direct aim at southern and eastern Europeans, whom the Protestant majority in the United States viewed with dogmatic disapproval. The sponsors simultaneously eliminated the few remaining categories for Asians. The act provided for the permanent exclusion of any “alien ineligible to citizenship.” Since Asians were barred from naturalization under the 1790 and 1870 laws, the possibility of their entry was cut off indefinitely. The primary target was the Japanese, who, while subject to the Gentlemen’s Agreement, had never been totally barred by federal immigration law until then. Now the message of exclusion to Japanese immigrants was reinforced in no uncertain terms.

As if to ensure that Asian American families would not proliferate, the 1922 Cable Act provided that if a U.S. citizen woman married an alien who was ineligible for citizenship, she would be stripped of her U.S. citizenship. The law complemented anti-miscegenation laws in many states.

Barring Filipino
The only Asians not affected by the 1924 Act were Filipinos, who remained exempt as nationals and who by then had settled into a familiar pattern of immigration. Before 1920, a few resided mostly in Hawaii; their presence on the islands helped establish conditions later conducive to a more substantial labor migration. They became a convenient source of cheap labor after Japanese immigration was restricted in 1908. Just as the Chinese exclusion law had encouraged employers to look to Japan, so the limitations on Japanese immigrants led to an intense recruitment, especially by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, of Filipino laborers because of their open travel status as noncitizen nationals.

By the late 1920s, Filipino laborers began to look beyond Hawaii, where the demand for their labor was shrinking, to the mainland where the need for cheap labor, especially in agriculture, was growing. Many left Hawaii partly in response to employers’ recruitment efforts. Most Filipinos who had come to the mainland previously had been students. But in the late 1920s, laborers came to California predominantly to work on citrus and vegetable farms.

Most white racism directed at Filipino laborers sprang from the immigrants’ success at acculturation. They were resented largely for their ability to get jobs and even for their contact with white women. In many respects they were perceived as a greater threat to white laborers than their Chinese and Japanese predecessors had been. To white workers in California, the privileged immigration status of Filipinos did not change the fact that they were an economic threat who had the physical characteristics of Asiatics.

Calls for the exclusion of Filipino workers were warmly received in Congress, which welcomed any seemingly uncomplicated proposal that promised relief for the depression’s high unemployment. For policymakers, however, dealing with anti-Filipino agitation was not as simple as responding to earlier anti-Chinese, anti-Asian Indian, and even anti-Japanese campaigns. They could travel in and out of the country without constraint, so until the Philippines was granted independence, Congress could not exclude Filipinos.

An unlikely coalition of exclusionists, anti-colonialists, and Filipino nationalists managed to band together to promote the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934. The law was everything exclusionists could hope for. When their nation would become independent on July 4, 1946, Filipinos would lose their status as nationals of the United States, regardless of where they lived. Those in the United States would be deported unless they became immigrants. Between 1934 and 1946, however, any Filipino who desired to immigrate became subject to the immigration acts of 1917 and 1924, and the Philippines was considered a separate country with an annual quota of only 50 visas!

Epilogue
World War II finally helped to usher in reforms to the Asian exclusion laws. In response to Japanese ridicule of China for supporting the United States—where the Chinese exclusion provisions were still in effect—Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion act in 1943. Similarly, in 1946, naturalization rights were extended to nationals of the Philippines and India—countries that were also U.S. allies. However, the national origins quota system that continued to severely restrict the number immigrant visas available to Asians was not repealed until 1965, when President Johnson followed through on President Kennedy’s push for a more egalitarian immigration system.

Resources: Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy (1993); Defining America Through Immigration Policy (2004).

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