Ilya Somin: The Economic Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act

Ilya Somin for the Volokh Conspiracy offers a novel economics impact approach to evaluating the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese immigration. As Somin puts it, the Act “led to the Supreme Court’s awful ruling in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case, which ruled that the federal government had a general power to restrict migration, despite the absence of any textual or originalist basis for it.” Somin has argued that the Chinese Exclusion Case should be added to the “anti-canon” of constitutional law.

Somin highlights a new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assessing the economic impacts of the Chinese Exclusion Act. “One of the main rationales for its passage was to benefit white workers, who were supposedly victimized by competition from the Chinese. Did it achieve that goal? Turns out not.”

Here is the abstract of the new study:

“This paper investigates the economic consequences of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigration from China to the United States. The Act reduced the number of Chinese workers of all skill levels residing in the U.S. It also reduced the labor supply and the quality of jobs held by white and U.S.-born workers, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, and reduced manufacturing output. The results suggest that the Chinese Exclusion Act slowed economic growth in western states until at least 1940.” (bold added).

KJ