The Chinese Exclusion Bill

Magazine article

By: Anonymous

Date: January 1892

Source: Anonymous. "The Chinese Exclusion Bill." The American Missionary. 44 (January 1892): 143

About the Author: The American Missionary was a publication from the American Missionary Association. The journal, published from 1846 through 1934, highlighted missionary work, religious issues, and racial issues regarding missionary outreach from the Congregationalist Church.

INTRODUCTION

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first piece of U.S. immigration legislation aimed at immigrants from a particular country. While trade with China extended back to the eighteenth century, substantial Chinese presence in the United States did not develop until the early 1850s, when the Gold Rush in California and increased development across the western United States led to the influx of Chinese miners, prospectors, and businessmen seeking gold or merchant opportunities. While many of the Chinese immigrants faced severe discrimination from white settlers, prospectors, fellow merchants and later mine owners, hundreds and later thousands of Chinese immigrants made the West Coast their permanent home.

By the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese immigrants flocked to parts of Latin America (notably Peru) for mining opportunities, and to the United States to work as laborers on the development of the railroad throughout the western territories. In the U.S., Chinese immigrants were easily targeted for discrimination because of their distinct features and accents; they were paid lower wages than white counterparts, and were the victims of violence during low employment opportunities or times of supply scarcity. Chinese settlers nonetheless persisted in their work, often bringing relatives, wives, and children to the U.S. once they'd saved enough money to do so.

Throughout the 1870s, nativism—discrimination against immigrants of any kind by native-born citizens—led to a series of reports and policies aimed at reducing Chinese employment, relocation, and later immigration into the U.S. An 1871 riot in Los Angeles led to the targeted killings of twenty Chinese immigrants. An 1877 report from the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration stated that: "The American race is progressive and in favor of a responsible representative government. The Mongolian race seems to have no desire for progress, and to have no conception of representative and free institutions. While conditions should be favorable to the growth and occupancy of our Pacific possessions by our own people, the Chinese have advantages, which will put them far in advance in this race for possession. They can subsist where the American would starve. They can work for wages, which will not furnish the barest necessities of life to an American. They make their way in California as they have in the islands of the sea, not by superior force or virtue, or even industry, although they are, as a rule, industrious, but by revolting characteristics, and by dispensing with what have become necessities in modern civilization. To compete with them and excel them the American must come down to their level, or below them; must work so cheaply that the Chinese cannot compete with him, for in the contest for subsistence he that can subsist upon the least will last the longest." Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high at the beginning of the 1880s.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed severe restrictions on Chinese immigration into the U.S. Religious groups, such as the American Missionary Association, feared that the act would cause problems with relations between the U.S. and China, restricting missionary activity throughout Asia. In 1892, Congress considered the renewal of the act. The following editorial expresses the views of the predominant Congregationalist missionary association in the U.S.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Undoubtedly this nation must throw some limitations in immigration to its shores. We cannot safely make this land the dumping-ground for the pauper and criminal classes of the old continents. But, in making such limitations, we must be guided by fairness and justice to all concerned. We must discriminate against character and not against races or nations. And especially we must not violate treaty obligations, nor cripple trade with the great nations of the old world, nor raise up such a sense of indignation as will exclude missionaries from heathen lands. We fear that all these objections lie against the bill recently passed in the House of Representatives excluding Chinese from our shores.

SIGNIFICANCE

Chinese immigration eastward included the West Coast of the United States and the island nation of Hawaii as well; by 1884, long before Hawaii became part of the United States, Chinese immigrants constituted more than twenty percent of the population of Hawaii, working as laborers on sugar plantations. As in the U.S. mainland, Chinese immigrants were paid lower wages and viewed as a threat to local workers; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had placed missionary workers in the U.S., Hawaii, and China in a difficult position, and the prospect of its renewal concerned missionaries.

Christian missionary outreach into China from the United States had begun in the early decades of the 1800s, with British and American missionaries working their way through Canton (Guangdong), China. The long history of Christian missionary activity was highly restricted, but these early Christian mission efforts linked directly with Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush in the early 1850s, as the first Chinese immigrants were from Guangdong, having heard of the United States through mission efforts. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act threatened mission workers with the potential of deteriorating foreign relations between the U.S. and China. In addition, in 1903, Hawaii imposed restrictions of Chinese immigrants that were similar to the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

In effect, the 1882 law halted legal Chinese immigration; by 1887, only ten Chinese immigrants had been permitted to enter the U.S. with proper documentation, down from 40,000 in 1882. In 1878, China had established an embassy in Washington D.C. and a consulate office in San Francisco; the Chinese government worked to negotiate with the U.S. on a series of acts and treaties, and strongly opposed the 1882 act. In 1885, a mob of 400 white men attacked Chinese immigrants in Colorado, killing one Chinese person and injuring others. In Tacoma, Washington, anti-Chinese sentiment reached a zenith when all Chinese immigrants were forced out of the city by railroad into Portland. As news of these violent events and others reached China, American missionaries feared local anti-American sentiment and worried about retaliatory violence.

In 1892, the Exclusion Bill, which became the Geary Act, reaffirmed the 1882 act and required all legal Chinese immigrants to carry a certificate of proof of legal residence, a requirement placed on no other immigrant group in the U.S. Chinese immigrants could not post bail or appear as a witness in court; the Geary Act applied to Chinese immigrants only. By the 1940s, Chinese presence in the U.S. had dropped by nearly half; the 1945 Magnuson Act replaced the Chinese Exclusion Act, and set the limit of Chinese immigrants at 105 per year. A post-World War II "war brides" provision allowed more than 6,000 Chinese women to enter the country, though Chinese immigrants would not receive equal treatment under the law until the Immigration Act of 1965.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Wong, K. Scott (ed.) and Sucheng Chan. Claiming America: Constructing Chinese Identities During the Exclusion Era. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 1998.

Web sites

Central Pacific railroad Photographic History Museum. "Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration." 〈http://cprr.org/Museum/Chinese_Immigration.html〉 (accessed June 11, 2006).

Cornell University: Making of America Archives. "The American Missionary." 〈http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/amis.html〉 (accessed June 11, 2006).

National Archives and Records Administration. "Chinese Immigration and the Chinese in the United States." 〈http://www.archives.gov/locations/finding-aids/chinese-immigration.html〉 (accessed June 11, 2006).