Passage and content
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress in 1882. Alex Nowrasteh, describing the sequence of American immigration statutes, says the law “did exactly what it sounds like it did”: it banned Chinese immigrants from coming into the United States Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016). He places it within a longer run of restrictionist measures: an 1875 law aimed at criminals, the insane and prostitutes, whose intent was to exclude Chinese women coming to join men who had come to work in the gold rush and other California industries; late-1880s laws against importing workers who could break up labor unions; a Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States stopping Japanese immigration; a 1917 law banning illiterate immigrants and nearly all immigrants from Africa and the rest of Asia; the 1921 Emergency Quota Act; and the 1924 law that hardened the quota system, followed by a 1929 executive action by Herbert Hoover that banned almost all immigrants from Europe for the rest of the Great Depression. Nowrasteh dates the most xenophobic stretch of American immigration law to roughly 1880 to 1930. He adds that the period was not racist alone but the product of what he calls an alliance between racists, labor unions and progressives, each supporting bans for its own reasons; Bob Zadek characterizes the pairing as a bootlegger-and-Baptist arrangement and Nowrasteh answers that he is not sure who the Baptist is Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016).
Speaking in 2023, Zadek puts the matter more bluntly: the turn away from the “let them all in” policy of the nineteenth century was made out of racial animosity and not because restriction was good or bad for the country, and he says the attitude continues today. In the same exchange he says the first regulation of immigration policy was, in his summary, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and that it was done because Americans did not like having so many Chinese American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023). Nowrasteh, agreeing, supplies the surrounding measures: the 1882 Act, a 1906 agreement associated with Teddy Roosevelt that blocked all Japanese immigrants, 1917 laws barring African and Asian immigrants, and the 1921 and 1924 laws restricting Southern and Eastern Europeans, aimed chiefly at darker-skinned Italian and Greek immigrants and at Eastern European Jews. Alongside the racial and ethnic prejudice he identifies a push from labor unions to protect their workers and a growing American nationalism holding that certain ethnicities, religions and groups — Jews, Chinese, Asians — could never assimilate. The eugenics movement, popular among progressives and some American nationalists, he says inspired many of these restrictions and ended the period of free immigration during which most Americans’ ancestors arrived American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).
Enforcement and the restaurant trade
Gabriel Chin’s account of the war on Chinese restaurants treats the exclusion laws as the resolution of that conflict rather than its cause. Union workers, he says, genuinely wanted to drive their competitors out of business and to keep the economic opportunities for themselves; the ordinances, protests and boycotts did not accomplish that. What they did accomplish was to keep political pressure on and to send the message that the unions did not want to compete with Asians and feared the “yellow peril.” The war on Chinese restaurants ended, in Chin’s telling, because in 1917 and more comprehensively in 1924 the exclusion enacted in 1882 was extended to all other Asian races, producing strict prohibition of Asian competitors; the unions then, as he puts it, breathed a sigh of relief. Almost immediately afterward the attitude toward Chinese restaurants changed — they were praised as clean and as an inexpensive meal available in town — because there was no longer any risk that they were the leading edge of an invasion The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017). Chin describes the earlier state activity as unconstitutional in the courts’ view, citing a White Women’s Labor Law, but politically purposeful: state measures kept the issue before federal elected officials, and he attributes support for President Trump in the last election in part to voters who wanted to limit immigration. He adds that for two hundred years nativist groups have said the old immigrants were great and the new ones different, and that every time this has proved wrong The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017).
Zadek draws an economic lesson from Chin’s history, invoking the principle of concentrated benefit and diffused detriment: the benefit of excluding Chinese restaurants accrued to a few — union workers, restaurateurs and other restaurant owners — who had reason to spend money and effort, while the benefit of Chinese restaurants is diffused and unfelt, so no one pickets for one. All the forces Chin describes — unions, government, police and licensing authority — had one goal, in Zadek’s summary: preventing a business person from selling a product Americans wanted to buy The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017).
United States v. Wong Kim Ark
The Act’s effect on individuals born in the United States is the subject of Sheldon Gilbert’s account, on an episode devoted to birthright citizenship. Gilbert tells the story of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrant parents, who worked as a cook in that city. When he was about nine, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Gilbert says banned more Chinese immigration and blocked the Chinese from becoming citizens. As a teenager Wong left the country to visit China; on his return, immigration officials told him he could not come back because he was not a citizen and was excluded from citizenship under the Act. His case reached the Supreme Court as United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Court had to grapple with Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time. Wong’s argument was that his parents were immigrants but he was born in the United States, so regardless of his race or ethnicity or of his parents he should be a citizen. The Court agreed, holding that under Section 1 a person born here and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is a citizen; the decision was handed down in 1898 Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018).
Gilbert frames the case within the story of Chinese immigration to the American West, noting that Chinese immigrants were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad. Bob Zadek, for his part, sets the episode in the context of a live debate over whether the children of illegal immigrants born in the country are citizens, and insists the question be considered both as a matter of what the law and Constitution say and as a matter of what the law should be Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018).
Across episodes: continuity of interpretation
Across the episodes the same account recurs without material revision. Nowrasteh in 2016 gives the chronology and the alliance-of-interests explanation; Zadek and Nowrasteh restate both in 2023, adding the eugenics movement and the economic cost of restriction to immigrants themselves — a Mexican immigrant of the same age and education as an American can raise their income by a factor of three by crossing the border, a Guatemalan by six, a Haitian by ten, figures Nowrasteh offers alongside the claim that immigration law violates the natural right to travel American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023). Chin, in 2017, supplies the labor-union and state-versus-federal dimension and the restaurant trade as the arena, treating 1917 and 1924 as the completion of what 1882 began. Gilbert, in 2018, supplies the citizenship consequence through Wong Kim Ark. The later treatments extend the earlier ones rather than revise them; no speaker in these excerpts departs from the account given by the others.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give the text of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the names of its sponsors or the vote by which it passed. They do not state which constitutional provision or amendment the Act’s defenders relied on, or how the statute’s own terms defined the exclusion. They do not describe the reasoning by which the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark reached its result beyond the holding as Gilbert summarizes it, nor the later statutes by which the exclusion was repealed.