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Chinese Exclusion Act

5 min read

Part of Immigration.

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Every episode (2)

Who argued it

Gabriel Jack Chin · Alex Nowrasteh

Immigration · Open Borders · Assimilation

Background

Enactment and content

Alex Nowrasteh dates the Chinese Exclusion Act to 1882, when Congress passed a law that, in his words, “banned Chinese immigrants into coming into the United States.” He places it within a sequence of federal measures: an 1875 law banning criminals and the insane and targeting prostitutes, whose intent was to exclude Chinese women coming to join men who had come to work in the gold rush or other California industries; laws from the late 1880s against importing workers who could break up labor unions; and a Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States stopping Japanese immigration Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016).

Sheldon Gilbert, discussing birthright citizenship, says Congress passed the Act when Wong Kim Ark was about nine, and that it “bans more Chinese immigration and it blocks the Chinese from becoming citizens” Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018). Bob Zadek, in a 2023 episode, calls the first regulation of immigration policy the Chinese Exclusion Act and says it was done because Americans did not like having so many Chinese American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).

Motives

Nowrasteh describes 1880 to about 1930 as the most xenophobic period of American immigration law, and says the restrictions were not only racist but the product of an alliance between racists, labor unions and progressives, each supporting bans for its own reasons Alex Nowrasteh: How Prop. 187 Turned California Blue (2016). In the 2023 episode he adds the eugenics movement, popular among progressives and some American nationalists, and a growing sense that certain ethnicities, religions and groups could never assimilate American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).

Bob Zadek frames the shift from open immigration as driven by racial animosity rather than by any judgment about the country’s good, and says there was no data-rich study behind it. He and Nowrasteh also identify labor unions as a restrictionist force, alongside a sense of American nationalism and the belief that certain groups could never become fully Americanized American anxiety about immigration is unwarranted. Here’s why. (2023).

The war on Chinese restaurants

Gabriel Chin, in an episode on the war on Chinese restaurants, says the laws, ordinances, protests and boycotts against Chinese restaurants did not succeed in driving competitors out of business, but were designed to keep political pressure on and to send the message that union workers did not want to compete with Asians and feared the “yellow peril.” That pressure worked, he says, because in 1917 and more comprehensively in 1924 the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was extended to all other Asian races, producing strict exclusion of Asian competitors. At that point, Chin says, the unions breathed a sigh of relief, and attitudes toward Chinese restaurants changed almost immediately, with praise for their cleanliness and inexpensive meals now that there was no risk of a yellow peril invasion The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017).

Bob Zadek draws the economic lesson in terms of concentrated benefit and diffused detriment: the benefit of excluding Chinese restaurants went to a few union workers and restaurateurs, who had reason to spend money and effort on exclusion, while the benefit of Chinese restaurants was diffused and unfelt, so no one rose up on the other side The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017).

Wong Kim Ark and the Fourteenth Amendment

Gilbert recounts that Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrant parents and worked as a cook there. When he left the country as a teenager to visit China and returned, immigration officials told him he could not come back because he was not a citizen and was excluded from citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act. His case reached the Supreme Court as United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which Gilbert says had to grapple with Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time. The Court agreed with Wong Kim Ark that because he was born in the United States he was a citizen, and the decision was handed down in 1898 Revenge of the Pen and the Phone (2018).

Across episodes

The Act is treated in four episodes spanning 2016 to 2023, and the episodes show no development in the argument: Nowrasteh in 2016 and 2023 gives the same account of the 1882 law and the same coalition of racists, unions and progressives behind it, while Chin in 2017 supplies the restaurant-war context and Gilbert in 2018 the Wong Kim Ark litigation. Each guest advances the same reading of the Act as racial exclusion rather than policy judgment.

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