At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

"Erika Lee wants to introduce readers to the fact that American law created and expanded a regime of exclusion from the country, based on race and nationality. She focuses on the Chinese Exclusion Act. The narrative that most Americans accept and learn in school is that American immigration was traditionally open and that everyone could come, as indicated by the often-quoted words from the Statue of Liberty. Lee wants you to know that for a significant group of people, identified by their race and country of origin, that has not been the case. The second thing she wants to show us is how immigration law was invented. Immigrants may or may not have been treated well when they reached America, but there were few significant legal prohibitions on their admission to the country, aside from some health and safety regulations, prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. So the source of modern federal immigration law – which limits and regulates immigration and imposes national quotas – lies in a statute that was passed to exclude a particular racial group from the country. We should never forget that the Chinese Exclusion Act was part of a larger effort to exclude entire groups from immigrating based on their race and nationality. Particular groups, generally from Asia, were singled out and excluded for over 50 years. That’s part of our history as much as the story of welcoming immigration that is taught in school. The second thing to learn is that it deeply affected the composition of America. Who’s American? What do Americans look like? These prohibitions helped cement into American culture the idea that only people who have a certain appearance are truly American. One possible end point of Lee’s story is the Immigration Act of 1965. It adjusted the immigration quotas, which had restricted or prohibited immigration from certain countries. Those quotas, set in place in the early 20th century, were put in place to favour immigration from northern and western Europe. Because of the 1965 Act, the quotas were adjusted, which made it possible for more immigrants to come from, for instance, Asia. One can date the increased presence of Asian immigrants in the United States to that time. We have now had governors of South Asian descent in South Carolina and Louisiana, Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, in part because the Immigration Act of 1965 helped change the colour of America. Slowly, over time, American expectations of what Americans could look like began to change as well. But the story doesn’t end there – we are having a related discussion today about the Americanness of newer immigrant groups. Most notably, the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907, whereby Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and the Japanese government agreed to prohibit further immigration of labourers from Japan, and the Immigration Act of 1917, which established an exclusion zone that prohibited immigration from a substantial portion of Asia. In fact, there are two sets of legal rules that were relevant in this area – rules that come under the rubrics of immigration and naturalisation law. Immigration law generally regulates the terms of admission to the country. Naturalisation law defines, among other things, who can become an American citizen after they arrive. The first American naturalisation law was passed by the first Congress in 1790 – a Congress that included a significant number of the framers of the United States Constitution. That law limited naturalisation to what was called “free white persons”. The explicit racial restrictions on naturalisation weren’t completely lifted until the middle of the 20th century. So for most of American history, there was a basic assumption written into federal naturalisation law that the United States was a white person’s country, which raised the question of who was actually white – one that many judges wrestled with. Non-whites could not naturalise, although for the most part their children would be American citizens if they were born here. This became very important during the World War II-era Japanese internment; when the assumption that American citizens and longtime US residents of Japanese descent were not truly Americans helped justify the internment. It was an assumption that influenced everyone from military officers to the Supreme Court justices who had to rule on the constitutionality of the internment."