Module 2: Restriction and Exclusion from Migration
Who “belongs” in the United States?
In 1934, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained Tung Pok Chin, along with thousands of other Chinese and Asian migrants, at Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay. As a nineteen-year-old from Taishan county in Guangdong province, Chin sought better opportunities for his family, but the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred individuals like himself.
According to his memoir, he spent months studying to gain entry by adopting the name of an American citizen of Chinese descent, and by becoming the “paper son” of the Chin family. The INS kept him in locked barracks at Angel Island for several weeks and interrogated him several times, testing to see if he was really the son of Chin. If he did not answer the hundreds of questions correctly, he would be deported.
Tung Pok Chin successfully passed his INS interview and eventually went on to work in hand laundries and write poetry for the Chinese Daily News. Despite his work and contributions in the US, the INS investigated his status and questioned him often, especially in the 1950s during the Chinese Confession Program, which sought to root out Chinese who entered unlawfully.
Chin’s migration story and struggles in the US are not unusual, but typical of tens of thousands of Chinese who lived during the Chinese Exclusion era (1882–1943) and beyond.
What were the reasons why different Asian groups were denied the right to migrate to the United States and how did they resist? Are those reasons still valid today to exclude groups from coming to this nation?
This module examines the specific laws that restricted and excluded Asian migration to the US and the ways in which Asian Americans have resisted these policies throughout history.
Why did the US government exclude Asian Americans from migrating to the US?
How can laws, policies, and narratives lead to violence against certain communities?
How have Asian Americans resisted restriction and exclusion throughout history?
Chinese Restriction and Exclusion
After the Civil War (1861–1865) and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery, many industries that had profited off of slave labor had to find new ways to exploit the cheap labor of workers. For instance, industries such as mining, railroad construction, and other urban manufacturers heavily recruited Chinese workers. To protect their citizens, China signed the Burlingame-Seward Treaty with the US in 1868, which guaranteed free migration for both Chinese and American people between the two countries.
However, racist and xenophobic labor organizations fought to keep jobs for white workers and to restrict economic competition from other racial groups. They racialized Chinese labor in various ways, including labeling Chinese men as “coolies” and women as “prostitutes.” These stereotypes became the focus of immigration policies discriminating against Chinese immigrants, as well as other Asian groups.
As chattel slavery became outlawed across the US and European colonies, employers and businesses sought other sources of labor that they could exploit. South Asian and Chinese indentured workers came to replace enslaved Black workers to labor in the most difficult and dangerous jobs such as on plantations, mines, and other forms of manual labor. Although formally considered “free” and under contract by personal choice, they labored under conditions very similar to those of enslaved Black people.
Emergence of Stereotypes
In the United States, “coolie” became shorthand for these indentured workers from China, and sometimes South Asia, who worked low-wage agricultural and industrial jobs and were viewed as unfree labor. Laws specifically banning Chinese labor emerged, including California’s 1862 “Anti-Coolie Act,” meant to “protect free white labor against competition with Chinese coolie labor, and to discourage the immigration of the Chinese to the State of California.” 1
In addition to being discriminated against for their labor, Chinese people were racialized as “heathens”—immoral, unassimilable pagans who threatened the American idea of a white, Christian republic. Magazines and xenophobic groups spread the belief that Chinese people carried diseases and that Chinese women were “prostitutes” who carried sexually transmitted diseases.
Image 42.02.01 — An illustration by Edward Holden titled, “On the Lower Deck,” and published in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in June of 1864, shows “heathen coolies” preparing to mutiny. Coolies were alternatively depicted as weak and slavish or dangerous heathens ready to disrupt the moral order.
These stereotypes shaped the debates over national immigration that began with the 1875 Page Act. As the earliest actively enforced immigration law in the US, the act banned Chinese women and “coolies” on supposed moral and economic grounds and specifically targeted “any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental country.” 2
After 1875, the already low numbers of Chinese women migrating to the US dropped severely, causing a gender imbalance and limited the growth of Chinese families with US-born children until the mid-twentieth century. Barring people from forming families and keeping them from reuniting with close relatives remains a key system of discrimination against immigrants in the US today.
Image 42.02.02 — The cover of The Wasp magazine from May 26, 1882, associates San Francisco’s Chinatown with “malaria,” “small-pox,” and “leprosy.” The portrayal of Chinese migrants as diseased began with coolies, and was one of several justifications provided by lawmakers to exclude Chinese and other Asian migrants from entry to the US.
More to explore
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Gendered Racial Stereotypes
The 1875 Page Law sharply reduced the entry of Chinese women based on the belief that Chinese women were entering the United States for “immoral purposes.” The belief that all Chinese women were either slaves or property of Chinese fueled beliefs about the immorality of Chinese culture and society.
Chinese Exclusion and Enforcement
Congress and local governments excluded and segregated Chinese people based on the idea that they were racial, moral, and economic threats to the nation. Along with these exclusion laws, the government developed official systems, administrations, and additional policies to enforce them.
Following xenophobic rhetoric that the “Chinese Must Go!,” Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese laborers from entering the US for ten years, with exemptions for a few categories such as merchants, students, and diplomats. Despite the exceptions, this sweeping immigration restriction racialized all Chinese immigrants as “illegal,” assumed to have entered the country unlawfully.
Image 42.02.04 — An 1879 regular ticket for the Workingmen’s Party of California, which ran on the slogan, “The Chinese must go!”
This law legitimized the forceful exclusion of Chinese by mob violence. Following its passage, anti-Chinese violence and physical displacement of Chinese communities increased significantly. Historian Beth Lew-Williams documented 168 cases where violent acts dispossessed Chinese settlements between 1885 to 1886. For example, in February 1885, three hundred Chinese migrants were expelled from Eureka, California. In November of that year, a mob of white men drove out nine hundred Chinese migrants from their community in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Upon being pushed out of their homes, an estimated twenty thousand Chinese migrants who were driven out had to gather in urban centers, forming Chinatown communities in response to the mob violence.
The enactment of this landmark immigration act also initiated the creation of government agencies and bureaucratic practices to exclude immigrants. In 1891 Congress created the Office of Immigration (later expanding into the Bureau of Immigration) with stations and inspectors to oversee and assess the admissibility of immigrants. Further, the 1892 Geary Act extended the Chinese Exclusion Act for another decade and required all Chinese residents to register for certificates that proved their legal entry or face detention and deportation. Thus, Chinese people were subject to surveillance and the constant threat of removal. By 1920 the population of Chinese people in America dropped from 107,000 to 61,000.
Image 42.02.05a — The 1892 Geary Act extended the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act for another ten years and required Chinese Americans to carry proof of residency in the US. This political cartoon uses racist caricature and stereotyped speech to depict a Chinese migrant as being booted out of the US.
Image 42.02.05b — The stipulations of the 1892 Geary Act required Chinese Americans to carry proof of residence. This certificate was granted in March 1894 in New York City to John Chu.
Resistance to the Chinese Exclusion Acts
Despite this drastic drop in numbers and extensive restriction and exclusion laws, Chinese people continued to find ways—through legal challenges, diplomatic means, and civil disobedience—to enter the United States and to fight against the discrimination they faced there.
Chinese Americans fought the onset of exclusionary laws through the courts and invoking the Burlingame Treaty and the Fourteenth Amendment’s standard of “equal protections” and “due process” for “all persons.” Filing over ten thousand appeals from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, many argued that singling them out as Chinese was unconstitutional and won.
Civil Disobedience
In 1892, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association organized Chinese to engage in mass civil disobedience against the Geary Act’s requirement to register as aliens, and then filed a lawsuit, the test case of Fong Yue Ting. Amazingly, over 90 percent of the community defied the law, the largest act of immigrant civil disobedience in American history. At this time, activist and journalist Wong Chin Foo founded the Chinese Equal Rights League to lobby against the Geary Act. He represented the league at a congressional hearing, and although the Geary Act was not repealed, his testimony and appeal likely contributed to some adjustments to the law.
In addition, the Chinese consulate argued that this law violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which guaranteed equal rights for Chinese in the US. Despite these protests, the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government has sovereign power to legislate and enforce immigration regulations. These kinds of authority remain widely used against all noncitizens.
Image 42.02.06 — Wong Chin Foo (Chin Foo Wong) was a prominent Chinese American journalist and activist. He challenged the 1892 Geary Act, which required Chinese residents to carry proof of residence.
Paper Sons and Daughters
As another form of civil disobedience, about 90 to 95 percent of the three million Chinese migrants to the US from 1882 to 1943 came as “paper sons and daughters.” This system was an elaborate transnational network between China and the United States in which Chinese applicants purchased the identity of a foreign-born child of a US citizen father. Applicants memorized every detail of their falsified identities to pass the scrutiny of immigration inspectors. The “paper son” system evaded restrictive immigration laws to help Chinese settle in the US.
Exclusion of Japanese and Koreans
West Coast politicians and labor leaders applied the same racial logic to target other Asian immigrant groups, such as Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos, for exclusion. As Japanese workers replaced Chinese workers in agriculture, they became racialized as economic threats, cheap labor, and immoral, unassimilable people.
For instance, an 1891 San Francisco newspaper headline read: “Undesirables: Another phase in the immigration from Asia; Japanese taking the place of Chinese; Importation of Contract Laborers and Women.” Expanding immigration restrictions relied upon prevailing beliefs in eugenics, or “race science,” which attributed biological differences to groups that we now think of as different ethnicities.
Founded in 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, later renamed the Asiatic Exclusion League, campaigned to “keep America white.” Animosity ran so high that a mob attacked fifteen to twenty San Francisco Japanese businesses during a labor strike. In 1907, the League successfully lobbied the San Francisco School Board to segregate Japanese school children into the Oriental Public School attended by Chinese children.
Unlike China, Japan had more international and military power to challenge the unfair treatment of its migrant citizens. It argued that school segregation violated the Treaty of 1894, which guaranteed Japanese equal rights in the US. Fearful of offending Japan, President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907. Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers to avoid being targeted by US exclusionary laws, and the San Francisco school board reinstated the Japanese students who had been barred from public schools. Japanese women were also able to enter as “picture brides,” people who entered arranged marriages through exchanges of photographs and were admitted to the US as close family members.
Koreans experienced similar patterns of recruitment, migration, settlement, and racial resentment. Hawaiian sugar plantation owners began recruiting Korean laborers starting in 1903, and within two years, more than seven thousand Koreans migrated to Hawaiʻi to escape famine and war. When their labor contracts expired, about half relocated to the US mainland. When Japan officially colonized Korea in 1910, more Koreans migrated to the United States.
In the US, Koreans remained politically active to protest Japanese colonization of their homeland. Legally, they were considered “Japanese nationals.” However, they resisted Japanese government efforts to represent them. When unemployed white workers attacked Korean fruit-pickers in Hemet, California, in 1913, Koreans sought to advocate for themselves instead of relying on the Japanese government.
Exclusion of South Asians
South Asians, mainly from the northern Punjab region of India, began migrating to the Pacific Coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Japanese and Korean Exclusion League decried this influx, vilifying South Asian immigrants, along with Chinese and Japanese groups. Declaring that South Asians were like “yellow coolies and immoral Japanese women” who came to “prey upon American society,” the league broadened their scope and renamed themselves the Asiatic Exclusion League. 3 They racialized South Asian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese people together as one undesirable group.
In 1906, a local newspaper in Bellingham, Washington, called this group a “Dusky Peril,” connecting South Asians to the “Yellow Peril” stereotype that portrayed East Asia as a menace to the western world. The reporter referred to a “horde” that was “invading the state,” using language that likened South Asians to a disease that threatened the health of the nation. 4 Such ideas were connected to scientific racism and eugenics of that period. A year later, in what became known as the 1907 Bellingham Riots, a mob of over five hundred white workers drove out two hundred South Asians from the city.
Text 42.02.07 — An article in the Puget Sound American dating from September 16, 1906, was titled “Have We a Dusky Peril?” The article claimed that “Hindu” migrants were replacing the “Yellow Peril” and were set to overtake the Pacific Northwest.
Congress also passed restrictions in the form of the Immigration Act of 1917 (Asiatic Barred Zone Act). The law prohibited the immigration of people from many parts of Asia and the globe, including India, as well as other people bearing certain “undesirable” characteristics. This list restricted immigration of disabled people, political radicals, poor people, and criminals, and contributed to growing beliefs in eugenics.
Rise of Eugenics
Eugenics, or “race science,” peaked in influence during the 1920s promoting beliefs that certain groups were genetically superior. Eugenics beliefs fueled nativism, or the belief in promoting and protecting the interests of those who are not immigrants, and influenced immigration policies seeking to protect the racial stock of the US. Later, the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) established a quota system to limit immigration from various countries and outright prohibited any “alien ineligible to citizenship.”
Exclusion of Filipinos
Like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Asian Indians, Filipinos faced racism in the form of legalized discrimination, mob violence, and other forms of exclusion. A key difference in policy was a result of the Philippines being a colony of the United States starting in 1898. The government categorized Filipinos as “US nationals” who could migrate to the United States but could not hold citizenship.
Their status as US nationals made it easy for Hawaiian sugar plantation owners to hire them to replace striking Japanese workers. An estimated 125,000 Filipinos arrived between 1906 and 1934, and many migrated to the US mainland in the following years. Politicians, news media, and white workers called Filipinos the “Third Asiatic Invasion,” accusing Filipino men of stealing work and consorting with white women.
As the nation experienced the Great Depression (1929–1939), soaring unemployment and widespread poverty stoked more racist violence. In 1930 a newspaper in Watsonville, California, published a headline warning that “The Filipino is the State’s Next Problem,” and shortly after, a mob of over five hundred white men attacked Filipinos at a nightclub in the city. 5 Over five days, vigilantes hunted Filipinos, beating them and killing a twenty-two-year-old named Fermin Tobera. The violence spread to nearby San Francisco, Stockton, and San Jose.
Text 42.02.08a — During the 1930 Watsonville Riots, Fermin Tobera, a twenty-two-year-old farmworker, was shot and killed by white mobs in a five-day wave of anti-Filipino violence. His murderer was never apprehended.
Image 42.02.08b — Filipino farmworkers, shown here working asparagus fields in Sacramento County, played a significant role in California agriculture while routinely facing discrimination and violence.
In 1934, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act (Philippine Independence Act), which eventually led to the end of US colonization of the Philippines, but also imposed limits on Filipino immigration. Filipinos were now reclassified as “aliens” instead of “US nationals” and became subject to more exclusionary policies.
Methods of Resistance
Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Filipino groups adopted several strategies to resist the exclusion and restriction they faced. Unlike other national groups, Japanese groups found support from Japanese government officials who had greater political influence in the United States at the time.
With limited protections in the United States and in their countries of origin, South Asian and Korean groups contributed to their home countries’ liberation struggles. South Asians in San Francisco founded the Ghadar Party in 1913, which connected independence from Great Britain’s colonization to the racism and exclusion they experienced in the United States. In 1919, two hundred Korean delegates met in Philadelphia for the first Korean Congress and called for the right of national self-determination.
Like other Asian groups, Filipino Americans resisted in many ways. When the Tydings-McDuffie Act was signed, two Filipinos en route to the US refused their orders for deportation. The Immigration and Naturalization Services failed to relocate them, gave up, and closed their files.
Conclusion
To protect their economic and racial dominance in the United States, white politicians, labor groups, and others launched decades-long efforts against Asian groups through immigration exclusion, segregation, and restriction from building full lives in this society. They used their positions of power to influence policy and bolster racist ideas that portrayed Asian groups as dangerous, threatening, and unable to assimilate. These ideas—and the punitive institutions attached to them—continue today.
Asian groups resisted in many ways—some of them through official channels like the court system, and others in everyday ways like creating community gathering spaces or support networks. Even if these tactics did not lead to immediate changes throughout their history in the US, Asians have actively challenged injustice and racism.
Glossary terms in this module
deportation Where it’s used
The forced removal of a non-citizen from a country.
Immigration Act of 1924 Where it’s used
Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, this law barred most Asian persons from immigrating and/or obtaining citizenship.
