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Chapter 4. Chinese Exclusion: Causes and Consequences, 1882–1943
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CHAPTER 4 Chinese Exclusion Causes and Consequences, 1882–1943 Roger Daniels CHINESE EXCLUSION INFLUENCED THE DEVELOPMENT of both American immigration policy and the bureaucracy created to enforce that policy. This chapter aims to show how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came to be enacted and to explain presidential involvement with Chinese immigration and the consequences of that involvement during the following six decades. After a brief summary of immigration law before 1882, I will discuss the evolution and eventual demise of the Chinese exclusion statutes and then analyze how those statutes operated in practice and indicate their ultimate significance.1 Immigration policy, I have argued, is in many cases a subset of foreign policy, although students of foreign policy often pay little attention to it. For example, the three volume Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, which Alexander DeConde edited in 1978, had no space in its 1,201 large pages for an article on “immigration,” although the second edition, published in 2002, has one.2 Immigration policy was largely inchoate during much of American history even though immigration itself was fundamental to the existence of offshoots of European civilization in the New World. Part of the bill of particulars against George III in Jefferson’s declaration was that “he has endeavoured to prevent the population of 90 | daniels these States . . . obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.” Similarly, while the Constitution makes no direct mention of immigration, the founders clearly assumed that immigration would occur, since Article 1, Section 8 empowered Congress “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization” and Article 2, Section 1 provided that only the president, and by extension the vice president, need be a natural-born citizen. A special case was Article 1, Section 9, barring any federal interference with the slave trade prior to 1808, euphemistically described as “the migration or importation of . . . persons.” Statutory provisions for immigration prior to 1875 are minimal. Congress quickly enacted a naturalization statute in 1790, which specified that naturalization was restricted to “free white persons,” but we know that on several occasions before 1882 Chinese and other East Asians were naturalized. I know of no evidence that Congress had Asians in mind in 1790. The obvious bar was to the naturalization of blacks and of indentured servants. The first French constitution of 1789 similarly forbade the suffrage of persons “in livery.” A U.S. statute enacted in 1808—the earliest possible date for such legislation—outlawed the importation of slaves into the United States, and in 1819, as part of a statute dealing with import duties, Congress ordered that every vessel entering an American port should deliver a manifest of passengers being landed to the collector of customs for that district.3 A similar provision had been contained in the Alien Act of 1798, but that act expired in the summer of 1800.4 One section in an 1870 statute limited the charges that states could levy on immigrants.5 No other immigration legislation existed prior to the first anti-Chinese legislation, the so-called Page Act of 1875. The lack of immigration legislation did not indicate a lack of interest in immigration. In fact, the need for immigrants was all but universally recognized. The Founding Fathers understood that immigration to fill up their largely empty new country was a necessity. They would have endorsed the maxim of the nineteenth-century Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–84) that “to govern is to populate.” The anti-immigrant legislation of the John Adams administration at the end of the 1790s—the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts—was not so much nativism as it was a desperate but vain attempt to keep the Federalists in power. Federalists, generally, were not against immigration and only opposed the immigrants they thought might vote for Jefferson. Apart from that episode, a long pro-immigrant consensus prevailed, a consensus well [3.238.161.165] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:03 GMT) Chinese Exclusion | 91 described in Pres. John Tyler’s 1841 message to Congress when he noted that “we hold out to people of other countries an invitation to come and settle among us as members of our rapidly growing family.”6 However, within a few years of Tyler’s message, the pro-immigration consensus was weakened. Heavy Irish immigration, in part a consequence of the terrible potato famine of the mid-1840s, brought many desperately poor immigrants to East Coast states...