Chinese Exclusion Act
California remained on a specie basis during the Civil War and the troublous years that followed it, and looked down upon the paper money of the East with good-natured contempt. For a while fortune attended her material development. The lessened demand for labor consequent on the completion of the Central Pacific should have given her a taste of the evil of over-population, but as if to ward off this misfortune so familiar to other communities, the development of the bonanza mines of the Comstock lode and good wheat harvests occurred, so that prosperity was rampant while the East suffered from the commercial crisis of 1873. Such good luck however could not last. While Chinese immigrants in the U.S. had to deal with the threat of armed attackers, they also were harassed by punitive laws and regulations, many targeted solely at them. The Foreign Miners License tax law required all non-native born workers to pay the exorbitant rate of twenty dollars per month for the right to mine. The Sidewalk Ordinance of 1870 banned the Chinese method of carrying vegetables and carrying laundry on a pole, while in San Francisco, the Queue Ordinance of 1873 outlawed the wearing of long braids by men, a Chinese custom. Chinese immigrants were prohibited from working for federal, state, and local governments, and from educating their children in public schools. For several decades, a law was in place that prevented Chinese immigrants from testifying in court against Americans of European descent--effectively placing thousands of immigrants outside the protection of the law.
California could not forever escape the commercial disturbance ushered in by the panic of 1873, especially as, within her borders, this disturbance was accompanied by disastrous local conditions. In 1876, there was a drought causing the failure of the wheat crop; cattle died for lack of pasturage; mines operated then by the hydraulic process shut down for the want of water. Contemporaneously silver declined in value; the production of the mines of the Comstock lode (which were of silver situated in Nevada) decreased in amount. Dividends stopped; values fell.
The community had been given over to a wild speculation. Capitalists, bankers, merchants and shop-keepers neglected their proper occupations to buy and "boom" or eagerly watch mining stocks. Mechanics, laborers, men and maid servants, all took a "flyer." All were bulls in the market. Early in 1877, the collapse came and, to a large part of the community, the collapse meant ruin. The bottom seemed to have dropped out of everything. Elation gave way to despair. Suffering such as comes from the rapid transitions of fortune was the lot of most citizens of San Francisco; and the city overflowed with unemployed men. Political demagogues were on hand to direct the irritation at the loss of money against the unoffending Chinese.
Attracted by the lure of gold, as were many other peoples, they had at first worked in the mines, where, as in all other places, they were successful in earning money and getting ahead. As conditions altered they left the mines for domestic service and laundry work, then took to railroad building, agriculture and other out-of-door labor and finally to manufacturing. The negotiation of the Burlingame treaty gave a fresh impetus to the immigration. In California their numbers in 1870, 1880, 1882 (when the maximum was reached) were respectively 55,000, 77,000, 93,000; on the entire Pacific coast 71,000, 105,000, 132,000.1 The Chinese had a passion for labor. Exacting the utmost cent by bargaining, they did not strike, so that their labor was continuous; this joined to cheap living and frugality made them desirable working men.
"For rent, etc.," wrote Henry George in 1869, then a resident of San Francisco, "they must always pay more than the whites. They are fair game for all sorts of rascals. ... To rob these timid people ... is comparatively safe; nor unless a white man happens to witness the operation is there any danger of subsequent punishment, for in the courts of California the testimony of a Chinaman cannot be received against a white." Nevertheless the Chinese felt that they had a nation and a history far superior, far higher and far beyond all others on the earth.
Even as they struggled to find work, Chinese immigrants were also fighting for their lives. During their first few decades in the United States, they endured an epidemic of violent racist attacks, a campaign of persecution and murder that today seems shocking. From Seattle to Los Angeles, from Wyoming to the small towns of California, immigrants from China were forced out of business, run out of town, beaten, tortured, lynched, and massacred, usually with little hope of help from the law. Racial hatred, an uncertain economy, and weak government in the new territories all contributed to this climate of terror and bloodshed. The perpetrators of these crimes, which included Americans from many segments of society, largely went unpunished. Exact statistics for this period are difficult to come by, but a case can be made that Chinese immigrants suffered worse treatment than any other group that came voluntarily to the US.
The desire for riot was in the air; the American "hoodlums" could not resist the prevailing tendency and directed their rage against the unresisting Chinese. In San Francisco a riot began on July 23, 1877 with a working-men's mass meeting held to extend their sympathy to their striking brethren in the East. The dregs of the community got control of the movement and, sacking a corner grocery for liquor, gutted laundries, killed two Chinamen and started to attack Chinatown, the segregated residence of the Chinese. The riots lasted a week. The Chinese prudently kept out of the way of the rioters and, though suffering little in person or property, due to the efficient measures of the supporters of law and order, were unquestionably terrorized and made to feel that they were an excrescence on the body politic.
But an overcrowded country with 350 millions on a surface of 1,500,000 square miles could not fail to look covetously upon the fair land of California, so resembling France in its fertility, which could certainly subsist in comfort at least 30 million Chinese.
In 1882 Congress passed a bill suspending the immigration for twenty years. This act was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history, and it excluded Chinese laborers from the country under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. This, President Arthur vetoed on the ground that good faith required the suspension for a lesser period; furthermore he hinted in his veto message that such legislation would receive his approval. Congress then passed the Act of May 6, 1882, suspending the immigration of skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers for a period of ten years. This enactment was signed by the President and proved the highwater mark of anti-Chinese agitation. It inaugurated the exclusion of Chinese labor.
The 1882 exclusion act also placed new requirements on Chinese who had already entered the country. If they left the United States, they had to obtain certifications to re-enter. Congress, moreover, refused State and Federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them. It also made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. Chinese men in the U.S. now had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new home.
When the exclusion act expired in 1892, Congress extended it for 10 years in the form of the Geary Act. This extension, made permanent in 1902, added restrictions by requiring each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, she or he faced deportation.
For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882, and prevented it from growing and assimilating into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did. Later, the 1924 Immigration Act would tighten the noose even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to other Asian immigrant groups. Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life apart, and to build a society in which they could survive on their own.
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