Source: https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Exclusion-and-Empire/First-Arrivals/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 05:52:12+00:00

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In the half-century between the California Gold Rush and the War of 1898, young men primarily from China and Japan flocked to the western states to fill an untold number of jobs brought about by America’s push across the continent. The West was sparsely populated, and demand for labor was high. The influx of Asian workers, however, created a volatile mix of hostility and resentment among the region’s white population that reverberated across the next few generations. On Capitol Hill, such anxieties were routinely codified into law. Even though America was home to thousands of Asian immigrants, they were almost completely prohibited from participating in the political process and were frequently ostracized from American society.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_5_TransContinentalRailroad_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress This 1869 cartoon from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicts the completion of the transcontinental railroad that connected the nation’s coasts. Thousands of Chinese laborers laid track for the railroad, and Chinese merchants followed the construction. The predominantly white frontier population reacted by adopting anti-Chinese sentiments.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_6_ChesterArthur_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which placed the first restrictions on immigration in U.S. history. The law specifically targeted Chinese immigration.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_7_SanFranciscoPanorama_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress This image is a section of a panoramic photograph of San Francisco from California Street Hill published by Thomas C. Russell in 1877. San Francisco would later become the site of anti-Japanese violence in the 1890s.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_8_JamesPhelan_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress As mayor of San Francisco from 1897 to 1902, James D. Phelan publicly espoused anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese views. Phelan later served as a U.S. Senator from California from 1915 to 1921.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_9_TRoosevelt_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt grappled with the segregation of Japanese children in San Francisco schools and nativist attacks on Japanese businesses. He reluctantly decided to restrict Japanese immigration.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_10_BillUniformRuleofNaturalization_NARA.xml Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration In March 1790, Congress debated America’s first immigration law. The bill allowed a “free white person” to petition for U.S. citizenship after two years of residency. Congress quickly approved the bill, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 became law on March 26, 1790.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_11_WWilson_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Immigration Act of 1917 because of its inclusion of literacy tests for immigrants. Congress overrode his veto to codify Asian exclusion.
At a policy level, citizenship remained perhaps the most powerful tool at Congress’s disposal and, during the 1910s, the national legislature completely overhauled the country’s immigration laws. For the first time, the federal government prohibited people from whole areas of the globe—not just individual countries—from coming to America. During World War I, fears of espionage and sabotage encouraged the United States to clamp down on visas, giving Congress time to consider bigger and broader reform. With the Immigration Act of 1924, the effort to codify total bans culminated in a restrictive national origins quota system built on the legal invention of “aliens ineligible for citizenship” popular in various state laws.
About this object Representative Albert Johnson of Washington chaired the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee from the 66th Congress to the 71st Congress (1919–1931), working to limit Japanese immigration to the United States.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_13_ChineseExclusionCaseFileofLeeSan_NARA.xml Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration District courts around the country maintained case files for individuals excluded under Section 3 of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This 1906 case record for Lee San indicates that he lived and worked in the United States without the legally required certificate of residency and ordered him to be deported.
/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_14_ImmigrationActof1924.xml Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration Public Law 68-139, approved during the 68th Congress (1923–1925) and known as the Immigration Act of 1924, established a national origins quota system. It limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States and barred immigration from most of Asia.
The impact of the law was arguably greatest in Japan, where many resented the section that singled them out as “an inferior race.”46 Somewhat optimistically, the Japanese government expected the immigration restriction to relax over time as the commercial interests between Japan and the United States strengthened. Nevertheless, Japan began viewing the United States, instead of the Soviet Union, as its primary military and naval adversary.47 That shift would have devastating consequences for America’s two major Pacific territories—the Philippines and Hawaii—during World War II.
But even the Philippines and Hawaii, which the United States assumed control over at the turn of the century, were not immune to some level of exclusion during the 40 years preceding the war. Beginning in 1898, the experience of the United States in the Philippines and Hawaii legalized the convergence of exclusionary practices at home and abroad as ideas about race and empire conflicted with American traditions of democracy and self-government.
5Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993): 196; Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015): 65, 72.
6Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, rev. ed. (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 1998): 35–36.
7Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002): 93; Treaty of Trade, Consuls, and Emigration, U.S.-China, 16 Stat. 739 (1868).
8Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1939; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991): 25–39; David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Penguin Books, 1999): 206.
9Bain, Empire Express: 640, 671; Lee, The Making of Asian America: 93.
10Charles S. Campbell, Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865–1900 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975): 114; Lawrence H. Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation (1946; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1967): 353; Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957): 19–20.
11Justus D. Doenecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981): 82; Campbell, Transformation of American Foreign Relations: 116n30; Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988): 55; 22 Stat. 826 (1880).
12Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998): 222–223; Sandmeyer, Anti-Chinese Movement in California: 92; Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 354; Campbell, Transformation of American Foreign Relations: 116n33, 117; Stephen W. Stathis, Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002: Major U.S. Acts and Treaties (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003): 122; Chinese Exclusion Act, 22 Stat. 58 (1882).
13For legal examples, see Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893) and Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889). In the United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court upheld the Fourteenth Amendment in which a child born in the United States became an American citizen even if his or her parents were Chinese aliens. Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 487–488; Daniels, Asian America: 58; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977): 444; Lee, The Making of Asian America: 84–85.
14Stathis, Landmark Legislation: 137; Sandmeyer, Anti-Chinese Movement in California: 106–108; Daniels, Asian America: 112.
15Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991): 11; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 46; Daniels, Asian America: 104–105, 109.
16The 1890 U.S. Census, for example, listed just 1,147 Japanese living in California. See Daniels, Asian America: 112.
17Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980): 133, 146, 203–204; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011): 12–13.
18Daniels, Asian America: 109–110, 112.
19Ibid., 112; Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966): 129.
20Roger Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962): 8, 22, 113; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 200–201.
21Charles E. Neu, An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 1906–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967): 23, 130; Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: 32–33.
22Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990): 256–257; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 201.
23Neu, Uncertain Friendship: 62, 66–67, 79; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 201–203.
24Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt: 252; Neu, Uncertain Friendship: 79–80; Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: 95; Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 369.
25Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan: 295.
26Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 203; Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan: 287–291.
27Lee, The Making of Asian America: 132; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 206–207.
28Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 205. The individual cases are: Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923);Porterfield v. Webb, 263 U.S. 225 (1923); Webb v. O’Brien, 263 U.S. 313 (1923); and Frick v. Webb, 263 U.S. 326 (1923). See Chan, Asian Americans: 47.
29Chan, Asian Americans: 95–96; Daniels, Asian America: 298–299; David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992): 18–19.
30Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 412–413; Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 55, 249n11.
31Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois tried to extend naturalization privileges to Chinese immigrants, but it was voted down. Daniels, Asian America: 43, 43n31.
32Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988): 216; Chan, Asian Americans: 47, 92–93.
33Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922): 197.
34Ichioka, The Issei: 221; Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922): 198; Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: 98.
35United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): 214–215; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 299; Chan, Asian Americans: 94.
36Chan, Asian Americans: 55; Michael E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994): 110; Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993): 32.
37Lee, The Making of Asian America: 171; Stathis, Landmark Legislation: 174; Daniels, Asian America: 149–150; Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America: 70.
38John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988): 302, 304–307, 309–311; Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 367–369; Tichenor, Dividing Lines: 142–143; Daniels, Coming to America: 280; Presidential Vetoes, 1789–1976 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978): 216.
39Daniels, Politics of Prejudice: 95; Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 369; Stathis, Landmark Legislation: 183; Public Law 67-5, 42 Stat. 5 (1921).
40Parrish, Anxious Decades: 112; Lee, The Making of Asian America: 134.
41Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 369; Higham, Strangers in the Land: 319; Parrish, Anxious Decades: 112.
42Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 370–371; Higham, Strangers in the Land: 310–321; Parrish, Anxious Decades: 112; Daniels, Coming to America: 282–283.
43Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East, 1921–1931 (1965; repr., Chicago, IL: Imprint Publications, 1990): 35.
44Parrish, Anxious Decades: 112; Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation: 371–373; Immigration Act of 1924, Public Law 68-139, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).
45Lee, The Making of Asian America: 135; Yuka Fujioka, “The Thought War: Public Diplomacy by Japan’s Immigrants in the United States,” in Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930s Japan, ed. Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara (Toronto, CN: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 164.
46Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: 210.
47Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967): 115, 152–153.

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