The first Chinese immigrants to the United…

March 1875 CE

The first Chinese immigrants to the United States had overwhelmingly been males, the majority of whom had begun arriving in 1848 as a part of the California Gold Rush.

They intended to make money in the United States and then return to their country, so even though more than half had wives and families, they stayed in China.

However, anti-Chinese sentiment could already be found in discriminatory laws in 1852 that limited Chinese possibilities.

The California State Legislature had assumed that Chinese men were forced to work under long-term service contracts, when in reality immigrants to America are not coolies, but borrow money from brokers for their trip and pay the money back plus interest through work at their first job.

Without enough money to send for their wives, a prostitution industry had developed in the male Chinese immigrant community and had become a serious issue to white Americans living in San Francisco.

Laws specifically directed at Chinese women immigrants had been created even though prostitution was fairly common in the American West among many nationalities.

Many of those in favor of Chinese exclusion are not worried about the experiences and needs of poor Chinese girls that are being sold or tricked into prostitution, but about “the fate of white men, white families, and a nation constructed as white”. (Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border; University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 34)

Chinese men hurt white men’s ability to earn money, “while Chinese women caused disease and immorality among white men”. (Luibheid, p.35.)

Both Chinese male “coolies” and Chinese female prostitutes are linked to slavery, which adds to the American animosity toward them since slavery and involuntary servitude had been abolished in 1865. (Abrams, Kerry, “Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law,” Colombia Law Review 105.3 (Apr. 2005): 641-716. p. 657)

Male-laborers are central to the anti-Chinese movement, so one might expect lawmakers to focus on excluding men from immigration, but instead they concentrate on women in order to protect the American system of monogamous marriages.

Furthermore, the American Medical Association believes that Chinese immigrants “carried distinct germs to which they were immune, but from which whites would die if exposed”. (Luibheid 37.)

This fear becomes concentrated on Chinese women, because some white Americans believe that germs and disease can most easily be transmitted to white men through sexual labor of Chinese prostitutes.

Additionally, during difficult times in China, women and girls are sold into “domestic service, concubinage, or prostitution”. (Luibheid 40.)

Some Chinese men have a wife as well as a concubine, usually a lower class woman obtained through purchase and recognized as a legal member of the family.

A woman’s status depends on her sexual relationship with Chinese men; “first wives enjoyed the highest status, followed by second wives and concubines, followed in turn by several classes of prostitutes”. (Abrams 653.)

Since all Chinese women are held in extreme submission by Chinese men, some immigration officials do not accept the Chinese culture (which considers the ownership and sexual exploitation of women to be a norm) and they are unable to distinguish between free women and exploited women.

Many believe that “virtually all immigrant Chinese women were enslaved prostitutes”. (Luibheid 40.)

Furthermore, the polygamy, prostitution, and subjugation of women that the Chinese men practice makes Congress believe that they are unfit for self-governance or assimilation. (Abrams 642.)

An additional concern is that the children of Chinese couples would become U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment and their cultural practices would become a part of American democracy.

As a result, the Page Law responds to “what were believed to be serious threats to white values, lives, and futures". (Luibheid 37.)

California state laws cannot exclude women for being Chinese, so they ware crafted as regulations of public morals, yet the laws are still struck down as “impermissible encroachment on federal immigration power". (Abrams 643 and 644.)

However, the Page Law sails through Congress without any expressed concerns of having a federal law that racially restricts immigration or violates the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 (which allows free migration and emigration of Chinese) because Americans are focused on protecting the social ideals of marriage and morality.