The United States Congress, alarmed by the…
May 1882 CE
The United States Congress, alarmed by the influx of two hundred thousand Chinese immigrants over a twenty-year period, bans the importation of Chinese workers for ten years in the first of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
The US adds to its exclusion list “lunatics and idiots.”
A United States federal law signed by Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act is one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in U.S. history.
The Act excludes Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers employed in mining" from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation.
Many Chinese are relentlessly beaten just because of their race.
The few Chinese non-laborers who wish to immigrate have to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they are qualified to immigrate, which tends to be difficult to prove.
The Act also affects Asians who have already settled in the United States.
Any Chinese who leaves the United States has to obtain certifications for reentry, and the Act makes Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship.
After the Act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. have little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new homes.
One of the critics of the Chinese Exclusion Act is the anti-slavery/anti-imperialist Republican Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, who describes the Act as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination."
The laws are driven largely by racial concerns; immigration of persons of other races is unlimited during this period.