Congress designed the Chinese Exclusion Act to halt the flood of Chinese immigration into the country and to deport Chinese who were allegedly living in the United States illegally. The presence of Chinese immigrants had been an issue for some time in western states, where Chinese settled in large numbers during the gold rush of the 1850s. As heavy competition and the dwindling number of gold fields winnowed out all but the most resourceful of miners, the Chinese began to move into the vast railroad construction projects that sought to unite the two coasts of the nation. The completion of the transcontinental railway decreased the cost of eastern-manufactured goods and forced western manufacturers to look for a source of low-cost labor. They found it in the thousands of now-unemployed Chinese railroad workers.
Agitation for limiting Chinese immigration began during the depression of 1873. Jobs were scarce and competition for them was fierce. White laborers saw the hiring of Chinese workers at low wages by cost-conscious manufacturers as acts of job thievery. Anti-Chinese riots erupted in several western cities. Mob violence, especially in California, was accompanied by political action as western politicians sought to end Chinese immigration. Congress produced such a bill in 1879, but it was vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes on the grounds that the bill would force the United States to abrogate a provision of the Burlingame Treaty, which allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration. Hayes subsequently negotiated a new treaty with China that regulated immigration.
The issue came up again in 1882 when Republican senator John Miller of California proposed a bill that would have restricted Chinese immigration for 20 years and made the Chinese residing in the United States ineligible for citizenship. President Chester A. Arthur vetoed the bill as undemocratic, but a revised bill passed by wide margins in the House and Senate and was reluctantly signed by Arthur. The moratorium was reduced to 10 years, but the Chinese were still barred from becoming citizens. In order to maintain good trade relations,
This cartoon by Thomas Nast shows a Democratic tiger and a Republican elephant joining forces to remove a Chinese immigrant who hangs on desperately to a tree labeled "Freedom to all." (Library of Congress)
Arthur’s secretary of state, Frederick Frelinghuysen, tried to curb California racists and lobbied for a ban on American exports of opium to China. The Chinese minister was mollified, and relations between the United States and China remained cordial.
Further reading: Justus Donecke, The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1981); Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
—Timothy E. Vislocky
World History
