The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is often considered the first major law to restrict immigration to the United States. But there is an earlier law that was used to effectively prevent Chinese women from immigrating to the United States: the Page Act of 1875.
Chinese immigration to America
The first Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1850s. Many were fleeing the economic consequences of the Opium War (1839-42, 1856-60), when the British fought to maintain the roads of open opium trafficking in defiance of China’s efforts to stop the illegal trade. A series of floods and droughts that followed caused members of the lower classes to leave their farms and seek new work opportunities abroad.
When gold was discovered in California in 1848, more and more Chinese immigrants came to the West Coast to join the gold rush. Some worked on American farms or in San Francisco’s growing textile industry. Others were employed as laborers on the Central Pacific and Transcontinental Railways, railways that would accelerate westward expansion and facilitate the movement of troops during the Civil War.
Despite their central role in building America’s infrastructure, racism directed against Chinese immigrants was a constant from the moment they arrived on American shores.
READ MORE: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How Chinese Immigrants Did It
Anti-Chinese sentiment
A Labor Party meeting on the sand court in front of San Francisco City Hall. The party was formed during a recession and expressed anger at Chinese immigrants on the West Coast who were seen as lower wages.
MPI / Getty Images
By the early 1850s, 25,000 Chinese immigrants had emigrated to the United States, joining a growing wave of Irish settlers fleeing the Irish potato famine and a growing number of German settlers seeking new life alongside other groups. Europeans.
European and Asian immigrants came to the United States to improve their economic well-being, says Dr. Melissa May Borja, assistant professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. But Chinese immigrants were seen as a bigger threat.
“They were seen as a racial threat to a pure white America. They were seen as an economic threat to free white labor. They were described as a threat of disease – a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric based on the fact to portray the Chinese as dirty and sick They were also seen as a religious and moral threat like the pagans who threatened a Christian America.
Prejudice against Asian women
Chinese women, wives of traders, in San Francisco, mid-19th century.
By Agostini / Getty Images
Chinese women were seen as a special kind of threat: a sexual threat. “They were stereotyped like prostitutes, like prostitutes,” Borja says.
While there were Chinese women working in the sex industry in the mid-19e century, they were distinguished from their white peers: “Chinese women have been specifically accused of spreading sexually transmitted diseases. They were scapegoats. This sexualized stereotype has stuck, ”says Dr. Kevin Nadal, professor at the City University of New York and vice president of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
The Page Act of 1875
Enacted seven years before the better-known Chinese Exclusion Act, the Page Act of 1875 was one of the first federal laws to restrict immigration to the United States in the 19th century. “It was designed to bar immigrants deemed ‘undesirable’ – defined as Chinese workers and prostitutes ‘coolies’ – from entering the United States,” says K. Ian Shin, Ph.D., assistant professor of history. and American Culture at the University of Michigan.
On paper, the Page Act of 1875 prohibited the recruitment of workers from “China, Japan, or any other eastern country” who were not brought to the United States of their own accord or who were brought for “purposes. obscene and immoral ”. It explicitly prohibits “the importation of women for the purpose of prostitution”.
In practice, it has been used to prevent Chinese women from migrating to the United States. It left the decision of whether or not to allow an individual’s entry into the United States to the consul general or the consul of port cities.
Under the Page Act, Chinese women attempting to enter the country at the Angel Island immigration post outside of San Francisco were subjected to invasive and humiliating questioning by immigration officials. Americans.
“The poems scratched on the wall of Angel Island identified the medical exams they were forced to undergo as barbaric, humiliating and discriminatory,” Borja says.
“One of the reasons why the number of Chinese immigrant women in the United States declined after the 1870s is precisely because these women chose not to submit to this type of interrogation,” says Shin.
Impact of the law on pages
Calvin T. Sampson’s shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts showing Chinese immigrants fixing soles to shoes, first published in Harper’s Weekly for an article on Chinese workers’ strikes, c. 1870.
Smith / Gado / Getty Images Collection
The impact of the Page Act has skewed gender ratios in the Chinese-American community to strongly male. “In the early 1870s, there were about 78 Chinese women for every 1,000 Chinese men in the United States,” Shin says. “After the law was passed, that number fell to 48 women per 1,000 men.”
Preventing women from immigrating alongside their partners meant that male laborers were unable to create families and settle in America. Instead, many sought to earn money and then return to China to join their families. The baccalaureate among Chinese workers, in turn, reinforced American suspicions. “They have been portrayed as driftless,” Borja says. “It reinforced the vision that they shouldn’t be full-fledged Americans. The barriers justified other barriers.”
Most of the west coast states had laws preventing people from marrying outside their race by the mid-1800s. Thus, by effectively barring Chinese women from entering the country through the Page Act, the US government has restricted the growth of Asian families. Nadal points out that there were no laws targeting immigrant women from European countries.
By setting a precedent of discrimination against a specific group of immigrants, the Pages Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act paved the way for other discriminatory immigration policies that imposed quotas on certain ethnic groups and prohibited l entry from people with mental disorders, physical disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community.
