Chinese Exclusion Act

Audience

Early angry calls to exclude Chinese from the United States came from the West Coast, where most Chinese laborers lived and worked. The congressional committee whose fact-finding mission supported legislation to exclude the Chinese included a representative and a senator from California. A California senator introduced the bill that became the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. On the West Coast, white workers, labor leaders (among them, Denis Kearney, who notoriously fanned flames of hatred toward Chinese workers), newspaper editors, and politicians celebrated its passage and immediately began to lobby for changes to strengthen the act. The act, then, was written in part to please West Coast Americans who claimed it was necessary to preserve jobs and good wages for whites, to promote health and safety in cities, and to protect American society against alien influence.

The movement to exclude had support throughout the nation, however. Critics of Chinese laborers from the eastern and southern states, where far fewer Chinese lived, often cast the immigrants as a new class of slaves, undesirable in post-Civil War times. “It is servile labor,” said James Blaine, Republican from Maine and in the forefront of the movement to exclude on the Senate floor during debates in 1879. “It is not free labor such as we intend to develop and encourage and build up in this country” (Miller, p. 251). Support for exclusion was far from unanimous, but it existed across the United States. Leaders from both major parties recognized in the movement to exclude a chance to attract electoral support, especially from the white working class. Thus, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which responded to highly organized protests on the West Coast, spoke to a national audience.