Chinese Exclusion Act

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Compare and contrast the movement to exclude Chinese laborers, which resulted in the 1882 Act, and the current movement to stop illegal Mexican immigrants from entering and residing in the United States. Which factors driving today's campaign against illegal Mexican immigrants are similar to those motivating the push to exclude Chinese? What are the biggest differences between the two movements?
• 2. Consider Section 14 of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which denies U.S. citizenship to Chinese, in light of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870 and prohibiting the United States from denying its citizens the right to vote based on race. What results if both dictates are followed? Can the two be consistent? Is it a representative democracy when persons excluded by law cannot vote to choose senators and representatives who will determine whether or how to change that law? Can you identify other examples in U.S. history (or in the present) where a group of persons has been (or is) kept from voting for the legislators who pass the laws governing them? Can you argue that it is justifiable?
• 3. The Chinese were not the only group characterized in the nineteenth century as “an indigestible mass in the community” and “an undesirable element in a republic” (Miller, p. 213). Native Americans, African Americans, and Catholic immigrants were also at times portrayed as unfit to participate fully or equally in American society. What is the purpose when political leaders and opinion makers express these negative portrayals? Do these characterizations ever go away? Have the laws of this nation tended more to challenge or to reinforce these kinds of views?
• 4. Far fewer Japanese than Chinese lived in the United States during the period when the movement to exclude Chinese laborers was raging. The 1890 U.S. Census reported only 2,039 Japanese and more than 100,000 Chinese among the entire U.S. population. The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 between the United States and Japan ended immigration of Japanese persons to the United States. That document resulted from quiet negotiations between the two governments, a process not at all like the complicated set of diplomatic and legislative steps leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Read about the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 and then compare and contrast its development and its content with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.