EP 164: The Chinese Exclusion Act

This week on Hashtag History, we will be discussing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the very first major US law restricting immigration to the United States of a specific national group. This act made it so that Chinese people could not immigrate to the United States for, initially, ten years. But then, it was renewed, made permanent, and then not officially repealed until…you ready for this? 1943. So, essentially, the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect for more than six decades! Even when the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act passed, it still only allowed 105 Chinese immigrants to come to the US each year. So even though the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, racist immigration laws were not officially dropped until the 50s and 60s.

Not only did the Act make it so that Chinese people could not immigrate to the United States—it also made it so that Chinese residents already in the United States could not become citizens. We’ll get into a specific case of this later in this episode but, even Chinese American citizens, when they traveled in and out of the country, were often denied re-entry into the country because they were told that they were not American citizens…even though they were.

And again, we’ll of course get into more detail about this in this episode, but…do you have any guesses why the US would finally, officially repeal this Act in 1943? The US was in the midst of World War II during 1943 and, well, we needed China as allies against Japan. As we were actively detaining Japanese Americans in detainment centers here on American soil, we dropped part of our racist laws against the Chinese so that we could get them on our side and help us work against our other enemies.

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