The Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China established formal friendly relations between the two countries. With the United States granting China most favored nation status, it was ratified in 1868. The treaty recognized China's right of eminent domain over all of its territory. It gave China the right to appoint consuls at ports in the United States, provided that citizens of the United States and China have...
every religious persuasion and Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country. And it granted certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, but the privilege of naturalization. of citizenship was specifically withheld. Now importantly, Chinese immigration to the United States was encouraged.
Opposition in Congress to Chinese immigration led President Rutherford B. Hayes to authorize James Burrell Angel to renegotiate the treaty in 1880. The treaty was amended to suspend, but not prohibit, Chinese immigration. while confirming the obligation of the United States to protect the rights of those immigrants already arrived. The treaty was reversed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The treaty allowed railroad corporations and the mining industry to recruit heavily and benefit from the use of Asian labor forces. So how did the hatred towards Asians begin? And this is where we get to Dennis Kearney.
and the Working Men's Party. Dennis Kearney was a California populist political leader in the late 19th century. He was known for his nativist and racist views towards Chinese immigrants. By August 1877, Kearney was elected Secretary of the newly formed Working Men's Party of California. He often led violent attacks on Chinese, including denunciations of the powerful Central Pacific Railroad, which had employed them in large numbers.
Kearney's Irish immigrant background made him subject to frequent accusations that he was a foreign agitator. Yet his populist rhetoric and his nativist baiting, similar to the tactics used by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, Others gained him a considerable following. In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, requiring U.S. officials to make sure that nobody coming to the United States does so for contract labor or prostitution. It required that any person immigrating from China, Japan, or other Asian countries should do so out of their free will. U.S. officials were to ensure that women brought to the United States to work as prostitutes did not enter the country.
It became a felony to bring or keep an immigrant woman in the United States for prostitution. This crime could incur up to five years of prison and a fine of up to $5,000. Likewise, it became a felony to bring or try to bring an immigrant to the United States under contract labor, which became punishable by up to one year of prison and a fine of up to 500. As interpreted by educators, this law prohibited the importation of unfree laborers and women brought for immoral purposes, but it was enforced primarily against the Chinese.
It was legislated amidst the nativist spread of anti-Chinese sentiment along the West Coast, and it spread eastward to the rest of the United States. This law was the first national effort to restrict Asian immigration without reference to race, but it based on the select categories of persons whose labor was perceived as immoral or coerced. It was the first restricted...
federal immigration law in the United States, which effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women. It was the first national immigration law that marked the end of open borders. The law was named after its sponsor, Representative Horace F. Page.
He was a Republican representing California, who introduced it to, in his words, in the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women. So after the 1880s, Chinese arrived in increasing numbers in the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles. And in the 1880s, Kearney claimed credit for making the Chinese question a national issue and affecting the legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. In California at first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well-tolerated and well-received. But as gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity towards the Chinese and other foreigners increased.
So after being forcibly driven from the mines, most Chinese settled in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and they took up low-end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. With the post-Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingmen's Party, as well as by the California governor John Bigler. Both of them blamed Chinese coolies for depressed wage levels.
Another significant anti-Chinese group organized in California during the same era was the Supreme Order of Caucasians with some 64 chapters. Newspapers around the country, and especially in California, started to discredit and blame the Chinese for most things. Most importantly, white unemployment. The police also discriminated against the Chinese by using the slightest opportunity to arrest them.
So the Chinese Exclusion Act was a significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history. The act also excluded Chinese unskilled and skilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining. They excluded them from entering the country for 10 years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation.
The act also affected Asians who had already settled in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for re-entry, and the act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. After the act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives or of starting families in their new home. So for all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882 and prevented it from growing and assimilating into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did.