“The Chinese Must Go!” was the rallying cry of White American laborers in the 1800s who blamed Chinese immigrants for job scarcity and low wages. Growing anti-Asian sentiment culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first federal law to explicitly suspend immigration based on nationality.
For more than sixty years, Chinese workers were prohibited from coming to America and those already in the country could not become U.S. citizens. Merchants, diplomats, teachers, students, and clergy were exempt but subjected to grueling interrogations, medical inspections, and long periods of detention.
Mounted watchmen of the U.S. Immigration Service, operating out of El Paso, patrolled the border to restrict Chinese immigrants from entering the country. Inspectors rode on horseback to pursue and arrest those who slipped past the guards.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 finally reversed decades of exclusionary policies. However, echoes of earlier discrimination reverberate today, with Stop AAPI Hate reporting nearly 11,500 anti-Asian American & Pacific Islander hate incidents between March 2020 and 2022.
(“AAPI Moments” was produced in partnership with KERA)
