Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
Congress barred Chinese laborers from coming in, a decision about wages as much as about race.
A poor Chinese worker already here faced a law built to stop his family and his countrymen from joining him.
A white working household in the West was told the ban would protect their wage, which is how the campaign was sold.
Railroad and mine owners who had recruited Chinese labor lost a source of workers they had used to build and to break strikes.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and barred them from citizenship.
It was the first federal law to shut out a named national group.
Later acts renewed and tightened the ban, which stayed in force until 1943.
Chinese Exclusion Act, 22 Stat. 58 (1882); Erika Lee, At America's Gates (2003)