aug 7, 1882 - A Nation of Immigrants: Restricting Immigration: Chinese Exclusion Act, Ellis Island (MIG, SOC)

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During the time of the construction of the statue of liberty, Congress passed a multiplicity of immigration restriction laws. One of the most well known restriction Acts was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed a ban on all immigrants from China. This Act was mostly invoked by complaints and hostility of the western states. Furthermore, more restrictions were placed on the people who could come into the United States. Criminals, convicts, paupers, and people who were diagnosed as mentally incompetent were all not allowed to come into the United States. Even when president Cleveland banned the literacy immigrants had to take before coming into the United States, the test was brought back in 1917. When Immigrants got past all the qualifications previously mentioned, they had to go through Ellis Island where they would go through intense medical examinations and were then asked to pay a tax to immigrate to the United States. These restrictions on immigration were supported by labor unions, nativist societies, and above all social darwinists. Unions saw immigrants threatened the job availability for whites, nativist society wanted to maintain a pure white protestant presence in America, and social darwinists saw whites as superiors to the incoming immigrants. In a great irony, immigrants saw the statue of liberty as a beacon of hope and did not let xenophobic sentiments in the United States stop them from immigrating into the United States.

The Chinese Question:The illustration shows a chinese man knealed down being protected by a women, in front of a wall of xenophobic propaganda opposing the immigration of the chinese. Some of the propoganda states messages about how the chinese are working for cheap, how they are “barbarians,” vicious, immoral, and heathenish. The chinese were being picked over white workers to work on railroads and other unskilled jobs, which created mass outrage within the white population of the west. This propaganda was meant to discourage chinese from settling into the western coast of the United States and ultimately what led to the creation of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

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