Constructing American Alienage

Abstract

The Chinese Must Go is a fascinating story of anti-Chinese violence in the United States West. It begins in the 1850s when there was no national gatekeeping and no separation between citizens and aliens. Gradually Chinese laborers experienced escalating racial violence, because the Chinese, according to American vigilantes, were incapable of assimilation. Both the American public and politicians feared the destructive power of social and cultural diversity, especially the threat of despotism, on American society and their republican enterprise. Congress therefore passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to restrict Chinese immigration. This first federal endeavor to curb immigration based on race, however, failed to brake Chinese entry into the United States. Anti-Chinese vigilantes, unsatisfied, took matters into their own hands, and from 1885 on violence became the main stream of the movement against the Chinese. In order to restrict the spread of violence and disorder, Congress strengthened its attempts to claim “sole authority to close American gates, regardless of treaty obligations” (171). With time, Chinese exclusion policy turned into a model for further exclusion targeting Japanese, Korean, Southern Asian, and Filipino immigrants in the early twentieth century. It is true that racial violence successfully made Chinese exclusion into a political necessity, but it does not follow that Chinese immigration ended completely. The significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history, however, was the development of modern American alienage.