Immigration Restrictions between 1840-1990

The first immigration law in the United States was the Alien Act, which dealt with deportation and whose intent was less to deal with immigrants than to suppress the Jeffersonian opposition party. (Higham, 13-22) After Jefferson repealed the Alien and Sedition Acts, aside from the Naturalization Act that limited citizenship to “free white persons,” immigration restriction was a non-issue for 150 years. Between 1840 and 1990, the United States received approximately 60 percent of all the world's immigrants. America was growing and in need of workers. Anti-immigrant impulses in the 1840s and 1850s resided in the Know-Nothing movement and the American Party, neither of which managed to effect restriction. Immigration control was regarded as a state power, not a federal one. And most states recruited immigrants rather than restricting them.

The 1849 gold rush brought Chinese to the United States in large numbers and set in motion a pattern of immigration by Chinese that would eventually result in the passage of the first restrictionist immigration laws aimed at voluntary immigration to the United States. Most of the early Chinese immigrants consisted of merchants and skilled artisans seeking opportunity. These Chinese did not intend to stay, though many did of necessity. The intent of these immigrants can be surmised by the Chinese term for these early immigrants, gamsaanhaak, or “gold mountain guest.” This refers to the literal translation of the Chinese writing symbol for California, “Gold Mountain.” When the placer mining played out in California, many of the “gold mountain guests” returned to China, and some remained in the United States. Those that followed consisted primarily of laborers, or “coolies.”

In 1864, the Republican campaign platform also advocated encouragement of foreign immigration to facilitate the building of these railroads. That same year, an Act to Encourage Immigration, better known as the Contract Labor Act, became law. This act allowed employers to recruit immigrants for jobs in the United States. Labor organizations opposed the law, and this opposition resulted in its eventual repeal in 1868. By that year, the Republican-controlled government further facilitated the importation of Chinese labor through the Burlingame Treaty, wherein the United States agreed to reciprocal immigration rights with the government of China. Anson Burlingame was a Republican representative in Congress from Massachusetts. In 1861, he became United States minister to China, and resigned that post in 1867. Burlingame then accepted an appointment by the Chinese Emperor as Chinese minister to the United States. As the new Chinese minister, he returned to Washington in a state visit in 1868 and, using old inside political connections, negotiated the treaty that bears his name, which opened immigration with China beyond what had already existed by removing and, at least temporarily, preventing obstructions to immigrants passing from one signatory country to the other.

Time was not on the side of the Burlingame Treaty, however. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 created a surplus of laborers of both Chinese and European origin. Large numbers of unemployed workers led to labor ...