RACISM WATCH : Shameful Act

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the repeal of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. This despicably racist law had no purpose other than to preserve white “racial purity” in the United States. Passed initially in 1882 and later extended, the law made Chinese immigration illegal. Besides permanently barring new immigration, the law denied citizenship to those Chinese who had already immigrated; sadly, support for it was highest in California, where so many of the Chinese immigrants had made their homes.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is significant in the history of U.S. race relations for reasons that transcend its target. It was the first law to restrict immigration to the United States at all, and it did so on a racial basis, laying an intellectual groundwork for a racially defined national identity and, in particular, for the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which established immigration quotas favoring Northern over Southern and Eastern Europe.

It was not because of any new, more tolerant and inclusionist American identity that the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. All of that would come only later.

In 1943 China was an American ally against imperial Japan. It was mainly military expediency that dictated the repeal.

That said, the repeal has stood, and Chinese immigration, which had been cut to zero for six decades, has gradually risen again, to the immense enrichment of the United States. If the exclusion act itself can be remembered only with shame, its repeal should be commemorated with applause.