On May 6th, 1882, the United States Congress passed the first racially restrictive immigration bill in American history that that prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. All in all, it was an unsurprisingly development considering that anti-Chinese (and other Asian minorities) sentiment had been culminating since the flood of fortune-seeking immigrants during the 1848 California Gold Rush.
That said, white resentment of the Chinese had largely arisen from two main factors: the perceived “job-stealing” of the Chinese immigrants and their refusal to assimilate into white culture. In the years following the Gold Rush, the Chinese population within the United states shot up from seven total Chinese …show more content…
The apparent refusal of Chinese immigrants to merge and submit to the dominant white culture, when in reality white laborers would refuse to work with the immigrants, made the Chinese a target and the Chinese community often responded by forming “Chinatowns,” immigrant havens where the local would not have to fear outside harassment; however, this was a double-edged sword as Chinatowns were considered to be dangerous, dirty, and foreign, which is why non-Chinese people would avoid them.3 Ironically, the formation of these defensive communities was then regarded as further refusal to assimilate and examples of “clannishness.”4 However, yet another factor that lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act was the “other-nization” of Chinese immigrants; the Chinese where perceived as “possessing magnificent intellect” and as a hard-working people.5 These stereotypes inflated the threat of “Yellow Peril,” or the idea that the East would conquer the West, with this thought clearly reflected in California Senator George C. Perkins’ defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act where he asserts that with “two races [Chinese and Americans] so radically different… there must be assimilation or the subjection of one to the other” followed by his fear of the Chinese as such an aggressively hardy race that “to meet with the Chinese on their own ground would mean decimation [of the American people] at once.”6 Thus, the danger of an “Asian-invasion” evidently had to be mitigated by preventing any Chinese from entering the United States at