How the Legacy of 19th & 20th Century Chinese Exclusion Continues to Permeate Immigration Rhetoric and Policy

Chinatown, San Francisco, 1896. Photo by Arnold Genthe via Loc’s Public Domain Archive.

Undocumented immigration has become a highly politicized issue in the United States, gaining particular salience during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, with or without documentation, was highly racialized and engaged in fear-mongering. As Trump announced his presidential bid in 2015, he commented: “When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. [...] They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.” Furthermore, Trump’s administration manufactured a migrant “caravan” crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, painting a relatively minor, predominantly family-based  influx in migration, to be an ominous, impending threat to U.S. national security.

Recent discussions covering undocumented immigration function under the assumption that most, if not all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. hail from Latin America. This assumption leads to a gross over-generalization suggesting undocumented immigration is an issue specific to those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border today. However, America has a rich, often-forgotten history of federally excluding immigrants of color. It is pertinent to assess the deep, historical roots of American policy and attitudes toward immigration in order to better contextualize recent patterns of racially-charged immigration rhetoric. In particular, the federal exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries and the modern legacy of falsified documents, or “paper names,” which Chinese immigrants utilized in response to the barring of their entry, are key to analyzing rhetoric and policy responses surrounding undocumented immigration from Latin America to the U.S. today. 

The incentive to immigrate to the U.S. has been largely defined by the promise of economic prosperity for both groups over the course of U.S. history. This promise is strongly bolstered by American exceptionalism and free market capitalism, painting a hopeful opportunity for immigrants to build lives without a persistent threat of federal persecution and economic instability. However, both Chinese immigrants in the 19th and 20th century and those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border today have been met with violent xenophobia and cultural dissonance which exists across a spectrum of American communities, and is perpetuated by the U.S. government, whose policies often enforce racism.

Following the first influx of Chinese immigration to the U.S., beginning during the late-1840s’ California Gold Rush, anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast became widespread among politicians and residents alike. Chinese immigrants, predominantly Cantonese-speaking laborers, were perceived as both an economic threat to the volume of labor opportunities for whites, and a racial threat to a white America. The Page Act of 1875 was the first restrictive federal immigration law in U.S. history. The policy was presented as a way to curb human trafficking, particularly of Chinese immigrant women who would be contracted as sex workers in the U.S. upon their arrival. However, the act was an effective mechanism to hyper-sexualize Chinese women and enforce stereotypes, subjecting them to invasive and humiliating interrogations by U.S. immigration officials under the prevalent assumption that most Chinese women were sex workers. The Page Act was not a stand-alone piece of policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers, and was extended in 1892 for an additional ten years by the Geary Act. The act was made permanent in 1902, but in 1943, partially due to U.S.-China allyship during World War II, the policy was rescinded. The Chinese Exclusion Act required non-laborers seeking entry to the U.S. to secure certification from the Chinese government stating they were qualified to immigrate. The policy also placed new restrictions on Chinese people who had already entered the country - if they left the U.S. at any point, they needed to obtain certifications to re-enter. Congress denied state and federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese American non-citizens.  

In the wake of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, many birth records and other public records were destroyed. This opened a key opportunity for Chinese people, who would not be able to legally immigrate to Northern California under the active Chinese Exclusion Act, to falsely claim American citizenship and their subsequent right to repatriate family to the United States. Many young people, coined as “paper sons,” were brought to the U.S. from China with purchased false documents that designated them as blood relatives of established Chinese American U.S. citizens. This practice required “paper sons” to adopt the surname of their sponsor families - a “paper name.” In many cases, these “paper names” have been transferred to the most current generation of offspring today.

Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns mirrored the efforts of the government during the period of the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts. A modern example of federally supported restrictions on the immigration of specific ethnic groups, Trump promised a slew of policy plans that would curb immigration from the southern border, a flow of immigration he painted as a direct threat to the stability of the American economy and social fabric. Prior to 2013, almost all migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border were Mexican citizens. However, Central Americans represent 81 percent of incoming immigrants as recently as 2019.  An increasing number of Haitian immigrants also comprise the population crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. About 28,000 Haitians were intercepted by the Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2021 fiscal year, which ended on September 30. Trump promised policies included an expansion of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, claiming the expansion would effectively stop drugs and gangs from entering the U.S. from Latin America. President Trump did not secure funding from Congress, in a pivotal moment that led to a federal government shutdown in 2019 and presidential declaration of a national emergency, which allowed him to divert funds to the construction of the wall. The Trump administration also implemented a zero-tolerance policy, allowing authorities to arrest and prosecute anyone caught crossing the southern border without authorization. 

Despite a temporal difference, both of these specific federal restrictions on immigration rely heavily on racial, national, and ethnic stereotypes. Acts restricting Chinese immigration, in conjunction with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, subsequently led to major growth of the Chinese American population, who held mostly false documentation. U.S.-Mexico border immigration restrictions were partly created in response to existing undocumented immigration, comparatively indicating that the governmental and national attitudes toward stigmatized immigrants are not dissimilar. A sentiment that the corresponding immigrant groups pose a threat and burden to the fabric of American society remains alive among Americans of each time period - however, this trend is optimistically turning around among younger generations of Americans, regardless of partisan background. 

The Chinese Confession Program (1956-1965), formulated and conducted by the Immigration Bureau and FBI, served as a mechanism to identify and regularize the status of many Chinese Americans who entered the U.S. using some form of immigration fraud under the discriminatory Chinese exclusion laws. Although seemingly conscious of the overt racism of previous policies, the program required participants to “confess” their status and identify family members and others involved in unauthorized immigration, making those implicated vulnerable to loss of their previously claimed legal immigrant status. While some were granted legal citizenship through the program, many were also deported as a result. The United States’ complicated historical relationship to racially discriminatory immigration policy sparks the question: will the U.S. government ever admit to its racially charged policy decisions regarding migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, like they half-heartedly did through the Chinese Confession Program—and what form would that take?

Emily Debs (BC ’24) is a staff writer at CPR majoring in Political Science, and minoring in Economics and Race & Ethnicity Studies. A multiracial Californian, she is particularly interested in examining the intersectional nature of U.S. policymaking and racial dynamics over the course of American history.