This Day in Immigration History (Chinese Exclusion Upheld by Supreme Court)

May 15, 1893—In Fong Yue Ting v. United States, one of its worst rulings ever, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld by a 5-3 majority the constitutionality of the Geary Exclusion Act, which banned emigrants from China and persons of Chinese descent from moving to America.

Thomas Geary, a Democratic Congressman from California, had proposed the legislation the year before as a 10-year extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. (The measure also denied bail to Chinese in habeas corpus cases.) At a stroke, roughly four-fifths of Chinese population in the United States were now at risk of deportation.

Then as now, economic distress fed resentments that immigrants were taking jobs from native-born Americans. Imported into the U.S. as cheap labor for railroad construction in the West, the Chinese soon ran afoul of labor unionists’ beliefs that they would be used as scabs.

Passage of the measure, however, provoked opposition at home and abroad. In the U.S., in one of the first acts of massive civil disobedience, thousands heeded the urging of the Chinese Six Companies to refuse to carry photo ID cards. In China, feelings against the act ran even higher, probably doubly so because the U.S. had insisted that its own citizens be allowed admittance into the country. Protestant missionaries, who had made numerous converts to Christianity while stationed in the country, feared for their safety in the tense atmosphere.

The first man forced out by the Geary Exclusion Act was Ming Lee Twe, who was deported on the steamship Rio de Janeiro three months after the Supreme Court ruling, with his fare paid by a $35 U.S. government voucher.

The legislation worked all too well. The Chinese population in California, which stood at 72,000 in 1890, dropped by more than half at the turn of the century. The demographic decline continued because Chinese women had also been banned.

The anti-Asian feeling did not abate at all as the twentieth century opened. The Exclusion Act was renewed in 1902, with Chinese immigration now being ruled illegal. Five years later, fearing retaliation against American citizens and needing a counterweight to Russian expansion in the Far East, President Theodore Roosevelt concluded a “gentleman’s agreement” with the Japanese government that excluded immigrants from that country. In return, at Roosevelt’s behest, the San Francisco board of education reversed its decision to place Japanese children in segregated schools

It took another President Roosevelt—Franklin—to allow Chinese to enter America again. In 1943, to keep China among the Allies in World War II, FDR finally reversed America’s 40-year exclusion of Chinese immigrants.