Long before anxiety about Muslims, Americans feared the 'yellow peril' of Chinese immigration.
msn.com
Donald Trump’s proposal to ban an entire class of people from entering the United States is not without precedent.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned all Chinese from coming to America, with a handful of exceptions: merchants, teachers, students, travelers and diplomats.
“This is the first time in US history,” says Professor Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, “that we single out a group for exclusion based on their race, and also based on class. But it would not be the last.”
Later, the ban was extended to cover all ethnic Chinese, wherever they hailed from. Then later still, pretty much all Asians were banned.
“It may be hard for people to understand, or even believe,” says Lee, “because today, Chinese Americans, and Asian Americans in general, have a stereotype of being the model minority in the United States. But a century ago, Chinese and other Asian immigrants were seen as the opposite of what America wanted. In fact, so dangerous to American society, the American economy, that the United States really needed to ban all of them from coming into the country.”
The Exclusion Act of 1882 was very popular. Pressure came from workers’ groups who were afraid that Chinese laborers were undercutting wages. More pressure came from racial theorists who feared that America would be literally overrun with Chinese. There was a bipartisan effort in Congress to over-turn a veto from President Chester A. Arthur. The atmosphere became toxic for Chinese Americans.
