Chinese Exclusion refers to a body of racially discriminatory immigration policies first set up in the United States, but later imitated by Australia (White Australia policy, 1901) and Canada (1923).
The American Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration policy instituted in May 1882 designed initially to keep Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, although in practice it targeted all but a select handful of Chinese elites from coming to America. It is largely recognized as one of the major defining events of Chinese American history, and of American immigration history, as it defines the first time in American history that a racial or ethnic group was barred from coming to the US.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was itself repealed in 1943, although recent scholarship has shown that in fact Chinese Exclusion-era immigration enforcement policies and techniques for dealing with Chinese immigrants continued well after the repeal.
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Famous quotes containing the word exclusion:
“All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)