Page Act of 1875 - Effects On Chinese Families and Future Immigrants To The U.S.

Effects On Chinese Families and Future Immigrants To The U.S.

Most Chinese women that immigrated to the U.S. in the 1860s and the 1870s were "second wives, concubines in polygamous marriages, or prostitutes," but Americans were wrong to believe that all Chinese women worked as prostitutes. Enforcement of the Page Act resulted not only in the reduction of prostitutes but also the “virtually complete exclusion of Chinese women from the United States”. In 1882 alone, during the few months before the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the beginning of its enforcement, 39,579 Chinese entered the U.S., and only 136 of them were women. Therefore, Chinese were unable to create families within the U.S. The Page Act was so successful in preventing Chinese women from immigration and consequently keeping the ratio of females to males low that the law "paradoxically encouraged the very vice it purported to be fighting: prostitution." Not until after World War II was an appropriate gender balance established, because between 1946 and 1952 almost 90 percent of all Chinese immigrants were women.

The sojourner mentality of the Chinese limited the number of wives that chose to immigrate as well as the financial cost of the trip; however, documents relating to the enforcement of the Page Act suggest that some women were able to overcome the barriers and join their husbands, but without this law the numbers might have been much higher. According to historian George Peffer, “all the evidence suggests that the women who survived this ordeal were most likely the wives of Chinese laborers” because they would have possessed the determination needed to endure the questioning, while importers of prostitutes “might have been reluctant to risk prosecution”. Yet, this fact is difficult to conclusively prove especially since Peffer himself noted that the cost of immigration as well as possible bribes paid to American consuls would have created a greater hardship for the “wives of immigrants who possessed limited resources, than for the wealthy tongs” who sent prostitutes to the U.S. Therefore, although the Chinese Exclusion Act was extremely important in transforming Chinese into a “declining immigrant group, it was the Page Law that exacerbated the problem of life without families in America’s Chinatowns”. Moreover, the Page Act created the policing of immigrants around sexuality which “gradually became extended to every immigrant who sought to enter America,” and today remains a central feature of immigration restriction.