Page Act of 1875 - Factors That Influenced The Creation of The Page Act

Factors That Influenced The Creation of The Page Act

The first Chinese immigrants to the United States were overwhelmingly males, the majority of whom began arriving in 1848 as a part of the California Gold Rush. They intended to make money in the United States and then return to their country, so even though more than half had wives and families, they stayed in China. However, anti-Chinese sentiment could already be found in discriminatory laws in 1852 that limited Chinese possibilities. The California State Legislature assumed that Chinese men were forced to work under long-term service contracts, when in reality immigrants to America were not coolies, but borrowed money from brokers for their trip and paid the money back plus interest through work at their first job. Without enough money to send for their wives, a prostitution industry developed in the male Chinese immigrant community and became a serious issue to white Americans living in San Francisco. Laws specifically directed at Chinese women immigrants were created even though prostitution was fairly common in the American West among many nationalities. Many of those in favor of Chinese exclusion were not worried about the experiences and needs of poor Chinese girls that were being sold or tricked into prostitution, but about “the fate of white men, white families, and a nation constructed as white”. Chinese men hurt white men’s ability to earn money, “while Chinese women caused disease and immorality among white men”. Both Chinese male “coolies” and Chinese female prostitutes were linked to slavery, which added to the American animosity toward them since slavery and involuntary servitude was abolished in 1865. Male-laborers were central to the anti-Chinese movement, so one might expect lawmakers to focus on excluding men from immigration, but instead they concentrated on women in order to protect the American system of monogamous marriages. Therefore, the number of immigrants (majority male) entering the U.S. from China during the Page Act’s enforcement “exceeded the total for any other seven year period, before passage of the Exclusion Act in 1882, by at least thirteen thousand,” but the female population dropped from 6.4 percent in 1870 to 4.6 percent in 1880.

Furthermore, the American Medical Association believed that Chinese immigrants “carried distinct germs to which they were immune, but from which whites would die if exposed”. This fear became concentrated on Chinese women, because some white Americans believed that germs and disease could most easily be transmitted to white men through sexual labor of Chinese prostitutes. Additionally, during difficult times in China, women and girls were sold into “domestic service, concubinage, or prostitution”. Some Chinese men had a wife as well as a concubine, usually a lower class woman obtained through purchase and recognized as a legal member of the family. A woman’s status depended on her sexual relationship with Chinese men; “first wives enjoyed the highest status, followed by second wives and concubines, followed in turn by several classes of prostitutes”. An additional concern was that the children of Chinese couples would become U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment and their cultural practices would become a part of American democracy. As a result, the Page Law responded to “what were believed to be serious threats to white values, lives, and futures". California state laws could not exclude women for being Chinese, so they were crafted as regulations of public morals, yet the laws were still struck down as “impermissible encroachment on federal immigration power". However, the Page Law sailed through Congress without any expressed concerns of having a federal law that racially restricted immigration or violated the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 (which allowed free migration and emigration of Chinese) because Americans were focused on protecting the social ideals of marriage and morality.