Page Act of 1875

The Page Act of 1875 (Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 3 March 1875) was the first restrictive federal immigration law and prohibited the entry of immigrants considered "undesirable." The law classified as "undesirable" any individual from Asia who was coming to America to be a forced laborer, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country.

The law was named after its sponsor, Representative Horace F. Page, a Republican who introduced it to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women". The Page Act was supposed to strengthen the ban against “coolie” laborers, by imposing a fine of up to $2,000 and maximum jail sentence of one year upon anyone who tried to bring a person from China, Japan, or any Asian country to the United States “without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service”. However, these provisions, as well as those regarding convicts “had little effect at the time”. On the other hand, the ban on female Asian immigrants was heavily enforced and proved to be a barrier for all Asian women trying to immigrate, especially Chinese.

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.

...
Wikipedia