Chinese Immigration During The Exclusion Era Analysis

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Pages: 3

In Erika Lee’s America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, she analyzes the complexity of the Chinese Exclusion Act and it’s power to restrict Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. As the country became a gatekeeping nation in 1882, Lee emphasizes the abundance of federal control over laborers and immigrants in which these standards were based on race, class, and gender (Lee 2003, 6). Through a variety of sources, she was able to depict the hardships they had to go through as a community during the country’s most diversified eras. In addition to this, she further expands on the different measures these immigrants took to challenge the immigration laws forced against them.
Around 1854, these immigrants were
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During this time, immigration officials argued that only certain classes of Chinese people­ merchants, teachers, student travelers and diplomats were entitled to enter (Lee 2003, 51). Lee develops her argument about the Chinese Exclusion Law being put into place to refrain from the possible threatening danger these immigrants could impose on American workers and society as a whole (Lee 2003, 29). According to chapter three, Lee provides more insight of how far these officials were willing to go as they searched for common parasitic diseases of Chinese people as a way to unfairly exclude them. (Lee 2003, 82). Despite these diseases not being seen as a serious health threat to Americans, those with symptoms of them were still detained to divide citizens and noncitizens even more. This widely displayed how this law introduced “another chapter of consolidation of white supremacy” and their goal for Chinese immigration to severely decrease. (Lee 2003, 44). Nonetheless, their favorable outcome did not last long as the Chinese soon started finding loopholes. It was through bribery and deception of officials that they challenged these laws to improve their social and economic standing. (Lee 2003,