For the immigrants:
Harbors open their doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies billboards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived?
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river!
It was time when strangers were ( Read more... )
In my case, the vast majority was here prior to America becoming a country, with the exception of some Germans and Alsatian Franco-Germans who showed up just before the Civil War. In Susan's case, they showed up in the last couple of decades of the 1800s.
Among the ugly past parts is the Chinese Exclusion Act, which basically choked off immigration to America from China from 1880 to the time of WW2.
For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882, and prevented it from growing and assimilating into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did. However, limited immigration from China did still occur until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay served as the processing center for most of the 56,113 Chinese immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning from China; upwards of 30% more who showed up were returned to China. Furthermore, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed City Hall and the Hall of Records, many immigrants (known as "paper sons") claimed that they had familial ties to resident Chinese-American citizens. Whether these were true or not cannot be proven.
Later, the Immigration Act of 1924 would restrict immigration even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to other Asian immigrant groups. Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life apart, and to build a society in which they could survive on their own.
The Act excluded Chinese "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining" from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. The few Chinese non-laborers who wished to immigrate had to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate, which tended to be difficult to prove.
The Act also affected Chinese who were already in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and the Act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. After the Act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new home.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act, which permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens. It also allowed a national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year, although large scale Chinese immigration did not occur until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Despite the fact that the exclusion act was repealed in 1943 the law in California that Chinese-Americans were not able to marry whites wasn't repealed until 1948.
Even today, although all its constituent sections have long been repealed, Chapter 7 of Title 8 of the United States Code is headed, "Exclusion of Chinese." It is the only chapter of the 15 chapters in Title 8 (Aliens and Nationality) that is completely focused on a specific nationality or ethnic group.
Reply
Leave a comment