Chinese Exclusion refers to a body of racially discriminatory immigration policies first set up in the United States, but later imitated by Australia (White Australia policy, 1901) and Canada (1923).
The American Chinese Exclusion Act was an immigration policy instituted in May 1882 designed initially to keep Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, although in practice it targeted all but a select handful of Chinese elites from coming to America. It is largely recognized as one of the major defining events of Chinese American history, and of American immigration history, as it defines the first time in American history that a racial or ethnic group was barred from coming to the US.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was itself repealed in 1943, although recent scholarship has shown that in fact Chinese Exclusion-era immigration enforcement policies and techniques for dealing with Chinese immigrants continued well after the repeal.
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Famous quotes containing the word exclusion:
“We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)