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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
cdarwin@c.im ("Chuck Darwin") wrote:
Arguably the most telling section of the White House report relates to its defense of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
The report’s authors bristle at any suggestion that this famously racist law may have been motivated by any kind of racial animus.
After all, such an acknowledgment might raise uncomfortable questions about the policies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller
—policies that are explicitly modeled on laws like this one.FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR:
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major federal law to restrict immigration based on race or nationality.It banned nearly all Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for a decade;
it also blocked Chinese immigrants who were already in the United States from ever becoming naturalized citizens.
The premise was:
If you were of Chinese descent,
you were incapable of ever becoming an American, on account of your race.The law was born of widespread
anti-Chinese sentiment.
It was passed amid a decade of growing repression and violence against Chinese immigrants in the Western United States,
which resulted in massacres s
uch as those in L.A.’s Chinatown (1871)
and at Deep Creek in Oregon (1887),
as well as many otheracts of violence in the region before and after the bill was made law.And then as now, economic precarity laid the predicate for virulent nativism.
The late nineteenth century was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval owing to industrialization, job displacement, and the country’s evolving geographic footprint
(including the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, which relied heavily on Chinese and Irish immigrant labor).
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/racist-law-from-1882-is-not-that-racist-chinese-exclusion-act-smithsonian