A Texas Historical Marker with a subject that might come as a surprise:
Chinese Texans and Civil Rights
Chinese immigrants arrived in Texas in the 1870s and 1880s, primarily to build railroads and work as laborers. These early immigrants faced harsh working conditions and racism from those fearing they would take away jobs. Chinese Texans were also met with violence, punctuated by Judge Roy Bean’s reported 1884 ruling that it was not illegal to kill a Chinese. With anti-Chinese sentiment spreading through the western and southern states, Congress restricted immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the only U.S. law to exclude a specific race from immigrating; it also denied citizenship to Chinese Americans.
As was true throughout Texas, discrimination against Chinese Texans was common in Houston. However, the Houston Chinese Community, which numbered only 50 in 1930, began to grow as immigrants came here from other southern states. In Houston, Chinese students could attend public schools with whites, and soon, Chinese Texans began attending state universities.
Through the efforts of American-born Chinese, economic and social injustices began to be righted. 1937 testimony by Edward K.T. Chen (name in hanzi characters) and Rose Don Wu (name in hanzi characters) helped defeat a proposed Texas law that would have prevented Chinese from owning urban property. In 1943, the Magnuson Act repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese American Citizens Alliance, including its Houston branch, under the direction of Albert C.B. Gee (name in hanzi characters), helped pass the Immigration Act of 1965, paving the way for large-scale Chinese immigration. Today, Chinese Texans continue to make a vital impact on politics and culture in Texas, standing as a tribute to the immigrants who withstood discrimination and thrived. (2009)
Marker is Property of the State of Texas
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
OurDocuments.Gov - U.S. National Archives & Records Administration.
In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. For the first time, Federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.
The Chinese Exclusion Act required the few nonlaborers who sought entry to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to immigrate. But this group found it increasingly difficult to prove that they were not laborers because the 1882 act defined excludables as “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining.” Thus very few Chinese could enter the country under the 1882 law.
The 1882 exclusion act also placed new requirements on Chinese who had already entered the country. If they left the United States, they had to obtain certifications to re-enter. Congress, moreover, refused State and Federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them.
When the exclusion act expired in 1892, Congress extended it for 10 years in the form of the Geary Act. This extension, made permanent in 1902, added restrictions by requiring each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, she or he faced deportation.
The Geary Act regulated Chinese immigration until the 1920s. With increased postwar immigration, Congress adopted new means for regulation: quotas and requirements pertaining to national origin. By this time, anti-Chinese agitation had quieted. In 1943 Congress repealed all the exclusion acts, leaving a yearly limit of 105 Chinese and gave foreign-born Chinese the right to seek naturalization. The so-called national origin system, with various modifications, lasted until Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1965. Effective July 1, 1968, a limit of 170,000 immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere could enter the United States, with a maximum of 20,000 from any one country. Skill and the need for political asylum determined admission. The Immigration Act of 1990 provided the most comprehensive change in legal immigration since 1965. The act established a “flexible” worldwide cap on family-based, employment-based, and diversity immigrant visas. The act further provides that visas for any single foreign state in these categories may not exceed 7 percent of the total available.
For more information on Chinese Immigration and the Chinese in the United States, visit the National Archives web site.
(Information excerpted from Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources From the National Archives. [Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1989.] pp. 82-85.)
Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965
History.com
By the early 1960s, calls to reform U.S. immigration policy had mounted, thanks in no small part to the growing strength of the civil rights movement. At the time, immigration was based on the national-origins quota system in place since the 1920s, under which each nationality was assigned a quota based on its representation in past U.S. census figures. The civil rights movement’s focus on equal treatment regardless of race or nationality led many to view the quota system as backward and discriminatory. In particular, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians–of whom increasing numbers were seeking to enter the U.S.–claimed that the quota system discriminated against them in favor of Northern Europeans. President John F. Kennedy even took up the immigration reform cause, giving a speech in June 1963 calling the quota system “intolerable.”
After Kennedy’s assassination that November, Congress began debating and would eventually pass the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, co-sponsored by Representative Emanuel Celler of New York and Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and heavily supported by the late president’s brother, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. During Congressional debates, a number of experts testified that little would effectively change under the reformed legislation, and it was seen more as a matter of principle to have a more open policy. Indeed, on signing the act into law in October 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson stated that the act “is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions….It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”
Immediate Impact
In reality (and with the benefit of hindsight), the bill signed in 1965 marked a dramatic break with past immigration policy, and would have an immediate and lasting impact. In place of the national-origins quota system, the act provided for preferences to be made according to categories, such as relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents, those with skills deemed useful to the United States or refugees of violence or unrest. Though it abolished quotas per se, the system did place caps on per-country and total immigration, as well as caps on each category. As in the past, family reunification was a major goal, and the new immigration policy would increasingly allow entire families to uproot themselves from other countries and reestablish their lives in the U.S.
In the first five years after the bill’s passage, immigration to the U.S. from Asian countries–especially those fleeing war-torn Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia)–would more than quadruple. (Under past immigration policies, Asian immigrants had been effectively barred from entry.) Other Cold War-era conflicts during the 1960s and 1970s saw millions of people fleeing poverty or the hardships of communist regimes in Cuba, Eastern Europe and elsewhere to seek their fortune on American shores. All told, in the three decades following passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, more than 18 million legal immigrants entered the United States, more than three times the number admitted over the preceding 30 years.
By the end of the 20th century, the policies put into effect by the Immigration Act of 1965 had greatly changed the face of the American population. Whereas in the 1950s, more than half of all immigrants were Europeans and just 6 percent were Asians, by the 1990s only 16 percent were Europeans and 31 percent were of Asian descent, while the percentages of Latino and African immigrants had also jumped significantly. Between 1965 and 2000, the highest number of immigrants (4.3 million) to the U.S. came from Mexico, in addition to some 1.4 million from the Philippines. Korea, the Dominican Republic, India, Cuba and Vietnam were also leading sources of immigrants, each sending between 700,000 and 800,000 over this period.
Citation Information
Article Title:
U.S. Immigration Since 1965
Author: History.com Editors
Website Name: HISTORY
URL
Access Date: February 26, 2019
Publisher: A&E Television Networks
Last Updated: February 7, 2019
Original Published Date: March 5, 2010