The Effects Of The Chinese Exclusion Act

Register to read the introduction… Specifically, the newly industrialized Japanese jumped at the chance. So instead of Chinese workers taking the jobs of iterant Californians, the Japanese were doing it instead. They came in such great numbers that the California legislature could not create an act quickly enough.[5] Because of this, quiet bitterness began to form in the place of public racism. While the Japanese and other eastern Asians were barred from entering the country in 1924, forty-two years of intense, bitter dislike for the Japanese did nothing but fan the flames of American Nativist policies. Denis Kearney stated that the Japanese and other East Asians, “Must Go.” [6] While the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first act of its kind in American legislature, it was not the last. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed the “National Origins, or Asian Exclusion Act” in response to increased Japanese immigrant and the desire to curb persecuted Jews from emigrating from America’s ‘current’ ally, Russia. At this time, however, Congressional opposition to the act was quite minimal. Popular opinion was strongly behind the act as well. [7] This time, however, the affected groups did not have to fully relinquish their traditions and culture. In five years, immigration from East Asia ceased almost entirely. With general anti-Japanese sentiments stemming from the Japanese defeat of the Russians in Russo-Japanese War, and anti-Japanese sentiments in America, the Japanese were treated almost exclusively as “aliens, unfit to live anywhere but the island from where they spawned.” [8] With the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, however, sentiments were simply cemented. In retaliation for Japanese atrocities, the American people fought hard for economic attacks on Japan. By the later stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War, American popular opinion was almost unanimously anti-Japanese, and after Pearl Harbor, President …show more content…
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