The Page Act of 1875 (Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 1873-March 1875) was the first federal immigration law and prohibited the entry of immigrants considered “undesirable.”[1] The law classified as “undesirable” any individual from Asia who was coming to America to be a contract laborer, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country.
The law was named after its sponsor, Representative Horace F. Page, a Republican who introduced to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women”.[2] The Page Act was supposed to strengthen the ban against “coolie” laborers, by imposing a fine of up to $2,000 and maximum jail sentence of one year upon anyone who tried to bring a person from China, Japan, or any oriental country to the United States “without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service”.[3] However, these provisions, as well as those regarding convicts “had little effect at the time”.[4] On the other hand, the bar on female Asian immigrants was heavily enforced and proved to be a barrier for all Asian women trying to immigrate, especially Chinese.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by Chester A. Arthur on May 8, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treatyof 1868. Those revisions allowed the U.S. to suspend immigration, and Congress subsequently acted quickly to implement the suspension of Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years. This law was repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943.
The Geary Act was a United States law passed in 1892 written by California Congressman Thomas J. Geary. It extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by adding onerous new requirements.
The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year of hard labor. In addition, Chinese were not allowed to bear witness in court, and could not receive bail in habeas corpus proceedings.
The Cable Act of 1922 (ch. 411, 42 Stat. 1021, “Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act”) is a United States federal law that reversed former immigration laws regarding marriage, also known as the Married Women’s Citizenship Act or the Women’s Citizenship Act. Previously, a woman lost her U.S citizenship if she married a foreign man, since she assumed the citizenship of her husband—a law that did not apply to men who married foreign women. The law is named for Ohio representative John L. Cable, who proposed the legislation. Former immigration laws prior to 1922 did not make reference to the alien husband’s race.[1] However, The Cable Act of 1922 guaranteed independent female citizenship only to women who were married to “alien[s] eligible to naturalization”.[2] At the time of the law’s passage, Asian aliens were not considered to be racially eligible for U.S. citizenship.[3][4] As such, the Cable Act only partially reversed previous policies, granting independent female citizenship only to women who married non-Asians. The Cable Act effectively revoked the U.S. citizenship of any woman who married an Asian alien. The Emergency Quota Act, also known as the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, the Per Centum Law, and the Johnson Quota Act (ch. 8, 42 Stat. 5 of May 19, 1921) restricted immigration into the United States. Although intended as temporary legislation, the Act “proved in the long run the most important turning-point in American immigration policy”[1] because it added 2 new features to American immigration law: numerical limits on immigration from Europe and the use of a quota system for establishing those limits. The Act restricted the number of immigrants admitted from any country annually to 3% of the number of residents from that same country living in the United States as of the U.S. Census of 1910.[2]Based on that formula, the number of new immigrants admitted fell from 805,228 in 1920 to 309,556 in 1921-22.[3]
