Naturalization Of Chinese Immigration

The story of Chinese immigration in the U.S. dates all the way back to the early 1840s, at which point China was being ruled by the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty, a system of absolute monarchy that essentially made life for farmers and middle class merchants miserable by imposing incredibly high taxes and limiting their basic civil rights. Subsequently, during the mid 1800s, uprisings and rebellions occurred all throughout China, ultimately resulting in the deaths of over 20 million Chinese citizens, and aside from that, the Chinese economy was suffering after the Opium wars with Britain. These circumstances eventually sparked a mass migration of Chinese men into the U.S. who were driven not only by the problems back home, but more significantly,
The primary terms of the Naturalization act were that only “free white persons” were eligible for citizenship in America, therefore excluding all Asian immigrants from this right. Most importantly however, this meant that no Chinese immigrants had the right to vote, and therefore had no voice in politics. This allowed the state governments of popular immigration locations (such as California) to essentially pass any discriminatory laws they wanted without political opposition from the huge numbers of immigrants. In such states/cities, dislike towards chinese immigration was expressed so openly that discrimination against the Chinese became an accepted part of American society. With that being said however, the state itself only had the power to torment the immigrants to a certain extent. “They couldn’t ban chinese immigrants, they could just make their lives
The Chinatowns were essentially developed to create “the illusion that Chinatown was really China.” In Chinatowns, things such as Chinese newspapers, theaters, barbershops, and herb shops were even started, and grocery stores carried all sorts of traditional Chinese foods such as bamboo shoots and roast duck. This preservation of Chinese culture only gave the state governments more reason to pass laws restricting the rights of the immigrants however. The U.S. government intended on completely politically crippling the Chinese, therefore they continued to take steps to limit them. Completely unreasonable laws continued to be passed prohibiting the use of ceremonial gongs, traditional chinese hairstyles, and laundromats being built out of wood without a license, until finally, a laundry man presumably named “Yick Wo” took a case of political discrimination to the Supreme