What was the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885

In the 1850s, Chinese workers migrated to the United States, first to work in the gold mines, but also to take agricultural jobs, and factory work, especially in the garment industry. Chinese immigrants were particularly instrumental in building railroads in the American west, and as Chinese laborers grew successful in the United States, a number of them became entrepreneurs in their own right. As the numbers of Chinese laborers increased, so did the strength of anti-Chinese sentiment among other workers in the American economy. This finally resulted in legislation that aimed to limit future immigration of Chinese workers to the United States, and threatened to sour diplomatic relations between the United States and China.

American objections to Chinese immigration took many forms, and generally stemmed from economic and cultural tensions, as well as ethnic discrimination. Most Chinese laborers who came to the United States did so in order to send money back to China to support their families there. At the same time, they also had to repay loans to the Chinese merchants who paid their passage to America. These financial pressures left them little choice but to work for whatever wages they could. Non-Chinese laborers often required much higher wages to support their wives and children in the United States, and also generally had a stronger political standing to bargain for higher wages. Therefore many of the non-Chinese workers in the United States came to resent the Chinese laborers, who might squeeze them out of their jobs. Furthermore, as with most immigrant communities, many Chinese settled in their own neighborhoods, and tales spread of Chinatowns as places where large numbers of Chinese men congregated to visit prostitutes, smoke opium, or gamble. Some advocates of anti-Chinese legislation therefore argued that admitting Chinese into the United States lowered the cultural and moral standards of American society. Others used a more overtly racist argument for limiting immigration from East Asia, and expressed concern about the integrity of American racial composition.

To address these rising social tensions, from the 1850s through the 1870s the California state government passed a series of measures aimed at Chinese residents, ranging from requiring special licenses for Chinese businesses or workers to preventing naturalization. Because anti-Chinese discrimination and efforts to stop Chinese immigration violated the 1868 Burlingame-Seward Treaty with China, the federal government was able to negate much of this legislation.

In 1879, advocates of immigration restriction succeeded in introducing and passing legislation in Congress to limit the number of Chinese arriving to fifteen per ship or vessel. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed the bill because it violated U.S. treaty agreements with China. Nevertheless, it was still an important victory for advocates of exclusion. Democrats, led by supporters in the West, advocated for all-out exclusion of Chinese immigrants. Although Republicans were largely sympathetic to western concerns, they were committed to a platform of free immigration. In order to placate the western states without offending China, President Hayes sought a revision of the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in which China agreed to limit immigration to the United States.

In 1880, the Hayes Administration appointed U.S. diplomat James B. Angell to negotiate a new treaty with China. The resulting Angell Treaty permitted the United States to restrict, but not completely prohibit, Chinese immigration. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which, per the terms of the Angell Treaty, suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers (skilled or unskilled) for a period of 10 years. The Act also required every Chinese person traveling in or out of the country to carry a certificate identifying his or her status as a laborer, scholar, diplomat, or merchant. The 1882 Act was the first in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration.

For American presidents and Congressmen addressing the question of Chinese exclusion, the challenge was to balance domestic attitudes and politics, which dictated an anti-Chinese policy, while maintaining good diplomatic relations with China, where exclusion would be seen as an affront and a violation of treaty promises. The domestic factors ultimately trumped international concerns. In 1888, Congress took exclusion even further and passed the Scott Act, which made reentry to the United States after a visit to China impossible, even for long-term legal residents. The Chinese Government considered this act a direct insult, but was unable to prevent its passage. In 1892, Congress voted to renew exclusion for ten years in the Geary Act, and in 1902, the prohibition was expanded to cover Hawaii and the Philippines, all over strong objections from the Chinese Government and people. Congress later extended the Exclusion Act indefinitely.

In China, merchants responded to the humiliation of the exclusion acts by organizing an anti-American boycott in 1905. Though the movement was not sanctioned by the Chinese government, it received unofficial support in the early months. President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the boycott as a direct response to unfair American treatment of Chinese immigrants, but with American prestige at stake, he called for the Chinese government to suppress it. After five difficult months, Chinese merchants lost the impetus for the movement, and the boycott ended quietly.

The Chinese Exclusion Acts were not repealed until 1943, and then only in the interests of aiding the morale of a wartime ally during World War II. With relations already complicated by the Opium Wars and the Treaties of Wangxia and Tianjian>, the increasingly harsh restrictions on Chinese immigration, combined with the rising discrimination against Chinese living in the United States in the 1870s-early 1900s, placed additional strain on the diplomatic relationship between the United States and China.

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The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is located on ancestral lands, on Treaty 1 Territory. The Red River Valley is also the birthplace of the Métis. We acknowledge the water in the Museum is sourced from Shoal Lake 40 First Nation.

Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Henry Yu

When he was a little boy growing up in Vancouver, Dr. Henry Yu didn’t understand why his grandfather frequently took him on long walks to visit Chinatown.

It was only when Dr. Yu was much older that he realized that his grandfather’s walks were connected to two discriminatory policies from Canada’s past: the Chinese head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Dr. Henry Yu.

To understand these two policies and the terrible effect they had on generations of individuals, you need to know a little about the history of Chinese immigration to Canada. In the late 1800s, there was an influx of Chinese immigration to Canada’s West. Many came to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway – the first Canadian Railway to cross the Rocky Mountains and reach the Pacific Coast – but Chinese people emigrated for many other reasons, too: working on farms, opening stores and participating in logging operations in British Columbia and elsewhere.

Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, photograph by Philip Timms, 78316.

Chinese people in Canada often worked in dangerous or low‐status jobs that others did not want.

Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, photograph by Philip Timms, 78316.

Unfortunately, many white Canadians were hostile to Chinese immigration. In 1885, immediately after construction on the Canadian Pacific Railway was complete, the federal government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which stipulated that, with almost no exceptions, every person of Chinese origin immigrating to Canada had to pay a fee of $50, called a head tax. No other group in Canadian history has ever been forced to pay a tax based solely on their country of origin. “It was an attempt to basically discriminate against the Chinese,” Dr. Yu explained. “…it was a way to alter the flow of migrants to the new Canada to be weighted towards European and in particular British migrants.”

In 1900, the head tax was raised to $100. Then, three years later, it went up to $500 per person. Between 1885 and 1923, approximately 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid the head tax, contributing millions of dollars to government coffers. One of those who paid the tax was Dr. Yu’s maternal grandfather, Yeung Sing Yew, who immigrated to Canada in 1923. Yeung was also one of the last Chinese immigrants to pay the head tax; in the same year as he arrived in the country, the Canadian government passed a new Chinese Immigration Act, which came to be known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Under the new act, Chinese immigration to Canada was completely banned. This legislation was kept in place until 1947, and its effect on Canada’s Chinese community was devastating.

Because of the costly head tax, by 1923, Canada’s Chinese communities were largely “bachelor societies,” where men outnumbered women by a ratio of almost twenty‐eight to one. Many Chinese men had come to Canada alone, hoping to save enough money to bring over their wives and families. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 destroyed those dreams. Yeung spent many years living alone in Canada.

Even after 1947, immigration to Canada was still challenging. Until Canada’s immigration system was overhauled in 1967, few Chinese were let into the country, and usually only for family reunification purposes. In fact, Yeung first met his daughter – Dr. Yu’s mother – when she immigrated to Canada in 1965. Both of Dr. Yu’s parents worked full time, so when he was young, he spent a lot of time with his grandparents –this brings us back to the long walks to Chinatown. 

It was only when Dr. Yu was older, and knew his grandfather’s whole story that he finally understood what the long walks were about: they demonstrated his grandfather’s joy at being reunited with his family. “It explains his showing me off to all those other elderly men gathered at these cafes in Chinatown,” Dr. Yu told me. He recounted how excited the old men would be, and how they would enthusiastically congratulate his grandfather: "It explains why my grandfather having me here was like an explosion of joy because the Exclusion Act basically made it impossible for many of them… to marry someone and have kids turn into grandkids. Many of them would die alone literally, growing old alone except for these other men in these cafes."

This experience helped teach Dr. Yu that the effects of racial discrimination take a psychological toll on many generations. He remembers how, until the late 1940s, the Chinese in British Columbia were not allowed to swim in pools with whites, and were segregated in movie theatres. He told me how many Chinese immigrants lived in fear of being deported because authorities would often look for reasons to remove people from the country. Dr. Yu’s grandfather used a fake identity, called a “paper name,” to get into Canada because he did not have a legal birth certificate – something that was very common at the time – and so he worried for many years about the authorities coming for him.

A page of the head tax register where “Low Jang Yit” – the “paper name” of Dr. Yu’s grandfather, was registered. His name is fifth from the bottom.

A page of the head tax register where “Low Jang Yit” – the “paper name” of Dr. Yu’s grandfather, was registered. His name is fifth from the bottom.

A page of the head tax register where “Low Jang Yit” – the “paper name” of Dr. Yu’s grandfather, was registered. His name is fifth from the bottom.

"So my grandfather, you could say he lived a life that unfortunately distorted who he could be, who he was – and by the time I knew him as an elder in the community, he wasn’t the same man he was when he was young. When I learned about things like the head tax…. It explained things about my grandfather that I already felt and knew. It’s kind of interesting that you can feel something’s wrong and not know why until later. You kind of don’t know the words, and then you finally find a name for your pain. You say "Oh now I get it. Now I understand.""

Chinese Canadians did call for acknowledgment of the human rights violations they experienced due to the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1983, Dak Leon Mark and Shack Yee requested that the Canadian government refund the $500 head tax they had each paid. In the years that followed, some 4,000 Chinese Canadians came forward seeking redress. Some Chinese Canadians also pursued justice through the court of law. Redress finally came in June 2006, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in the House of Commons. That same year, $20,000 in redress was offered by the Government of Canada to all surviving individuals who had paid the head tax. The government also allocated $24 million for a community historical recognition program and $10 million for a national historical recognition Program meant to educate Canadians on the impacts of the head tax and the racism experienced by many different groups in Canada.

Photo: The Canadian Press, photograph by Lyle Stafford.

Thomas Soon, 97 (left) and Charlie Quon, 99, holding the first head tax redress payments from the Government of Canada.

Photo: The Canadian Press, photograph by Lyle Stafford.

Dr. Henry Yu is now a professor of History at the University of British Columbia. He has played a key role in the Chinese Head Tax Digitization Project, which created a searchable database of Chinese Canadian immigrants who paid the head tax. The database allows individuals to search for family members, and it allows researchers access to important demographic information. For Dr. Yu, it also serves as a connection to his grandfather and to all those who have passed away, ensuring they and their stories are never forgotten:

"You could say that in this research, this database, I can find ways to hear from him and all those other men who are otherwise silent. And so that’s where, in a way, we were able to find a voice and let it say things that perhaps they couldn’t at the time."

The story of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act and the struggle for redress can be found in the Museum’s Canadian Journeys gallery. This blog was written in part using research conducted by Mallory Richard, who worked at the Museum as both a researcher and a project coordinator.