Film explores Chinese Exclusion Act as U.S. immigration ‘DNA’
Politicians seizing on immigrants as an election issue. Newspaper headlines calling for action. Talk of legislation to institute a ban.
If viewers of “The Chinese Exclusion Act” documentary end up with a sense of deja vu between the film’s subject, a law from 1882 that barred Chinese people from coming to the United States, and current events, that’s pretty much the point, according to its filmmakers.
“The ‘A-Ha!’ for anybody coming to it ... is oh, there’s a history to how we have decided who can come and when they can come, who’s a citizen and who’s not a citizen,” said documentarian Ric Burns, who made the film with Li-Shin Yu.
It airs on the PBS television series “American Experience” on Tuesday.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was America’s first and only immigration act that barred people from a specific country from coming to the United States. After its initial enactment for a 10-year period in 1882, it was regularly renewed and then made permanent in 1904. It was finally repealed in 1943.
Making the documentary was an eye-opening experience for Burns and Yu, who had never heard of the law and believe most of the American public isn’t aware of it either, but should be.
“This is the DNA of American immigration policy,” Burns said. “It is not A story about immigration, it is THE story about immigration and you’re not going to understand any of the other aspects of it without understanding this thing: In 1848, you got off the boat and disappeared, in 1882 suddenly there was a racially invidious distinction being made.”
The documentary, which Burns and Yu initially started several years ago, starts several decades before the law’s enactment on May 6, 1882. The Chinese had started coming to the West Coast, primarily California, in the middle part of the 19th Century, drawn by the possibilities of the California Gold Rush and looking to escape the unrest in China in the wake of the Opium Wars over the West forcing China to open to trade.
They became targets of prejudice by white miners and other Californians as gold became more difficult to come by, as well as politicians appealing to nativist sentiments and those concerned immigrants were depressing wages. But they were also vital labour in the building of the Western half of the transcontinental railroad, forced to work for lower pay and in worse conditions that white workers.
The documentary shows how, even though estimates put the Chinese population at about 100,000 or so when the overall country’s population was about 50 million, there was a rising sentiment that the Chinese were a problem.