Page Act of 1875

United States law banning Chinese women immigrants

The Page Act of 1875 (Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 3 March 1875) was the first restrictive federal immigration law in the United States, which effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women, marking the end of open borders. Seven years later, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned immigration by Chinese men as well. The law was named after its sponsor, Representative Horace F. Page, a Republican representing California who introduced it to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women." The law technically barred immigrants considered "undesirable" and defined that as a person from East Asia who was coming to the United States to be a forced laborer, any East Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country. 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 East Asian country to the United States "without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service." Only the ban on female East Asian immigrants was effectively and heavily enforced and proved to be a barrier for all East Asian women trying to immigrate, especially Chinese women. Moreover, the Page Act created the policing of immigrants around sexuality, which "gradually became extended to every immigrant who sought to enter America" and has remained a central feature of immigration restriction, according to some scholars. In 1875, President Ulysses Grant delivered a Seventh Annual Message to the United States Senate and House of Representatives. President Grant reaffirmed the United States bearing regarding the immigration of women originating from the Far East.

The first Chinese immigrants to the United States were mostly males, the majority of whom began arriving in 1848 as a part of the California Gold Rush. The California State Legislature assumed that Chinese men were forced to work under long term service contracts, when in reality immigrants to America were not coolies, but borrowed money from brokers for their trip and paid the money back plus interest through work at their first job. Without enough money to send for their wives, a prostitution industry developed in the male Chinese immigrant community and became a serious issue to Americans living in San Francisco. Laws specifically directed at Chinese female immigrants were created even though prostitution was fairly common in the American West among many nationalities. Both Chinese male "coolies" and Chinese female prostitutes were linked to slavery, which added to the American animosity toward them since slavery and involuntary servitude was abolished in 1865. Male laborers were central to the anti Chinese movement, so one might expect legislators to focus on excluding men from immigration, but instead they concentrated on women in order to protect the American system of monogamy. Therefore, the number of immigrants (majority male) entering the U. S. from China during the Page Act's enforcement "exceeded the total for any other seven year period, before passage of the Exclusion Act in 1882, by at least thirteen thousand," but the female population dropped from 6.4% in 1870 to 4.6% in 1880. Furthermore, the American Medical Association believed that Chinese immigrants "carried distinct germs to which they were immune but from which whites would die if exposed." That fear became concentrated on Chinese women because some white Americans believed that germs and disease could most easily be transmitted to white men through labor of Chinese prostitutes. Additionally, during difficult times in China, women and girls were sold into "domestic service, concubinage, or prostitution." Some Chinese men had a wife as well as a concubine, usually a lower class woman obtained through purchase and recognized as a legal member of the family. A woman's status depended on her relationship with Chinese men; "first wives enjoyed the highest status, followed by second wives and concubines, followed in turn by several classes of prostitutes." An additional concern was that the children of Chinese couples would become U. S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment and their cultural practices would become a part of American democracy. As a result, the Page Law responded to "what were believed to be serious threats to white values, lives, and futures." California state laws could not exclude women for being Chinese, so they were crafted as regulations of public morals, but the laws were still struck down as "impermissible encroachment on federal immigration power." However, the Page Law sailed through Congress without any expressed concerns of having a federal law that racially restricted immigration or violated the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which allowed the free migration and emigration of Chinese people, because Americans were focused on protecting the social ideals of marriage and morality.

By forcing Chinese women to undergo invasive examinations to prove they were not sex workers, the Page Act effectively prevented immigration to the United States by Chinese women and resulted in a sharply skewed gender ration in the Chinese American community. This gender imbalance lasted until the mid 20th century. Most Chinese women who immigrated to the U. S. in the 1860s and the 1870s were "second wives, concubines in polygamous marriages, or prostitutes," but not all Chinese women worked as prostitutes. Enforcement of the Page Act resulted not only in fewer prostitutes but also the "virtually complete exclusion of Chinese women from the United States." In 1882 alone, during the few months before the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the beginning of its enforcement, 39,579 Chinese entered the U. S., only 136 of them women. Therefore, Chinese immigrants were unable to create families with each other within the U. S. The Page Act was so successful in preventing Chinese women from immigrating and consequently keeping the ratio of females to males low that the law "paradoxically encouraged the very vice it purported to be fighting: prostitution." Not until after World War II was an appropriate sex balance established because between 1946 and 1952, almost 90% of all Chinese immigrants were women. The sojourner mentality of the Chinese limited the number of wives who chose to immigrate as did the financial cost of the trip; however, documents relating to the enforcement of the Page Act suggest that some women were able to overcome these barriers and join their husbands, but without this law, the numbers would have been far higher. According to historian George Peffer, "all the evidence suggests that the women who survived this ordeal were most likely the wives of Chinese laborers" because they would have possessed the determination needed to endure the questioning, while importers of prostitutes "might have been reluctant to risk prosecution." Yet, this is difficult to conclusively prove, especially since Peffer himself noted that the cost of immigration as well as possible bribes paid to American consuls would have created a greater hardship for the "wives of immigrants who possessed limited resources, than for the wealthy tongs" who sent prostitutes to the U. S. Therefore, although the Chinese Exclusion Act was extremely important in transforming the Chinese into a "declining immigrant group, it was the Page Law that exacerbated the problem of life without families in America's Chinatowns."