Chinese exclusion laws patterned their restrictions on earlier Black laws

Evidence

In 1870, Congress for the first time opened the possibility of citizenship by naturalization to immigrants of African descent, but it declined to do the same for immigrants from China. In the 1880s, Chinese immigrants and their children found their standing in the United States sharply undercut by a series of exclusion acts that limited their entry and mobility in ways that echoed the Black laws that had decades before restricted free Black Americans. And in 1895 a man of Chinese descent born in the city of San Francisco, Wong Kim Ark, found himself detained in his home city’s port, refused entry by federal officials who deemed him a noncitizen. Officials there regarded men like Wong indelibly foreign by virtue of their parents’ status as noncitizen Chinese immigrants. It was a devastating deviation from the birthright principle. Only after the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark’s case was it clear that Chinese Americans also enjoyed the same birthright protections that Black people had fought for decades to enshrine. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 739

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the 14th Amendment birthright-citizenship debates from earlier in the book and the Slavery’s Shadow ‘deviation vs design’ framework — Chinese exclusion as another deviation from birthright principle.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did colored-convention activists respond to Chinese exclusion at the time — did they see the parallel the author draws here?
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘deviation’ framing here shows exclusion acts as deviations from the birthright principle — a specific instance of the book’s core origin-story-as-infrastructure thesis operating on a non-Black population, demonstrating the pattern’s generalizability.