Anxiously waiting for history to repeat itself…again.
2 part Planet Money piece -
" Almost as soon as the Chinese came to America, they were targeted with discrimination, hostility, and violence. First, it was at the local and state levels. Beginning as early as 1849, California mining counties began passing laws that sought to restrict the rights of the Chinese to mine. In 1850 and 1852, the California State Legislature passed laws taxing foreign miners (any foreigner who was considered a “free white person” was exempt). These were only some of the first shots in a barrage of discriminatory laws and community actions that would make life harder for Chinese immigrants."
"However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants — and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.
In the years after the Act’s passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against “illegal immigration” — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal."
The price America paid for its first big immigration crackdown : Planet Money : NPR.