Paper Trails of Immigration and Discrimination: Evidence from Chinese Exclusion

Hannah Postel, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University

This project links individual-level historical data to assess the effects of a historical immigration ban. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 and enforced until 1965, was the first nationality-based immigration restriction and achieved its goal of severely limiting Chinese immigration to the United States. There has been no quantitative assessment of this policy’s effects; however, new probabilistic matching techniques make such an evaluation possible. My dissertation links census microdata, immigration and emigration files, residence and identity certificates issued under Exclusion, and mortality records to observe how increasingly restrictive policies impacted individual Chinese immigrants’ economic and geographic mobility. This paper will assess how different forms of immigration control impacted Chinese migration flows in the late nineteenth century. Chinese Exclusion was not only the first federal immigration restriction ever implemented; its various iterations of increasing stringency and experiments with different forms of border enforcement provide a unique opportunity to study the effects of each policy tweak. As new restrictions were sequentially introduced, how did Chinese populations change? Census data show that while California’s Chinese population – home to 71% of Chinese-born individuals in the US in 1880 – plummeted during Exclusion, communities on the Eastern Seaboard demonstrated substantial growth. A traditional explanation of this geographic dispersion is that the Chinese attempted to escape Californian violence; however, these trends are impossible to disentangle through aggregate data, and difficult to granularly measure due to the lack of 1890 census microdata. By tracking individuals across time, I will be able to assess whether Chinese migrants already present in the western United States moved eastward, or if new Eastern communities were comprised of new migrants. I also aim to answer questions about how many individuals returned home permanently, traveled circularly, or entered the United States for the first time during this period.

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 Presented in Session 237. Migration, Regulation, Exclusion, and Control at and within Borders