My parents were immigrants to America. And now, my kids are too.

There's been a lot of talk recently over immigration laws. A lot of protests in the street over who should be allowed where and under what circumstances.

So, I thought it might be valuable to look over an important chunk of American history, written into law, about the kind of immigrant family mine has become. I'm always surprised when I run into adoptive parents who haven't heard of this stuff, since we're basically living in the aftermath.

Here's the texts of the Chinese Exclusion Treaty of 1880 and Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Remember those names.

The tricky bit is Section 14 of the Act:

SEC. 14. That hereafter no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship; and all laws in conflict with this act are hereby repealed.

So. Come again? Poor, huddled masses yearning to be free unless you happen to be Chinese?

That's about the size of it, unfortunately.

The Act came about after some unpleasantness in California involving words like "lynching" and "massacre." There were a lot of Chinese people there who'd crossed the Pacific to work on the railroads. Railroad work was all tied in with two other things: the Gold Rush (oh! a Land of Plenty! Come! Come! said the handbills) and the abolition of slavery (meaning cheap, unskilled labor had to come from elsewhere). America had actually, briefly, encouraged as many Chinese people to come as wanted to, but then kind of changed its mind after the, uh, unpleasantness with the Wild West vigilante justice as well as the general disapproval towards those kinds of people elsewhere in the country.

Oh, and the act isn't just Old West history - it was extended in 1904.

So there were all these people primed by the promise of the American dream landing at Angel Island and waiting and waiting and waiting to see if they'd be allowed in. Some waited for as long as two years. And the funny thing was, some of those people were American citizens. People who were born in San Francisco (or points further east) who'd gone to visit family in China then tried to return.

At the same time, Chinese Americans living here created underground Chinatowns throughout the West, because it wasn't always safe to be seen socializing out in the open.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in living memory - in 1943, when a new act made it legal for 105 Chinese immigrants to come to America per year. That arbitrary quota wasn't lifted until 1965. And although the individual sections of the Chinese Exclusion Act were repealed over half a century ago, the law itself was around long enough to have named a chapter of the United States Code, the official compilation of federal laws.

This is the only chapter heading to name an ethnic group or nationality.

So, this is where we live.

The links above will tell you all you need to know, but don't skip the summary of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the court case that set the foundation for the anti-Jim Crow decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, and thus gave birth to the whole "civil rights" business.