Jason Oliver Chang

And this law creates a new legal invention.

It creates a racial distinction that says that the Chinese are a different race, which should not be allowed to immigrate or naturalize. There are some exemptions built into the law, which provide exemptions for students and diplomats and merchants.

I'm Associate Professor of History in Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

They would inspect their hands to see if they were calloused and say, are you really an upper class merchant or are you a laborer who's pretending? And so they would have these very demeaning, humiliating kinds of approaches to really enforce the racial rule of the land.

So we have these constant kinds of battles for the lived reality of citizenship.

These were important messages that also aligned with a broader kind of sense that the West was for white people.

Their job in the United States was over. Their introduction for the railroads was over.