Laying the Groundwork for a Movement

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the Chinese exclusion repeal campaigns as a negotiation between a community-based effort driven by the needs of Chinese Americans and an elite white American campaign rooted in Washington’s wartime imperatives. In what became a pattern in later campaigns, a group called the Citizens Committee interrupted and ultimately superseded Chinese Americans’ attempts to restore non-quota admission for the alien wives of Chinese American citizens. Charting this context makes clear how the Magnuson Act, far from a product of wartime geopolitics alone, more accurately represented the convergence of transnational and national, diplomatic and community-based pressures. It frames the 1943 Magnuson Act repealing Chinese exclusion as culminating years of lobbying to liberalize U.S. immigration policy toward Chinese on the one hand, and as planting the seeds of a longer repeal movement on the other.