The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese immigration, was one of the most important immigration restrictions in American history. It barred large numbers of Chinese immigrants, condemning them to a life of poverty and oppression. It also set the stage for later immigration restrictions. Perhaps even more significantly, it led to the Supreme Court's awful ruling in the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case, which ruled that the federal government had a general power to restrict migration, despite the absence of any textual or originalist basis for it. That, of course helped make future immigration restrictions possible. Elsewhere, I have argued the Chinese Exclusion Case should be added to the "anti-canon" of constitutional law.
