Secondary Source
“While European expansion set the world in motion, it was the free migration of a few thousand Asians to America that gave rise to modern immigration controls. In the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 holds the distinction of being one of the first laws to substantially restrict mass immigration, and the first to do so on the basis of racial or national difference. Until then, migration from China to the United States had been governed by mutual agreement—treaty. But in the Chinese Exclusion Cases, the Supreme Court asserted for the first time that Congress had an ‘absolute and unqualified’ right to exclude and deport foreigners, ‘however it might see fit.’ The Court held that Congress’s power to restrict migration was essential to national integrity and could not be limited by treaty—or by the Court itself. Though the crude racism expressed in the Chinese Exclusion Act now appears to most Americans as an embarrassing wrong that we can consign to the past, the unqualified power to restrict migration remains at the foundation of contemporary immigration law.”
- Sherally Munshi, Historian, “Indians in the United States: Movements and Empire,” 2022