Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Review: A New Film Investigates the Time America Banned an Entire Race

“The Chinese Exclusion Act,” a new PBS documentary, explores the first American law to restrict the immigration of a particular ethnic group and ban it from citizenship. Above, Chinese women and children in a California immigration station.Credit...PBS

“The Chinese Exclusion Act,” appearing Tuesday as part of PBS’s “American Experience,” was in the works well before the election of Donald Trump. But it feels as if it were made for a moment when border walls and immigration controls are topics of daily conversation.

Directed by the PBS stalwart Ric Burns and his longtime collaborator Li-Shin Yu (who was an editor on the 2003 PBS series “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience,” which covered some of the same ground), the documentary is centered on the 1882 act of the title, the first American law to restrict the immigration of a particular ethnic group and ban its members from citizenship.

But the film’s scope is far larger. Tracing the story of Chinese immigration from 1840 (when the United States census showed a total of four Chinese among a population of 17 million) to the present, it provides a well-documented but not well-known alternate history — a corrective to the national myth of the melting pot.

The filmmakers and their cast of mostly Asian-American historians frame the Exclusion Act as part of a long national narrative of racism, xenophobia, predatory capitalism and political calculation. The China trade and the Opium Wars, the Civil War and the collapse of Reconstruction, and cycles of economic depression and labor unrest all figure into a story that doesn’t begin to turn until well after World War II. It’s also a cautionary tale, reminding us that open ideas about immigration and citizenship that are now under attack have only had currency since the 1960s.

Throughout the film, the contemporary parallels smack you in the face. Chinese laborers, imported to build the western side of the transcontinental railroad, are seen as a threat when the railroad is finished and the post-Civil War depression of the 1870s drives up white unemployment. A presidential candidate (Rutherford B. Hayes) exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote. Principled opposition to a citizenship ban (mostly from Republicans) is finally outweighed by the need to court Southern lawmakers readmitted to Congress after Reconstruction.

It’s a complicated and lengthy history to pack into two hours, and it takes some focus on the viewer’s part to keep the thread. Ms. Yu and Mr. Burns don’t deviate from the style that Mr. Burns and his brother Ken have helped codify — slow pans and zooms over myriad archival photos and objects, and interviews with an engaging group of scholars that includes Mae Ngai of Columbia, Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota, K. Scott Wong of Williams College and the ubiquitous California historian Kevin Starr.

(You could reasonably ask why a non-Asian-American filmmaker like Mr. Burns should be the driving force in such a prominent telling of an Asian-American story. The answer, beyond the quality of the work, lies in the inevitable advantage that established figures like him and, in the case of “Becoming American,” Bill Moyers have in raising money. “The Chinese Exclusion Act” is a production of Mr. Burns’s Steeplechase Films and the Center for Asian-American Media.)

The film isn’t only concerned with politics and legislation. There is plenty of social history, of life in Chinatowns and the profound dislocations forced on Chinese-American families, as well as an account of the horrific wave of violence (including mass lynchings) and ethnic purges that struck around 300 cities and towns in the western United States in the years after 1882.

A section on the Page Act of 1875, a forerunner to the Exclusion Act, reveals how a ban on immigration by Asian prostitutes — which led to grueling, humiliating interviews — effectively barred Chinese women from America while greatly contributing to the sexual stereotyping of all Asian women.

There are also heroes in the story, like the American-born Wong Kim Ark, whose victory in the Supreme Court in 1898 established the birthright to citizenship that we’ve taken for granted until recently.

The volume and tenaciousness of legal challenges to the Exclusion Act, and the eloquence of Chinese immigrants who spoke out and editorialized against it, feed a recurring if not very convincing theme in the film that the Chinese were particularly attracted to the democratic values of the founding fathers.

The more pertinent lesson would seem to be that nothing fundamentally changed until World War II shifted American alliances and sympathies from Japan to China. The Exclusion Act, originally intended to last 10 years, extended for more than 60, and wasn’t repealed until 1943. Against fear and racism, tenaciousness and eloquence were no match.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Unwelcome Mat. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT