The following is a guest post by Caitlin Connelly, an intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress. She is a graduate of the Master of Information program at Rutgers University.
This post is a continuation of The Chinese Exclusion Act, Part 1 – The History.
By 1880, social tension and political pressure prompted the federal government to renegotiate its treaty with China. The resulting Angell Treaty opens by commenting upon the “constantly increasing immigration of Chinese laborers to the territory of the United States, and the embarrassments consequent upon such immigration.” (Immigration, Ta-Tsing Empire (China)-U.S, July 24, 1868. 49 U.S.T. 685) It scrapped the “open door” policy of the Burlingame-Seward Treaty and granted the U.S. the p