# Page Act of 1875 The **Page Act of 1875**, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant, was the first restrictive federal immigration law in U.S. history — the moment the federal government first asserted the power to bar categories of immigrants. Nominally it prohibited the importation of forced labor ("coolie" labor) and the immigration of any woman brought for "lewd and immoral purposes," i.e., prostitution. In practice, its enforcement was overwhelmingly directed at Chinese women: U.S. consular officials in Hong Kong subjected Chinese women seeking to emigrate to invasive interrogation and screening on the presumption that they were likely prostitutes, effectively blocking nearly all Chinese female immigration. ## Effect and intent By choking off the immigration of Chinese women, the Page Act helped ensure that the largely male Chinese laboring population in the United States could not easily form families or establish permanent communities — a demographic strategy of exclusion that operated years before outright exclusion was enacted. It established the template of *race-coded* immigration restriction: a law written in ostensibly neutral or moral language (anti-prostitution, anti-forced-labor) but designed and enforced to target a specific ethnic group. ## Significance for the knowledge base The Page Act is the opening move of the **Exclusion Era** and an early, instructive instance of [[Nativism]] written into federal law. It matters for the knowledge base both as the literal first restrictive immigration statute — the precedent that there *is* a federal power to exclude — and as an early demonstration of a recurring technique the KB tracks across immigration history: pursuing ethnically targeted exclusion through facially neutral statutory language. The mechanism it pioneered was generalized seven years later in the [[Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882]] and, decades on, in the national-origins quota regime. ## The state precedent The Page Act is the first *federal* restriction, not the first American one. California had spent the preceding quarter-century building the same structure at the state level: the [[Foreign Miners' Tax]] (1850, re-enacted 1852) taxed Chinese miners out of the goldfields, and [[People v. Hall]] (1854) barred Chinese witnesses from testifying against white defendants. California's most aggressive measure — an 1855 $50 head tax on shipmasters landing anyone ineligible for citizenship, intended to halt Chinese immigration outright — was struck down in 1857 as an intrusion on the federal foreign-commerce power. That is the sequence worth holding onto: the states tried exclusion first, were told it was a federal prerogative, and then Congress exercised the prerogative in their favor. The Page Act is where that transfer completes. ## See Also - [[Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882]] — the law that generalized exclusion - [[Foreign Miners' Tax]] · [[People v. Hall]] — the California state precedents - [[Nativism]] — the animating ideology - [[Immigration Restrictionism]] — the movement tradition - [[US Immigration Timeline]] — chronological context