The Trump administration is defending the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act — the first U.S. law to bar an entire group from the country based solely on race — in a new report that has drawn sharp criticism from Asian American advocacy groups, according to AsAmNews.
The defense appears in a White House report released July 4 titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” AsAmNews reports. The nearly 200-page document takes aim at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, arguing its exhibits portray restrictive immigration laws as tools of white supremacy rather than as products of more complicated historical circumstances.
According to AsAmNews, the report singles out the museum’s “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, which describes how Chinese laborers who traveled west during the gold rush era faced hostility from white workers who saw them as competition — hostility that eventually led to the Exclusion Act. The White House report frames that same history differently, casting 19th-century anti-Chinese immigration policy more as an economic dispute than a racially motivated exclusion.
That reframing is what alarms advocates. Eunice Kwon of the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley told Asian Americans “our rights and our humanity in this country are negotiable.” She connected the report to a broader pattern of current policy — including a refugee program that admits almost no one except white South Africans, entry bans covering dozens of Asian and African countries, and continued separation of migrant families.
David Lei of the Chinese Historical Society of America told AsAmNews he wasn’t surprised by the report, even as he acknowledged the reaction says something troubling about how normalized this kind of rhetoric has become. Eunice Kwon of the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley pointed out that Congress formally apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act more than a decade ago in a unanimous, bipartisan resolution — making the administration’s defense of the law a reversal of that consensus, AsAmNews reports.
The Chinese Historical Society of America, for its part, has scaled back its staff amid funding pressures but says it will continue documenting Chinese American history as a largely volunteer-run organization, independent of government support, according to the report.
Read the full story at AsAmNews.
