The Trump administration is defending the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act against charges that the law had a racist intent. The surprising defense of the 144-year-old law appears in a White House report criticizing the Smithsonian Institution. That the report would attack the Smithsonian Institution was foreordained by the executive order directing it, entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Conservatives not aligned with the Trump administration have also criticized some of the institution’s emphasis and historical interpretations. However, the report goes much further by defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions and the 1882 law targeting Chinese immigrants.
Immigration Restrictions Defended In White House Report
In a report released on July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History of “ideological capture” and said it “erases our heritage.” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe a more than year-long effort to compel the Smithsonian Institution to adopt the viewpoints of Donald Trump, JD Vance and other administration officials.
It began with Trump’s desire to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet. According to Haberman and Swan, “It soon became clear that Mr. Trump was unhappy about a photograph of himself in the Portrait Gallery. It was awful, he would say to others. He objected strongly to the text on the wall noting his two impeachments.”
The reporters describe a meeting with Democratic Sen. Gary Peters and other members of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents in June 2025, where Vance and other administration officials threatened to defund the Smithsonian Institution unless it fired Sajet. Given the unique structure of the Smithsonian Institution, it is unclear if the president could have fired Sajet, who later resigned. “When Mr. Vance argued that the Smithsonian was politicizing the nation’s history, Mr. Peters retorted: You’re coming here threatening to cut off funding to the Smithsonian if we don’t paint the picture you want. That’s politicizing it. Mr. Vance disagreed.”
The report defends what many historians consider the most notorious immigration restriction in American history by criticizing the “didactic” (the text or information accompanying an exhibit) for the Chinese Exclusion Act. According to the White House report, “The Many Voices, One Nation didactic entitled ‘Negotiating Inclusion’ alleges that when ‘thousands of Chinese journeyed to the American West, encouraged by the promise of gold rush opportunity’ in the 1850s, ‘their race…troubled white Americans,’ leading to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, ‘the first of many restrictive immigration laws.’ Another states, ‘White laborers considered the Chinese competition and responded with hostility.’” (Emphasis added.)
It is difficult to argue, as the White House report implies, that Chinese immigrants did not face significant racial hostility in the 1800s in America. “The legislative history of anti-Chinese movement cannot be fully understood without taking into account the violence that punctuated it,” writes Roger Daniels, author of Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. “No one can ever know how many Chinese were murdered and brutalized, but some of the worst outrages can be catalogued here.”
Daniels notes that during an anti-Chinese riot in 1871 in Los Angeles, “21 Chinese were shot, hanged or burned to death by white mobs.” He cites an historian finding 100 Chinese were killed in Idaho in 1866-1867. “Most of the early violence was in California . . . 31 urban centers . . . underwent burnings of Chinese stores and residences and expulsions of Chinese residents.”
The push for anti-Chinese legislation began at the state level in California. “The growth of organized labor has been very closely connected with the movement against Chinese immigration,” writes Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer in The Anti-Chinese Movement in California.
According to Sandmeyer, an 1876 article in the Marin Journal captured the sentiments that encouraged labor unions and others in California to lobby for legislation to stop immigration from China. The article says of Chinese immigrants: “That his sister is a prostitute from instinct, religion, education and interest, degrading to all around her. That American men, women and children cannot be what free people should be, and compete with such degraded creatures in the labor market.”
State-level restrictions could not stop immigration from China, notes historian Lucy E. Sayler, Supreme Court cases in 1876 limited a state’s ability to restrict immigrants. As a result, unions and others lobbied for immigration restrictions at the federal level.
President Chester Arthur vetoed legislation proposed by California representatives to suspend Chinese immigration for 20 years. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended it for 10 years. Congress passed legislation in 1892, 1902 and 1904 that continued the ban on the entry of Chinese immigrants. Because China was a U.S. ally during World War II, Congress repealed the exclusionary law and permitted 105 immigrants from China each year. That limit changed in 1965 when Congress repealed the “national origins” quotas by passing the Immigration Act of 1965.
Supporters of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act argued that prohibiting Chinese immigrants would help U.S. workers. “Proponents argued that Chinese workers, who constituted 12% of the male working-age population and 21% of all immigrants in the western United States, reduced economic opportunities for white workers,” according to research by Joe Long (Northwestern University), Carlo Medici (Brown University), Nancy Qian (Northwestern University) and Marco Tabellini (Harvard Business School). “Many business owners opposed Chinese Exclusion.”
The economists found the Chinese Exclusion Act “reduced the Chinese labor supply by 64%” and produced “negative effects.” Those negative effects included reducing the white male labor supply by 28% and whites, on average, moving from higher-paying to lower-paying occupations. The lower labor supply caused a slowdown in growth in the Western part of the United States. “We find that Chinese Exclusion reduced total manufacturing output by 62% [and] reduced the number of manufacturing establishments by 54% to 69%.” The legislation ended up discouraging white workers from moving to the West and resulted in many deciding to stay in the East.
“The main finding is that the Chinese Exclusion Act, which triggered an exodus of Chinese workers from the U.S. West, slowed economic growth of those states for at least 80 years,” said Nancy Qian in an interview. “In other words, the economic development would have been faster and sooner had the Chinese (and later immigrants) not been banned. The departure of the Chinese undermined the economic dynamism of budding Western locals and those who would have moved from the Eastern U.S. to help growth in the West instead chose to remain in the East.”
Report Shows White House Officials Dislike Negative Portrayals Of Immigration Restrictions
The report on the Smithsonian Institution shows White House officials may be sensitive to criticism of the Chinese Exclusion Act because the Trump administration has adopted a number of similar policies. On Dec. 16, 2025, Trump issued a proclamation that barred immigration from 39 nations, primarily Asian and African countries. The administration also has stopped all refugees from entering the United States with the exception of white people from South Africa, a development few people would have predicted prior to Trump’s second term.
In 1882, Senator John F. Miller of California supported the Chinese Exclusion Act and other restrictions by arguing that people from China could not become Americans due to where they’re from. He said, “The Chinaman is the result of training in the art of the low life . . . It is in the economy of Providence that man shall exist in nationalities, and that they shall be divided by the antipathies of race.”
In 2025, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stated in a social media post about immigration: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”