How Racial Prejudice Shaped U.S. Immigration Policy in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries New York, N.Y.—In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to explicitly bar an ethnic group from entering the country. Chinese Exclusion in the U.S., 1848-1911 The legislation was rooted in the racist sentiment captured by the phrase, “The Caucasian will not tolerate the Mongolian,” a slogan popularized by labor leaders and politicians who framed Chinese immigrants as...