Institutional Discrimination and Assimilation: Evidence from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese immigration to the U.S. and institutionalized discrimination against Chinese immigrants in U.S. society. This study examines the impact of institutional discrimination on the assimilation of Chinese immigrants by exploiting the passage of the Act and the state-level variation in the intensity of discrimination, measured by the voting outcomes of the Act and the number of anti-Chinese incidents. The difference-in-differences estimates show that discrimination substantially slowed the labor market assimilation of Chinese immigrants in the Exclusion Era (1882–1943) and that Chinese immigrants responded to discrimination by investing in human capital, improving English skills, and increasingly adopting Americanized names. The triple difference estimates show that these effects are significantly stronger in states with higher support rates of the Act or greater numbers of anti-Chinese incidents. These findings are not driven by the selection in migration and fertility. ∗We thank Joshua Angrist, Shihe Fu, James Heckman, Wei Huang, Cong Liu, Xin Meng, Yang Song, participants of China Econometric Society Meeting, International Symposium of Quantitative History, Asian Historical Economics Conference, Workshop on Family and Labor Economics, International Labor Symposium,History andDevelopmentWorkshop, seminars at FudanUniversity, XiamenUniversity, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Jinan University for valuable comments. We thank Xiao Han and Jiaxin Lei for their excellent research assistance. We thank Lijun Liu, Hao Xiong and Yajing Song for assistance on the U.S. laws. Shuo Chen thanks the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71933002) and the Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (No. 2017-01-07-00-07-E00002). Bin Xie thanks the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71904063) and the 111 Project of China (No. B18026). We alone are responsible for any remaining errors. †Email: cs@fudan.edu.cn. Address: School of Economics, Fuxing Building, 600 Guoquan Road, Shanghai, China, 200433. ‡Email: xiebinecon@outlook.com. Address: Institute for Economic and Social Research, Zhonghui Building, 601 Huangpu Avenue West, Guangzhou, China, 510632.