The Geary Act (text)

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  • The Geary Act (text)

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Title

The Geary Act (text)

Subject

[no text]

Description

This is the text of the Geary Act of 1892, a federal law that extended Chinese Exclusion for another ten years and added important additional restrictions.
Representative Thomas J. Geary, a California Democrat, was one of the leading advocates for Chinese Exclusion. This act added several important requirements, including the stipulation that Chinese laborers who already resided in the U.S. apply for and carry on their person certificates of residence to prove their right to be in the U.S. If a law enforcement official found them without their certificate, they would be held without bail and could be deported or forced to serve a year of hard labor. 

Many Chinese Americans were incensed at the new requirements and advocated that Chinese refuse to register. Chinese Americans challenged the constitutionality of the Geary Act. Just over a year after its passage, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 6 to 3 in the case Fong Yue Ting v. The United States that the Geary Act was indeed constitutional. 

Creator

U.S. Congress

Source

Michael Geary, "The Geary Act of 1892," Geary Central, http://www.geary.com/The_Geary_Act_of_1892.

Publisher

[no text]

Date

1892-05-05

Contributor

[no text]

Rights

No known copyright restrictions.

Relation

[no text]

Format

.pdf. 60 kb.

Language

eng

Type

[no text]

Identifier

Immigration_21

Coverage

[no text]

Document Item Type Metadata

Text

[no text]

Original Format

Federal law

Citation

U.S. Congress, "The Geary Act (text)," in The World at the Fair, Item #103, http://uclawce.ats.ucla.edu/items/show/103 (accessed June 18, 2013).