Asiatic Exclusion League

The Asiatic Exclusion League (often abbreviated AEL) was an organization formed in the early 20th century in the United States and Canada that aimed to prevent immigration of people of Asian origin.

[1] Among those attending the first meeting were labor leaders and European immigrants, Patrick Henry McCarthy of the Building Trades Council of San Francisco, Andrew Furuseth, and Walter Macarthur of the International Seamen's Union.

Following the first meeting, the San Francisco Chronicle published a picture of laborers who collected at the meeting saying: "Some present owned their own little homes; while a majority know what it is to sit with the good wife of an evening, figure on approaching rent day and make up the cash on hand to see if there is enough to carry the family over to the next day."

[3] AEL framed a campaign geared towards the San Francisco Board of Education to exclude Japanese and Koreans from public schools.

Applying active pressure on Congress, in March 1907, Congress approved amending existing immigration legislation, thereby allowing President Theodore Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 589 that ended migration by Japanese or Korean laborers from Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii to the continental United States.

This was taken together with the Gentlemen's Agreement (1907–1908) with Japan, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for those laborers seeking work in the United States.

The league enhanced its activities by recruiting members, pledging political candidates to an exclusion law and by attempting to organize all of the western states in a concerted movement that would force Congress to grant their aspirations.

[12] Another important, albeit indirect, consequence of AEL activity was that the 1907 Vancouver riots led to the first drug law in Canada.

"[13] Both Asiatic Exclusion Leagues were the product of an overall atmosphere of white racism against Asians that prevailed in Canada and the United States from the 1800s on, culminating in the imposition of a head tax and other immigration policies designed to exclude Asians from Canada, as well as Japanese American internment and Japanese Canadian internment during World War II.