[1] In the 1850s, Chinese workers migrated to the United States to work in gold mines, take jobs in agriculture and factories, and built railroads in the American West.

"As the truth is a merchantable commodity from a Chinese point of view, those certificates were in many instances sold to Chinamen who had never been in this country, who took them and came to the United States in violation of the law," Scott said when introducing the act.

[7] In congressional debate regarding the Scott Act, representatives' only other concern was keeping those certificate holders who weren't in the United States from returning.

Senator Henry Teller, Republican of Colorado, said of the act, "There are now about one hundred thousand Chinese who have come into this country, and I myself will welcome any legislation that shall deport every single one of them from the United States and send them back to China, where they belong."

[7] Due to public pressure, the Chinese government chose not to ratify the treaty, and President Grover Cleveland signed the Scott Act into law on October 1, 1888.

In an accompanying message he sent to Congress along with the law, he justified the act by saying China had promised in the renounced Bayard-Zhang treaty to prevent workers from coming to the United States.

I cannot but regard the expressed demand on the part of China for a reexamination and renewed discussion of the topics so completely covered by mutual treaty stipulations, as an indefinite postponement and practical abandonment on the objects we have in view..." He recommended that separate legislation should be introduced to allow reentry of the Chinese who were already in transit back to the United States, but this never happened.

[1][7] On October 8, 1888, Chae Chan Ping, a Chinese citizen and unskilled laborer working in San Francisco, returned to the US after a trip home to China.