ownership, enacted laws making it impossible for Chinese and Japanese to
buy land outright; and in other ways they discriminated against
Orientals. Such proceedings placed the federal government in an
embarrassing position. By treaty it had guaranteed specific rights to
Japanese citizens in the United States, and the government at Tokyo
contended that the state laws just cited violated the terms of the
international agreement. The Western states were fixed in their
determination to control Oriental residents; Japan was equally
persistent in asking that no badge of inferiority be attached to her
citizens. Subjected to pressure on both sides, the federal government
sought a way out of the deadlock.

Having embarked upon the policy of restriction in 1882, Congress readily
extended it. In that same year it barred paupers, criminals, convicts,
and the insane. Three years later, mainly owing to the pressure of the
Knights of Labor, it forbade any person, company, or association to
import aliens under contract. By an act of 1887, the contract labor
restriction was made even more severe. In 1903, anarchists were excluded
and the bureau of immigration was transferred from the Treasury
Department to the Department of Commerce and Labor, in order to provide
for a more rigid execution of the law. In 1907 the classes of persons
denied admission were widened to embrace those suffering from physical
and mental defects and otherwise unfit for effective citizenship. When
the Department of Labor was established in 1913 the enforcement of the
law was placed in the hands of the Secretary of Labor, W.B. Wilson, who
was a former leader in the American Federation of Labor.

=The Literacy Test.=--Still the advocates of restriction were not
satisfied. Still organized labor protested and demanded more protection
against the competition of immigrants. In 1917 it won a thirty-year
battle in the passage of a bill excluding "all aliens over sixteen years
of age, physically capable of reading, who cannot read the English
language or some other language or dialect, including Hebrew or
Yiddish." Even President Wilson could not block it, for a two-thirds
vote to overcome his veto was mustered in Congress.

This act, while it served to exclude illiterates, made no drastic cut in
the volume of immigration. Indeed a material reduction was resolutely
opposed in many quarters. People of certain nationalities already in the
United States objected to every