What were the legal frameworks in America that made it difficult to nearly impossible for Indians to enter the United States?
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Towards the end of the 19th century, more and more people came to the U.S. some to stay and others to work and return to their country of origin, so the government decided to be more restrictive. The selection criteria were based on race and class and the legislations were built on a racist and xenophobic frame, which made it more difficult for immigrants including South Asian peddlers and workers to come to the U.S. (Bald, 14,40). An example of those legislations is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the first legislation that restricted the immigration of an ethnic group in the United States (National Archives). Even though at first, this legislation targeted Chinese people, it legitimizes the xenophobic sentiment that white Americans would have about other people of color.
The Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 prohibited companies from bringing unskilled immigrants into the United States to work under contract (University of Texas Department of History). One of the problems with this regulation was that ‘’contract workers were difficult to identify at ports of entry’’ (University of Texas Department of History). So, what would happen is that even people of color who were not contract workers would be penalized by the assumption that they were contract workers.
In 1917, the Immigration Act was implemented. According to the National Archives’ website, ‘’ the Immigration Act of 1917 became the first widely enacted law that implemented a literacy test and restricted immigration from the geographically designated ‘Asiatic Barred Zone’… The barred zone extended from parts of West Asia to Western China and extended north into parts of Russia and southwest to the Pacific Islands. ‘’ (National Archives)
The other sources I used
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act#:~:text=It was the first significant,immigrating to the United States.