The 1883 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Asian Exclusion Act were specifically written to keep Chinese and later other non-white people from immigrating to the United States, and set quotas limiting annual immigrants from many ethnic groups or countries to a small percent of the number of them already in the US, so as to avoid diluting the mainly Anglo-Saxon-German-Scots-Irish ethnicity.
This wasn’t about legal complexity and sheer number of applicants, this was about unabashedly racist immigration laws designed to deny a legal path for immigration. After I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve met a number of Chinese-Americans who say “My family’s been here for five generations, I don’t speak Chinese, and if I did it would be the wrong dialect” (because almost all current Chinese immigrants speak at least some Mandarin, while most of the Gold Rush / railroad labor immigrants spoke Cantonese or other southern dialects.) It took me a while to realize that this was because of the Chinese Exclusion Act (if you hadn’t been here five generations, you or your parents were post-Mao and learned Mandarin in school, and there’s almost nobody in between.)
