These laws and agreements, however, did not remove all grounds for the agitation of the subject.  They were difficult to enforce and it was claimed by residents of the Coast that in spite of federal authority Oriental laborers were finding their way into American ports.  Moreover, several Western states, anxious to preserve the soil for American 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 barrier that shut out their own kinsmen.  Some Americans of the old stock still held to the idea that the United States should continue to be an asylum for “the oppressed of the earth.”  Many employers looked upon an increased labor supply as the means of escaping what they called “the domination of trade unions.”  In the babel of countless voices, the discussion of these vital matters went on in town and country.