Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Chinese Exclusion Acts and Interracial Marriages for Chinese Americans between 1880 to 1940

Man Xu , New York University Abu Dhabi

Marriage, one of the most intimate personal relationships, provides information on individual preferences, but it also reflects laws and societal inequalities. By answering who marries whom or who is not in the marriage market, we understand more about family and social group formation. Two deviations from the traditional family formation tendencies are intermarriage and female-headed households. Studying these deviations helps us understand social boundaries and stratification systems. Motivated by recognizing of systemic or structural factors affecting marriage outcomes among Chinese in the United States. This paper explores how U.S. miscegenation laws designed to preclude the marriage of Chinese with whites, resulting in inequalities. To date, most of the studies on the effects of U.S. Anti-Miscegenation laws focus on black-white intermarriage. Little quantitative research has directly examined the historical impacts of U.S. Anti-Miscegenation for other minorities, such as the Chinese. U.S. Anti-Miscegenation Laws existed at the state level and were made unconstitutional nationwide by Loving v. Virginia in 1967. However, not every state had an Anti-Miscegenation Law, and not every state excluded Chinese from marrying whites. Using the U.S. Decennial Census data from 1880 to 1940 and employing the difference-in-difference estimator, my results show no statistically significant impact from Chinese anti-miscegenation law on Chinese males’ interracial marriages. This finding is robust to an event history analysis and a synthetic cohort method.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course