the United States was over 100,000 and located primarily in California. Over 90% of immigrants were male and had come to the United States to earn money to send to their families. As the majority of these men planned to return to China, they needed to keep their queues lest they be marked as revolutionaries. In light of this, the idea behind the institution of the Pigtail Ordinance was that Chinese immigrants would be less likely to ignore the city's sanitary ordinance. Anti-Chinese sentiment also was a driving factor, hoping that the enforcement of the Pigtail Ordinance would keep potential Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States. Veto and passage After approval by the Board of Supervisors, the order was immediately vetoed by San Francisco mayor William Alvord. In his veto, the mayor stated that "this order, though general in its terms, in substance and effect, is a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race." On April 3, 1876, the California State Legislature enacted their own law to Los Angeles's Sanitary Ordinance. The city no longer had the power to ignore the enforcement of the law, so the board made a second proposal of the Pigtail Ordinance. This time the law passed with a vote of 10–2, and was approved by mayor Andrew Jackson Bryant. Lawsuit As a result of the new law, a Chinese immigrant named Ah Kow was arrested for living space violations and had his queue removed at the jail. He sued the sheriff for damages, claiming that the Pigtail Ordinance caused him irreparable harm. On June 14, 1879, United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field, sitting in the local federal court—despite much criticism from the general public—found in favor of the plaintiff; his decision held that it was not within the powers of the Board of Supervisors to set such a discriminatory law and that the ordinance was unconstitutional. In particular, he cited the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guarantees equal protection under the law to all persons within its jurisdiction. See Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 Fed. Cas. 252 (1879). See also Anti-Chinese legislation in the United States Beard and haircut laws by country Chinese Americans California Gold Rush References Anti-Chinese legislation Law in the San Francisco Bay Area History of San Francisco Chinese-American history