In the Western US , the regular cultural lynching Chinese people yielded the coinage of a phrase , " Having a Chinaman 's chance in Hell " , meaning no chance at all . In 1880 Denver , the Yellow Peril pogrom featured a lynched Chinese man and destruction of the local Chinatown . In 1885 , the Rock Springs massacre of 28 miners destroyed a Wyoming Chinese community . In Washington Territory , Yellow Peril fears realised the Attack on Squak Valley Chinese laborers , 1885 ; the arson of the Seattle Chinatown ; and the Tacoma riot of 1885 by which local white folk expelled the Chinese community from their towns . In Seattle , the Knights of Labor expelled 200 Chinese people by the Seattle riot of 1886 . In Oregon , 34 Chinese gold miners were ambushed , robbed and killed in the Hells Canyon Massacre ( 1887 ) . Moreover , about being Chinese in the 19th-century US , in the essay " A Chinese View of the Statue of Liberty " ( 1885 ) , Sauum Song Bo said , : Under nativist political pressure , the Immigration Act of 1917 established an Asian Barred Zone of countries from which immigration to the US was forbidden . The Cable Act of 1922 , or the Married Women 's Independent Nationality Act , guaranteed citizenship to independent woman unless they married to an alien ineligible to naturalization . During the 1920s , when the Cable Act of 1922 was law , Asian men and women were excluded from American citizenship . In practice , the Cable Act of 1922 reversed some racial exclusion laws and granted independent-woman citizenship exclusively to women married to white men . Analogously , the Act allowed revocation of the US citizenship of a white woman married an Asian man . Nonetheless , legalized Yellow Peril racism was challenged ; in the Supreme Court case of '' Takao Ozawa v. United States '' ( 1922 ) , a Japanese – American man tried to demonstrate that the Japanese are a white race eligible for naturalized US citizenship , but the Court ruled that the Japanese are not white people . Two years later , the National Origins Quota of 1924 specifically excluded the Japanese from the country and citizenship
Rock Springs massacre
Rock Springs massacre
Yellow Peril