The Gentlemen's Agreement

In the United States we offer citizenship for all those who wish to join our nation. Although it is not easy, before WW2 and Japanese wishing to obtain citizenship had to jump through many hoops. The first law that came into effect was “The Gentlemen’s Agreement”. The gentlemen’s agreement was an unofficial treaty that protected both the United States and Japan. Japan had just defeated China in 1895, then defeating Russia in 1905. Japan demonstrated that they were not to be messed with and established themselves as a world power. During this time that Japan was establishing dominance of the Asia. The United States had just passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which caused labor shortages in the Unites States, primarily in the west coast.
As many Japanese saw this as an opportunity to make money, many left Japan

and traveled to Hawai’i and California. As waves of Japanese immigrants flooded into the United States they were met with discrimination. Anti Japanese leagues were started and school children were segregated. In order to diffuse tension between the United States and Japan, President Theodore Roosevelt met with the Japanese government and created the Gentlemen’s agreement, which assured the United States and Japan's relationship by both countries limiting immigration and creating a friendship between nations avoiding war.
Following the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in 1913 California enacted the California Alien Land law, which prohibited any alien from owning land. Following the footsteps of California, other states such as Arizona in 1917;Louisiana in 1921; New Mexico in 1922; Idaho in 1923; Montana in 1923; Oregon in 1923; Kansas in 1925; and Utah in 1943 all passed similar if not even harsher laws preventing Japanese Americans from owning land. In 1943 the Arkansas legislature enacted the Anti Japanese land law which directly targeted and prevented Japanese Americans, which were lawful citizens, as well as non-naturalized Japanese. Even though this act violates the fourteenth amendment, the state used a loophole that these Japanese descendants were ineligible to naturalize, thus making the law valid in Arkansas. But the law could not apply to any resident that lived in Arkansas at the time due to the fact that Arkansas’s constitution states, “No distinction shall ever be made by law between resident aliens and citizens in regard to possession, enjoyment or descent of property.”(Dudley O. McGovney,8) In total eleven states enact laws that limit or prohibit Japanese descendants or Japanese Americans from owning land.
While some states were still enacting anti Japanese land ownership laws, the United States government passed the Johnson-Reed act or the Immigration act of 1924.

This act limited the amount of immigrants that were allowed to enter the United States based off their country of origin. For this act a quota was created for each race. This quote only supplied 2% of all of peoples that wished to immigrate to the United States, but completely excluded all Asian immigrants. The uncertainty of a national security threat caused by World War one, made congress open to this act and eventually was a great driving force for it. Following the footsteps of the 1907 immigration act that required a literacy test for all those over the age of 16, it also included the “Asiatic barred zone”. There was no need to bar the Japanese from entering the United States due to the gentlemen’s agreement, but the United States eventually did formally exclude the Japanese with the 1924 immigration act. With protest from Japan regarding the violation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, the United States focused on regulating immigration rather than protecting bonds between the US and

Japan.