Timeline of Sikhs in the United States

Who: Punjabi, mostly Sikh, farm and mill workers and their descendants in the United States, and the laws and mobs that tried to exclude them.

What: The main dates, with the sources' differing figures where they differ.

• 6 April 1899: the San Francisco Chronicle announces four Sikh men admitted at San Francisco, which the UC Davis Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora archive calls the first record of South Asian pioneers in California.
• 1907 to 1910: about 7,000 people arrive in the peak years (UC Davis archive).
• 4 September 1907: a mob of about 500 drives Punjabi mill workers out of Bellingham, Washington. HistoryLink records a similar attack at Everett on 2 November, and the UC Davis archive lists violence at Marysville, Live Oak and Fair Oaks that year.
• 1910: the Angel Island immigration station opens; about 7,000 Punjabi pioneers pass through it (UC Davis archive).
• 1912: the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society founds the first Sikh temple, at Stockton (UC Davis archive).
• 1913: the Ghadar Party is founded, and California passes an Alien Land Law, with more in 1920 and 1921, barring aliens ineligible for citizenship from leasing or owning farmland (UC Davis archive).
• 5 February 1917: Congress overrides President Wilson's veto of the Immigration Act, which creates the Asiatic Barred Zone.
• 1923: the Supreme Court denies Bhagat Singh Thind's appeal against the withdrawal of his citizenship (UC Davis archive).
• 1924: a new Immigration Act extends the exclusion of Asians; the number of Indians entering falls fast, and most Punjabis come illegally by way of Panama and Mexico (UC Davis archive).
• 1941: Balwant Singh Brar is drafted, the first Sikh and first Indian American drafted in the Second World War (UC Davis archive).
• 1946: the Luce-Celler Act lets Indians become citizens and allows 100 immigrants a year (Wikipedia).
• 1949 to 1957: Dalip Singh Saund, born in Amritsar, becomes a citizen in 1949, wins election in 1956 and sits from 1957 as the first Asian American member of the House of Representatives (House of Representatives history site).
• 15 September 2001: Balbir Singh Sodhi is shot dead at his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, four days after the 9/11 attacks, by a man who mistook him for an Arab Muslim (Wikipedia).
• 5 August 2012: six people are killed at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin (White House archive).

Where: The United States, from the farms of California and the mills of Washington State to the Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco Bay.

Why it mattered: The record shows Sikh workers driven out by mobs in 1907, shut out by statute in 1917 and 1924, and denied citizenship by the courts in 1923, until the reopening of 1946. Their first temple, at Stockton, and the Ghadar Party date from 1912 and 1913, in the years of the attacks and the land laws.