US Immigration Act of 1917 creates the Asiatic Barred Zone

Who: The United States Congress, which passed the Act over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. Those it shut out included the Punjabi migrants, among them many Sikhs, who had come to California's farms and the Pacific North-West's mills.

What: Wilson vetoed the bill on 14 December 1916. The House overrode the veto on 1 February 1917 by 287 to 106, and the Senate on 5 February 1917 by 62 to 20 according to Wikipedia; EBSCO's research starter says 62 to 19. The law made immigrants over sixteen show they could read in their own language. It also created the Asiatic Barred Zone, defined by latitude and longitude, which Wikipedia says took in China, British India, Afghanistan, Arabia, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, the Dutch East Indies, Russia east of the Urals and most Polynesian islands. Japan and the Philippines were left out, and Japan was added by the Immigration Act of 1924. The Office of the Historian says the Act barred anyone born in the zone.

The UC Davis Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora archive says about 7,000 people arrived from Punjab between 1907 and 1910 and that the Act stopped almost all Asian immigration, with enormous consequences for Punjabis and their families. After the Immigration Act of 1924, the number of Indians entering declined rapidly, and most Punjabis then came illegally, landing in Panama and travelling north through Mexico; in 1922 the usual fee for a crossing was $400, according to the same archive.

Punjabis already in the country faced other limits. California's Alien Land Laws of 1913, 1920 and 1921 barred aliens who could not become citizens from leasing or owning farmland, and in 1923 the Supreme Court denied Bhagat Singh Thind's appeal against the withdrawal of his citizenship, the archive says. Wikipedia says the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 ended discrimination against Asian Indians and Filipinos, gave them the right to become citizens and allowed 100 immigrants a year, and that the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act revised the older laws.

Where: It was a law of the United States, enforced at ports of entry such as Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Angel Island's immigration station opened in 1910, and about 7,000 Punjabi pioneers passed through it, the archive says.

Why it mattered: Almost all Asian immigration stopped, and lawful immigration from India stayed closed until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946, according to the UC Davis archive and Wikipedia. The UC Davis archive says most Punjabis who came in the 1920s and 1930s entered illegally. The Act came ten years after the attacks of 1907 on Punjabi mill workers and nine years after Canada's Continuous Journey Regulation.