These legal restrictions reflected nativist claims that:
the Chinese posed multiple threats. They came as servile “coolie” laborers who would take away the livelihood and destroy the dignity of white workingmen. They lived “huddled together…almost like rats” in pestilential ghettos, “Chinatowns” that endangered the health and welfare of the larger white community. Behind the apparently placid demeanor of these Orientals lurked the sexually demonic. The “Chinamen” not only drove their own women into prostitution but also sought to debauch vulnerable white women—or so it seemed in the sexual fantasy of their foes.”
