Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. In this full-length study of Chinese exclusion, Gyory argues that earlier explanations for the policy attributed significant support for exclusion to trade unions and workers generally. In fact, he contends quite persuasively that working-class hostility to the Chinese was limited to the West coast. His explanation focuses on presidential and local politics.

Lee, Erika. “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924.” Journal of American Ethnic History 21, no. 3 (2002): 36–62. Lee makes several important arguments: that the exclusion of the Chinese created the phenomenon of illegal immigration; that from that point on illegal immigration has been defined, for practical purposes, in racial terms; that exclusion turned the United States into a “gatekeeping nation” that used the full powers of the state, however ineffectively, to police those considered to be not American-born.