Anti-Chinese sentiment has existed in the United States since the mid-19th century, shortly after Chinese immigrants first arrived in the United States. It was manifested in the 1860s, when the Chinese were employed in the building of the world's First Transcontinental Railroad, culminating in the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned further Chinese immigration as well as naturalization. Its origins can be traced to the American merchants, missionaries, and diplomats who sent home from China "relentlessly negative" reports of the people they encountered there. These attitudes were transmitted to Americans who never left North America, triggering talk of the Yellow Peril, and continued through the Cold War during McCarthyism. Some modern anti-Chinese sentiment may be the resu