During their first year, the league mounted a campaign to exclude Japanese and Koreans from America. Under pressure from the league, the San Francisco Board of Education ruled that all Japanese and Korean students would join the Chinese at the segregated Oriental School established in 1884. 93 Japanese students attended the 23 San Francisco public schools and out of those 93 students, 25 of them were born in the United States.
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Japan. The Japanese government agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers, which slowed down the immigration to the United States and America agreed to not legislate against the Japanese, sparing them their pride. The Japanese valued their pride above all else in their culture. Americans thought this would stop the growth of Japanese in America but they were wrong. After the "Gentlemen's Agreement" was passed, it was still okay for Japanese wives and children to come over to America. . Japanese males started to come over illegal and the Japanese that were in America started to reproduce. This agreement was the first of many anti-Japanese sentiments, which would haunt the immigrants, making them second-class citizens. The whites didn't want to see anymore Japanese in the United States. They wanted the Asian population to decrease and not increase.
The United States passed the "Lady's agreement." This law said that Japanese could not bring their wives over from Japan. From 1908 to 1924, many Japanese women immigrated to the United States, some as "picture brides." "Picture brides" were like mail order brides. The "Lady's Agreement" stopped all Japanese females from coming to the United States. Without their wives in America, this meant that Japanese males had to be bachelors if they didn't already have someone. The United States figured that if the Japanese males didn't have their wives with them, they wouldn't be able to reproduce and the population would decrease from there.
