Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992
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The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) was a bill sponsored by U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) which granted permanent residency to all Chinese nationals who arrived in the United States on or before April 11, 1990. It made permanent a temporary ban on deportation of Chinese nationals, which President George H. W. Bush had created with Executive Order 12711.
One provision of the act was that permanent residency status granted to a Chinese national under the act would subtract from the immigration spaces available in later years. The stated purpose of the CSPA was to prevent political persecution of Chinese students in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Though targeted at students with expiring visas, the CSPA covered even Chinese nationals who had entered the U.S. illegally. The main sources of illegal aliens from China at the time were smuggling gangs known as Snakeheads from the Fujian. Those gangs have smuggled unskilled labor into New Zealand, Japan, and other Pacific Rim nations for some decades.
See also: Chinatown: Smuggling of immigrants.