Download FRONTIER PANEL – CHINESE

FRONTIER PANEL – CHINESE
POPULATION EXPANSION
The first settlers from the United States were mostly
midwestern farmers of Anglo-Saxon descent. With the gold
rush a more cosmopolitan mix appeared. Ships sailed into
San Francisco from the Atlantic Seaboard, Europe, and the
Orient. In 1850 more than half of the Californians were in
their 20s, typically male and single. Only a few hundred
Chinese lived in the state in 1850, but two years later one
resident out of 10 was Chinese; most performed menial
labor. Irish laborers came with the railroad construction
boom during the 1860s. The Irish, French, and Italians
tended to settle in San Francisco. As Los Angeles began to
grow at the end of the 19th century, it lured Mexicans,
Russians, and Japanese, but primarily an additional influx
of Anglo-Saxons from the Midwest.
In the 1860s, when Chinese laborers immigrated to the
United States to build the Central Pacific Railroad, a new
population with both physical and cultural differences had
to be accommodated within the racial worldview. While
industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap
labor, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the
presence of this “yellow peril.”
EXCLUSION
The political climate after 1876 was distinguished by
labor problems and the activity of those seeking to control
mining, irrigation, and fruit growing through state funding.
Economic problems were particularly intensified by the
forces seeking the exclusion of the Chinese, who provided
cheap labor. A slump in the 1870s brought increased
discontent among the unions. The problems and agitation
of the period resulted in the constitution of 1879, which
carried reforms but discriminated against the Chinese. An
exclusion law passed by the U.S. Congress that year was
killed by presidential veto (by President Hayes on the
ground that it abrogated rights guaranteed to the Chinese
by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868), but in the next year, a
treaty agreement with China allowed U.S. regulation of
Chinese immigration. In 1880 these treaty provisions were
revised to permit the United States to suspend the
immigration of Chinese. This was followed by the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1882, which suspended Chinese
immigration for 10 years. The Chinese Exclusion Act was
renewed in 1892 for another 10-year period, & in 1902 the
suspension of Chinese immigration was made indefinite.
Congress reenacted exclusion legislation against the
Chinese. By cutting off cheap labor, exclusion helped make
the huge single-crop ranches unprofitable and led to the
proliferation of smaller farms growing varied crops. This act
was both the culmination of more than a decade of
agitation on the West Coast for the exclusion of the
Chinese and an early sign of the coming change in the
traditional U.S. philosophy of welcoming virtually all
immigrants.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first significant
restriction on free immigration in U.S. history. The few
Chinese non-laborers who wished to immigrate had to
obtain certification from the Chinese government that they
were qualified to immigrate, which tended to be difficult to
prove. The Act also affected Chinese who were already in
the U.S. Any Chinese who left the U.S. had to obtain
certifications for re-entry, & the Act clarified that the law
applied to ethnic Chinese regardless of their country of
origin. Extensions of the Act made Chinese permanent
aliens by excluding them from citizenship.
DISCRIMINATION
During this time, Governor John Bigler blamed the
Chinese for depressed wage levels. Another significant
anti-Chinese group was the Supreme Order of Caucasians
with some 64 chapters statewide. One of the main critics of
the Chinese Exclusion Act however, was Republican
Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts who
described the Act as “nothing less than the legalization of
racial discrimination.”
Discrimination grew strong, especially against Asians.
An alien land law intended to discourage ownership of land
by Asians was not ruled unconstitutional until 1952. At one
time the testimony of Chinese in courts was declared void.
Separate schools for Asians were authorized by law until
1936, and not until 1943 was the Chinese Exclusion Act
repealed by Congress. As discrimination against the
Chinese flared, Japanese were encouraged to immigrate,
and in 1900 alone more than 12,000 entered California.
Prospering as farmers, they came to control more than 10
percent of the farmland by 1920, while constituting only 2
percent of the population. Los Angeles became the center
of the nation's Japanese community, while San Francisco's
Chinatown became the nation's largest Chinese settlement.
EFFECTS & AFTERMATH
Much of the population increase during westward
expansion was due to the more than 9,000,000 immigrants
who entered the United States in the last 20 years of the
century, the largest number to arrive in any comparable
period up to that time. From the earliest days of the
republic until 1895, the majority of immigrants had always
come from northern or western Europe. Beginning in 1896,
however, the great majority of the immigrants were from
southern or eastern Europe. Nervous Americans, already
convinced that immigrants wielded too much political power
or were responsible for violence and industrial strife, found
new cause for alarm, fearing that the new immigrants could
not easily be assimilated into American society. Those
fears gave added stimulus to agitation for legislation to limit
the number of immigrants eligible for admission to the
United States and led, in the early 20th century, to quota
laws favoring immigrants from northern and western
Europe.
For all practical purposes, the Exclusion Act, along with the
restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in
place in 1882 & prevented it from growing & assimilating
into U.S. society as European immigrant groups did.
However, limited immigration from China continued to
occur until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Later,
the Immigration Act of 1924 would restrict immigration even
further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants &
extending the restriction to 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the
Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel
Island State Park in San Francisco Bay served as the
processing center for most of the 56,113 Chinese
immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning
from China; upwards of 30% more who showed up & were
returned to China. After the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, which destroyed City Hall, along with the
records, many immigrants (known as “paper sons”) falsely
claimed familial ties to resident Chinese-American citizens,
which could not be disproved.
REPEAL & CURRENT STATUS
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943
Magnuson Act, allowing a national quota of 105 Chinese
immigrants per year, although large scale Chinese
immigration did not occur until the passage of the
Immigration Act of 1965.