A history of events leading up the Chinese Exclusion Act and what happened after. ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
A history of events leading up the Chinese Exclusion Act and what happened after.
[D]uring and after completion of the railroad, Chinese immigrants became a more sought after workforce, which effectively put a target on their backs. Increasing numbers of white workers began to resent them. They saw them as a culturally alien workforce, willing and able to do all sorts of jobs for less pay. And it wasn't just railroads. Chinese immigrants now worked in all sorts of West Coast industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, woodcutting, and mining. "While the Chinese constituted less than 10 percent of the population of California in 1870, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of the workforce," writes Beth Lew-Williams in her book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.
As the economy cratered after the Panic of 1873, a scarcity of jobs led to a zero-sum mindset amongst white workers. [...]
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In 1882, after a presidential election [...] Congress passed a forceful bill halting immigration of Chinese workers for twenty years and requiring Chinese immigrants already in the United States to register with the government and obtain "passports" so they could prove their legal status (similar to a "green card" today).
However, President Chester A. Arthur — who had only recently been elevated to the presidency after James Garfield was assassinated — objected to the law and decided to veto it. He believed it was too harsh.
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Arthur's veto, however, proved to be a political disaster. Many Americans erupted with anger. The Knights of Labor, a growing national labor union, organized thousands of workers to protest it. Across California, townspeople burned and hanged President Arthur's effigy. Members of Arthur's own Republican party worried his veto meant that they would fail to win elections on the West Coast for the foreseeable future.
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[T]he Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants — and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.
In the years after the Act's passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against "illegal immigration" — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal.
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Over the course of 1885 and 1886, more than 160 communities across the West Coast would expel their Chinese inhabitants. And they made it abundantly clear to national politicians: many Western voters were not satisfied with the 1882 law.
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland — hoping to carry Western states in his upcoming reelection battle — signed into law another Chinese Exclusion Act that had more teeth than the first one. This one prohibited all Chinese laborers from coming into the country — whether or not they had resided in the United States previously. It was a policy that was easier to enforce and administer. It was also quickly implemented, leaving thousands of Chinese immigrants who had traveled abroad stranded and unable to return. It was also a policy that angered China and marked the beginning of an age in which the United States set restrictive immigration policy unilaterally.
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Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.
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Across California, near the start of the spring of 1886, "large-scale farmers, food processors, and cannery owners realized that they would not be able to carry on their businesses without the Chinese," writes Pfaelzer.
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The crackdown against Chinese immigrants, Qian says, hurt most of the white population in the West. And, further, it made West Coast towns and cities that had large Chinese populations in 1882 less of a magnet for white workers from the East because economic opportunities in these places shriveled. The economists find that Chinese exclusion, in its many 1882 and post-1882 incarnations, slowed down the economic growth and development of the West.
This sentiment spilt over well into WWII. The Japanese concentration camps represented a massive theft of west coast farm land from Asian Americans, which is now worth fantastic amounts of money....
This sentiment spilt over well into WWII. The Japanese concentration camps represented a massive theft of west coast farm land from Asian Americans, which is now worth fantastic amounts of money. Even after being liberated, many lost everything they had.
This sort of happened to the family behind the Kokuho Rose rice (a popular strain of American sushi rice). They were forced to entrust the rice farm to other locals, who looted it and stripped it of everything, though they retained the land and bred that new rice strain after. They were also involved in fighting to overturn a law against "aliens" owning agricultural land or businesses.
Note that what the USDA considers to be a very small amount of farmland, anywhere in the US, is easily worth millions of dollars. California farmland at vineyard or rice growing scale is worth far more. How much generational wealth was stolen? We have a whole class of multimillionaires now who have that because the state and federal governments helped steal it all from Asian Americans.
Concerned question: how do citizens escape from this same trap? Income inequality and speculation --> bust --> unemployment make people angry, and while a person is smart a mob is dumb. It doesn't...
Concerned question: how do citizens escape from this same trap? Income inequality and speculation --> bust --> unemployment make people angry, and while a person is smart a mob is dumb.
Shortly after, a mob of white residents stormed into the city's Chinatown chanting "Hang all the Chinamen!" and "Burn Chinatown!" City leaders, including the mayor, sheriff, and a Christian minister, intervened to prevent arson and murders, but white gangs looted Chinatown.
It doesn't feel like education is enough. It doesn't sound like position of political, legal or moral authority alone help either. What do we do? I feel like this is going to repeat / is in early stages of repeating yet again -- do we make plans to hide community members? Flee with them? Help send them to safer havens? My hope is that Canada remains less insane. Much easier to cross a friendly land border than what these poor Chinese citizens faced with boats.
People like to say racism in situations like this, or the one the world (and certainly the US) is in the early stages of facing now, but that's really not accurate. It's tribalism, not racism....
Exemplary
People like to say racism in situations like this, or the one the world (and certainly the US) is in the early stages of facing now, but that's really not accurate. It's tribalism, not racism. It's people picking "their team" and deciding everyone else isn't on their team. The team could be a country, a state, a county, a city, a neighborhood.
Since, historically, populations tended to homogenize over generations, newcomers usually stand out physically, if not by custom and culture. New is more scary than old, than familiar. When people get scared, they don't want "scary" things around them. Especially if they perceive those sources of fear as causing the fear.
Now put that in the context of adults, who have bills. Food costs money. A roof over your head costs money. When times get tough, when it becomes uncomfortably mysterious and uncertain whether or not you'll have food and a roof next month, next week, tomorrow, people dial up their survival instincts.
And those instincts tell them to get what they can for themselves. Whatever they can, however they can. Money, food, whatever; they don't have it, they need it, and they want it. If there's not enough to go around, they'll have to get it from someone else. If that person has to go without, that's just what'll happen.
Anyone who insists that's not how they are, not who they are, has never faced these circumstances. Has always had enough. It's really easy to be generous and accommodating when you have what you need. And enough to give some of it away. It's another thing entirely to give the shirt off your back, the food off your plate. And not just your shirt, your plate; the shirt and plate that belongs to your kids, your family.
Is it good, that people get needy and greedy and grabby? No. But it's human. Dogs fight over scraps. Give a starving dog food, then try to take that food. See how likely it is you keep your hand intact. People are just smarter dogs when they're starving.
All over the western world, the wealth classes have taken and taken. Right up to the line. The rise of populism argues they've crossed the line, again. Taken too much. They've denied too many wage increases, raised housing costs too far, pushed food and other basic supplies too high.
It's not mysterious that establishment politics, which has overseen these failures, is not trusted to fix them. If they didn't want these situations to become so dire, they would've done something before now is the thinking desperate voters use when deciding to listen to the populist.
In the same way a coach of a perennially losing team will be blamed, so too are the politicians in power. They had their chances to fix the situation their most vulnerable citizens were in. And didn't. It's remarkably easy for outsiders to say "it's their fault" and use that as a lever to vault to power. It's happening all over the world right now. In Europe, in America.
It'll keep happening until power cracks down to "restore order", or people stop feeling so vulnerable. That uncertainty, that poverty, drives fear. The basic simple fear of going without. Of starving, of being homeless. If "the establishment" politicians all around the world want to return to the good old days where they were comfortably in charge and got to run their countries mostly in peace, they need to change the circumstances that leave voters feeling so afraid.
Wages must go up, costs must go down. Period. Any solution has to boil down to that, and it has to be a rapid boil with a rapid fix and rapid results the populaces can feel. That's what'll dampen their fear, and defang the populists whose only card to play is "it's their fault" while pointing.
If the people they try to point at are helping, fixing problems, the pointing isn't as productive. Doesn't yield as many votes. It'll stop, fade, cease to be a disruptive political force when people stop listening. They'll stop listening when they have other options. When they believe others will help them more than the populists.
Or, the establishment and everyone else can just whine about how evil and sad it is that we're all 'devolving'.
People never evolved. We just had periods of plenty. Then, as ever, other people came along and took more than their share. Leaving others to struggle and starve. Unlike starving dogs, people have tools.
Some of those tools are horrific. But so is starving to death.
I am unfamiliar with this story. Wikipedia in brief: 1992 LA - police brutally beat Mr. Rodney King. The LAPD were acquitted. Then there were riots. Then police decided to only defined wealthy...
I am unfamiliar with this story. Wikipedia in brief: 1992 LA - police brutally beat Mr. Rodney King. The LAPD were acquitted. Then there were riots. Then police decided to only defined wealthy neighborhoods and stop responding to calls. Then Korean Americans had to fend for themselves. What a gong show.
Should note though, that the Korean American defenders were up against African Americans, not whites or wealthy, politically powerful and police backed mobs.
Nevertheless..... neighbors, and neighbors with guns might be the answer -..- certainly I can see the advantage over no neighbors with guns......
I think someone who wanted to investigate this question could learn from the history of jewish people over the last 1800 years. What makes me concerned is how social media has made the process of...
I think someone who wanted to investigate this question could learn from the history of jewish people over the last 1800 years.
What makes me concerned is how social media has made the process of sharing outrage and organizing a mob so much faster. The book the Chaos Machine by Max fisher contains many true accounts of incidents worldwide where online outrage led to harassment, riots and sometimes pogroms.
In times like those we learn about from history, try to survive the best you can, I suppose. It’s unusual for one person to be able to do all that much about sweeping historical trends like this....
In times like those we learn about from history, try to survive the best you can, I suppose. It’s unusual for one person to be able to do all that much about sweeping historical trends like this. Even the actions of presidents can backfire.
But one thing we do learn from reading history is that things used to be a lot worse, which also implies that things are better now. American racism against Asians isn’t gone, but it didn’t win, and now there are about 20 million Asians in the US.
The last election showed that Asian voters are becoming a powerful political force in some California cities. They tend to be pretty interested in education and in law and order.
Company I work for just completed a ten year, billion dollar project. There's photos and press release of big wigs but none of all the workers either. Yes the last rail whatever was racist, but...
As many as 1,200 Chinese immigrants died constructing it. However, on this day of celebration, railroad executives decided to exclude their Chinese workers from the official ceremony and photographs. Ouch.
Company I work for just completed a ten year, billion dollar project. There's photos and press release of big wigs but none of all the workers either. Yes the last rail whatever was racist, but our attitude towards "who is the real builder of infrastructure and economy" hasn't changed.
From Wikipedia, income inequality in the US was really bad right around the time the lynchings happened.
In 1860, the top 1 percent collected almost one-third of property incomes, as compared to 13.7% in 1774. There was a great deal of competition for land in the cities and non-frontier areas during this time period, with those who had already acquired land becoming richer than everyone else. The newly burgeoning financial sector also greatly rewarded the already-wealthy, as they were the only ones financially sound enough to invest.[19]
Same playbook: wealth concentration, competition with cheaper goods, speculative bubble burst, depression, populists urging violent new order.
So dumb that Kearney went to the fancy neighborhood to preach about violence towards the poor and downtrodden. Where were the police then? Was it a convenient way to redirect wealth inequality anger as well as an easier way to get rid of excess, now redundant, labour?
Which is exactly why I was pondering that question: how did a mob of several thousand make it anywhere NEAR the rich neighbourhood except with tacit permission from the rich's cronies. And later...
Which is exactly why I was pondering that question: how did a mob of several thousand make it anywhere NEAR the rich neighbourhood except with tacit permission from the rich's cronies. And later on in Tacoma, the mayor and other political leaders were part of the mob, "where" were the police should be obvious as well.
Oh I misread your post. Probably because this was before cars and phones so it was easier to travel off the beaten path and harder to call for help. There were telegraphs, but I doubt they were...
Oh I misread your post. Probably because this was before cars and phones so it was easier to travel off the beaten path and harder to call for help.
There were telegraphs, but I doubt they were ubiquitous.
But also because your last sentence was probably spot on.
The thing that I find so frustrating and disturbing is how one oppressed group keeps trying to attain acceptance by targeting another. 1877 is just a few decades after some of the worst anti-Irish...
In late 1877, an Irish immigrant in San Francisco named Denis Kearney founded The Workingmen's Party of California. Kearney articulated a populist politics that combined pro-labor and anti-corporate rhetoric with virulent anti-Chinese racism.
The thing that I find so frustrating and disturbing is how one oppressed group keeps trying to attain acceptance by targeting another. 1877 is just a few decades after some of the worst anti-Irish violence in the US.
In 1854, an anti-Catholic mob in Ellsworth, Maine, dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst—who had circulated a petition denouncing the use of the King James Bible in local schools—into the streets where they stripped him and sheltered his body in hot tar and feathers. That same year, the Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before hoisting an American flag from the belfry and setting the building ablaze. When the bishop of Portland returned to the city a year later to lay a cornerstone for the church’s replacement, another mob chased him away and beat him.
The violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky, in August 1855 when armed Know-Nothing members guarding polling stations on an election day launched street fights against German and Irish Catholics. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Between 20 and 100 people, including a German priest fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed. Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the riot’s aftermath, but no one was ever prosecuted for crimes committed on “Bloody Monday.
Well, it worked for them, no? The Irish are firmly in the “white” camp now, and Catholics are not particularly discriminated against. There’s been several catholic presidents since then.
Well, it worked for them, no? The Irish are firmly in the “white” camp now, and Catholics are not particularly discriminated against. There’s been several catholic presidents since then.
It "worked," but I find it extremely depressing and a strike against humans as a species that, having suffered injustice we are more likely to use that experience to punch down than to extend a...
It "worked," but I find it extremely depressing and a strike against humans as a species that, having suffered injustice we are more likely to use that experience to punch down than to extend a hand to those in a similar position.
Humans are fundamentally selfish, in the end. The time-tested way for an out group to become an in group is to find an even further out group and make them the out group. That being said I think...
Humans are fundamentally selfish, in the end. The time-tested way for an out group to become an in group is to find an even further out group and make them the out group.
That being said I think it’s a common fallacy that people think minorities will automatically band together simply because they share oppression. The enemy of your enemy sometimes is also your enemy. You can even see it in the recent US elections. How could Trump win so much of the Hispanic and Asian American vote? It’s not so simple, sometimes.
Violence leading to more violence seems more likely than not. Also, I don’t know how much influence there would have been between events more than 20 years apart and on opposite coasts?
Violence leading to more violence seems more likely than not. Also, I don’t know how much influence there would have been between events more than 20 years apart and on opposite coasts?
Anti-Irish sentiment had not disappeared by the 1870s. Here is an article from the Atlantic published in the 1890's just dripping with Anti-Irish racism. Even if Kearney were ignorant of recent...
Anti-Irish sentiment had not disappeared by the 1870s. Here is an article from the Atlantic published in the 1890's just dripping with Anti-Irish racism. Even if Kearney were ignorant of recent history, certainly he was aware of the current state of things.
Thank you for sharing that! There is nothing like reading a 130 year old racist screed against Irish people to remind you how absurd immigrant hatred is.
Thank you for sharing that! There is nothing like reading a 130 year old racist screed against Irish people to remind you how absurd immigrant hatred is.
A history of events leading up the Chinese Exclusion Act and what happened after.
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This sentiment spilt over well into WWII. The Japanese concentration camps represented a massive theft of west coast farm land from Asian Americans, which is now worth fantastic amounts of money. Even after being liberated, many lost everything they had.
This sort of happened to the family behind the Kokuho Rose rice (a popular strain of American sushi rice). They were forced to entrust the rice farm to other locals, who looted it and stripped it of everything, though they retained the land and bred that new rice strain after. They were also involved in fighting to overturn a law against "aliens" owning agricultural land or businesses.
The California "wine king" had similar issues with having land stolen by the Alien Land Laws and being imprisoned in the concentration camps.
Note that what the USDA considers to be a very small amount of farmland, anywhere in the US, is easily worth millions of dollars. California farmland at vineyard or rice growing scale is worth far more. How much generational wealth was stolen? We have a whole class of multimillionaires now who have that because the state and federal governments helped steal it all from Asian Americans.
Concerned question: how do citizens escape from this same trap? Income inequality and speculation --> bust --> unemployment make people angry, and while a person is smart a mob is dumb.
It doesn't feel like education is enough. It doesn't sound like position of political, legal or moral authority alone help either. What do we do? I feel like this is going to repeat / is in early stages of repeating yet again -- do we make plans to hide community members? Flee with them? Help send them to safer havens? My hope is that Canada remains less insane. Much easier to cross a friendly land border than what these poor Chinese citizens faced with boats.
People like to say racism in situations like this, or the one the world (and certainly the US) is in the early stages of facing now, but that's really not accurate. It's tribalism, not racism. It's people picking "their team" and deciding everyone else isn't on their team. The team could be a country, a state, a county, a city, a neighborhood.
Since, historically, populations tended to homogenize over generations, newcomers usually stand out physically, if not by custom and culture. New is more scary than old, than familiar. When people get scared, they don't want "scary" things around them. Especially if they perceive those sources of fear as causing the fear.
Now put that in the context of adults, who have bills. Food costs money. A roof over your head costs money. When times get tough, when it becomes uncomfortably mysterious and uncertain whether or not you'll have food and a roof next month, next week, tomorrow, people dial up their survival instincts.
And those instincts tell them to get what they can for themselves. Whatever they can, however they can. Money, food, whatever; they don't have it, they need it, and they want it. If there's not enough to go around, they'll have to get it from someone else. If that person has to go without, that's just what'll happen.
Anyone who insists that's not how they are, not who they are, has never faced these circumstances. Has always had enough. It's really easy to be generous and accommodating when you have what you need. And enough to give some of it away. It's another thing entirely to give the shirt off your back, the food off your plate. And not just your shirt, your plate; the shirt and plate that belongs to your kids, your family.
Is it good, that people get needy and greedy and grabby? No. But it's human. Dogs fight over scraps. Give a starving dog food, then try to take that food. See how likely it is you keep your hand intact. People are just smarter dogs when they're starving.
All over the western world, the wealth classes have taken and taken. Right up to the line. The rise of populism argues they've crossed the line, again. Taken too much. They've denied too many wage increases, raised housing costs too far, pushed food and other basic supplies too high.
It's not mysterious that establishment politics, which has overseen these failures, is not trusted to fix them. If they didn't want these situations to become so dire, they would've done something before now is the thinking desperate voters use when deciding to listen to the populist.
In the same way a coach of a perennially losing team will be blamed, so too are the politicians in power. They had their chances to fix the situation their most vulnerable citizens were in. And didn't. It's remarkably easy for outsiders to say "it's their fault" and use that as a lever to vault to power. It's happening all over the world right now. In Europe, in America.
It'll keep happening until power cracks down to "restore order", or people stop feeling so vulnerable. That uncertainty, that poverty, drives fear. The basic simple fear of going without. Of starving, of being homeless. If "the establishment" politicians all around the world want to return to the good old days where they were comfortably in charge and got to run their countries mostly in peace, they need to change the circumstances that leave voters feeling so afraid.
Wages must go up, costs must go down. Period. Any solution has to boil down to that, and it has to be a rapid boil with a rapid fix and rapid results the populaces can feel. That's what'll dampen their fear, and defang the populists whose only card to play is "it's their fault" while pointing.
If the people they try to point at are helping, fixing problems, the pointing isn't as productive. Doesn't yield as many votes. It'll stop, fade, cease to be a disruptive political force when people stop listening. They'll stop listening when they have other options. When they believe others will help them more than the populists.
Or, the establishment and everyone else can just whine about how evil and sad it is that we're all 'devolving'.
People never evolved. We just had periods of plenty. Then, as ever, other people came along and took more than their share. Leaving others to struggle and starve. Unlike starving dogs, people have tools.
Some of those tools are horrific. But so is starving to death.
Do what the Roof Koreans did in 1992. I hate to say it, but the barrel of a gun is a near-universal deterrent.
I am unfamiliar with this story. Wikipedia in brief: 1992 LA - police brutally beat Mr. Rodney King. The LAPD were acquitted. Then there were riots. Then police decided to only defined wealthy neighborhoods and stop responding to calls. Then Korean Americans had to fend for themselves. What a gong show.
Should note though, that the Korean American defenders were up against African Americans, not whites or wealthy, politically powerful and police backed mobs.
Nevertheless..... neighbors, and neighbors with guns might be the answer -..- certainly I can see the advantage over no neighbors with guns......
I think someone who wanted to investigate this question could learn from the history of jewish people over the last 1800 years.
What makes me concerned is how social media has made the process of sharing outrage and organizing a mob so much faster. The book the Chaos Machine by Max fisher contains many true accounts of incidents worldwide where online outrage led to harassment, riots and sometimes pogroms.
In times like those we learn about from history, try to survive the best you can, I suppose. It’s unusual for one person to be able to do all that much about sweeping historical trends like this. Even the actions of presidents can backfire.
But one thing we do learn from reading history is that things used to be a lot worse, which also implies that things are better now. American racism against Asians isn’t gone, but it didn’t win, and now there are about 20 million Asians in the US.
The last election showed that Asian voters are becoming a powerful political force in some California cities. They tend to be pretty interested in education and in law and order.
Company I work for just completed a ten year, billion dollar project. There's photos and press release of big wigs but none of all the workers either. Yes the last rail whatever was racist, but our attitude towards "who is the real builder of infrastructure and economy" hasn't changed.
From Wikipedia, income inequality in the US was really bad right around the time the lynchings happened.
Same playbook: wealth concentration, competition with cheaper goods, speculative bubble burst, depression, populists urging violent new order.
So dumb that Kearney went to the fancy neighborhood to preach about violence towards the poor and downtrodden. Where were the police then? Was it a convenient way to redirect wealth inequality anger as well as an easier way to get rid of excess, now redundant, labour?
Generally speaking, beating the poor and black people who dared to go to a fancy neighborhood.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Which is exactly why I was pondering that question: how did a mob of several thousand make it anywhere NEAR the rich neighbourhood except with tacit permission from the rich's cronies. And later on in Tacoma, the mayor and other political leaders were part of the mob, "where" were the police should be obvious as well.
Oh I misread your post. Probably because this was before cars and phones so it was easier to travel off the beaten path and harder to call for help.
There were telegraphs, but I doubt they were ubiquitous.
But also because your last sentence was probably spot on.
I don’t know what happened with the police, but I suspect that policing was a lot different 150 years ago.
The thing that I find so frustrating and disturbing is how one oppressed group keeps trying to attain acceptance by targeting another. 1877 is just a few decades after some of the worst anti-Irish violence in the US.
From https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis
Well, it worked for them, no? The Irish are firmly in the “white” camp now, and Catholics are not particularly discriminated against. There’s been several catholic presidents since then.
It "worked," but I find it extremely depressing and a strike against humans as a species that, having suffered injustice we are more likely to use that experience to punch down than to extend a hand to those in a similar position.
Humans are fundamentally selfish, in the end. The time-tested way for an out group to become an in group is to find an even further out group and make them the out group.
That being said I think it’s a common fallacy that people think minorities will automatically band together simply because they share oppression. The enemy of your enemy sometimes is also your enemy. You can even see it in the recent US elections. How could Trump win so much of the Hispanic and Asian American vote? It’s not so simple, sometimes.
Violence leading to more violence seems more likely than not. Also, I don’t know how much influence there would have been between events more than 20 years apart and on opposite coasts?
Anti-Irish sentiment had not disappeared by the 1870s. Here is an article from the Atlantic published in the 1890's just dripping with Anti-Irish racism. Even if Kearney were ignorant of recent history, certainly he was aware of the current state of things.
Thank you for sharing that! There is nothing like reading a 130 year old racist screed against Irish people to remind you how absurd immigrant hatred is.