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. [...]
...
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.
...
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.
...
[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.
...
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.
...
Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.
...
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.
...
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.
A history of events leading up the Chinese Exclusion Act and what happened after.
...
...
...
...
...
...
...