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.