Labor and Chinese Exclusion in US History

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white working-class activists and their allies in the United States acted as a political vanguard in efforts to limit the entry, naturalization, and civil rights of Chinese migrants, especially laborers. First in California in the 1850s, and then throughout the North American West and the nation at large, a militant racist-nativist minority of trade unionists and labor reformers assailed Chinese as an economic, cultural, and political threat to white workers, their living standards, and the republic itself. Uniting with Democrats and independent antimonopoly parties, workers and their organizations formed the base of a cross-class anti-Chinese movement that, by the 1880s, eroded Republicans’ support for Chinese labor migrants and won severe legal restrictions against them. Organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor and its leadership, played a key role, lobbying Congress to refine and extend Chinese exclusion and erect similar barriers against other Asian migrants, including Japanese and Filipinos. Anti-Chinese labor advocates also influenced and coordinated with parallel pro-exclusion movements abroad, leading a global white working-class reaction to the Chinese labor diaspora across parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In many ways, anti-Asian working-class nativism prefigured early-20th-century measures placing unprecedented constraints on white European migration. Yet organized labor barely opposed the demise of anti-Chinese and national-quota restrictions during World War II and the Cold War, as diplomatic demands, economic expansion, and a changing international system weakened domestic political support for exclusion.

Policing, Profits, and the Rise of Immigration Detention in New York's “Chinese Jails”

“Policing, Profits, and the Rise of Immigration Detention in New York's ‘Chinese Jails’” explains how Chinese exclusion law created a “detention economy” in upstate New York. From 1900–1909, Northern New York jails held thousands of Chinese migrants who had been apprehended by immigration authorities crossing the U.S.-Canada border, and had filed habeas corpus claims in district courts. While scholarship on Chinese Exclusion has addressed the legal battles around due process, it has overlooked the detention infrastructure that these claims produced. Because the federal immigration service had no detention facilities in the region, they “boarded out” Chinese detainees at local jails, paying counties a nightly rate for each migrant held. These contracts transformed Chinese migrants into a commodity for rural communities looking to secure federal cash, with four Northern New York counties constructing separate “Chinese Jails” in order to increase the number of Chinese migrants they could incarcerate. This article challenges the scholarship that has presented immigration detention as a Cold War era development, instead showing how communities profited off jailing migrants at the turn of the century. Through the case of U.S. v. Sing Tuck, I argue that immigration officials eventually turned to the courts to streamline deportations and reduce their need for jail space.

Imigran dan Warga Keturunan Jepang di Amerika Serikat: Sentimen-Sentimen Terhadapnya Dulu dan Kini

Abstrak Sejarah mencatat sentimen rasial yang tertuang dalam produk undang-undang Amerika Serikat seperti Chinese Exclusion Act 1882, pada masanya turut menyasar para imigran dan warga keturunan Jepang. Beragam tindakan kekerasan verbal maupun fisik dan diskriminasi dialami imigran Asia, dalam konteks ini Cina dan Jepang, ketika itu. Lebih lanjut, merebaknya Covid-19 dalam kurun dua tahun ini kembali memunculkan masalah sosial serupa bagi komunitas imigran dan warga keturunan Asia, termasuk Jepang. Isu berhembus memojokan para pendatang dan warga keturunan Asia sebagai tertuduh pembawa virus Covid-19. Dengan demikian, aksi-aksi rasis, diskriminatif, dan xenophobic terrekam pada dua konteks waktu yang berbeda. Dengan mengumpulkan data-data melalui metode studi pustaka dan kemudian mengolahnya, diketahui terdapat perbedaan dan kesamaan fenomena di tengah sentimen-sentimen yang menarget imigran maupun warga keturunan Jepang di Amerika. Perbedaan yang dimaksud merujuk pada aspek pemicu. Pada masa-masa awal kedatangannya, sentimen terhadap imigran Jepang di Amerika Serikat dipicu oleh masalah kesempatan kerja dan kecurigaan bernuansa politik. Sementara itu, pada kurun waktu pandemi Covid-19 sentimen anti-Asian dipicu oleh isu penyebaran virus Covid-19. Di sisi lain, terdapat kesamaan dalam munculnya sentimen-setimen anti-Asian dulu dan kini yaitu tersebarnya informasi palsu dan provokatif, merebaknya prasangka dan diskriminasi rasial, adanya peran tokoh publik dalam menyebarkan kebencian, dan adanya kebijakan hukum yang diambil oleh otoritas untuk merespon isu terkait. Kata Kunci: Amerika Serikat, Jepang, Imigran, Xenophobia, Covid-19 AbstractChinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was one of the US Federal Laws restricting immigration, was meant to target Chinese immigrants at that time. Being among the Asian communities in the US, the Japanese immigrants were unsurprisingly affected. Racial discrimination and hatred began to arise as the implementation of the law was going on. Various acts of verbal and physical violence suffered by the Asian (Chinese and Japanese) immigrants at that time. Further, the outbreak of Covid-19 in the past two years has raised similar social problems for the immigrant communities and people of Asian descent including Japanese. The issue of cornering the immigrants and the residents of this descent as being accused of carrying the Covid-19 virus arises. Various acts of hatred begin to target the immigrants and citizens of Asian descent. Applying the library research method and processing the relevant data, there found differences and similarities amidst the sentiments targeting the immigrants and citizens of Japanese descent in America. The difference refers to the triggering aspect. In the early days of their arrival, the anti-Japanese immigrant sentiment in the United States was more motivated by the problems of job opportunity and political suspicions. Meanwhile, during the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-Asian sentiment was triggered by the issue of the spread of the Covid-19 virus. On the other hand, there are similarities to the emergence of anti-Asian sentiments today including the spread of false and provocative information, the spread of racial prejudice and discrimination, the role of public figures in spreading hatred, and the existence of legal policies taken by authorities to respond to the related issues. Keywords: the United States, Japanese, Immigrants, Xenophobia, Covid-19

The “Phantasmatic” Chinatown in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” and Mark Twain’s Roughing It

This chapter explores Chinatown as an ephemeral site of visual indeterminacy in the 1870s by looking at a number of Californian Chinatown accounts in Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Chinese Empire” (1878) and Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). Late-nineteenth-century Chinatown as an exhibitory locus of authentic Chinese-ness for Western tourists is paradoxically characterized by its mutability rather than realism. By examining the accounts of Jackson and Twain about the Chinese in the 1870s, the decade before the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the paper rethinks the “virtual” existence of Chinatown, its contested nature as a “phantasmatic site” for Western projections and visual consumption, which manifests the potential realization of national transformation in the mythic Orient of the new West.

Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented

Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants’ everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past.

Chinese Elites and U.S. Gatekeeping: Racial Discrimination and Class Privilege in Boston's 1905 King Incident

In 1905, Boston immigration officials detained four Chinese students of the King family, inciting protest from Euro-American elites and sparking an international controversy that gave momentum to the American Boycott movement in Shanghai. A prominent family, the Kings successfully rallied business leaders to take their cause to President Theodore Roosevelt and effectively used the press to articulate Chinese grievances. Bringing to a head the tension between race-based and class-based interpretations of exclusion that troubled the legislation from its inception, the case prompted key reforms in the administration of Chinese exclusion and helped promote a pivot away from the movement for a wholesale “Chinese ban.” An examination of this incident and its role in struggles over immigration law illuminates the conflicted position of Chinese elites—disempowered by race yet empowered by class status—under exclusion. It also provides insights into the agency of Chinese elites in mobilizing resources to combat immigration abuses.

Borders of Salt and Rock

On the Pacific Coast, the transition from boundary survey to day-to-day control took half a century. Canadian and American dependence on Indigenous labor limited the restrictions they could implement. By the mid-1880s, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of settlers shifted the balance of power. Both governments drove the Coast Salish out of the work force and imposed a new geographic order on top of existing Indigenous ones. At the same time, Chinese immigration drove grassroots pressure to reform federal border controls. In the wake of riots, protest, and vigilante justice, the United States passed Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882 and 1888 and Canada developed a head tax.