CHINESE IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

'Chinese immigration to the United States' has come in many waves. Like all the American immigration experiences, the Chinese immigration has seen both hardship and success.

Contents

1800 to 1950

Gold Rush

Transcontinental Railroad

Settlement

Discrimination

1950 to present

Notes

See also

1800 to 1950

The first Chinese arrived in the United States around 1820. Subsequent immigrants that came from the 1820s up to the late 1840s were mainly men. In 1852, the ratio of Chinese males to females in California was 1,685:1.^[1] Due to the lack of Chinese women in the United States at that time, a number of men intermarried with Americans of Eastern European descent. However, the majority of male immigrants lived as bachelors.

Gold Rush

The first major immigration wave started around the 1850s. The West Coast of North America was being rapidly colonized during the California Gold Rush, while southern China suffered from severe political and economic instability due to the weakness of the Qing Dynasty government, internal rebellions such as the Taiping Rebellion, and external pressures such as the Opium Wars. As a result, many Chinese emigrated from the poor Toisanese- and Cantonese-speaking area in Guangdong province to the United States in order to work. The Chinese population rose from 2,716 in 1851 to 63,000 by 1871. 77% were located in California, with the rest scattered across the West, the South, and New England. Those in California tried their hand at mining for gold. Eventually, protest rose from white miners to eliminate the growing competition from foreign miners. From 1852 to 1870 (when the Civil Rights Act was passed), the California legislature enforced a series of taxes aimed at foreign miners who were not U.S. citizens. Given that the Chinese were ineligible for citizenship at that time and constituted the largest percentage of the non-white population, the tax revenue was generated almost exclusively by them.

Chinese immigrant workers building the railroad in the snow.

Chinese came to America in large numbers as individual miners during the 1849 California Gold Rush with 40,400 being recorded as arriving from 1851-1860, and again in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited large labor gangs, many on five year contracts, to build its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese laborers worked out well and thousands more were recruited until the railroad's completion in 1869. Chinese labor provided the massive labor needed to build the majority of the Central Pacific's difficult railroad tracks through the Sierra Nevada mountains and across Nevada. In the decade 1861-70 64,301 are recorded as arriving, followed by 123,201 in 1871-80 and 61,711 in 1881-1890.

Transcontinental Railroad

Portrait of Chinese-American men who include Wa Chin and Tang Ya-Shun in Georgetown (Clear Creek County), Colorado. Dated 1890-1910.

After the gold rush wound down in the 1860s, the majority of the work force found jobs in the railroad industry. For the Central Pacific Railroad, hiring Chinese as opposed to whites kept labor costs down by 1/3, since the company would not pay their board or lodging. This type of steep wage inequality was commonplace at the time. Laborers used to enduring poor living conditions in their homeland were willing to sign up for prepaid long-term labor contracts to work in the U.S. Many gave the sum of money to their family and did not expect to be able to return home alive. Chinese labor was integral to the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. After that project was completed, many workers relocated and looked for employment elsewhere, such as in farming, manufacturing firms, garment industries, and paper mills. However, widespread anti-Chinese discrimination and violence from whites, including riots and murders, drove many into self-employment.
Most came from Southern China looking for a better life; escaping a high rate of poverty left after the Taiping Rebellion. This immigration may have been as high as 90% male as most immigrated with the thought of returning home to start a new life. Those that stayed in America faced the lack of suitable Chinese brides as Chinese women were not allowed to emigrate in significant numbers after 1872. As a result, the mostly bachelor communities slowly aged in place with very low Chinese birth rates.

Settlement

1892 certificate of residence for Hang Jung: From Papers relating to Chinese in California

Across the country, Chinese immigrants clustered in Chinatowns. The largest population was in San Francisco. Some estimated over half of these early immigrants were from Taishan. At first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well tolerated and well-received. As the easy gold dwindled and competition for it intensified, animosity to the Chinese and other foreigners increased. Organized labor groups demanded that California's gold was only for Americans, and began to physically threaten foreigners' mines or gold diggings. Most, after being forcibly driven from the mines, settled in Chinese enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. A few settled in towns throughout the west. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingman's Party as well as by Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels.

Discrimination

The flow of immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868) was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This act outlawed all Chinese immigration to the United States and denied citizenship to those already settled in the country. Renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902, the Chinese population declined until the act was repealed in 1943. Official discrimination extended to the highest levels of the U.S. government: in 1888, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, proclaimed the Chinese "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."
Many Western states also enacted discriminatory laws which made it difficult for Chinese and Japanese immigrants to own land and find work. Some of these Anti-Chinese Laws were the Foreign Miners' License tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Chinese could not become citizens because they had been rendered ineligible to citizenship by the 1790 federal law that reserved naturalized citizenship to white persons. This remained in place until voided by the Civil Rights Act of 1870. By then, California had collected $5 million from the Chinese. Another was "An Act to Discourage Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof", which imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of $50 for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship. "To Protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California" was another law that imposed a $2.50 tax per month on all Chinese residing in the state, except Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in mines, or engaged in the production of sugar, rice, coffee or tea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it unlawful for Chinese laborers to enter the United States for the next 10 years and denied naturalized citizenship to Chinese already here. Initially intended for Chinese laborers, it was broadened in 1888 to include all persons of the Chinese race. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 banned all immigrations from Japan, China and most of Asia. Other laws included the Cubic Air Ordinance, which prohibited Chinese from occupying a sleeping room with less than 500 cubic feet of breathing space between each person, Que Law, which forced Chinese with long hair to pay a tax or to cut it, and Anti-Miscegenation Act of 1889 that prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women (and terminating citizenship for white American women who married an Asian man, Cable Act of 1922). These laws were not overturned until the 1950s, at the dawn of the modern American civil rights movement.

1950 to present

With the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and later the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, a second wave of Chinese immigration began. There was an increase in immigration of professionals from Mainland China, which began to allow for emigration in 1977. This group of Chinese tended to cluster in suburban areas and to avoid urban Chinatowns and speak fluent Mandarin in addition to their native dialects.
A third wave of recent immigrants consisted of undocumented aliens, chiefly from Fujian province who went to the United States in search of lower-status manual jobs. These aliens tend to concentrate in urban areas such as New York City and there is often very little contact between these Chinese and higher-educated professionals. While most speak some Mandarin, they mostly use Min, which, although somewhat close but not mutually intelligible to Taiwanese or Min Nan, does not generally produce much affinity with Taiwanese Americans. The amount of immigration from this group has begun to decrease as the economic situation in Fujian improves. Typically, an immigrant from Fujian will pay a snakehead several tens of thousands of dollars to be transported to the United States, as well as room and board. The funds for the trip are provided by the immigrant's family and village. The immigrant will usually work for three years, the first two to pay off the debt and the third as profit.
Ethnic Chinese immigration to the United States since 1965 has been aided by the fact that the United States maintains separate quotas for Mainland China and Hong Kong. Absent from the list of Chinese Americans are immigrants from Hong Kong, who because of immigration law, tended to immigrate to Canada.
In the 1980s, there was widespread concern by the PRC over a brain drain as graduate students were not returning to the PRC. This exodus worsened after the Tiananmen protests of 1989.
Many immigrants from the PRC benefited from the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 which granted permanent residency status to immigrants from the PRC. One unintended side effect of the law was that the primary beneficiaries of the law were undocumented Fujianese immigrants, who unlike the Chinese graduate students would have had no chance to gain permanent residency through normal means.

Notes

1. Strangers From A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, , Ronald, Takaki, Back Bay Books, ,

See also

★ Chinese American

★ Asian American Immigration History

★ Immigration to the United States

★ Chinese Exclusion Act