To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing

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СКАЧАТЬ example, one of the earliest efforts to exclude the Chinese from California by state law was passed in the assembly as a companion to a measure barring entry to those of African descent. And certainly the major political parties stressed concepts of race superiority which excluded African Americans and by implication other people of color from the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. But in Congress’s 1870 deliberations over whether to liberalize the naturalization laws by extending them to all aliens irrespective of origin or color, the right to naturalize was extended to aliens of African descent and denied to Chinese because of their “undesirable qualities.”⁵

      Republicans and Democrats alike tended toward nativism. In California, the antagonism between old stock and European immigrants subsided and coalesced. By 1876, both major political parties had adopted anti-Chinese planks in their national platforms, and the Workingman’s Party of California emerged as a leading force against Chinese immigration.⁶

      An important element in the anti-Chinese crusade was doubt that they could successfully assimilate into American society. The assumption was that Chinese were infusible elements—an assumption that would trouble melting-pot assimilationists and certainly the more extreme supporters of Anglo-conformity. Until the coming of the Chinese, no immigrant group had differed sufficiently from the Anglo-American root stock to compromise basic social institutions such as Christian religion and ethics, monogamy, or natural rights theory. Social foundations were not negotiable to advocates of “Americanization.” The immigrant had to convert and shed foreign, heathen ways. The alternative was total exclusion of culturally distant groups. American opinion leaders may have had a real melting pot in mind prior to the arrival of the Chinese, albeit one which already excluded Native Americans and African Americans, but the idea of adding Chinese to the mix was not acceptable.

      As immigrants, the Chinese posed the first serious threat to the melting pot concept. They were believed to be immutable, tenaciously clinging to old customs, and recalcitrantly opposing progress and moral improvement. Nonwhite and non-Christian at a time when either trait alone was a serious handicap, the Chinese looked different, dressed differently, ate differently, and followed customs wholly unfamiliar to Americans.⁷

      Racist beliefs that evolved during the three decades of unrestricted Chinese immigration added a biological dimension to Chinese exclusion. Oriental blood supposedly determined the oriental thoughts and oriental habits that precluded any possibility that the Chinese could be Americanized. The failure to extend the naturalization laws in 1870 officially recognized this in denying citizenship to Chinese immigrants. Even supporters of unrestricted Chinese immigration made it clear that they could not conceive of the Chinese as a permanent part of American society. An 1876 congressional commission report concluded that the denial of naturalization to Chinese was necessary to preserve republican institutions. Irish newspapers noted that “degraded races” such as “Niggers and Chinamen” were incapable of understanding the democratic principles for which the Irish had continually fought.⁸

      Anti-immigrant sentiment was initially legitimized at state and local levels. Chinese immigrants were barred from operating laundries and testifying at trials. Latin miners were targeted for special taxes. All aliens were barred from owning land. Antimiscegenation laws prevented the marriage of whites to people of color. The rights of non-English speakers were trashed in public schools. But after the 1875 Supreme Court ruling in Cby Lung v. Freeman that states could not pass laws regulating immigration,⁹ greater pressure was placed on Congress to exclude.

      The Chinese were the first ethnic group to be targeted in sweeping federal legislation. Although Chinese laborers were at first encouraged and welcomed, they soon encountered fierce racial animosity in the 1840s, as did miners from Mexico, South America, Hawaii, and even France. Irish Roman Catholics in California, replicating the racial prejudice they had suffered on the East Coast, rallied against the brown, black, and yellow foreigners in the mines. This racial prejudice, exacerbated by fear of competition from aliens, prompted calls for restrictive federal immigration laws.

      California’s foreign miners’ tax of 1850 effectively forced out Latino miners who refused to pay the $20 per month license fee. But the Chinese remained, thereby standing out as the largest body of foreigners in California and eventually feeling the full weight of prejudice upon them. “Anticoolie” clubs (low-wage Chinese laborers were referred to as “coolies”) surfaced in the early 1850s, and sporadic boycotts of Chinese-made goods soon followed. By 1853 anti-Chinese editorials were common in San Francisco newspapers.

      For a time this sentiment gained powerful political backing from the newly formed Know-Nothing Party. Organized in the 1850s to exclude all foreign-born citizens from office, to discourage immigration, and to “keep America pure,” the Know-Nothing Party demanded a twenty-one-year naturalization period. On the East Coast it fought against Irish Catholic immigration, while on the West Coast the target was usually the Chinese.¹⁰

      By the late 1860s the Chinese question became a major issue in California and Oregon politics. Many white workers felt threatened by the competition they perceived from the Chinese, while many employers continued to seek them as inexpensive laborers and subservient domestics. Employment of Chinese by the Central Pacific Railroad was by this time at its peak. Anticoolie clubs increased in number, and mob attacks against Chinese became frequent. Seldom outdone in such matters, many newly organized labor unions were by then demanding legislation against Chinese immigration. The Chinese were at once resented for their resourcefulness in turning a profit on abandoned mines and for their reputed frugality. Much of this resentment was transformed into or sustained by a need to preserve “racial purity” and “Western civilization.”

      In 1879 a measure was placed on the California ballot to determine public sentiment: 900 favored the Chinese, while 150,000 were opposed. During the 1881 session of Congress, twenty-five anti-Chinese petitions were presented by a number of civic groups from many states. The California legislature declared a legal holiday to facilitate anti-Chinese public rallies that attracted thousands of demonstrators.

      Responding to this national clamor, the forty-seventh Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act on May 6, 1882. The law excluded laborers for ten years. But leaders of the anti-Chinese movement were not satisfied. After pressing for a series of treaties and new laws, they succeeded in securing an indefinite ban on Chinese immigration in 1904.

      Similar reactions eventually led to the exclusion of other Asian immigrants. Japanese immigration was first curtailed in 1907, then permanently barred in 1924. An Asiatic Barred Zone was established in 1917 partly in response to negative reactions to immigrants from India. But the Zone excluded immigrants from Arabia to Indochina, and included Burma, Thailand, the Malay States, Indian Islands, Asiatic Russia, the Polynesian Islands, parts of Arabia and Afghanistan, as well as India. Filipinos, who were regarded as nationals of the United States after the U.S. takeover of the islands in 1898, were given an annual immigration quota of only fifty after Philippine independence was finalized in 1946.

      MAKING AMERICANS OUT OF MEXICANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS

      The Mexican immigration experience shares commonalities with that of the various Asian groups, including the exploitation of workers and a challenge to family reunification. Immigration from Mexico to the United States, even well into the twentieth century, was largely unrestricted. But as soon as economic, social, and political pressures in the United States rose to certain levels, the restrictions quickly fell into place. In 1821 Mexico took control of California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada when it declared its independence from Spain. Within twenty-five СКАЧАТЬ