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“Exclusion of the Chinese” (1884)

 

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 Context: From 1882 until 1943, most Chinese were barred from U.S. immigration—the first time that race and nationality were used as a legal immigration criteria. Only Chinese travelers, merchants, teachers, students, and those born in the U.S. could enter the country. And federal law prohibited Chinese residents from becoming naturalized citizens regardless of how long they had legally worked and lived in the U.S. This article appeared in the North American Review.

 

The Chinese bill established as the policy of the United States . . . the exclusion of Chinese laborers from our territory. . . The present bill was undoubtedly a concession to the clamorous demands of California. . . The wisdom and justice of exclusion, and its consistency with the object and spirit of our institutions, are still open questions.

 

The policy of the Chinese bill . . . appeared to be contradictory of the principles of the Revolution and antagonistic to the spirit and subversive of the ends of our institutions whereas, it is fully in conformity with them. The people of the Pacific coast perceive a national danger which has escaped the perception of the political philosophers of New England, and they now supplicate the assistance of the sentiment which antagonized slavery when it was sapping the manhood of the masses of America. They object to the influx of Chinese laborers because it is calculated to sweep from existence our great middle class, and to reduce the mass of our population to the condition of laborers destitute of property and excluded from the comforts, the refinements, and the means of intellectual and physical culture and of progress which our civilization affords, and because it threatens to overthrow our domestic institutions and the democratic condition of our society. The people of the Pacific coast do not intend a real departure from the policy of the founders of our Government. The fathers embraced the whole human race in their philanthropic sympathy. . . But the reason for the policy ceases when its operation threatens the destruction of our democratic society and the dissolution of our republican institutions. It does this when it threatens the existence of our domestic institution, and the continuance of the normal industrial and economical condition of our society.

 

This Chinese labor element is calculated to produce, and has actually set on foot, a destructive social change. It is a change similar to that wrought by slavery. Slavery undoubtedly produced immense wealth both in the North and the South, but it was effecting a fatal change in the structure of society. It was working a division of society into three strongly marked classes: First, a class of white aristocrats, composed of the white land-owners and of the men of the professions and of literature; second, a class of black slaves and, third, a class of miserable whites, who fell from the first class to sink to a level socially little above that of slavery. The aristocratic class was becoming narrower by the dropping out of bankrupt land-owners and by the consolidation of estates. The whites of modest property were becoming steadily impoverished by competition with their slave-owning neighbors. . . It was impossible for them, by labor and frugality, to accumulate wealth to become thus independent, and to furnish their children with refining surroundings and with an education. In such a social state, poverty and ignorance were the lot of the major portion of the white population, or would soon be.

 

In 1880, an analogous condition of things seemed imminent in the West, owing to the presence of a considerable Chinese laboring population. . . They easily adapt themselves to work requiring no great capacity, and they flock to any manual employment for which they are fitted, making the competition therein extreme. They are submissive laborers, but they are incompetent for positions where managing ability, good judgment, and energy are required. They come from the lowest stratum of Chinese society. . . . They are the only class of Chinese who are disposed, and who need, to come to America. . . . They are almost exclusively employed in woolen mills, fish canneries, and sugar manufactories; they form a majority of the employees in sack and boot factories, and in fruit-canning establishments. With each year they acquire facility in some operation of industry peculiar to our society. That their serviceableness is due to imitativeness is evidenced by the wages in the woolen mills of California. In New England there are ten or more classes of operatives. Wages vary with each class, and range from $5.34 to $11.00 per week. In California, the Chinese operatives, constituting ninety percent of the workmen in such mills, receive a uniform compensation of $5.25 per week.

 

These male laborers bring no families with them. However long their stay, no individual of these thousands of laborers shows an inclination to acquire a wife and family. As general is the absence of any intention to acquire property, or of the faintest desire to become more than mere laborers upon this continent. The laborer intends to save a little fortune and then return to China; but the majority spend their earnings in opium and gambling, and die in America. . . . They sleep in bunks or in lofts, from six to twenty in a house, and cook over a furnace or broken stove. The cellars beneath are either opium dens or the quarters of the only women in Chinatown, the prostitutes who minister to the apathetic passions of this laboring population. In the city of San Francisco, the Chinese population of twenty thousand, with the exception of a few washermen, is crowded into less than twelve blocks. . . .

 

[As a result of competition with Chinese labor] millions of our citizens of little property, citizens possessing homesteads or little fortunes, men who had commenced with their hands alone for capital, would cease to exist as such. They would either pass up by increased prosperity to the higher classes, or sink down, through mistakes, misfortune, or competition, to the propertyless and hence the laboring classes. But of this latter class none would rise to replenish the middle class. Thus, the present great middle class would disappear. Society would consist of a single unbroken rank of aristocratic wealth with the professions, and a common unbroken level of laborers, toilers, and bondsmen in reality. The former class would become smaller in proportion to the whole population, but yet it would become richer and more powerful in its hold upon the regular means of political influence. The latter class would form a majority, and a constantly increasing majority.

 

Edited by: Prof. Stephen Duncan

 

Primary Source Material: The North American Review. Volume 139, Issue 334, Sept. 1884.

 

"Exclusion of the Chinese" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license by Prof. Stephen Duncan at Bronx Community College.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.