Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882

To the memory of

Harry H. L. Kitano

(1926-2002)

Friend, Activist, Scholar

Table of Contents

Title Page

List of Tables

PART I - The Golden Door Closes and Opens, 1882–1965

CHAPTER ONE - The Beginnings of Immigration Restriction, 1882–1917

CHAPTER TWO - The 1920s: The Triumph of the Old Nativism

CHAPTER THREE - No New Deal for Immigration

CHAPTER FOUR - World War II and After: The Barriers Begin to Drop

CHAPTER FIVE - Admitting Displaced Persons: 1946-1950

CHAPTER SIX - The Cold War and Immigration

CHAPTER SEVEN - Lyndon Johnson and the End of the Quota System

PART II - Changing Patterns in a Changing World, 1965-2001

CHAPTER EIGHT - Immigrants from Other Worlds: Asians

CHAPTER NINE - Immigrants from Other Worlds: Latinos

CHAPTER TEN - Refugees and Human Rights: Cubans, Southeast Asians, and Others

The Case of Elián Gonzales

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Immigration Reform: Myths and Realities

CHAPTER TWELVE - Controlling Our Borders: Struggles over Immigration Policy

EPILOGUE - Immigration After 9/11

Acknowledgments

ALSO BY ROGER DANIELS

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes

Copyright Page

List of Tables

TABLE 1.1

TABLE 1.2

TABLE 2.1

TABLE 2.2

TABLE 3.1

TABLE 3.2

TABLE 3.3

TABLE 3.4

TABLE 4.1

TABLE 4.2

TABLE 6.1

TABLE 7.1

TABLE 7.2

TABLE 8.1

TABLE 8.2

TABLE 9.1

TABLE 9.2

TABLE 9.3

TABLE 10.1

TABLE 10.2

TABLE 12.1

TABLE 12.2a

TABLE 12.2b

TABLE 12.2c

TABLE 12.3

TABLE 12.4

PART I

The Golden Door Closes and Opens, 1882–1965

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginnings of Immigration Restriction, 1882–1917

In the beginning Congress created the Chinese Exclusion Act. Like much of what Congress has done about immigration since then, it was conceived in ignorance, was falsely presented to the public, and had consequences undreamt of by its creators. That May 1882 statute, which has long been treated as a minor if somewhat disreputable incident, can now be seen as a nodal point in the history of American immigration policy. It marked the moment when the golden doorway of admission to the United States began to narrow and initiated a thirty-nine-year period of successive exclusions of certain kinds of immigrants, 1882–1921, followed by twenty-two years, 1921–43, when statutes and administrative actions set narrowing numerical limits for those immigrants who had not otherwise been excluded. During those years a federal bureaucracy was created to control immigration and immigrants, a bureaucracy whose initial raison d’etre was to keep out first Chinese and then others who were deemed to be inferior.

The most comprehensive historical work on American immigration policy posits a different periodization, distinguishing between the development of a regulatory system in 1883–1913 and a period that went from regulation to restriction in 1913–29.¹ This seems to me to make a false distinction: in fact each narrowing of the grounds of admission to the United States made subsequent narrowings easier. The same would be true in reverse, when restrictions were progressively relaxed from 1943 on. In the decades following World War II, even as the immigration laws and regulations were loosened and made less discriminatory, the second generation of immigration historians tended to assume that immigration would never again be a major factor in American life. From a vantage point at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, it now appears that the period of intense restriction, which eventually resulted in very small numbers of immigrants, was a temporary rather than a permanent alteration in a general pattern.

The clearest way to demonstrate the apparent continuity of immigration patterns in modern American history is to examine the percentage of foreign-born residents in the country, whom the census began to count only in 1850 vis-à-vis the gross number of immigrants admitted. The data show that between 1860 and 1920, a period when almost every aspect of American life was transformed, the incidence of immigrants in the American population was remarkably stable: in seven successive censuses, about one American in seven was foreign-born, the actual percentages varying only between 13.2 and 14.7 percent. The total number of resident immigrants grew steadily from 1850 to 1930, but their incidence in the population began to decline in 1910 and hit a low of 4.7 percent—less than one American in twenty—in 1970. This was well after immigration had begun to grow again, but the drop in incidence continued due to the high mortality among foreign-born because so many were old and so few immigrants had arrived in the previous four decades.a Because of depression, war, and immigration policy, fewer immigrants came to the United States between 1931 and 1971—7.3 million—than had arrived in the single decade 1901–10, even though the population in 1970 was more than twice as large as that in 1910. Since 1970 the number and incidence of immigrants have risen, but that incidence is still well below traditional levels. The commonly held perception that America is receiving an unprecedented proportion of immigrants is false.

TABLE 1.1

FOREIGN BORN IN THE UNITED STATES, 1850–2000

Source: U.S. Census data. A most useful analysis is in Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–1990, Population Division Working Paper No. 15, Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, February 1999.

TABLE 1.2

IMMIGRATION, 1851-2000

Source: Immigration and Naturalization Service, 2000 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington: GPO, September 2002, Table 1, p. 15.

What has changed, however, have been American attitudes toward immigration and immigrants. One issue that this book explores is the dualistic attitude that most Americans have developed toward immigration and immigrants, on the one hand reveling in the nation’s immigrant past and on the other rejecting much of its immigrant present.

That the United States, along with a number of other settler societies, is a nation of immigrants goes almost without saying.² Despite this, most historians do not accord either immigration or immigration policy the attention these topics deserve, and the space allocated to them in most textbooks is both cursory and spasmodic. Most still maintain the old invidious distinction between the earlier colonists and the later immigrants.

The founding fathers knew that continued immigration was vital to help fill their largely empty new nation. Thomas Jefferson’s list of complaints against King George III in the Declaration of Independence included the charge that the king had endeavored to prevent the population of these States … obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners [and] refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither. Eleven years later the authors of the Constitution clearly had immigration in mind when they provided that Congress should establish a uniform rule of naturalization (Article I, Section 8) and made immigrants eligible for all federal offices save president and vice president. They also protected the foreign slave trade, a major source of immigration, by prohibiting interference with it for twenty years (Article 1, Section 9). When that period expired, Congress, at President Jefferson’s invitation, promptly made that trade illegal, but did not interfere with either the domestic slave trade or slavery itself. The approximately 50,000 slaves smuggled into the United States after 1808 became the first illegal immigrants.

President George Washington and all his successors through John Tyler took it as a given that continued immigration was vital for the health of the nation. While none made as blunt a declaration as the nineteenth-century Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi, who insisted that to govern is to populate, their endorsements were unambiguous. Washington, addressing an association of Irish immigrants just after the battle of Yorktown, said:

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to participate in all of our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.³

The anti-immigrant legislation of the John Adams administration in the late 1790s—the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts—was not so much an effort to restrict immigration as a desperate but vain attempt to keep Federalism in power and Jeffersonians out. Federalists generally opposed only those immigrants who they thought might vote for Jefferson. Apart from that episode, a pro-immigrant consensus long prevailed, a consensus well described in President John Tyler’s 1841 message to Congress: We hold out to the people of other countries an invitation to come and settle among us as members of our rapidly growing family.⁴

Thus for the first sixty years, and beyond, immigration and naturalization laws were minimal. Congress quickly enacted a 1790 statute specifying that naturalization was restricted to free white persons.⁵ The obvious intention was to bar the naturalization of blacks and indentured servants. (The French constitution of 1789 had similarly barred the suffrage of persons in livery.) This naturalization act, as amended, was used later to bar the immigration of Asians, but there is no evidence that Congress had Asians in mind in 1790, and, in fact, a number of Asians were naturalized in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, at least one of them at the behest of the federal government.⁶ And the first statute dealing directly with free immigration was not enacted until 1819, when Congress ordered, as part of a statute dealing with import duties, that every vessel entering an American port deliver a manifest of passengers being landed to the collector of customs for that distriet.⁷ No other immigration statutes were enacted until after the Civil War.

The political elites’ positive consensus about immigration and absence of legislative regulation does not mean that immigration was universally popular. Many Americans had long held hostile feelings toward immigrants in general and certain types of immigrants in particular—a position that has come to be known as nativism. The historian John Higham, its premier explicator, has defined it as intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e., ‘un-American’) connections.⁸ I will use the word more broadly to describe persons, organizations, and movements that oppose immigration or the amount of immigration on whatever grounds, and I shall use it often in the plural.b

American nativisms are older than the United States. For example, early in the eighteenth century a Boston mob tried to prevent the landing of Protestant Irish and later in the century that transplanted Bostonian Benjamin Franklin published one of the first nativist tracts. His Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751) had as its main target the burgeoning German immigration in Pennsylvania, but also demonstrated a broad, if to us curious, racism.

Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Franklin’s comments are typical of American complaints against immigrants irrespective of time and place: they have bad habits (Palatine boors); they are clannish (herding together); they don’t speak English (their Language); and they are going to take over (Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them). These are the arguments used against Italians, Jews, and others a hundred years ago, and may be heard today against Mexicans, Latinos, Hispanics, etc. The targets have changed, but the complaints remain largely the same. Their gravamen is simply this: they are not like us.

Franklin went on to demonstrate the degree to which notions of race are relative rather than absolute. He noted that the number of purely white People in the World is proportionately very small, but his notion of who was white was strangely narrow. Most Europeans were not white but, according to him, swarthy: in this category he mentioned Spaniards, Ital-ians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans except for the Saxons, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

Finally, Franklin proposed an explicitly racist immigration policy: Why Increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?⁹ Yet, although Franklin can justly be called a founding father of American nativism, he was a father with no intellectual children. And it should be noted that this theme does not recur in Franklin’s writings and that the forty-five-year-old American had not yet been abroad when he wrote these sentences. In his old age he encouraged immigration from the European continent.c

No concerted anti-immigrant movement developed in America until almost a century later. But when many thousands of desperately poor Catholic Irish immigrants began arriving at East Coast ports in the mid-1840s, many of them fleeing the consequences of the terrible potato famine that killed more than a million Irish, the pro-immigration consensus was weakened. (Many of the immigrants had been subsidized to emigrate by Irish landlords and the British government.) In reaction, Massachusetts and New York passed laws taxing and otherwise impeding immigrants. These were appealed to the Supreme Court, which struck them down in the Passenger Cases of 1849, ruling that: 1) although the Constitution said nothing about immigration directly, it was clearly foreign commerce, which the Constitution explicitly reserved to Congress; and 2) Congress’s jurisdiction was preemptive so that even in the absence of any federal legislation, state governments could not regulate immigration.¹⁰

Immigration had been growing very quickly in the antebellum decades. In the 1830s, 600,000 came, 1.7 million arrived in the 1840s, and 2.6 million in the 1850s, which amounted to a 433 percent increase over two decades. About a third of the immigrants were Irish, almost all of them Catholic, and another third were German, a large segment of whom were Catholics. Irish immigrants went largely to the northeastern United States, many entering through Boston and New York, with a substantial minority entering via Canada. Almost all Irish settled in cities as far south as Baltimore and as far west as Cincinnati: large numbers of them moved into new urban occupations such as policemen, firemen, and horse-car drivers, as well as unskilled labor. Unlike the Irish, almost no Germans settled in New England; most entered through New York, which supplanted Philadelphia as the chief immigrant port in the 1820s. German settlement in the East was concentrated between New York and Baltimore, but a growing minority settled within the area between St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, which scholars have called the German Triangle. Many Germans came seeking farms and found them, while large numbers were skilled craftsmen.

The frustration of Protestant nativist groups over the increasing immigration and the growing crisis over slavery were the preconditions for the first anti-immigrant mass movement in American history. In the 1830s and 1840s violent anti-Catholic riots occurred, primarily in New England and Philadelphia: in 1834, just outside Boston, a mob burned down an Ursuline convent; and in Philadelphia during the 1840s a number of mobs attacked Catholic churches. No organization accepted responsibility, as we say today, but by the early 1850s a new political movement had been born, directed largely against immigrants.

The Know-Nothings, as contemporary opponents and later historians called them, were members of a secret Protestant fraternal organization, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, whose members had to be native-born white Protestants who took an oath to [resist] the insidious policy of the Church of Rome, and all other foreign influences against the institutions of our country, by placing in all offices in the gift of the people, whether by election or by appointment, none but native-born Protestant citizens. Members of the Order were instructed to reply I know nothing to any questions about the organization.

It had a meteoric rise, growing from just forty-three members to more than a million in a little over two years. A million white males represented almost one-eighth of the nation’s potential electorate (in 1852 just some 6 million men voted for president). It is therefore no surprise that anti-immigrant candidates did well in the elections of 1854 and 1855, electing eight governors, more than a hundred congressmen, the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and thousands of other local officials. Many states enacted anti-immigrant statutes in this period. In Massachusetts, for example, naturalized citizens were denied the vote until two years after they became citizens, an act that particularly outraged Abraham Lincoln. The movement’s national agenda included lengthening the period required for naturalization from five to fourteen years, various proposals to limit immigration, and a constitutional amendment barring foreign-born citizens from holding any public office.¹¹

Emboldened by its electoral success, the Order formed the American Party and in 1856 ran ex-President Millard Fillmore for president on a platform that ignored the slavery issue but included anti-immigrant planks. Fillmore got more than 800,000 votes, some 20 percent of the electorate, but carried only the state of Maryland. The American Party collapsed and, by 1860, so had the Know-Nothing movement. The Civil War years, in which immigrant soldiers fought for both the Union and the Confederacy, often in ethnic regiments or smaller units, ended, for a time, the anti-immigrant furor. The Know-Nothings did not achieve any of their agenda, but they serve as an exemplar of one kind of anti-immigrant movement: one whose major objection to immigrants is their religion.

The depression-scarred 1890s saw a minor reprise of organized anti-Catholicism. The short-lived American Protective Association, founded in Iowa in 1887 by a still-obscure man named Henry Bowers, had its greatest appeal in the rural Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. Its political agenda was similar to that of the Know-Nothings, but it had little national impact and faded with the return of relative prosperity around 1900.¹² Yet, religious prejudices against Catholics and Jews continued to be an important element of many subsequent anti-immigrant movements, though never again at their core. In the post-Civil War years that core was provided first by race and then by ethnicity.

The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in the summer of 1868 with its unambiguous initial sentence—All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside—established, for the first time, a national citizenship and made citizens of former slaves who had been born in the United States, and left those who had been born in Africa or the West Indies ineligible to citizenship.¹³ Quite logically, Congress took up the question of amending the naturalization law, basically unchanged since 1790, which still limited eligibility to free white persons.¹⁴

Had Congress amended the naturalization statute in 1866 it might well have simply dropped white as well as free from the new statute, but events in 1868, 1869, and early 1870 brought the issue of Chinese immigration into national prominence. This, along with the turmoil of Reconstruction helped to focus anti-immigrant sentiments on race rather than religion.¹⁵

Chinese had begun to immigrate to California and the American West in significant numbers in the 1850s. They came like thousands of others from Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the United States, seeking gold. Almost all came from the area around Canton and were young men seeking riches: consular reports indicated that for many the goal was to return with $400 and that by mid-decade some had already achieved it. In the tradition of previous Chinese migrants within Asia, they called themselves guests: since the Chinese characters for California also mean gold mountain, those in California were gan sam hack or gold mountain guests. Students of immigration usually call such immigrants sojourners and note that there have been numerous sojourners among immigrants to America since the seventeenth century.

The census of 1870 recorded more than 60,000 Chinese, three-quarters of them in California and almost all of them men. As late as 1867, California Republicans were still willing to pass a resolution in favor of voluntary immigration … from whatever nationality it may come, but after losing the gubernatorial election in that year, partially because their opponents had labeled them as pro-Chinese, they vied with other parties in the virulence of their anti-Chinese expressions.¹⁶

The following year the Senate ratified the Burlingame Treaty with China, which recognized the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and the mutual advantage of … free migration, although the treaty specified that nothing contained herein shall be held to confer naturalization … upon the subjects of China in the United States.¹⁷

The completion of the Union-Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in May 1869, threw some 10,000 Chinese railroad builders onto the California labor market and pushed the Chinese immigration issue to the top of western workingmen’s political agenda. Although there had been legal and extra-legal discrimination against Chinese almost as soon as the first immigrants got off the boat, the major phase of the anti-Chinese movement in California dates from that time. In the same month the golden spike was driven, Henry George, a radical reformer and economic theorist, raised, perhaps for the first time anywhere, the bogus specter of the invasion of the United States by an Asian army, what came to be called the Yellow Peril. In a front-page article in the New York Tribune, the prophet of San Francisco warned that:

The 60,000 or 100,000 Mongolians on our Western coast are the thin edge of the wedge which has for its base the 500,000,000 of Eastern Asia … The Chinaman can live where stronger than he would starve. Give him fair play and this quality enables him to drive out stronger races … [Unless Chinese immigration is checked] the youngest home of the nations must in its early manhood follow the path and meet the doom of Babylon, Nineveh and Rome … Here plain to the eye of him who chooses to see are the dragon’s teeth [which will] spring up armed men marshaled for civil war. Shall we prohibit their sowing while there is still time or shall we wait until they are firmly embedded, and then try to pluck them up?¹⁸

In the South many had a different reaction. Faced with the problems of reinserting the freedmen into the Southern labor system, some Southern businessmen and planters fantasized that indentured Chinese labor might allow them to set up a new system of slavery. They tried to disguise their efforts as a kind of missionary enterprise, arguing that by bringing Chinese to America they would be

falling in with the apparent leanings of Providence, and while we avail ourselves of the physical assistance these pagans are capable of affording us, endeavor at the same time to bring to bear upon them the elevating and saving influence of our holy religion, so that when those coming among us shall return to their own country, they may carry back with them and disseminate the good seed which is here sown, and the New World shall thus in a double sense become the regenerator of the Old.¹⁹

With the help of the Dutch-born labor contractor Cornelius Koopmanschap (1828-82), perhaps a thousand or so Chinese laborers were sent from the West Coast to the South in the early 1870s, the largest group of whom worked on the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad. Although Chinese workers were never a significant factor in the Southern economy, the discussions of this scheme in the press helped make Americans more aware of the Chinese question.²⁰

Against this background of growing hostility and attention to the issue of Chinese in America the Massachusetts radical Republican senator, Charles Sumner, in an April 1870 speech delivered just after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, announced his intention to go one step further on the road to true democracy and ensure that the word white was eliminated from the naturalization laws. This drew a reaction from Frank Pixley, a San Francisco lawyer and Republican politician (later notorious as an anti-Chinese demagogue). Though he supported the Fifteenth Amendment and African American suffrage in California, he opposed naturalization and citizenship for Chinese. This is not the question of the African whom our forefathers brought here and who had generations of ancestors born upon the soil, Pixley wrote Sumner. This is a question of bringing a new-people here, and are we not planting the seeds of an evil which may develop to our great and permanent injury? Pixley admitted that as a class Chinese are intelligent, and he believed, erroneously, that all of them - could read and write and were mere sojourners who did not acquire lands or real property, also that among the multitudes of Chinese women in our state there is not a wife or virtuous female in their number.²¹

Such criticism did not faze Sumner and he may not have answered Pixley, but the San Francisco attorney’s letter prefigured the debate that took place in the Senate that summer. The issue of color-blind naturalization was not a new one. Sumner had introduced bills removing the word white from the naturalization statutes in 1868 and 1869, but neither had come to a vote and the issue of Chinese naturalization had not been raised. His chance to force the issue came in July 1870, when the Senate had under consideration two similar bills to amend the Naturalization Laws and to punish crimes against the same. Their object was to prevent election frauds perpetrated by unnaturalized or illegally naturalized voters—who presumably voted Democratic. On July 2 Sumner moved to add, as a new section of one of them, the text of a bill he had previously introduced that would strike out the word white wherever it appeared in acts of Congress relating to naturalization, so that in naturalization there shall be no distinction of race or color.

In his brief remarks that day he spoke of the denial of rights to African Americans and made no direct mention of Chinese, although a number of Republican senators, including William M. Stewart of Nevada and George Henry Williams of Oregon, raised the specter of hordes of incoming Chinese and massive Chinese suffrage. Williams, an Oregon Republican, moved a further amendment: "Provided, that nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the naturalization of persons born in the Chinese Empire. When Oliver P. Morton (R-IN) remarked that the whole Chinese problem was involved and called for caution and reflection, Sumner countered that it simply opens the question of the Declaration of Independence." Thus was the issue of Chinese naturalization—and behind that of Chinese immigration—joined for the first time in Congress.

Sumner rose to the occasion. In the ensuing debate, conducted on the Fourth of July, Sumner made his defense of Chinese naturalization.

Senators undertake to disturb us … by reminding us of the possibility of large numbers swarming from China; but the answer to all this is very obvious and very simple. If the Chinese come here, they will come for citizenship or merely for labor. If they come for citizenship, then in this desire do they give a pledge of loyalty to our institutions; and where is the peril in such vows? They are peaceful and industrious; how can their citizenship be the occasion of solicitude?

As was his wont, Sumner made direct and personal replies to the arguments of his opponents. After reading aloud from the Gospel of St. Matthew’s account of Peter’s triple denial of Jesus of Nazareth, Sumner analogized that thrice has a Senator [Stewart of Nevada] on this floor denied these great principles of the Declaration of Independence. The time may come when he will weep bitterly.

In answer to Williams of Oregon, who had argued that color-blind naturalization would give millions of heathens and pagans power to control our institutions, Sumner answered, Fearlessly we may go forward and welcome all corners, for there can be no harm here; the heathens and pagans do not exist whose coming can disturb our institutions. Worse than any heathen or pagan abroad are those in our midst who are false to our institutions. Later he insisted that the peril to the Republic existed only in imagination; it is illusion, not a reality.

On what had become the Chinese issue—no other Asian group was mentioned—Sumner did not prevail. In a confusing parliamentary situation, his amendment was first rejected, then accepted, then reconsidered, and twice again rejected, on votes of 30-14 and 26-12. But Sumner’s struggle for African naturalization did bear fruit. An amendment by an Ohio-born Republican from Alabama, the former brevet major general of Ohio Volunteers Willard Warner, to extend naturalization to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent was narrowly adopted by votes of 21-20 and 20-17. A motion by Lyman Trumbull (R-IL) to extend naturalization to persons born in the Chinese Empire, was defeated 31-9, and the amended bill passed, 33-8, with Sumner voting in the affirmative.²² For the next seventy-three years Chinese and other Asians were the only persons genetically ineligible to American citizenship, and some Asians remained ineligible until 1952 when the McCarran-Walter Act made the naturalization statutes color-blind.

Thus most Reconstruction Era Republicans took the position that the Californian Pixley had: that naturalization rights should be accorded to Africans and foreign-born African Americans, but not to Chinese. Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, understood that an important principle had been defeated: the great African American leader congratulated Sumner for being in the right place on the Chinese question. As usual you are in the van, the country in the rear.²³ Sumner’s brief fight for Chinese rights was quickly forgotten by contemporaries and many historian. d

In 1870 the census counted 63,000 Chinese in the country and in 1880 found 105,000. In that year more than 70 percent of all American Chinese lived in California and a mere 3 percent lived in all the territory east of Denver. Males outnumbered females by a little more than twenty to one.

Originally drawn to the mines of the Sierra Nevadas, Chinese were - driven from them by the violence of white miners and deliberate discrimination by the state of California, which levied a heavy foreign-miners tax collected almost exclusively from Chinese. They were largely employed in humble occupations, although a significant number were merchants and other entrepreneurs. But even as Sumner spoke on the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Declaration, an event in the western part of his home state was helping to stimulate anti-Chinese activity in the eastern United States.

On June 13, 1870, in North Adams, Massachusetts, seventy-five Chinese workmen brought from San Francisco under three-year contracts arrived on a train and were escorted by thirty policemen to the shoemaking factory of Calvin T. Sampson. He had brought them in to replace his striking shoemakers, members of the Knights of St. Crispin, the shoemakers union, then America’s largest trade union.²⁴ Although Chinese labor never became a significant factor in Eastern industrial labor—only two other instances are known—the incident had significant repercussions. In August the National Labor Union, the first national labor federation of the post-Civil War period, changed its policy about immigration. The previous year its convention had resolved that voluntary Chinese emigrants ought to enjoy the protection of the laws like other citizens. Now, with Crispin and California delegates in attendance, it resolved thatthe presence in our country of Chinese laborers in large numbers is an evil … and should be prevented by legislation.²⁵

For the labor movement this was a Rubicon: from then until the very end of the twentieth century its basic stance was anti-immigrant, and although most of its leaders and its academic apologists claim that the opposition was based completely on economic grounds, racism was a major factor. By the early twentieth century not only business unionists like Samuel Gompers but also socialists like Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger were virulent opponents of Asian immigration: the latter insisted that the United States and Canada must remain White Men’s countries.²⁶

Yet, despite the efforts of Western congressmen—often with border states and Southern allies—to erect legislative barriers to Chinese immigration, Congress was reluctant to do so. In his 1874 annual message, President Ulysses S. Grant weighed in against the Chinese, claiming that the great proportion of Chinese were involuntary contract laborers—and thus illegal immigrants—and that an even worse evil were Chinese women, almost none of whom perform any honorable labor, but … are brought for shameful purposes. He went on to say that if this evil practice can be legislated against it would be his pleasure to enforce it.²⁷

The next year, 1875, Congress passed the so-called Page Act—for Horace F. Page (1833-90) then a first-term California Republican congressman. It created two classes of illegal immigrants—persons under sentence for crimes other than political and women imported for purposes of prostitution and made the importation of any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental country without their consent a felony. Rhetorical sections of the statute and remarks made during the congressional debate made it clear that the bill was really aimed at Chinese women.e Though historians have long treated it as an ineffective legislative way station on the road to exclusion, recent scholarship focusing on the act’s administration has shown that it was, in fact, an effective inhibition on the immigration of Chinese women.²⁸

The same Congress that passed the Page Act also authorized a joint congressional committee to investigate Chinese immigration; this took testi-mony in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco just before and after the presidential election of 1876. By that time both national political party platforms inveighed against the Chinese, the Republicans a little tentatively—it is the immediate duty of Congress to investigate the effects of the immigration and importation of Mongolians—while the Democrats unreservedly denounced the policy which tolerates the revival of the coolie-trade in Mongolian women held for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men to perform servile labor.²⁹

The majority report of the joint congressional committee claimed that the Pacific Coast had to become either American or Mongolian, and insisting that there was not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese race to furnish motive power for self-government and that there is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese. It urged the president to get the Burlingame Treaty modified and Congress to legislate against Asiatic immigration.³⁰ The report was presented to Congress while it was settling the disputed election of 1876, so no immediate action was taken. After much debate the next session of Congress, just before it went out of existence, passed the so-called fifteen passenger bill which barred any vessel from bringing more than fifteen Chinese immigrants. A sticking point was the existing Burlingame Treaty, which some wanted to override totally while others wanted to wait for a diplomatic renegotiation. The bill also instructed the president to notify the Chinese that portions of the treaty were abrogated, which passage of the bill would have accomplished.

Rutherford B. Hayes responded with a reasoned veto message that accepted the desirability of stemming Chinese immigration. He argued that the Chinese manifested all the traits of race, religion, manners, and customs, habitations, mode of life, segregation here, and the keeping up of the ties of their original home … [which] stamp them as strangers and sojourners, and not as incorporated elements of our national life.³¹ But, he insisted, there was no emergency to justify unilateral abrogation of the treaty, which could have disastrous consequences both for American merchants and for missionaries in China. He promised that there would be a renegotiation of the treaty.

Somewhat protracted