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 years, however, Texas was annexed by the United States. And by the end of the Mexican-American War in 1849, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave all Mexicans living in these areas the option of becoming U.S. citizens or of relocating within the new Mexican borders. Although some Mexicans moved to Mexico, most remained in what became U.S. territory. In the years following the treaty, Mexicans and Americans paid little attention to the newly created international border. Miners, shepherds, and seasonal workers traveled in both directions to fill fluctuating labor demands in what was essentially one economic region.11
While many states engaged in active recruitment of Mexican immigrants through the late 1800s, nativist sentiment was also conspicuous. Mexican immigrants may have been welcomed as workers, but they occupied an inferior position in the social structure. Eventually old labor began to attack new labor for its reluctance to enter unions.12 This mixture of demand for cheap Mexican labor and resistance to massive Mexican migration has continued throughout much of the twentieth century leading to enigmatic combinations of guestworker/temporary worker programs (e.g., the Bracero Program), and massive raids and Proposition 187 movements.
While Mexicans were also subject to cultural, social, and racial complaints from the Anglo-oriented power structure, for some time in the early part of this century at least they were not regarded as unassimilable as had been the Chinese. But Mexicans definitely had to be assimilated. From 1915 to 1921, one government-sponsored Americanization program was aimed directly at Mexican immigrants. In 1900, about a hundred thousand persons of Mexican descent or birth resided in the United States. By 1930, the figure was 1.5 million. While restrictionists and employers who claimed a need for cheap labor battled over future Mexican immigration, a third group of “Americanists” sought to assimilate Mexican immigrants. By 1913, California Governor Hiram Johnson was able to establish a Commission on Immigration and Housing, which directed efforts to teach English to immigrants and involve them in Americanization programs. The Commission focused its attention on Mexican immigrant women, in the belief that they were primarily responsible for the transmission of values in the home. School districts employed special classes and “home teachers,” hoping that Mexican women would pass on their newfound values to children and their husbands.13
The