Chinese Immigration

Chinese Immigration

Chinese immigration to the United States consisted of three major waves, with the first beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigration came to the United States after hearing of the “Golden Mountain” or “Gum Saan” when California’s Gold Rush began in 1848. Civil war and famine back home in southern China, where most of the first immigrants were from, propelled them on as well, so that they could work in the United States and send money to families back home. In steamships, they arrived in San Francisco’s harbor, where the first Chinatown was founded. The Chinese immigrants, almost 95% male, also worked on the Transcontinental Railroad in the later 1800’s. While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labor, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of this “yellow peril.” By agreeing to lower-paying wages than other workers, and by enduring the rough and dangerous working conditions, they were largely responsible for laying down the tracks for the western railways, in one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century.   It was completed in 1868, at a breakneck pace.
After the completion of the railroad, the Chinese people became increasingly the targets of the racial attacks and discriminatory legislation because their labor was no longer needed and Whites began seeing them as an economic threat. This anti-Chinese movement was accompanied by numerous anti-Chinese riots, lynching, and murders. Despite the provisions for equal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, political and labor organizations rallied against the immigration of what they regarded as a degraded race and “cheap Chinese labor.” Newspapers condemned the policies of employers, and even church leaders denounced the entrance of these aliens into what was regarded as a land for whites only. So hostile was the opposition that in 1882 the United States Congress eventually passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited...