9. What Were Government, Business, and Individual Responses to the Influx of Immigrants.

First Arrivals, Commencement Reactions

In the half-century between the California Gold Rush and the War of 1898, immature men primarily from China and Japan flocked to the western states to fill an untold number of jobs brought near by America'southward push across the continent. The West was sparsely populated, and demand for labor was high. The influx of Asian workers, still, created a volatile mix of hostility and resentment among the region's white population that reverberated across the adjacent few generations. On Capitol Hill, such anxieties were routinely codified into constabulary. Even though America was home to thousands of Asian immigrants, they were almost completely prohibited from participating in the political process and were frequently ostracized from American society.

/tiles/not-collection/A/APA_essay1_5_TransContinentalRailroad_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress This 1869 cartoon from Frank Leslie'south Illustrated Newspaper depicts the completion of the transcontinental railroad that connected the nation'due south coasts. Thousands of Chinese laborers laid runway for the railroad, and Chinese merchants followed the construction. The predominantly white frontier population reacted past adopting anti-Chinese sentiments.

Get-go in 1849, Chinese immigrants came to California for the same reason anybody else did: to go rich mining gold. But when the federal authorities began a spirited race to build the western leg of the transcontinental railroad, American companies hired Chinese laborers by the thousands.⁵ Chinese merchants followed, setting upward shops that catered to the immigrants. Many became labor brokers themselves.⁶ In 1868 the United States and Mainland china negotiated the Treaty of Merchandise, Consuls, and Emigration, known as the Burlingame Treaty, which established a reciprocal human relationship for the movement of people and goods between the two countries.⁷

Chinese Exclusion

The influx of Chinese into California during the 1850s and 1860s did not sit down well with the white borderland population. The two groups were vastly different, and what white Californians did not sympathise they began to fear. It was not long before an anti-Chinese movement took root. In response, the California legislature produced an astonishing ingather of laws hostile to the Chinese that raised taxes, discouraged clearing, restricted educational opportunities, and limited due process.^viii

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_6_ChesterArthur_LC.xml Paradigm courtesy of the Library of Congress President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Human action in 1882, which placed the first restrictions on immigration in U.South. history. The police specifically targeted Chinese clearing.

When the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, thousands of Chinese laborers were suddenly left unemployed. Many returned to the Due west Coast, where anti-Chinese violence and labor unrest soon flared up. In tardily Oct 1871, for instance, "the largest mass lynching in U.South. history," equally described by historian Erika Lee, took place in Los Angeles when a mob of 500 killed 17 Chinese in response to the shooting of a police officer.⁹

Over the next decade, Congress clamped downward on Chinese immigration, recommending changes to both the Burlingame Treaty and existing immigration laws.^ten Presidential administrations went along with the effort by negotiating a new treaty ratified in 1881 that empowered Congress to "regulate, limit, or suspend" the period of Chinese laborers into America.¹¹

That yr Congress doubled down on its anti-Chinese position and passed a bill that closed Chinese labor clearing for 20 years and excluded Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. Business concern interests pushed dorsum and President Chester A. Arthur vetoed the mensurate, but he hinted that a shorter intermission would work. Within months, a new bill had been canonical that closed Chinese immigration for 10 years.¹²

The Chinese Exclusion Human action of 1882 imposed the first restrictions on clearing in U.S. history. Similar clockwork, Congress extended its provisions, including the citizenship prohibition, every ten years. With the backing of the Supreme Court, subsequent renewals and amendments expanded the original act.^thirteen By 1892 Congress had streamlined deportation procedures and required Chinese immigrants to carry a certificate of residence. Half dozen years later, Congress banned Chinese laborers living in Hawaii from entering the mainland. The ban against Chinese immigrants became permanent in 1904.¹⁴

Japanese Immigration and Exclusion

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_7_SanFranciscoPanorama_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress This image is a section of a panoramic photograph of San Francisco from California Street Hill published by Thomas C. Russell in 1877. San Francisco would later get the site of anti-Japanese violence in the 1890s.

During the 19th century, Nihon modernized its economy and, in the process, became a rise earth power. Following Chinese exclusion, significant numbers of Japanese came to the United States to attend America's schools and work as diplomats and entrepreneurs. Unlike China, which had a weak central land and thus did non closely monitor its citizens living abroad, Japan's regime, with its stiff administrative construction, played an active role recruiting and vetting immigrants. In an effort to brand sure Japanese immigrants avoided the kind of discrimination that befell the Chinese, Japanese envoys regularly checked on living conditions in u.s..^xv

/tiles/non-drove/A/APA_essay1_8_JamesPhelan_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress As mayor of San Francisco from 1897 to 1902, James D. Phelan publicly espoused anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese views. Phelan later served equally a U.S. Senator from California from 1915 to 1921.

At the fourth dimension, the Japanese presence on the mainland remained small and never approached the number of Chinese living on the West Coast, although their numbers in Hawaii earlier annexation were substantial.¹⁶ The vigilance of the Japanese government, which included formal inquiries and loftier-level diplomacy, helped solve problems earlier they worsened. America's expanding territorial footprint in the Pacific too contributed to the relationship: Washington sought to maintain good relations with Japan rather than risk its interests in the Philippines.¹⁷

Combined, those factors help explain the early lack of widespread anti-Japanese agitation beyond a few local hot spots similar San Francisco, where several fierce incidents occurred in the 1890s. By 1900, however, Japanese immigration had been swept upwardly into larger anti-Asian movements.¹⁸ "Chinese and Japanese … are non the stuff of which American citizens can be made," proclaimed San Francisco Mayor and future U.S. Senator James D. Phelan, ignoring the reality that the Constitution conferred citizenship to the children of Asian immigrants built-in in America. Although the Japanese government responded by halting passports for laborers, immigrants connected to travel freely from America'due south territories to the mainland.¹⁹

/tiles/not-collection/A/APA_essay1_9_TRoosevelt_LC.xml Epitome courtesy of the Library of Congress In the early on 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt grappled with the segregation of Japanese children in San Francisco schools and nativist attacks on Japanese businesses. He reluctantly decided to restrict Japanese immigration.

As more and more than Japanese immigrants arrived to piece of work on the West Coast, anti-Japanese agitation took hold especially in California, where the state government routinely petitioned Congress for wholesale Japanese exclusion.²⁰ Despite a brusque period of goodwill after Japan gave San Francisco a substantial donation to recover from a massive earthquake, anti-Japanese policies soon reemerged.²¹ In the fall of 1906, the San Francisco board of instruction announced that all Japanese children would nourish segregated schools.²² Japan'due south government criticized the measure, and in just a short while the United States had been whipped into a total-blown war scare before the metropolis finally rescinded the segregation club. Only a few months later tempers flared over again when mobs of California nativists attacked Japanese businesses during a San Francisco streetcar strike.²³ War threatened again, only President Theodore Roosevelt defused the situation before it escalated.²⁴

Roosevelt was always the optimist, but it all led him to a distressing thought: "I take been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that it is indispensable for the Japanese to be kept from coming in whatever numbers every bit settlers to the The states."²⁵

Alien Land Laws and Citizenship

During the start 2 decades of the 20th century, the state of California enhanced its already stringent anti-Asian policies and explored ways to restrict the property rights of Japanese immigrants, farther excluding them from American social club.²⁶

The process culminated in 1913, when the state government passed an human activity prohibiting "aliens ineligible to citizenship"—nigh universally people of Asian descent—from owning land in California. As U.S. nationals, Filipinos were eligible for entry in the The states, but withal ineligible for naturalization. Other states, particularly Oregon and Washington, passed their own laws based on California's formula.²⁷

As a result, many issei—offset-generation Japanese immigrants—registered belongings in the name of their native-born children. Others had to charter or own land using a corporation held in trust for their children. Only California airtight even these loopholes in 1920.²⁸

The federal courts, moreover, sided with the states. In November 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld both California's and Washington'south alien land laws likewise as a handful of other restrictions. Over the next ii decades, California strengthened its holding laws, even going so far equally to seize land and avails from Japanese Americans incarcerated during Earth War Ii.²⁹

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_10_BillUniformRuleofNaturalization_NARA.xml Paradigm courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration In March 1790, Congress debated America'southward start immigration law. The bill allowed a "gratuitous white person" to petition for U.South. citizenship after two years of residency. Congress quickly approved the bill, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 became law on March 26, 1790.

Simply by the late 1940s, public opinion on the issue had started to shift, and the federal courts began reversing their earlier decisions. On April 17, 1952, in Sei Fujii v. California, the California supreme court declared the land laws unconstitutional. California voters finally erased the policy in a public referendum in November 1956. Washington Country removed the country's last alien land constabulary in 1966.³⁰

At the root of the event were the country's qualifications for citizenship, and for much of U.S. history, the courts severely circumscribed who was eligible to become a naturalized denizen. For 80 years (1790–1870) only "free white persons" qualified. In 1870 Congress added "persons of African descent."³¹ For Asian immigrants, in the second one-half of the 19th century at that place was no standard national practice. At the time, local judges determined who was eligible for naturalization on a instance-past-case ground. As immigrant numbers increased early in the 20th century, national eligibility requirements became a major event. In a handful of cases that made it to the U.Southward. Supreme Court, Asian-American leaders decided to test whether Japanese immigrants could be classified as "white" for purposes of naturalization.³²

In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court decided two significant cases that demonstrated the historical malleability of ideas about race. In Ozawa five. United States, the courtroom validated the category of "aliens ineligible to citizenship" past arguing that, "The federal and state courts, in an about unbroken line, have held that the words 'white person' [in the 1870 Naturalization Act] were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race."³³ This 1922 decision meant that Takao Ozawa could not allocate every bit white and was disqualified from naturalized citizenship.³⁴ A yr later, in United States five. Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant from the Punjab in India-who had served in the U.S. Ground forces during Earth War I-claimed the right to become a naturalized American citizen. The Justices, yet, unanimously agreed that Thind's ethnicity fell beyond the bounds of what "the common man" understood to classify every bit white. In doing and so, the court upheld the ban against Thind, in item, and Asian Indians, generally.³⁵

Toward Full Exclusion

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_11_WWilson_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Immigration Act of 1917 considering of its inclusion of literacy tests for immigrants. Congress overrode his veto to formulate Asian exclusion.

At a policy level, citizenship remained mayhap the most powerful tool at Congress'southward disposal and, during the 1910s, the national legislature completely overhauled the country'due south immigration laws. For the first time, the federal government prohibited people from whole areas of the world—not just private countries—from coming to America. During Globe War I, fears of espionage and demolition encouraged the United States to clench down on visas, giving Congress time to consider bigger and broader reform. With the Immigration Act of 1924, the effort to codify full bans culminated in a restrictive national origins quota system built on the legal invention of "aliens ineligible for citizenship" popular in various land laws.

As anti-Asian feelings grew more pronounced, immigrants from Republic of india—many of whom began arriving in the U.s.a. in the 1890s—became 1 of the start groups affected by the new laws. At the time, federal clearing restrictions brutal into two categories: generalized groups (for instance, paupers and anarchists) and private nationalities (for example, Japanese and Chinese). But, by 1911, Asian Indians had become a category all their ain. As a new target for exclusionists, the authorities classified them as "Hindu" no matter their religion or ethnicity.³⁶

Congress went even farther and passed the Immigration Act of 1917, creating an "Asiatic Barred Zone" that excluded Chinese, Asian Indians, Burmese, Thai,and Malays and extended to parts of Russia, the Arabian peninsula, Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, Polynesia, and all East Indian islands—about 500 million people in total. The Woodrow Wilson assistants omitted Japan because its immigrants already faced a number of prohibitions. The police force besides exempted the Philippines since its residents, as members of an American territory, were U.S. nationals and legally eligible to move to the States.³⁷

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_12_AlbertJohnson_HC.xml Collection of the U.Due south. House of Representatives
About this object Representative Albert Johnson of Washington chaired the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee from the 66th Congress to the 71st Congress (1919–1931), working to limit Japanese immigration to the United States.

The eruption of Globe War I also had a pronounced effect on the number of people coming to the States. Immigration rates dropped during the state of war, encouraging Congress to build on the Asiatic Barred Zone and consider ways to shut America's borders completely. Merely reform attempts struggled to get off the ground, and in 1920 Congress abandoned its cause for an outright ban. Instead, it settled on a legislative formula creating a national origins quota system.³⁸

After the White Business firm changed hands in 1921, the Republican Congress, working with the new Republican presidential administration of Warren Yard. Harding, redoubled its efforts to overhaul America's clearing policy. Within a month of existence introduced, the national origins quota system became law on May nineteen, 1921.³⁹ The quota law fix total almanac immigration at 355,000, or 3 pct of the strange-born population during the final Census in 1910. Federal officials used the aforementioned calculus to determine the number of immigrants allowed on a nation-by-nation basis.^forty

Immigration difficult-liners who had long opposed Asian immigration began worrying that America would feel a surge of refugees from hard-hit southern and eastern Europe after the war. In 1923 President Calvin Coolidge called for new legislation in club to limit clearing completely, and Congress quickly obliged. In the House, the Immigration and Naturalization Committee, led by Albert Johnson of Washington, who had long opposed Japanese immigration, began working on means to tighten the quota organisation, pushing the baseline numbers back from the 1910 Census to the 1890 Census, which were lower and would therefore exist more restrictive.⁴¹

/tiles/not-collection/A/APA_essay1_13_ChineseExclusionCaseFileofLeeSan_NARA.xml Prototype courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration Commune courts around the country maintained example files for individuals excluded nether Department 3 of the Chinese Exclusion Act. This 1906 instance tape for Lee San indicates that he lived and worked in the United States without the legally required certificate of residency and ordered him to be deported.

On March 17, 1924, afterward a stalled first endeavor, Chairman Johnson introduced H.R. 7995, the committee's comprehensive immigration reform bill. The legislation filled in policy gaps, but, more importantly, devised a quota arrangement organized by nationality that limited future immigration to a minor fraction of the foreign-born population in 1890. Moreover, to effectively bar immigration from Japan, the legislation adopted the legal definition of "aliens ineligible to citizenship" popular in the Pacific states.⁴²

The problem, however, was that Japan had become a global ability whose naval strength trailed but the Us and United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. Country Department officials feared that, if the pecker became law, whatsoever cooperation existed betwixt America and Nippon in their work to maintain political stability in the Pacific basin would terminate.⁴³ Nevertheless, the nib cruised through the House, passing 323 to 71. When the White House and the Japanese ambassador tried to pressure level the Senate into removing the clause, the plan backfired. The Senate overwhelmingly approved the immediate exclusion clause. President Coolidge signed the clearing neb into police force on May 26, 1924.⁴⁴

/tiles/non-collection/A/APA_essay1_14_ImmigrationActof1924.xml Prototype courtesy of the National Archives and Records Assistants Public Law 68-139, approved during the 68th Congress (1923–1925) and known as the Immigration Human action of 1924, established a national origins quota system. It limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States and barred clearing from near of Asia.

As enacted, the Johnson–Reed Human activity limited almanac immigration to the United States to 165,000, but placed few restrictions on people from the Western Hemisphere. For the remaining transatlantic migrants, their access quota was set at 2 percent of the total number of foreign-built-in nationals living in the The states in 1890. The new police closed America'due south borders to all Japanese men, women, and children. Combined with the earlier Chinese exclusion acts and the Asiatic Barred Zone, Congress's new Japanese exclusion clause had effectively stopped transpacific immigration to all but Filipinos.⁴⁵

The bear on of the law was arguably greatest in Nippon, where many resented the section that singled them out as "an inferior race."⁴⁶ Somewhat optimistically, the Japanese regime expected the immigration restriction to relax over time as the commercial interests betwixt Japan and the Us strengthened. Nevertheless, Japan began viewing the United states, instead of the Soviet Union, as its primary military and naval adversary.⁴⁷ That shift would have devastating consequences for America's 2 major Pacific territories—the Philippines and Hawaii—during World War Ii.

But even the Philippines and Hawaii, which the United States assumed control over at the turn of the century, were not allowed to some level of exclusion during the forty years preceding the war. First in 1898, the experience of the United States in the Philippines and Hawaii legalized the convergence of exclusionary practices at abode and away as ideas about race and empire conflicted with American traditions of democracy and self-government.

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Source: https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Exclusion-and-Empire/First-Arrivals/

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