Exclusion by Nationality, Race or Occupation

Question 1

Chinese population by mid-19th Century

Answer 1

5000 out of 23.2 Million

Question 2

What projects and occupations were Chinese labourers employed in

Answer 2

• Labouring on farms
• Mining for Gold in California
• Chinese women, many of whom worked as domestic
  servants, seamstresses, or gardeners, or in laundries?were almost universally associated with prostitution
• Construction of the East-West railways: Many worked on Alabama- Chattanooga railroad from 1870

Question 3

The growth of Anti-Chinese Agitation in California in the 19th century

Answer 3

• Post-boom economy after gold rush: Chinese were cheap labour, and threatened the economic status of white workers
• Dennis Kearney, founder of Workingmen’s Party: ‘And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!’
• Other ethnic minorities joined the call for immigration restriction. African-American publications advocated restriction because Chinese threatened the precarious status of black workers

Question 4

Profiling of female Chinese immigrants attempting to enter America

Answer 4

• Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, only 136 of nearly 40 000 Asians to enter America were women
• Discriminatory practice at Angel Island, where Chinese women were suspected of sexual immorality and prostitution
• Evident in Page Act 1875: prohibits transportation of immigrants from Asia without their consent, and prohibits prostitution

Question 5

How did Chinese immigrants attempt to evade discriminatory laws?

Answer 5

• Claimed they had family in residence in the United States
• Attempted illegal entry before border patrol was operational
• Legal challenges

Question 6

1875 Page Act

Answer 6

• Bans immgiration of chinese under ‘heads’ without their consent
• Explicitly challenges female immigration for ‘lewd and immoral purposes’

Question 7

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

Answer 7

• Restricted immigration of all Chinese labourers

- Those who were not labourers were exempt, for instance, merchants, students, family of Chinese-American citizens

Question 8

1868 Burlinghame Treaty

Answer 8

• Mutual agreement on both sides not to restrict immigration
• Altered one-sidedly in 1880 to allow for restriction in America –> 1882 Act

Question 9

1885 Alien Contract Labour Law

Answer 9

prohibits immigration of immigrants engaged in contract labour

Question 10

1888 Scott Act

Answer 10

The Scott Act declares over 20,000 Chinese laborers’ re-entry permits null and void

Rescinds right of re-entry

Question 11

1892 Geary Act

Answer 11

• extended exclusion act

- no longer allowed to testify in court, had to carry id card,

Question 12

Indefinite Renewal of Chinese Exclusion Act in…

Answer 12

1902

Question 13

1917 Immigration Act

Answer 13

• literacy test previously advocated by Henry Cabot Lodge
• Asiatic Barred Zone excluded much of Asia except Japan/Philippines
• Allowed temporary work permits to let Mexican workers in to complete infrastructure projects like railroads

Question 14

How were Chinese labourers represented in popular discourse?

Answer 14

“will work harder and for less wages, and are more
tractable than the Irish or Germans.” - The Nation

Called the ‘Yellow Peril’ in the New York Times

Question 15

Evidence of Chinese being a grievance for organised labour: Chinese replacement labour in strikes

Answer 15

• ln 1870, 75 Chinese Shoemakers were brought all the way from Sa Fransisco to North Adams, MA, under a three-year contract to break a strike staged by mostly Irish and French Canadians.

1870, Passaic Steam Laundry in New Jersey, and 1872, Cutlery at Beaver Falls New Jersey, same thing happens

Question 16

Evidence of Chinese being a grievance for organised labour: Chinese replacement labour in strikes

Answer 16

• ln 1870, 75 Chinese Shoemakers were brought all the way from Sa Fransisco to North Adams, MA, under a three-year contract to break a strike staged by mostly Irish and French Canadians.

1870, Passaic Steam Laundry in New Jersey, and 1872, Cutlery at Beaver Falls New Jersey, same thing happens

Question 17

Demographics: Number of Asian arrivals on the eve of the Chinese exclusion act, and immediately afterwards

Answer 17

39, 629 in 1882

8031 afterwards

Question 18

Demographics - were Chinese labourers in California really a significant threat in the 1870s?

Answer 18

• Only 9% of population
  BUT
• All economically active men and 1/4 of the wage earners in the state

Question 19

According to Zolberg, how did the Chinese immigration restriction measures affect later immigration?

Answer 19

Although this was done on an ad hoc basis, in the course of pursuing their objective they generated institutional innovations in the sphere of immigration control that rendered further regulation much easier to achieve.

Question 20

Why, according to Zolberg, is ‘economic rationality’ an insufficient explanation for restrictionist legislation?

Answer 20

• Cheap chinese/immigrant labour was good for industrial elites - doesn’t necessarily make economic sense to halt it
• Lower class labourers had concerns about immigrant labour but they didn’t write the legislation

–> Needs to be further explanation

Question 21

Popular fears of mass immigration of the Chinese as a factor in restrictionism

Answer 21

• Well publicised events in China worried Americans

EVIDENCE

• Massacre of missionaries at Tsiensin (1868)
• Coolie revolt in Peru (1870)
• Fear of being swamped with coolie labour

EVIDENCE
- China’s vast population of 400 million was intimidating for many

Question 22

Popular fears of mass immigration of the Chinese as a factor in restrictionism

Answer 22

• Well publicised events in China worried Americans

EVIDENCE

• Massacre of missionaries at Tsiensin (1868)
• Coolie revolt in Peru (1870)
• Fear of being swamped with coolie labour

EVIDENCE
- China’s vast population of 400 million was intimidating for many

Question 23

What was the inadvertant result of successful restriction of Chinese Immigration in 1882?

Answer 23

• Increase in non-white immigration to replenish the labour force

Contemporary: “The history of general labor in California since about 1886 is the story of efforts to find substitutes for the vanishing Chinese”

Question 24

Who and why, according to Zolberg, advanced restrictionist regulations?

Answer 24

• Their linguistic and religious distance from
  the hegemonic anglo-germanic, Protestant culture, was expected to make their assimilation into the mainstrea more difficult; and it was reckoned that the difficulty of Americanizing them would be compounded by the sheer mass of newcomers, as well as by that fact that many of them saw themselves as temporary migrants, who had little incentive or opportunity to adopt American ways.

The movement to restrict immigration was thus initiated by traditional social elites of the East Coast, and quickly gained widespread support among what would be termed in a later age the “silent majority’’.

Question 25

What date does Zolberg give for the ‘reorientation’ of Immigration policy?

Answer 25

1896

In this year, both houses approve literacy test that would bar immigrants from southern/eastern Europe

Vetoed by successive presidents, but eventually passed in 1917

Question 26

What administrative changes were affected in the late 19th/early 20th century in response to more restrictive immigration?

Answer 26

• Change from immigration restriction centred on the border to more restrictive measures placed in advance of arrival
• Eg necessary to apply for a visa, immigration acts of the early 20th century imposed fines on shipping companies bringing illegals to US

Question 27

What was the long term implication of restrictionist legislation for American society, according to Zolberg?

Answer 27

Beyond this, the adoption of the “zero baseline norm” contributed to the naturalization of nativism, that is, of a cultural construction whereby national societies are viewed as self contained population entities with a common and homogeneous ancestry, growing by way of natural reproduction alone.

Question 28

PRIMARY SOURCE: James G Blaine, to Senate, 1879

Answer 28

‘we have this day to choose…whether our legislation shall be in the interests of the American free labourer or for the servile labourer from China…you cannot work a man who must have beef…alongside a man who can live on rice.’

Question 29

Erica Lee on anti-Chinese agitation as the reason for exclusion

Answer 29

Race was the ‘most important’ factor shaping immigration restriction and had the most significant implications for racialising immigrants later

Question 30

Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate - what does he view as the cause of exclusion?

Answer 30

Politicians - not California, not workers, not national racist imagery, ultimately supplied the Agency for Chinese exclusion

Question 31

Kitty Calavita,

Answer 31

• Says class ie how some Asians exempt from exclusion by occupation has been understated.
• Gender equally ignored

Question 32

PRIMARY SOURCE: Developments in California state legislature , and at a federal level, in 1876

Answer 32

In 1876, the California Senate established a committee to research the impact of Chinese immigration and sent its report, “An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration,” to Congress
(California State Legislature 1878).

That same year, Congress formed the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration and launched a series of hearings. The committee began its
final report by underscoring the alleged racial inferiority of the Chinese: “There is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese”

Question 33

REASONS FOR THE QUOTA ACTS

Racist discourse at the level of the US Congress: what ideas were put across

K. Calavita, At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Class

Answer 33

to an “indigestible mass,” (U.S. Congress 1877:v), “herds,”
“leeches,” “floods,” “an exhaustless human hive,” “hordes of … rats,” “locust”

e developed into a race of people of such character and physical qualities as to be able to exist and thrive where and under conditions the white man would perish and die out” (Congressional Record 1882)

“the masses ofthe [Chinese] people do not regard truth

Question 34

Sen. George Frisbie Hoar as example of progressive attitude in congress

Answer 34

Senator George Frisbie Hoar of
Massachusetts nonetheless echoed much of the racist rhetoric of
the day: “The history of Indian wars, of broken treaties, of a thousand million dollars lavished in ninety years on a people of a fourth of a million in number illustrates the folly of dealing with savage by the methods of savagery

Question 35

Kitty Calavita on the treatment of Race and Class in Chinese exclusion

Answer 35

• Most appeared not to notice this slippery juxtaposition of racism and classism in which merchants were simply plucked out of the “polluted” stream of the Chinese race. Indeed, while at one level race and class seemed to be conflated and to define each other in the congressional rhetoric, at another it was as if race and class existed on parallel and nonintersecting axes. In speaking of labourers, the race axis was foregrounded; for merchants, the class axis dominate

Question 36

Discussion of Chinese Women in the Senate, 1882s

Answer 36

“Out of the four or five thousand Chinese females in California there are not six who pre tend to be good women” (Congressional Record 1882: 47th Cong. Ist sess., Vol. 13, pt. 4, 193

Question 37

The Status of Female Immigrants after the Chinese Exclusion Bill: The Case of Cheong Ah Moy v. United States,

Answer 37

• Cheong Ah Moy labourer, leaves US, returns with bride
• Bride takes status of husband and, because she has no re-entry permit, is refused entry
• Is a woman an extension of her husband, a companion? In challenging her right to enter, is the sanctity of their union compromised?

Question 38

Nativism in California, evidence of miner nativism in 1840s

Answer 38

The first nativist acts in the gold fields were resolutions passed by groups of American miners to keep foreigners out. Though these resolutions were passed
everywhere in the mining country, the largest number appeared in the Southern Mines, where visible contingents of foreigners had congregated.

In the spring of 1849, for example, notices appeared there warning all non-U.S. citizens to leave within twenty-four hours.

In late September, miners along the North and South
forks of the Stanislaus River resolved that “none but Americans” would be allowed to mine in those areas.

Question 39

Chinese miners in california

• IMPORTANT HISTORIOGRAPHY - why did the Chinese come to America?

Sucheng Chan, A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism, and Racism in the California Gold Rush

Answer 39

• After the initial gold rush in 1848
• 1852-3 - Chinese become most populous place claim miners in California
• In 1880, the number of Chinese employed as miners in some districts of California varied between 50-70%
  HISTORIOGRAPHY
  argues that Chinese not initially imported as coolie labour, but as miners. Only later became coolie labour
• Sucheng Chang, A People of Exceptional Character

Question 40

Francis Galton

Answer 40

Eugenicist, founder of Eugenics movement in America

Writes Hereditary Genuius in 1869, and coins term Eugenics

where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalised.

Question 41

Herbert Spencer

Answer 41

Spencer is best known for the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864),

Question 42

Immigration Restriction League

Answer 42

• 1894 by three young Harvard College graduates, Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott Farnsworth Hall
• Advocated literacy testing
• ## League members made a distinction between the “old immigrants” of English, Irish, and German stock and the “new immigrants” from Italy and Eastern Europe.

Question 43

Mendel’s Laws of Heredity

Answer 43

• Person can be homozygous or heterozygous for a trait, and can pass on ‘dominant’ traits

Question 44

Madison Grant, the passing of the great race

Answer 44

-

Question 45

Ripley, the Races of Europe

Answer 45

-

Question 46

1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act

Answer 46

• Entry denied to anyone born in the geographically defined ‘Asiatic Barred Zone’

Question 47

1921 Emergency Quota Act

Answer 47

• No more than 3% of the population of a country whose citizens were already living in the United States could immigrate to the United States each year
• Used the 1910 census to calculate the proportions
• Immigration from Northern and Western countries remained unchanged by this quota. Approx. 175 000 allowed in, Approx. 175 000 had come before
• Southern/Eastern Europeans had been coming in higher numbers - 680 000 a year - and were heavily affected

Question 48

1924 Johnson Reed Act

Answer 48

QUOTAS

• 2% of foreign born in 1890 census
• Barred those racially ineligible to citizenship
• quotas for admission to be allocated to countries based on the proportion of Americans who originated from those countries - based on census data from the past
• The law further provided that after 1927, the maximum
  number of European immigrants would be 150,000; this was to be divided so that each nationality quota “shall be a number which bears the same ratio to 150,000 as the number of inhabitants in the continental United States
  in 1920 having that national origin.”1

Question 49

Joseph A. Hill and determining the national origins quotas

Answer 49

• Submitted three reports to congress after 1924 Act to determine the natural origins of the nation
• By third report, given in 1929, Hill said “The present computations are as near as we can get on this matter to determining the national origins, practically.”

Question 50

Joseph A. Hill and determining the national origins quotas

Answer 50

• Submitted three reports to congress after 1924 Act to determine the natural origins of the nation
• By third report, given in 1929, Hill said “The present computations are as near as we can get on this matter to determining the national origins, practically.”

Question 51

What does Ngai view as the ‘central theme’ of the process that led to the passage of the 1924 Act?

Answer 51

-The central theme of that process was a race-based nativism, which favoured the “Nordics” of northern and western Europe over the “undesirable races” of eastern and southern Europe

Question 52

What, according to Ngai, were the long-term implications of the 1924 act?

Answer 52

The Immigration Act of 1924 thus established legal foundations for social processes that would unfold over the next several decades, processes that historians have called, for European immigrants, “becoming American” (or, more precisely, white Americans), while cast-
ing Mexicans as illegal aliens and foredooming Asians to permanent foreignness.

Question 53

Why should the Quota system be understood as a construction or races and American identity, and not a reflection of pre-existing conditions?

Answer 53

The census did not differentiate the foreign- born until 1850 and did not identify the places of birth of parents of the native-born until 1890.

Immigration was unrecorded before 1820 and not classified according to origin until 1899, when it was arranged, not by politically defined nation-states, but
according to a taxonomy called “races and peoples.”

‘Demography, and the census itself, far from being the simple quantification of material reality, grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a language for interpreting the social world’

• Ngai

Question 54

Who was excluded from the American population of 1920 by the quota board?

Answer 54

(1) immigrants from the [Western Hemisphere] or their descendants,
(2) aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants,
(3) the descendants of slave immigrants
(4) the descendants of the American aborigines
(5) discounted all Chinese, Japanese, and South Asians as persons “ineligible to citizenship,” including descendants of such people with American citizenship by native birth.
(6) China, Japan, India, and Siam each received the minimum quota of 100, but the law excluded the native citizens of those countries from immigation - could have non- Chinese from China?

Question 55

Francis A. Walker

Answer 55

Organised censuses of 1870 and 1880
- president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a brilliant scholar in the new field of statistics.

• He was also an ardent nativist and social Darwinist who believed immigrants from Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia were “vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions . . . beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence”
• Theory that America’s birthrate was declining due to immigration –> Legitimised fears of America being ‘overwhelmed’ by immigrants

Question 56

Joseph A. Hill

Answer 56

• Elite background
• 1910/1920 censuses, restored ‘mutaloo’ race category, wanted to gauge literacy ability and ability to speak English
• Tasked with creating quotas. Used ‘A Century of Population Growth’ to determine share of 1790 census that was white. Determined 82%. With help of Howard Barker and Marcus Hansen’s analysis in 1928, this fell to 67%

Question 57

The Case of Mexicans in the 1920s

Answer 57

• Nativists wanted their restriction, but agricultural elites needed their labour. They also weren’t immediately obviously white or black
• Under The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans in conquered territory in 1848 would become citizens after one year

Question 58

Dillingham and the Dilligham Commission

Answer 58

• Headed by Vermont Senator William Paul Dillingham,
• Began work in 1907, concluded by 1911
• Eventually published 41 volumes of statistics, highly influential in the Immigration Legislation of the early 20th century

Question 59

Harry H. Laughlin

Answer 59

• Nominated by chairman Albert Johnson as the “Expert Eugenical Agent” of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Laughlin had a continuous influence on its members.

He presented several reports, including “Biological Aspects of Immigration”: “[t]he character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities; that is, by the hereditary physical, mental, and moral or
temperamental traits of its people.”

Laughlin argued that “the recent immigrants, as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks.”

Question 60

Evidence of institutional, ingrained eugenics beliefs in American society

Answer 60

1) Big sponsors like Carnegie and Rockerfeller foundation
2) Taught at over 370 universities
3) Eugenics Records Office, later Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory
4) American Breeders Association (ABA) Run by Charles Davenport

Question 61

John Higham on the racial origins of nativism in Anglo-Americans

Answer 61

The origins of the racial theories regarding Europeans lay in what Higham calls the Anglo-Saxon nativist tradition, which held that Europeans of English or generally North European origin were the group that embodied the
best of the white race.

Question 62

What evidence does lehtinen cite to support the idea that racial-nativist thinking wasn’t absolutely accepted?

Answer 62

• At Harvard nativists in the minority
• Literary test took several years to pass
• Wasn’t the scientific consensus (Franz boas stressed nurture over nature)

Question 63

Why was the quota system, in part, a response to fears that immigration restriction might go too far?

Answer 63

-“A Bill to Provide for the Protection of the Citizens of the United States by the Temporary Suspension of Immigration.” introduced in 1920 but seen as too absolute

—> Dillingham introduces quotas and, after quota amount reduced from 5% to 3%, the bill passed

Question 64

What developments occured in congress between the passing of the 1921 act and the 24 act?

Answer 64

• 21 Act extended for two years
• Several more bills introduced
• House Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation

Question 65

What factors does Lehtinen cite as the most important contemporary arguments for Immigration Restriction?

Answer 65

‘The debate on immigration restriction in the first half of the 1920s turned mainly on three questions: the economic impact of immigration, the danger
posed by foreign, radical ideas, and the racial character of the immigrants.’

Question 66

What was the crucial difference between restrictionist arguments against ASIANS and SOUTHERN & EASTERN EUROPEANS?

What does Lihtinen think about the significance of racial attitudes to Europeans?

Answer 66

• Asians were never doubted to be a separate and inferior race
• Southern and Eastern Europeans were never doubted to be white, but were still thought to be inferior

“It should be noted, however, that the significance of racial views regarding European immigration can be overstated.”

• Normally a mix of cultural and historical arguments rather than a ‘coherent racial ideology’

Question 67

What does Lihtinen view as the racial justification for exclusion of Asians?

Answer 67

• Not that they didn’t want to assimilate, but that they wanted to establish themselves on an equal footing with Europeans and many found this to be threatening

Question 68

PRIMARY SOURCERacial arguments against S+E Europeans

Answer 68

• Argued in Congress that Americans, whilst immigrants, are of ‘distinct racial stock’ (Nordic Race) and do not want to be corrupted by inferior European races

Question 69

PRIMARY SOURCE Cultural arguments against S+E Europeans

Answer 69

‘Behold the immigration policy, the unutterable national stupidity that can not or will not discriminate between the gentleman of English, French and German culture on the one hand, and the bashibazouk, with his traditions of murder, plunder and assassination on the other’

Question 70

Economic arguments against immigration:

Lihtinen

Answer 70

• Traditionally the foremost significant factor
• Postwar recession, unemployment, saturated job market meant its the wrong time to take on immigrants who were typically characterised as being unskilled
• Particular immigrants (Hindus, Asians) excluded on the basis of their ability to live on less in hard times, would put Anglo-Americans at a disadvantage
• No longer strong need for low-skilled labourers
• Accepted minority groups, African Americans, felt threatened by other minorities and supported immigration restriction for this reason

Question 71

Immigrants as a threat to American institutions and society:

Answer 71

• Southern and Eastern Europeans who had lived under autocratic dictators would not warm to American democracy
• Already a history of banning those who threatened political institutions, sanctity of marriage, those who would burden the state institutions like hospitals (Likely to become a public charge)

EVIDENCE

• 1903 Anarchist exclusion act
• 1907 Act excluded insane persons, imbeciles, physically defective
• Red Scare: “flood tide of bolshevists, anarchists, and bomb throwers” - Congressional records
• Rejection of amendment proposed by Representative Sabath to exempt political asylum seekers from the quotas

Question 72

What was distinct about the climate of the quota acts for Lihtinen?

Answer 72

-‘ What was new in the 1920s, however, was that all these strands of nativism seemed to surface simultaneously and from several quarters’