Racial Discrimination Against Chinese Immigrants In America

After civil war had settled down, many immigrants came to America to live from many countries such as Germany, Ireland, and England. There are as many as 12 million immigrants at this time. Regarding Chinese immigration, they immigrated to the United States from 1849 to 1882. Between this period, America had California Gold Rush, which is one of the reasons Chinese people immigrated. Because the Chinese Exclusion Act was taken into practice, no more Chinese people could immigrate to the United States after 1882. Chinese immigration is the divergent point for Chinese’ lives who lived in America.

The Chinese Exclusion act banned all Chinese people moving to America. Chinese people emigrated to California in 1848 during the California Gold Rush. Massive amounts of Chinese people moved to the west Coast to make money and return home to the Qing Empire. They were mainly drawn to the west coast as a way to prosper economically. Many were discriminated against and given low wages, and had poor

The Chinese Experience records the history of the Chinese in the United States. The three-part documentary shows how the first arrivals from China, their descendants, and recent immigrants have “become American.” It is a story about identity and belonging that is relative to all Americans. The documentary is divided into three programs, each with a focus on a particular time in history. Program 1 describes the first arrivals from China, beginning in the early 1800’s and ending in 1882, the year Congress passed the first Chinese exclusion act. Program 2, which details the years of exclusion and the way they shaped and distorted Chinese American

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Those on the West Coast were especially prone to attribute declining wages and economic ills on the despised Chinese workers. Although the Chinese composed only .002 percent of the nation’s population, Congress passed the exclusion act to placate worker demands and assuage prevalent concerns about maintaining white “racial purity.”

Millions of immigrants over the previous centuries have shaped the United States of America into what it is today. America is known as a “melting pot”, a multicultural country that welcomes and is home to an array of every ethnic and cultural background imaginable. We are a place of opportunity, offering homes and jobs and new economic gains to anyone who should want it. However, America was not always such a “come one, come all” kind of country. The large numbers of immigrants that came during the nineteenth century angered many of the American natives and lead to them to blame the lack of jobs and low wages on the immigrants, especially the Asian communities. This resentment lead to the discrimination and legal exclusion of immigrants,

When they arrived in America most of the Chinese immigrants moved west. Most of the Chinese immigrants moved west because they wanted to get jobs in rural areas and build homes for their families. A lot of Chinese immigrants got jobs working on building railroads. The Chinese immigrants were very good at this job, because they got paid very low wages, and that affected the pay rates of white Americans, European immigrants, and Russian immigrants. In the 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This act stated that Chinese laborers could not enter the country, because chinese immigrants accepted low wages, and also affected the pay rates of others. However Immigrants from Italy and Russia did not have to go through this. They also had an easier time getting jobs because of

Before World-War II, the Chinese immigrants to the U.S had many characteristics. First, the Chinese immigrants mainly came from mainland China, such as the Guangdong province. The Chinese immigrants mainly came from the Guangdong province of China because of the location of Guangdong province. The Guangdong province was close to coastal areas where Guangong people could take the boasts and migrate to America. Also, Guangdong people was far away from the Chinese government's control. Therefore, Chinese immigrants could easily migrated from the Guangdong province of China to America. Second, most of the Chinese immigrants were poor and came from rural areas in China. They migrated to America because they suffered from poor harvests and

The first Chinese immigrants flooded to America, in the hopes of “striking gold” during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Unfortunately, the citizens of California greeted these newcomers with many unfair laws. Beginning with the Foreign Miner’s License Tax Law of 1850, the Chinese experienced nothing but bigotry from the citizens who surrounded them. This inequality peaked when President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring the immigration of Chinese workers for ten years. During that time, the immigration of Japanese in search of work rapidly increased. These immigrants also faced racial discrimination, from their ineligibility for citizenship to the laws prohibiting Japanese from owning land. The full

Many groups immigrated to the United States, mostly in California, for land, jobs, wealth and freedom. One of the main ethnic groups of immigrants that came to California to work were the Chinese. Many companies used the Chinese men to work on railroads that connected America through transportation that later helped develop modern day America.

In the late 1800’s European, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants traveled To the United States. The Europeans came looking for opportunities while Japanese were recruited from Hawaiian planters as for the Chinese immigrants they came for many reasons some were attracted to the gold rush, while the others came to work for the railroads, farmed or became domestic servants. While immigration and urbanization was beginning to unfold they began creating social, political, and economic problems. These problems made life hard for immigrants but one race that seemed to be affected was the Chinese not only was it because they became successful but also because they increased in a big amount and as technology started improving labor was not needed as much. Chinese arrived between 1851-1882, 300,000 Chinese arrived on the west coast When the Chinese immigrants first came to work in the gold mines , agriculture , and railroads the Chinese were very instrumental in building railroads and at the time Chinese immigrants started to grow successful but as they increased so did the strength of anti-Chinese sentiment among other workers wanting to limit the amount of Chinese immigrants.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was established in 1882, in which the first time United States prevent a group of immigrants with nationality (Lee 4), marked United States’ from welcoming nation to an enclosed and discriminative nation, has monumental impact on each Chinese immigrants and culture of the entire American Chinese community (6). The poor conditions and lack of opportunities in the 19th century China and the Chinese’s hope of accumulating wealth to support their families in China fostered the huge influx of Chinese immigrants to United States. The discovery of gold in California also fuelled many Chinese’s dream of fast wealth (112). Due to the need for mass labour stemming from industrialization and high productivity of Chinese labours, employers would enthusiastically hire Chinese labour, which in turn sparked the increasing competition with the local workers and a growing anti-Chinese sentiment (114).

While thousands of European immigrants came into the United States on the East Coast, Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast in smaller numbers. Approximately 200,00 Chinese immigrants arrived between 1851-1883. Beginning in 1910, Chinese immigrants entered the United States through the Angel Island Immigration Station, where they might be detained in barracks for weeks or months. Pull factors for Chinese immigrants included the California Gold Rush in 1848 and jobs working on the construction of the transcontinental railroad (1862-1869) and other railroads in the West. In the later years of this wave of immigration, Chinese immigrants worked as “stoop laborers” in farming, mining and also domestic service such as laundering. Friction

After the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States in the early 1840s during the California Gold Rush, many Chinese people continued to travel across the Pacific, escaping poor conditions in China with hopes and ambitions for a better life in America. Many more Chinese immigrants began arriving into the 1860s on the Pacific coast for work in other areas such as the railroad industry. The immigrants noticed an increasing demand for their labor because of their readiness to work for low wages. Many of those who arrived did not plan to stay long, and therefore there was no push for their naturalization. The immigrants left a country with thousands of years of a “decaying feudal system,” corruption, a growing

Laws are not only as the dictionary says, “any written or positive rule or collection of rules prescribed under the authority of the state or nations.” The rules that are written reflect the racist, classist, and sexist biases and assumptions maintained in our nation. In other words, laws mirror the customs of the majority that are in power. This is especially evident in the United States during the late nineteenth century when many people were debating the question of what it means to be an American. There are various responses, some by “native born” such as, Fredrick Jackson Turner who wrote the propaganda piece: The Significance of the Frontier or some like Takao Ozawa, an immigrant from Japan who defines Americanness in his legal brief for naturalization. However, it seems as those who are vulnerable [i.e. women, Black, and Brown people] in an aggressive nation such as the United States, hold with them the true meaning of what it means to be American. For instance, while some were arguing whether or not to assimilate the “other” as Americans, one community of the other were fighting to stay in a land they were forced into; to be considered humans let alone American. In this paper, I will discuss the ways that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments brought freedom for African Americans, for a moment, and how white supremacy has fought this from happening. It also looks at the ways non-black and non-white immigrants, such as Japanese and Mexican people, have utilized the

The railroads had a unique opportunity to shape settlement in the region. To build the railroad Americans chose Chinese immigrants because these people were a hard worker and building the railroad was a hard job. During the gilded age, each year almost a million southern and eastern immigrants came in to the united states and crowded in to cities specially in New York, Boston, Chicago, and, Philadelphia. Americans stated that these immigrants are poor and could not learn English. The fact that these immigrants were Jewish, orthodox or catholic, made protestant Americans dislike these new immigrants. Also, Americans had a unique hatred for the new Chinese immigrants who worked long hours of labor for low ages. At that time, Chinese people were inexpensive labor the real road chose them so they can pay these people law wages.