The Chinese Immigration Into Hawaii

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Less than ten percent of Hawaii’s population is true, native, pureblooded Hawaiian. The influx of immigrants came as an reaction to find work for the sugar fields. The Chinese immigration into Hawaii began in the latter part of the eighteenth century. They were the first wave of immigrants to arrive on the islands, followed by Japanese, Portuguese, Filipinos, and Koreans. It has been noted in history, as far back as Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778, that Chinese presence began to occur. Since the increasing trade between China and North America, Hawai’i became an essential stop along the trade route. The first group of indentured Chinese plantation recruits arrived in 1852. “Between 1852 and 1856, several thousand Chinese were brought into…show more content…
A driving force in the economy was the new potential immigrants looking for jobs on the sugarcane farms. The sugar export industry didn’t surge until the 1860s, when access to Southern sugar was cut off during the Civil War. In order for this industry to be commercially profitable, it was necessary to import foreign laborers due to all the external, Western diseases that had wiped out the native population, and the remaining natives were not enough to keep the workforce profitable. The sandalwood trade had already established a relationship between Hawai‘i and China. Furthermore, civil unrest and natural disasters in China made the country difficult to earn a living. Thus, Hawai‘i became an attractive destination for Chinese immigrants — mostly married males who set out to earn money for their families back in China. The Chinese laborers were signed to five-year contracts, after those five years around half returned to China while the other half stayed, creating Honolulu’s Chinatown. The neighborhood quickly grew with around 6,000 people occupying it. But in 1886 a fire broke out and destroyed eight blocks of Chinatown. The government responded to this fire by putting building restrictions, sadly none of those were enforced causing more rickety buildings to be built. In 1900 Chinatown became quarantined thanks to the Black Death. An answer to this solution was “sanitary fires” to try to prevent further spread of the disease.
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