Chinese Immigration

The 1849 gold rush brought Chinese to the United States in large numbers and set in motion a pattern of immigration by Chinese that would eventually result in the passage of the first restrictionist immigration laws aimed at voluntary immigration to the United States. Most of the early Chinese immigrants consisted of merchants and skilled artisans seeking opportunity. These Chinese did not intend to stay, though many did of necessity. The intent of these immigrants can be surmised by the Chinese term for these early immigrants, gamsaanhaak, or “gold mountain guest.” This refers to the literal translation of the Chinese writing symbol for California, “Gold Mountain.” When the placer mining played out in California, many of the “gold mountain guests” returned to China, and some remained in the United States. Those that followed consisted primarily of laborers, or “coolies.”

The coolie trade began in 1806 when the British started importing Chinese laborers to work their sugar plantations. Not coincidentally, the British passed a ban on the slave trade in 1807. The timing of the two events helps illustrate the real nature of the coolie trade. It served as a replacement for black slave labor, contracting impoverished Chinese laborers, or in many cases kidnapping Chinese laborers, to do arduous labor without the social baggage of enslavement. In the United States, Chinese coolies became equated with slaves. The ending of slavery and the future unavailability of black slaves as a labor source stimulated efforts to import Chinese in place of blacks.

Railroad construction provided the initial primary occupation for imported Chinese labor. The Republican Party, enmeshed in a Civil War and desirous to open the western frontier of the United States to settlement, passed several acts to spur railroad construction and encouraged the construction of a transcontinental railroad. In 1864, the Republican campaign platform also advocated encouragement of foreign immigration to facilitate the building of these railroads. That same year, an Act to Encourage Immigration, better known as the Contract Labor Act, became law. This act allowed employers to recruit immigrants for jobs in the United States. Labor organizations opposed the law, and this opposition resulted in its eventual repeal in 1868. By that year, the Republican-controlled government further facilitated the importation of Chinese labor through the Burlingame Treaty, wherein the United States agreed to reciprocal immigration rights with the government of China. Anson Burlingame was a Republican representative in Congress from Massachusetts. In 1861, he became United States minister to China, and resigned that post in 1867. Burlingame then accepted an appointment by the Chinese Emperor as Chinese minister to the United States. As the new Chinese minister, he returned to Washington in a state visit in 1868 and, using old inside political connections, negotiated the treaty that bears his name, which opened immigration with China beyond what had already existed by removing and, at least temporarily, preventing obstructions to immigrants passing from one signatory country to the other.

Time was not on the side of the Burlingame Treaty, however. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 created a surplus of laborers of both Chinese and European origin. Large numbers of unemployed workers led to labor unrest. An economic downturn in the 1870s further exacerbated the problem. Industrialists and other employers—such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Confederate General and Southern war hero as well as founder of the original Ku Klux Klan—generated widespread publicity for their plans to import Chinese laborers to break strikes. Such threats, and the actual employment of Chinese as scabs, drew hot resentment from laborers of European descent. The striking laborers, in increasing proportions, were immigrants themselves. The hostility to the Chinese workers did not stem from the immigrant status of the Chinese, but instead it originated from plainly visible racial and cultural differences and from being on opposite sides of the labor conflict. The hostility to Chinese grew to the point that violent massacres of Chinese began to occur in regions with large communities of Chinese, primarily in the western states. For instance, massacres of Chinese occurred in Los Angeles, California, in 1871; Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885; Eureka, California, in 1885; Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, in 1885; and Snake River, Oregon, in 1887.

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