Chinese Immigration

After the Civil War, immigrants again began to stream to the United States. Between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants arrived--more foreign-born people than had come to the country in the preceding 70 years. During the 1870s and 1880s, the majority came from Germany, Ireland, and England--the principal source of immigration before the Civil War. Even so, a relatively large group ofChinese immigrated to the United States between the start of the California gold rush in 1849 and 1882, when federal law stopped their immigration.
While the majority of immigrants came to settle in the United States permanently, many worked for a time and returned home with whatever savings they had set aside from their work. The majority of Chinese immigrants, for example, were single men whoworked for a while and returned home. At first, they were attracted to North America by the gold rush in California. Many prospected for gold on their own or labored for other miners. Soon, many opened their own businesses such as restaurants, laundries, and other personal service concerns. After the gold rush, Chinese immigrants worked as agricultural laborers, on railroad construction crewsthroughout the West, and in low-paying industrial jobs.
With the onset of hard economic times in the 1870s, other immigrants and European Americans began to compete for the jobs traditionally reserved for the Chinese. With economic competition came dislike and even racial suspicion and hatred. Such feelings were accompanied by anti-Chinese riots and pressure, especially in California, for the exclusion ofChinese immigrants from the United States. The result of this pressure was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882. This Act virtually ended Chinese immigration for nearly a century. As the following documents suggest, there were many opinions about this issue.
|In many respects, the motivations for the Chinese to come to the United States are similar to those of most immigrants.Some |
|came to "The Gold Mountain," and others came to the United States to seek better economic opportunity. Yet there were others |
|that were compelled to leave China either as contract laborers or refugees. The Chinese brought with them their language, |
|culture, social institutions, and customs. Over time they made lasting contributions to their adopted country and tried to ||become an integral part of the United States population. |
|Chinese immigration can be divided into three periods: 1849-1882, 1882-1965, and 1965 to the present. The first period began |
|shortly after the California Gold Rush and ended abruptly with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. During this ||period thousands of Chinese, mostly young male peasants, left their villages in the rural countries to become laborers in the |
|American West. They were recruited to extract metals and minerals, construct a vast railroad network, reclaim swamplands, build|
|irrigation systems, work as migrant agricultural laborers, develop the fishing industry, and operate highly-competitive ||manufacturing industries. At the end of the first period, the Chinese population in the United States was about 110,000. |


Throughout most of the second period (1882-1965), only diplomats, merchants, and students and their dependents were allowed to travel to the United States. Otherwise, throughout this period, Chinese Americans were confined to segregated ghettos, called Chinatowns, in majorcities and isolated regions in rural areas across the country. Because the Chinese were deprived of their democratic rights, they made extensive use of the courts and diplomatic channels to defend themselves. The Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, particularly the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought in a new period in Chinese American...