Washington Historical Society
“The Tacoma Method” of Chinese expulsion
Truckee, California, took a different approach to Chinese expulsion. Truckee sits in the basin underneath the Sierra Nevada peaks where Chinese rail workers had painstakingly built tunnels to allow passage for the transcontinental railroad (see Part 1 of this story). It boomed in population during and after the railroad’s construction, and many Chinese rail workers made it their home. By 1870, around a third of Truckee’s population was of Chinese descent. It had one of the biggest Chinatowns in the United States.
White residents of Truckee had long made life difficult for its Chinese residents. In 1876, for instance, white militants — part of a secretive group called “The Caucasian League” — murdered a Chinese woodcutter and wounded others and then, despite a trial, were found innocent (these types of acquittals for racist thugs and vigilantes were common in the West back then). Over the years, Truckee’s Chinatown was burned in a series of mysterious — but actually not so mysterious — fires. In fact, after one such fire, the town forced their Chinese residents to build a new Chinatown across the Truckee River. This new Chinatown had no bridge, so they had to cross the river by ferry.
But this wasn’t enough for the white residents of Truckee. They wanted Chinese people gone from the area completely. In the winter of 1885-86, a local lawyer and newspaper owner named Charles McGlashan was inspired by the cascade of purges across the West Coast. However, by then, there seemed to be some growing political and legal blowback for these extralegal expulsions. The town of Eureka, for example, was being sued by their former Chinese denizens for reparations. National politicians condemned violence in places like Rock Springs.
It was within this context that McGlashan pioneered what became known as “The Truckee Method,” a relatively non-violent — but still violent — boycott and harassment campaign against Chinese businesses and white businesses that employed Chinese people. The aim was to starve the Chinese out by eliminating their local economic opportunities and making their lives miserable. The campaign proved successful in ridding the town of Chinese residents and was copied by numerous other towns up and down California. McGlashan became a leader in an anti-Chinese boycott movement across the state.
Over the course of 1885 and 1886, more than 160 communities across the West Coast would expel their Chinese inhabitants. And they made it abundantly clear to national politicians: many Western voters were not satisfied with the 1882 law.
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland — hoping to carry Western states in his upcoming reelection battle — signed into law another Chinese Exclusion Act that had more teeth than the first one. This one prohibited all Chinese laborers from coming into the country — whether or not they had resided in the United States previously. It was a policy that was easier to enforce and administer. It was also quickly implemented, leaving thousands of Chinese immigrants who had traveled abroad stranded and unable to return. It was also a policy that angered China and marked the beginning of an age in which the United States set restrictive immigration policy unilaterally.
After President Cleveland signed this legislation into law, many white westerners took to the streets to celebrate. This was only two years after the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, which proclaimed that America was a refuge for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Four years later, with the Geary Act, Washington renewed Chinese exclusion for another ten years, expanded the power of the federal government to enforce anti-Chinese immigration laws, and implemented the registration and “passport” system that President Arthur had called “undemocratic and hostile to the spirit of our institutions.”
The Chinese Exclusion Acts — and the mob violence, pogroms, boycotts, and other forms of expulsion — had their intended effect. In 1890, the US Census Bureau recorded 107,488 Chinese people living in the United States. In 1900, that number dropped to 89,863. And by 1910, it was 71,531. The restrictions on Chinese immigration would not begin to be lifted until World War II.
The Economic Effects of Chinese Exclusion
Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.
Eureka, California faced all sorts of economic problems. “For most white residents, the financial loss was immediate,” writes Jean Pfaelzer in her book Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Businesses lost workers. “Some went into debt to pay higher salaries to new white employees.” Landlords lost tenants. Stores lost customers. Chinese entrepreneurs had run the laundries in the town, and now people were stuck with dirty clothes. Chinese vegetable growers had provided the town with its produce and their disappearance meant no more fresh veggies. “White residents tried their hands at growing their own vegetables but complained about their poor results, the lack of variety of food, and the rotting produce that was shipped north from San Francisco,” writes Pfaelzer.
It was similar in Truckee. “The Chinese were renters, shoppers, and low-paid laborers, and white agents made money from their legal, real estate, and commercial transactions,” writes Pfaelzer. Charles McGlashan, the leader of the anti-Chinese boycott, sought to replace Chinese laundromats with an “expensive steam laundry,” but it was “simply too large and expensive for the needs of the small railroad town, and the Truckee Laundry Association was sued by its major investors.” Truckee businesses desperately recruited white workers with advertisements, but “cheap white labor did not emerge, and mountain inns and hotels faced a summer season without food, while lumber camps could not staff their cookhouses.”
Across California, near the start of the spring of 1886, “large-scale farmers, food processors, and cannery owners realized that they would not be able to carry on their businesses without the Chinese,” writes Pfaelzer.
Of course, all of these are just anecdotes about local effects. And, until recently, we’ve had no rigorous economic study of the effects of Chinese exclusion on the American economy. But in a new study, economists Nancy Qian, Joe Long, Carlo Medici, and Marco Tabellini provide just that.
The title of their working paper is “The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the economic development of the Western United States,” but Nancy Qian, an economist at Northwestern University, says their study’s estimated effects really include all the anti-Chinese laws, discrimination, and purges that affected Chinese Americans after 1882. “If vigilante violence and discrimination had been milder, then the anti-Chinese legislations would have probably had a smaller negative effect on the US economy,” Qian says. Namely, these laws would have reduced the inflow of Chinese immigrants, but they would not have caused as many Chinese Americans to flee communities, workplaces, and, more broadly, the United States.
In this way, Qian and her colleagues’ study may provide some insight into the effects not only of the restricted inflow of immigration — the official intent of the Chinese Exclusion Act — but also of mass deportations since many Chinese were forced out of communities and ultimately left the country.
Chinese immigrants had been vital to many West Coast industries. “By 1882, the Chinese had spread out across a lot of different sectors, and they were taking the skills that they had learned, mining, building the railroad, and also the ones they brought from China — they were applying it to lots of different things,” Qian says. This, she says, made the economy better for just about everyone.
“The sad punchline” of their study, Qian says, “is that very few people benefited from the Chinese Exclusion Act” and later laws and community actions. Western businesses suffered, and cities and towns across the West that saw their Chinese populations decline or disappear became less economically vibrant. For example, Qian and her colleagues find there was a slowdown in Western manufacturing, a sector in which many Chinese immigrants had worked.
The crackdown against Chinese immigrants, Qian says, hurt most of the white population in the West. And, further, it made West Coast towns and cities that had large Chinese populations in 1882 less of a magnet for white workers from the East because economic opportunities in these places shriveled. The economists find that Chinese exclusion, in its many 1882 and post-1882 incarnations, slowed down the economic growth and development of the West.
But Qian and her colleagues find there was at least one clear group of workers who benefited from Chinese exclusion: local white miners. It’s interesting because the first wave of Chinese immigrants who came here, after 1849, came to America with the hope of finding gold. And the first discriminatory laws they faced were at the local level and aimed to discourage Chinese immigrants from mining. It also provides more context for the resentment and rage of white miners that exploded in the Rock Springs massacre.
Mining is maybe more zero sum than other parts of the economy. There’s a fixed level of stuff in the ground and one person’s gain in finding valuable minerals is another person’s loss.
But Qian’s study suggests most of the economy didn’t work this way. It was not zero sum. Chinese workers actually improved the economic lives of most white workers and businessmen.
As a concrete example, she points to Chinese woodcutters. “So the Chinese workers — who were chopping down trees and making them into planks for the railroad — were now chopping down trees and making them into planks for the construction of houses and bars and hotels in western towns,” Qian says. “This is a very valuable skill. Now, all of a sudden, they leave. That doesn’t just affect the lumber mill. But you have to think about all the people who are relying on using the wood. So now the doctor’s office, the barmen, the hotel men, the railroad, everyone now has to pay more for wood. I mean, this is just a very important material for the whole economy.”
So, if there’s a lesson from Qian’s study, it’s that, yes, maybe immigration restrictions and expulsions or deportations can actually help some native workers. But, really, the cost is tremendous — not just for the immigrants themselves but also for almost everyone else.
The Recent Movement To Honor Chinese Victims
The story of what happened to Chinese immigrants is horrific. And in recent years, towns on the West Coast that purged their Chinese populations have begun to memorialize this dark period of history and honor the Chinese people who were kicked out of their towns.
For example, the city of Tacoma worked with the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation, a nonprofit, to create a park, which is called Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park.
Since 2021, an organization called the Eureka Chinatown Project has done various projects around Eureka to “honor the history and culture of the first Chinese people in Humboldt County, California” (the county Eureka is in).
Earlier this year, Truckee unveiled a plaque to commemorate the two Chinatowns that once existed in the town.
Many Americans remain ignorant of this history, and the organizers behind these projects want to educate them about it — with the hope history won’t repeat itself.
When researching this history, we read a number of illuminating books. We thank the historians for their work. You can check them out yourself:Â
Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Gordon H. Chang
Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer
The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams
This first appeared in the Planet Money newsletter. You can sign up here.
Copyright 2024 NPR
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6746a66e7e1548389e04b1fcea61d5af&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kpbs.org%2Fnews%2Feconomy%2F2024%2F11%2F26%2Fthe-price-america-paid-for-its-first-big-immigration-crackdown&c=16417687089797451587&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-11-25 22:55:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
