May 6, 1882: Give me your tired, your poor, but not your Chinese.
Tue May 06, 2008 at 06:12:01 AM PDT
It is May 6, 1882. The U.S.'s first Transcontinental Railroad has been in place for almost 13 years to the day. The 19th century gold rush, which saw San Francisco's population boom, is kind of gone. The economy is in the shitter, and politicians are railing against yellow people as being the source of this malaise, since they'll work themselves to death. (Union what?) The Statue of Liberty, meant as a centennial gift but delivered 10 years late, is still being financed.
With the U.S.'s no longer needing cheap labor to risk life, limb and bucket blowing holes in mountains, the Burlingame Treaty, a piece of goodwill legislation enacted in 1868 with China, is essentially tossed aside. (Apparently Chinese ambassadors didn't ask the pre-Euro invasion inhabitants of this land about our history of honoring treaties.) Initially this is done by suspending Chinese immigration — but assuring the Chinese people in America, however long they have been here, that their rights will be recognized.
On May 6, 1882, the U.S. drops any pretense of honor, passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, and screws the Chinese in America until 1965.
The parallels between the Chinese Exclusion Act and the current immigration debate are frankly frightening. Consider:
A) Web browsers have been around for 14 years, and the railroad had been in service for 13 years.
B) The dot-com bubble has burst, albeit more recently than the gold rush had slowed.
C) The economy is in the shitter.
D) That discounted oil we were supposed to get from Iraq in exchange for their freedom is fantastically late. (That's the Statue of Liberty analogy.)
E) Outsourcing has taken a lot of jobs overseas, just as the railroad jobs dried up.
F) Let's blame brown people!
G) This was the first piece of immigration-restricting legislation, and we're currently working on building our first border fence (excluding the one in Iraq).
H) National ID card, meet certificate of residence.
I) Path to citizenship by first leaving the country, paying a fine and getting in line behind everyone else, meet imprisonment, deportation and a ban on non-whites' (regardless of how long they had been in the country) becoming U.S. citizens. (That one, as you'll see later, had been in place for a while.)
For all people want to talk about this election as possibly mirroring that of any in the 1930s, the similarities between 2008 and 1882 scare me.
Here, in all its yellowed, racist glory, is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Or, if you'd like a version King George could have read, read and weep (underlining is in original; italics is in transcript; bolding is mine):
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the expiration of ninety days next after the passage of this act, and until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended; and during such suspension it shall not be lawful for any Chinese laborer to come, or having so come after the expiration of said ninety days to remain within the United States.
But the 1882 act was just the beginning. Many Chinese people were still getting into the country (though fewer compared to the gush from China into the 1880s), despite the provision of the 1882 act forbidding skilled or unskilled laborers from immigrating and restricting family-based "entry only to those that had been born in the U.S. or had husbands or fathers who were citizens." Since Chinese people could not become citizens, the restriction effectively meant that if you, a Chinese person of however many generations in the U.S., wanted to take a trip to China, you might as well just move, because it would be far too straining an ordeal to bother trying to get back into the States.
Now, not everyone supported this measure. Senator George Frisbie Hoar, a man all American schoolchildren (and all Kossacks) would do well to learn about in history class, opposed it. He also spoke out for blacks and women and had this to say about America's military action in the Phillipines, remarks that with precious little editing could today be delivered regarding the war in Iraq:
You have wasted nearly six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.
Your practical statesmanship has succeeded in converting a people who three years ago were ready to kiss the hem of the garment of the American and to welcome him as a liberator, who thronged after your men when they landed on those islands with benediction and gratitude, into sullen and irreconciliable enemies, possessed of a hatred which centuries can not eradicate.
The practical statesmanship of the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule would have cost nothing but a few kind words. They would have bought for you the great title of liberator and benefactor, which your fathers won for your country in the South American Republics and in Japan, and which you have won in Cuba. They would have bought for you undying gratitude of a great and free people and the undying glory which belongs to the name of liberator. That people would have felt for you as Japan felt for you when she declared last summer that she owed everything to the United States of America.
And according to his biographer, Hoar "believed that 'Chinese exclusion represented nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination.'" Gee, ya think?
(In my research for this article, I came across one of those wonderful Southern Democrat types. Check out a man who walked out of the 1936 Democratic National Convention because a black preacher was about to address the gathering, then said the late Sen. John C. Calhoun would have lauded that racist reaction. Ellison D. Smith, this was your life, and what good you could have done with it.)
So our beloved government, looking at something that had stemmed the flow of Chinese people into the country and made assimilation more difficult, felt it had to make life even more fun. Anti-miscegenation laws were on the books until 1948. That same site has the ruling on naturalized citizens: They must be "free white persons." Not a Chinaman's chance indeed.
And then some politicians realized that pandering to race fears could go beyond one kind of Asian — and beyond even Asia. Indeed, the Immigration Act of 1924 can be held accountable for some of the concentration camp carnage:
At the same time, thousands of persons sought to flee totalitarian regimes like that in Nazi Germany. Since American immigration policies failed to distinguish between immigrants and refugees in the quota counts, most of the refugees (principally Jews) were barred from coming to the United States.
Here is the 1924 act's definition of immigrant:
DEFINITION OF IMMIGRANT. SEC. 3. When used in this Act the term "immigrant" means an alien departing from any place outside the United States destined for the United States, except (1) a government official, his family, attendants, servants, and employees, (2) an alien visiting the United States temporarily as a tourist or temporarily for business or pleasure, (3) an alien in continuous transit through the United States, (4) an alien lawfully admitted to the United States who later goes in transit from one part of the United States to another through foreign contiguous territory, (5) a bona fide alien seaman serving as such on a vessel arriving at a port of the United States and seeking to enter temporarily the United States solely in the pursuit of his calling as a seaman, and (6) an alien entitled to enter the United States solely to carry on trade under and in pursuance of the provisions of a present existing treaty of commerce and navigation.
Now, I'd think "I want to avoid being gassed by Nazis" would qualify as pleasure (section (2)), but I am not a lawyer.
Oh, and a history lesson for use against anti-immigration folks (Lou Dobbs, are you paying attention?):
[continuation of the definition of a NON-QUOTA IMMIGRANT:] (c) An immigrant who was born in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Canal Zone, or an independent country of Central or South America, and his wife, and his unmarried children under 18 years of age, if accompanying or following to join him; [...]
(The term non-quota immigrant refers to an immigrant from a country where there is no immigration quota. All of South America could have come to the states in 1925 completely legally.)
So, in the spirit of Republican arguments against John Kerry (and which have mysteriously disappeared as a mark against a presidential candidate since John McCain ascended), we were for unlimited Mexican immigration before we were against it. We ... changed our mind. (We were for it back then for much the same reason many pro-business folks are for it now: cheap farm labor.)
The difference between 2008 and 1924, for those of you following at home, is that all the wedge issues — before immigration came up again — favored Democrats. Republicans decided they hated immigrants largely because they thought such hate would deliver votes, not because of any actual concern over the number of Americans who want badly to be picking tomatoes for 35 cents an hour but who are turned back because the Mexicans have beaten them there.
So here you are, faithful progressive Kossack, wondering what we can learn from this 80-year love affair with hating Chinese people (and later, Asians in general). How can we stop it? Well, the Chinese got a break when we ended up being allied with them in World War II, though they — and citizens of other non-Western nations — didn't stop getting the legal shaft until 1965. So maybe the trick is to get that Coalition of the Willing going again, but this time with a bunch of Mexicans. (The trouble with this, as I channel my inner Republican, is that Mexicans look too much like Arabs. Shades of Windtalkers.)
Or maybe the trick is to realize that history is repeating itself, as I indicated earlier. The parallels are there, and they are frightening — even down to the closeness of the electoral college decision before immigration became a huge issue. Rutherford B. Hayes, seeing an electoral college deadlock, was elected essentially based on his promise to remove federal troops from the Southern states and thus free up white southerners to make life hell for black people for the next, oh ... 131 years, two months, four days and counting. (Yes, it's gotten better. No, it's not yet acceptable. Call me when environmental racism isn't still poisoning black children and Republicans aren't still refusing to take a stand on lynching.) And we all know of George W. Bush and his massive electoral college and popular vote win in 2000.
But the parallels are there in more than the historical similarities. The parallels are there in terms of the political and social plays being made by the people pushing for what one might call the Hispanic Exclusion Act of 2009 (since this year's debate for such an act seems to have died):
A) Blaming foreigners (some of whom aren't so foreign) for the problems our beloved government has discovered it can foist upon the American people and the next administration.
B) Breaking up families by deporting the parents because they were born not on American soil but only near it.
C) Using divisive terms ("illegals" or "aliens" now, "An act to limit the migration of aliens into the United States..." then) instead of treating humans with respect.
D) Seeing Mexicans and other brown immigrants as being only migrant workers lacking the education to, say, run flower shops. (Ask me how I know.)
E) One party's demonizing people it has been taking advantage of — whether for blowing up mountains or picking produce so it doesn't spoil.
(The intimation on the part of Colorado, of course, is that it's better to be in prison than to be an undocumented immigrant. Seems to me the person smart enough to not get caught shouldn't be the one being punished. But that's Tom Tancredo for you.)
So next time you hear someone talking about how immigrants don't assimilate, slap that person upside the head inform that person of the government's role from 1880 to 1965 forbidding immigrants — however long ago their families had immigrated — from assimilating. Tell them about the rule on who could be a citizen of this country, of how long it was before interracial marriages could not legally be forbidden.
Oh, and since that person will inevitably be a deeply Christian Republican, give them this Bible verse and watch as they hem and haw and talk about context (which never mattered when they were quoting Leviticus at me):
Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.
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