Stephanie Hinnershitz: Chinese Immigration & Exclusion | BRI Scholar Talks

0:04 welcome to another life liberty in the pursuit of happiness scholar talk i’m tony williams with the bill of rights institute senior fellow there and we are very honored to have stephanie hendershitz uh here with us to discuss the piece she wrote on the chinese exclusion act of 1882 and immigration in the late 19th century so thank you for joining us thank you for having me all right well i’ll introduce you if you don’t mind uh dr stephanie hendershotz is an assistant professor of history at cleveland state university she’s the author of race religion and civil rights asian students on the west coast from 1900 to 1968 and more recently a different shade of justice asian american civil rights in the south and i understand that you have a forthcoming book on japanese american incarceration during world war ii again thank you for your contribution to the life liberty and pursuit of happiness textbook uh and to joining us today thank you all right well let’s jump right in uh and i was wondering if maybe you can help provide the teachers and students with with some historical context for chinese immigration to the united states in the late 19th century what what um you know compel them to leave china or what compel them to come to the united states

1:35 one of the things that i use when i’m teaching to help students understand why students or not why students why immigrants leave their home countries and why they come to the united states it’s this idea of push and pull factors so there’s a reason why they choose or maybe they feel like they don’t have much of a choice and that they they have to go for economic or political or cultural reasons but for the chinese during the mid to late uh 19th century there’s a lot of political upheaval um there are the opium wars with britain there’s environmental disasters droughts floods um there’s rebellions there’s a lot of a lot of events that are going on that are making chinese especially uh farmers uh you know men who are not incredibly wealthy maybe they’re just trying to get by but they they start to lose access to their livelihood and so the push factors are political economic they’re feeling like they can’t really provide for themselves or their families so they’re looking for some place to go so the pushes there are forces that are kind of pushing them out and then the pull factor it’s it’s actually pretty global so there are other places that chinese could choose to go and did go so one of the big industries that will draw them away from china is mining and so mining is certainly important becoming

3:06 important in the united states by the late 19th century but it’s also becoming very large in australia in south america so there’s a lot of chinese who do actually go to those places and they start to come to the united states in larger numbers um in the 1850s as part of part of the gold rush so just like with a lot of other people within the united states that are moving out to the west to try and and make their fortune or maybe just get a little bit of extra money the chinese are doing that as well so there’s this idea of looking at the us as gold mountain that’s what chinese men refer to it as we’re going to go make their make their money on gold mountain send money home and then eventually they’re going to want to return home back to their back to their families um and then they also you know not just not just mining but when they come and settle in places like california and other places out in the west there are these little towns that pop up around um the mining claims and the chinese find an economic spot to get into doing jobs like cooking and laundry that a lot of the other miners um didn’t necessarily want to do so there’s a lot of a lot of push and pull that’s that’s going on and they’re they are part of a larger movement of migrants to the united states from other places around the world right uh and and the railroad uh yes yeah

4:37 yeah so once once the the claims to the mines start to start to kind of dry up and that doesn’t pan out exactly as a lot of individuals would have hoped then the next sort of wave of industry um out west in the 19th century would be the railroads so especially the transcontinental railroad um that’s also where you’re going to see a lot of competition for jobs between chinese employer or chinese employees and white laborers so it’s like the chinese kind of moved from mining into doing the labor on the railroads um they they do accept lower wages um than some of the white laborers do and that’s because you know they left china to come here so they’re intent on on making some extra money and there’s also this sort of stereotype among bosses that chinese men are preferable to white laborers because the white laborers are they get drunk a lot um they rough house they’re not disciplined and so that creates some some friction between chinese and white laborers but yeah chinese come to the united states when at a time when the united states is industrializing and also expanding yeah right right and this is part of a much larger movement of people’s around the world and and to the united states can you talk a little bit maybe about that that the general immigration picture during the late 19th early 20th century yeah definitely so and and this is

6:08 another good example of using that framework of push and pull if you’re teaching because you can you can kind of move it and apply it to a lot of different groups and a lot of historians look at migration during this time late 19th early 20th century and they they trace it to this massive industrialization that’s happening a lot of expansion among different businesses and corporations in the united states uh that time period you know around the gilded age early 20th century up until that point is going to be the largest influx of migrants to the united states and also the most varied so that’s another really key about this time period in american immigration history because you will see people from different nations arrive in larger numbers than america has ever seen before so especially when employers are looking for laborers um there’s the idea that america is this land of opportunity compared to political crises and china political crises in europe you know a lot of uh people going on over there um people free and persecution from their religious beliefs um cultural beliefs and practices so yeah it’s massive it’s just this massive wave of migration that’s coming to the united states because of economic and and political forces as well yeah right and you know europe had a lot of uh american recruiters

7:39 going over or and trying to to to draw the immigrants for their their cheap labor and so forth was there any anything like that going on in like let’s say chinese port cities or yeah yeah there was so something very similar some kind of a similar mechanism where there were recruiters um who would be in china more often there would be recruiters um kind of at the ports like san francisco other places when chinese arrived here to the united states so sometimes it would be kind of word of mouth you know if you someone heard from someone over in the united states you come here you’ll get a job and there would be recruiters from mining companies um other corporations who would be there ready and willing to enlist chinese to come work for them and um especially after the civil war in the south um there’s a there’s a unique time period where former plantation owners um who are now just planters right they’re not necessarily plantation owners but they’re just planters um but they’re looking for another form of cheap labor to take the place of of slaves and so they think they can get that um from the chinese and so there’s a lot of recruiters who go out west in san francisco and even bring chinese down to um places like mississippi even into alabama a little bit so that’s that’s part of the story as well so there’s a big drive to try and recruit and bring chinese to a lot of different places okay very very interesting uh i’m learning a lot already

9:10 so um you’ve alluded to this a little bit already but uh so where did the uh chinese immigrants in america where did they settle more specifically and and why would they settle there so with this wave during the mid to late 19th century it was predominantly in the west um predominantly in california not just the cities but um you know a lot of these these little towns that would pop up around mining claims um other little towns along the railroad so really california was kind of this hot spot for chinese settlement um san francisco at first los angeles during the late 19th century was kind of like this little backwater town so the chinatown was not not anything like what san francisco was even by the 1870s or 1880s um but it was starting to it was starting to grow places in wyoming um up in washington state there’s they they kind of stick along the west coast and they stick to where um those industries like mining and railroad construction where they were kind of where they were at they would they would hang out around there um and then in the south too and there and there were chinese who you know ended up on the east coast in new york city um a lot of a lot of those communities had been around before this more recent more recent waves like chinese merchants they might have been along the east coast before but for this uh specific wave it’s it’s predominantly in the west or at least like in the rockies the rockies area so they

10:42 they fit into this this story of of migration but also american settlement in the west so they’re definitely part of that that narrative too okay excellent and um you know a lot of uh xenophobia a lot of nativism towards immigrants of all kinds in the late 19th century and so can you maybe specifically talk about why there may have been hostility towards the chinese specifically and and their immigration to the country it’s really interesting because the sharp turn against chinese immigrants especially chinese working class men who that’s that’s the majority of who are coming here very few women it’s it’s overwhelmingly male um it happens quickly like it’s it’s kind of this sharp turn where um for the most part generalizing is kind of never good but it makes sense in this case for the most part when chinese men came to the united states to work they were filling a labor gap so there there was a need for them to come here because um you know not many people were doing those same types of jobs so when a chinese man came to mind and let’s say you know he didn’t exactly find what he wanted but he was willing to do the laundry and cook the food for others in the mining town okay right there’s no competition there there’s no worry that

12:14 a chinese worker is going to take someone else’s job by the time you get to the 1870s though and you see that shift away from mining to railroad construction there’s economic competition and that’s when things are really going to start to change in terms of the perception of chinese immigrants so what i would say is what began as maybe you know at best this ambivalence toward chinese immigrants a lot of white americans looked at them as they were you know quote strange or different or just completely unable to like assimilate to american culture um but almost like this kind of curiosity with them by the 1870s that starts to take um a sharp turn and you start to see a lot of the xenophobia come out of economic competition which is that’s part of like immigration history in america in general there’s a lot of economic basis for that so as soon as you get more white men competing for those railroad jobs with the chinese then all of a sudden the chinese aren’t just kind of quote these oddities now they’re real threats and they’re threats to um livelihood their perceived threats to like american what it means to be an american man you know you’re working you’re supposed to be providing for your family and there’s a there’s a growing movement among nativists who claim to be speaking for you know who’s looking out for the the white male worker there’s a lot of politicians who can get their get their start on that and say i

13:46 am because you have to compete um with the chinese there’s also economic downturns in the late 19th century in the 1870s panics things of that nature so yeah economic times get more difficult there’s more competition and then you start to see some of the much the more violent um outpourings of of xenophobia so it’s it’s pretty quick you know when we go from being like oh all right you know the chinese are here but they’re they’re filling a labor need to now all of a sudden um their competition and then it just it touches on every other aspect of chinese culture then it the xenophobia starts to really really pick up and manifest in some pretty pretty nasty ways right and and on the american side that leads me to my next discussion what particular groups may have been for or against uh immigration chinese immigration i think a lot of students may be surprised at some of the answers but just in terms of maybe the political parties or labor and business and and just just different groups in american society who who is foreign against yeah so one of the one of the interesting things um that i think that’s happening now and more recently and and what historians are writing about this time period is we’re starting to get a much more nuanced and complex understanding of chinese exclusion who was for or against it um it’s one of the things that i think is particularly interesting about

15:17 immigration history in general because sometimes you end up with these really strange bedfellows where you have people who you write you think wait a minute based on everything that this party claims to be or based on everything um that otherwise would make me think that you feel this way about the chinese that’s not what’s actually happening um so it’s the chinese uh migration and chinese exclusion act is an interesting way to see this play out and there’s a couple different couple different ways to approach this um a traditional way that historians had looked at it and it’s not entirely it’s it’s not incorrect we’ve just kind of added some more layers to it is the regional difference so the regional difference between where the majority of chinese settled which would be on the west coast um and where you know there were chinese communities but they weren’t around some of the same economic problems that they were in the west so there’s like this regional divide among white working-class men and labor unions um in the west who saw them as a direct threat versus people on the east coast who again certainly not saying that they weren’t prejudiced or didn’t have weird very kind of racist stereotypes in the chinese but there there might not have been a huge outpouring of anti-chinese sentiment so there’s um this this regional divide between people um in the south for example so

16:50 um in the south you have these um southern planters who you know knowing any everything that we know about southern planters who were once uh plantation owners um by all accounts rather racist individuals there might be an inclination to say oh well they would be they would be opposed to chinese immigration not necessarily um wide range of or spectrum of beliefs there so you certainly did have um southerners southern politicians who didn’t want chinese migrating to the united states because eventually they would make their way to the south um and there are some politicians who who express in congress saying we don’t need quote you know another race problem we’ve got enough of our own we don’t need one more group but on the other hand you’ve got um corporations you’ve got people corporations who want to build railroads in the south you have planters who they are not initially opposed to chinese migration because they fulfill an economic need um in ohio for example too i mean the chinese population in ohio and like the 1870s and 1880s is minuscule but farmers who otherwise might not be that interested in immigration they really don’t see much of a problem with chinese immigrants because they fulfill different labor needs um merchants so merchants on the on the east coast some of these traders who’ve been around

18:21 for a while businessmen they don’t want necessarily want chinese restriction because they want to keep the trade channels with china open so they’re they’re pushing and saying let’s not be too hasty about this because we don’t want to make china angry and then limit any kind of opportunities for for trade that we might have um politicians um including some kind of you know high-ranking ones chester arthur before he um does eventually sign the chinese exclusion act he will veto um the first round of it and he again for diplomatic reasons doesn’t want to do anything that would make um you know the chinese government angry but if you’re looking at more kind of working-class groups white working-class groups um there especially in the west there’s going to be a push for restriction and then eventually exclusion because they are an economic threat and that’s that’s this kind of rallying cry for people on the west coast all the way up to 1924 um where unions um different nativist groups they’ll they’ll argue that who’s looking out for them you know like these wealthy elitists in washington dc they don’t know what it’s like to be a white working-class man on the west coast competing for jobs with the chinese no one’s looking out for us and then that’s when states start to pass their own anti-chinese and eventually anti-japanese laws they’re kind of taking it um taking it upon themselves african-americans are another

19:52 really interesting group with with chinese migration also kind of spanning a spectrum there um there’s a source that a friend had shown me years ago i think it was a an african-american preacher from one of the one of the southern states but he kind of wrote this this sermon that was anti-chinese immigration and his argument was uh they’re quote heathens right they’re not they’re not christian they’re never going to be christian they have backwards um habits they gamble they engage in prostitution they smoke opium um so kind of this this backlash there and then you you know you had other african-americans who felt the same way about they don’t want to compete with chinese laborers after all i mean they just you know kind of fought to get out of slavery and now they don’t even have a fair shot you know with their their economic livelihood and then um you had others who were very pro um chinese migration for a lot of different reasons so it’s it’s messy right it’s very complicated and that that might be somewhat confusing but um i think it’s it’s interesting to even have maybe students you know really kind of hone in and look at these look at these groups and how they kind of challenge preconceived notions of of kind of taking what we know about immigration today party affiliation what not and kind of like what happens when you when you transfer

21:24 that back to um the 19th century and it doesn’t necessarily look the same right i mean it’s one of the interesting things about studying history you can’t do that it’s very difficult very difficult to do that um so there were a lot of you know on the west coast and the changes between the democratic party of today in the democratic party of yesteryear you know in the 19th century a lot of powerful politicians on the west coast were democrats and they spoke for their white working-class constituents and sometimes it was the politicians who spoke um you know the most aggressively against chinese migration because they could kind of rally up their base a little bit and get get votes that way so very complicated very complicated but you delineated everything very well and just endlessly fascinating i mean really really interesting picture you painted there and can you provide some of those examples were there particularly egregious examples of discriminatory practices or examples of violence even against chinese immigrants during the year yeah so i’m kind of kind of challenged myself a little bit with what i said what i said earlier so yeah i mean chinese when they did come here they were filling an economic need um and people were kind of and built and ambivalent about them about you know chinese as a wave of migration but almost from day one there were acts that were discriminatory and that they singled out

22:55 chinese immigrants um and held them to a certain set of laws and rules that they did not hold other groups too so there was the earliest example is a tax um a foreign miners tax um in places like california where if you were a minor and you were foreign born you had to pay um a higher tax that specifically meant chinese i mean like even if it didn’t exactly say that that’s by that point you know the chinese were the largest minority mining group at that time um state of california raised a lot of revenue from foreign uh foreign miners the chinese were you know they paid it because they expected that they um would make it kind of big eventually many did not but a lot of revenue there that came from discriminatory taxes uh you have in the west before you see any kind of stable or sophisticated police presence so before there was any kind of you know really working or efficient law presence a lot of towns cities communities had things called public enemy lists where they would be different you know different acts that could be considered illegal or if you did those things you were a public enemy and then there might be vigilante justice against that but it was a way to kind of order things so a lot of these public enemy lists um when you get to like the 1870s

24:26 many of those acts or many of the things that are considered you know harmful to the community specifically mentioned chinese or asiatics um or mongolian immigrants so if you are someone if you are a a white individual who teaches a chinese person how to read or write english you could be put on a public enemy list because you’re assisting you’re assisting the chinese um to maybe get a leg up uh when it comes to economic competition there’s even laws like in rancho chico california um that’s just one i know off the top of my head because i i use it a lot in teaching where there was a you know if you are an employer and you hired a chinese employee even above an african-american man you were a public enemy so there it gets even more complicated where you know they’re kind of favoring even african americans before the chinese so those are those are pretty discriminatory um there are going to be nationwide acts passed against chinese women being able to come to the united states the belief there that any chinese woman if she’s here because the population is overwhelmingly male then she has to be a prostitute that was the argument and so there’s uh very few chinese women in the united states in the late 19th century um you know some there were those who were prostitutes because they were maybe tricked or trafficked

25:56 come over to the u.s and they end up doing something that they don’t want to do but that’s another you know another form of discrimination and then as those those laws become more common and nativism starts to increase when you get to the 1870s and then especially the 1880s um right before chinese exclusion that’s when you start to see a lot of violence so that’s where you start to see a lot of nativist groups or even just kind of mobs um start to get frustrated because they feel like no one is listening to them and so they take matters into their own hands and either you know with the assistance of the local law enforcement or you know the local law enforcers kind of look the other way there are these massive demonstrations of violence against the chinese one of the the largest examples of a public lynching in american history happens in 1871 in los angeles where um there’s a dispute between two chinese men in los angeles is really small chinatown um guns are drawn there ends up being a white farmer i believe who gets killed in the act and you know i think a police officer gets gets killed too or gets injured and so this creates this idea that the chinese are out of control and they need to be taught a lesson so there’s this massive like interracial inner ethnic mob of people who round up all the people in chinatown lynch

27:29 18 chinese men and then basically burn los angeles chinatown down and push them away um and not much comes of it the only kind of victories that the chinese can get for their suffering is they’re able to file property suits which sometimes chinese actually have that’s the most successful avenue they take if they they might not get justice for physical damage or injury but they do have a pretty successful record in the late 1800s of filing for property damages which is also interesting and then another big example of violence this happens after chinese exclusion but it is the 1880s in tacoma washington there is a massive it’s similar to los angeles but a massive act of violence against the chinese community where you know businesses attacked people attacked and then eventually all chinese just run out and there’s never any justice done no one has ever really held responsible and that sets a standard um for other towns and communities in the west that they can do the same thing they can run out the chinese and they’re not going to be held responsible for it and that that idea that you can take that kind of violent measure against the chinese becomes so common that becomes known as the tacoma method um because if it could happen in tacoma it can happen anywhere and so that’s that’s sort of the build up to exclusion and it continues to happen even after exclusion so it gets

29:00 very violent you go from seeing these kind of racist caricatures of chinese and political cartoons which it’s kind of easy maybe for some people to look at that and say well that’s terrible but it’s a political cartoon right i mean it’s not actually hurting anyone the end result is it does right because it does these stereotypes of the chinese as completely other and they can’t assimilate that’s what lays the groundwork for people to treat the chinese as as they’re not human right they can kind of treat them however they they want to do it yeah i mean i think a lot of that information will surprise students especially since we normally associate lynching and maybe properly so with african americans but uh it happened to other groups as well and um yeah some some really uh untold stories uh so thank you for sharing those because we probably don’t know a lot about them you know you don’t really read many of those in in textbooks so that’s the story behind the story so okay um so what so let’s start to talk about this the movement towards exclusion uh this exclusion act and so what particular arguments are made uh maybe i guess at the state or national level for for advocating chinese exclusion and if i’m not mistaken uh you’re right and you’re saying that some people such as frederick douglass whom students have heard of from reading our other essays uh in the textbook uh they did speak

30:31 courageously against it so what what are these forces involved in exclusion so you have uh in a really kind of interesting way the violence that’s taking place in the west against the chinese for a lot of people elsewhere and a lot of politicians elsewhere across the country they’re going to use that as an example for why chinese migration should be restricted and then eventually excluded their argument is look at what’s happening right there’s this level of there’s this level of violence and uh it’s out of control and you know sort of who’s to blame for this well it might not necessarily be people who are doing the violent acts so the rational thing to do is to limit or exclude chinese immigrants so it’s this it’s it’s very weird but it starts to be this idea of how the chinese if they’re not violent themselves because of the kind of landscape of america and where we’re at they bring violence with them through their interactions there’s also people who are going to take some of the stereotypes of chinese as criminals you know they’re they’re doing illegal things gambling prostitution um drugs and say they’re a criminal element so you know there’s there’s proof that these individuals engage in these behaviors um you know what they don’t say is that well there’s plenty of white

32:01 people who also go to chinatown to do the same things and gladly give them their business but again the argument is that well that wouldn’t be there without the chinese there’s the economic argument um starts to become much more powerful that there is a level of economic competition there and if corporations um can’t look out for white employees if corporations are um perhaps greedy and they’re looking for you know they’re looking out for the the bottom line and how to make a quick buck uh then maybe we should exclude chinese laborers from coming to the united states so there’s just like you know the different groups of who are for or against chinese exclusion the reasons for exclusion are are very varied and sometimes they run you know this kind of we’re only looking out for the best interests of the chinese you know if they come here and they get attacked by white people oh maybe they shouldn’t come here to no they’re becoming more of an economic threat and the economic threat element of this um i would say plays a pretty important part because that’s a big part of the chinese’s collusion act it’s not all chinese it’s chinese laborers now all that being said you do have people who who are speaking out against against exclusion and as you work eventually kind of toward that and frederick douglass is a really good example i would say he’s a good example because for all of maybe like the wishy-washy

33:33 sentiments of people for why they might be opposed to exclusion um you don’t want to let the the white mob win this one you know if you kind of give in and cave then then what are we doing here but he has a very kind of i mean forward-thinking explanation for why chinese exclusion is bad so he he gives writes about what he calls a composite nation and how america is america because it is a land of many different people who bring many different gifts um and that’s that’s what makes america an economic powerhouse right you can’t turn away these individual groups when they have done so much and so he compares like the chinese with the germans and he’s like they’re you know kind of the same idea they’re they might be different but they offer something um but then he takes it one step further and he specifically mentions you know and this is in the 1800s he specifically mentions human rights which i think is is incredibly radical right for the time like talking about human rights and he starts to bring up this idea that no matter what you might think about the chinese um and he has this little has this like paragraph in in this composite nation speech where he even says he’s like all right if you’re a white person maybe i could see how as a white person you control everything you’re worried about chinese coming here and upsetting things fine right i don’t agree with you but okay

35:04 i’ll hear your i’ll hear your argument um he counters that by saying well one of the things that all humans hold very dear is this idea of what he calls a locomotion right your ability to move the freedom of movement the freedom where um you know if you are someone on the east coast and you want a better life it’s your right to be able to pick up and move out west you know being a pioneer and he’s basically saying that’s a human right it’s not something that just belongs to white people um it’s not even something that just belongs to americans the human right to be able to move and to seek a better life that’s for him at the core of why chinese exclusion is i mean really he would say against human rights but unconstitutional i mean it’s it’s severely limiting on the liberties that we have as americans so that’s i mean that’s a great primary source to use um it kind of stands apart i would say from some of the other arguments and just how reasoned and kind of forward thinking it is but yeah it’s the economic competition element of this um that it’s it’s reflected in the act itself and there’s kind of no way of of getting around that right well you know i thank you for speaking about douglas so much he appears frequently in our book and and standing for for those constitutional um principles right and and and justice and and equality of all

36:34 people so um so he was doing it in ways that we maybe normally don’t even think of right yeah fantastic and so uh maybe you can tell students what the chinese exclusionary act what did it specifically do so um being a product of economic anxiety and again again i would constantly kind of consistently remind students that um this is not a very stable economic time in america um even though you’ve got you know you’ve got the rockefellers and the the carnegie right and the vanderbilts they’re they’re racking up their money at this time and there are certainly a lot of americans moving up into the middle class um it’s not very stable there are panics there are you know we call today like recessions these kind of cycles so there is a lot of economic anxiety here which feeds into the exclusion act and what it does is it doesn’t technically exclude all chinese it focuses especially on laborers manual labor so these would be the people who would directly compete with americans for the types of jobs which are more prevalent at the time which would be manual laboring jobs manufacturing different things of that nature so if you are um there’s some there’s some excluded groups from the exclusion act um if you’re a diplomat a religious official and there were plenty of chinese who were christians who came to the united states if you

38:05 were a student if you were a merchant um you could come to the united states because you’re not competing you’re not directly competing with the vast majority of of americans at the time it was still difficult you still had to get special um written documents from the chinese government proving that you weren’t a manual waiver which is still a little bit difficult but this is this excludes chinese laborers from coming to the united states it’s set for 10 years it will be renewed again in 1892 and then in 1902 renewed kind of indefinitely and another part of this exclusion act as it becomes difficult if not impossible for chinese to naturalize so the way that chinese immigrants could naturalize before was they could become citizens at the lower court level so like you know different kind of cities state courts um that that is that power is stripped away by the exclusion act so it makes it difficult again if not impossible for chinese to naturalize and become citizens so that’s basically what it does um it’s significant because it’s really kind of the beginning almost of our nationwide centralized immigration policy um and it has its roots in this very discriminatory um and and frankly racist

39:37 racist act you know it’s um another way interesting that you can get around the chinese exclusion act so i mean it certainly had an impact on the number of chinese who who came here without a doubt but chinese immigrants they still did come to the united states even during this you know era of exclusion so um if you can prove that you’re a merchant right you can come here so a lot of chinese restaurant owners a lot of chinese laundry owners that’s a way you can get around this coming into the united states through uh mexico or even through china those are ways you can get around that but yeah the exclusion act specifically targeted uh manual labors and then when it’s renewed again in 1892 then you’re expected if you are a chinese national if you were born in china and you’re here to carry papers with you at all times to prove that you are here uh you know legally all right and the follow-up when is this rescinded not uh until world war ii technically so in 19 i want to say 1943 now i’m forgetting the exact date but 1943 is when the exclusion act is is officially repealed and very pragmatic reasons uh you know china is our allies in world war ii so um it’s seen as this

41:07 kind of outdated not very conducive to good relations um especially with chinese americans you know in the united states so yeah it’s it sticks around for a while um and then even beyond that it’s not really until 1952 that asian immigrants can have that that path to naturalization so yeah the chinese exclusion act is kind of the law of the land up until the 1940s wow for decades okay uh and uh final question uh so how is uh chinese uh immigration and uh contrarily exclusion uh part of these broader trends of immigration and late 19th early 20th centuries uh obviously immigration is a perennial question that students are going to grapple with throughout the their their us history courses and you know even today i mean it just remains uh and as as you’ve discussed and through today controversial right the least and so what would be your general conclusions about how it fits into some of these larger patterns so i definitely think um you know the push and pull factors are are key here it’s a it’s a really the chinese are a really good example to see um how that works there you know sometimes when um we think about immigration more generally i would say maybe the general public when they think about immigration at the turn of the 20th century we kind

42:38 of immediately go to there’s ellis island and the italians right and um you know jewish immigrants from other places and that excludes a whole separate separate group who are you know they are part of this i mean by you the time you get to the early 1900s there’s there’s exclusion but chinese are coming here at right around the same time as all of these other groups so it’s not just ellis island right you gotta shift also to angel island on the west coast that’s certainly part of this bigger story and it kind of takes the idea of immigration and broadens it and also challenges a little bit this notion of the melting pot which is a very specific progressive era invention to talk about how easy it is for americans to get melted into what it means to be an american you know how true is that when you have an entire you know nationality and eventually race when you get to asian immigrants in general excluded um so it’s it complements it fits into this bigger story um and adds some nuance in in different ways it might not immediately be there and then you as you move toward the early 20th century and you work toward um the big one the immigration act of 1924 it’s different groups kind of take the place for the chinese um different asian groups so once the chinese are you know kind of dealt

44:10 with with the chinese exclusion act there’s still going to be a need on the west coast for you know laborers and agriculture then you get japanese immigrants who are going to come to the west coast and um you know the push factor there is a little bit different japan is kind of coordinating this effort to have japanese immigrants seek you know their fortunes elsewhere and to seek out other opportunities and kind of integrate into this modern this modern world um so japanese are going to come and settle in california and they’re going to they’re going to be agricultural laborers but then they’re going to start become really successful in having their own farms and they’re they’re taking risks so they’re actually planting crops that you know a white farmer would not have thought to have plant or they didn’t have the means or the knowledge of like irrigation so there i mean again by 19 teens people are angry at japanese farmers because they’re developing a monopoly on the land and they’re using all of these shady business practices and that’s how they’re able to get ahead and the white farmer is getting pushed off the land um kind of the same pattern people on the west coast are demanding federal action federal government doesn’t necessarily want to do it because they don’t want to make japan angry they don’t want to jeopardize relations there so states start to pass laws like california

45:40 that say aliens ineligible for citizenship which is very vague but it actually at this time it means predominantly asians and japanese they are unable to own property um they can’t own property and start you see these pop up even in southern states like louisiana um and florida where the japanese population is not that big at the time but the fear that japanese if they get pushed from the west coast they’re going to come settle in the south um that’s enough to prompt reaction from southerners who may not even have seen you know a japanese immigrant before um in the florida state constitution there’s there’s still to this day the language about um aliens ineligible for citizenship being unable to own property it’s still there you can’t enforce it but it’s still there today um later on so once the japanese are quote dealt with you’re going to see filipino immigrants or migrants because they’re colonial subjects at the time they’re going to come and kind of fill the spaces and the jobs that the japanese once did but by the time you get to the 1930s uh we’re in the depression so now there’s that competition again right for the the same job similar to what happened back with the chinese so the chinese kind of set this this bad standard for how america deals with immigration and does honestly kind of cave to the base or elements of society where they

47:11 you know the government kind of goes along with this um and doesn’t necessarily push back and by the time you get to 1924 you know that’s that’s massively discriminatory not just to the chinese or even asians but to these you know italians eastern europeans uh the numbers that are able to come under the immigration act of 24 are really low compared to people who can come from britain or france or germany um or even uh caribbean islands that are under british control at the time um and that’s that’s partly because you know the government had learned that they they could do this take this kind of action um and people certainly protested against it but the chinese exclusion kind of sets that sets that up that you can target specific groups you can pass laws whether they’re at the city state or federal level and you can enforce them all right stephanie hendershotz uh thank you so much for for joining us uh joining me today in this this very interesting conversation you will have a tapestry of a very complex picture of america and an american in immigration chinese immigration and exclusion so we certainly thank you for uh for weaving that tapestry for our students and teachers and uh for your excellent contribution i hope uh every student reads your essays because they’re really

48:42 fantastic for all the students and teachers out there you can access our life liberty and the pursuit of happiness textbook for free online at bill of rights institute.org and we also have an excellent immigration curriculum to check out while you’re at it so again thank you for joining us and have a good day thank you