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Chinese
Immigration:
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Labor
The Chinese were among the first
groups of Asians to arrive in the United States, and they came to
America largely because of the demand for labor.[1]
When the Chinese arrived in the United States they were not a
threat, but a curiosity. They were “benign and non-competitive.”[2]
Chinese rarely left their homeland to search for a better way of
life, but when they did, the men usually traveled alone, leaving their
families behind. The
emigrants hoped to earn a fortune through trade or labor in another
country and bring what they earned back to China for their families.
The Chinese were sojourners.
They would go to another country, make a substantial living, and
return to China.[3]
When the Chinese arrived in the United
States, usually in San Francisco, they registered their names, arranged
for a portion of wages to be remitted to relatives at home, and even
arranged for their bodies to be shipped back to China should they die
while in the United States. After
taking care of all these details, the Chinese were usually shipped to
gold mines, railroads, or fields where they would begin work.
The immigrants who arrived in the late 1840s and early 1850s were
usually sent to the mines because of the gold rush.[4]
Once at the mines, the Chinese took jobs as miners, cooks, and
laundrymen. Chinese
immigrants did not have anything technologically advanced; they did
their mining work the hard way, with the pickaxe, pan, and the water
wheel.[5]
The living conditions in the mining camps were usually primitive
and unsanitary. Where most
white miners were provided housing, the Chinese slept on the ground or
burrowed in caves using only one blanket to keep warm.
If they were lucky they could find a tent or cabin white miners
had abandoned.[6]
The Chinese were also an excellent
source of cheap labor for the railroad industry.
They would disembark in San Francisco and be recruited by the
railroad magnates. They
were then shipped in boxcars and on flatcars to the site where the
railroads were being built.[7]
Four Sacramento men owned the Central Pacific Railroad: Leland
Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker.
These men began hiring Chinese, and when the Central Pacific was
chartered by the government to build the transcontinental railroad, they
knew they needed to obtain more labor.[8]
When Crocker announced he was going to hire Chinese men, European
employees, including superintendent James Harvey Storbridge protested
that the Chinese were too small and frail to handle heavy construction,
mason work, and explosives. As
a compromise the Central Pacific hired fifty Chinese to break and cart
rocks, cut down trees, root out swamps, and lay rails and ties.
Storbridge was so impressed by Chinese laborers that he hired
fifty more, and by 1865 the Central Pacific Railroad was continually
hiring Chinese employees. The
Chinese were also trusted to do more difficult labor such as leveling
roadbeds, digging tunnels, and blasting mountains.
When all was said and done, between 12,000 and 14,000 Chinese
were hired by the Central Pacific.[9]
In 1869 the transcontinental railroad was completed and
celebrations took place to honor the men who worked to accomplish the
feat. The Chinese were not
included in the celebration, but news of Chinese excellence and
reliability spread quickly. Due
to their excellent work for the Central Pacific, Chinese were hired to
toil for other railroads. The
Northern Pacific Railway Company recruited over 430 Chinese from Hong
Kong to work on their railroad, and in 1870 the Union Pacific hired the
Chinese to be section hands. In
1875 the Union Pacific also hired Chinese to serve as strikebreakers
when white workers struck at the coalmines in Rock Springs, Wyoming.[10]
When work on the railroads and in the
mines began to run thin, the Chinese needed to search for new
employment. They entered
new occupations in agriculture, fishing, trade, and manufacturing.[11]
The Chinese were excellent fisherman and created fishing
enterprises up and down the Pacific coast.
By 1888, in California alone, 2000 were engaged in some aspect of
the fishing industry.[12]
Chinese immigrants were hired to work in salt basins around San
Francisco and gather borate deposits in Oregon, Nevada, and California.
They also reclaimed areas of tule swamp.
They helped reclaim this land for farming and comprised the bulk
of farm labor in California.[13]
Wheat harvesters enjoyed the versatility of the Chinese, and with
the transcontinental railroad completed, California farmers could plant
and ship more perishable items like grapes and other fruits and
vegetables. The Chinese
became the main attendants for these labor-intensive crops.[14]
Other states also benefited from
Chinese labor in agriculture. Farms
in the Pacific Northwest and southern United States hired Chinese to
work on orchards, pick cotton, harvest rice, and build canals.[15]
White planters in the South hoped to use Chinese to replace Black
labor and thwart the growing political power of freed Blacks.
Some Southerners offered opium as an inducement to work for them.[16]
Employers from Pennsylvania also wanted the Chinese in their iron
works and manufacturers from New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey
wanted to bring Chinese to their factories.[17]
[1] Sharon M. Lee, “Asian Immigration and American Race Relations: From Exclusion to Acceptance,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1989, 12(3): 375. [2] Choy, Dong, and Horn, The Coming Man, 21. [3] Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 33. [4] Ibid, 10. [5] Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 7. [6] Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 13. [7] Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890-1905 (Ohio State University Press, 1971), 7. [8] Tsai, The Chinese in Experience in America, 15. [9] Ibid, 16. [10] Ibid, 18. [11] Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 7. [12] Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 23. [13] Choy, Dong [14] Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, 20. [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid, 9. [17] Gyory, Closing the Gate, 30.
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Created by Jaime Boyle Last Updated 12/06/03
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