[Outline of the Asian Immigration Website] 

From the Ancient East to a New Nation

Asian Peoples

China was in decline as America was spreading westward. During the 19th and 20th century political struggles and poverty created chaos throughout China. Manchu Dynasty corruption and war caused both poverty, and a new openness to trade with the outside world. Americans and Chinese first interacted in the 1700’s when American sailing vessels began to participate in the China trade. American ships began to bring furs to south China and to take back silks, porcelain and spice.  In this process of trade a few Chinese sailors and merchants visited U.S. ports. Shortly thereafter, poverty more than adventure caused Chinese peasants (mostly from the Fukien and Kwangtung providences, by the western treaty ports) to sail to America to seek a new life.

 

Today there are approximately one million people of Asian Descent living in the United States. Like many of the earliest American colonial people, who crossed the Atlantic, Asian immigrants too sought economic opportunity. The lure of real economic opportunities in the vast new land across the great Pacific beckoned to many Asians. Not all Asian American became US citizens by sailing to this continent. A number of Japanese and Koreans traveled to Hawaii, later annexed by the US, to work in the Pineapple groves.  However, most Chinese workers traveled to the San Francisco Area.

 

America had an “open door” immigration policy. In the Eastern U.S. the major entry point for later immigrants was New York’s Ellis Island. However, the “the Ellis Island of the West” was California’s  Angel Island Immigration Station. There, as at Ellis Island, medical examinations would have to be passed before a refugee could enter America.  Following the early immigration period when Asians worked predominately in the mining, railroads, agricultural and fishing industries, restrictive immigration laws were passed.  The 1870’s economic downturn, coupled with a burgeoning European immigration west, had acerbated racial tensions. A “yellow peril” threatened the white worker seeking employment. Immigration of Asians was greatly curtailed in subsequent years. However, the Chinese comprised 0.002 per cent of the our nation population. The post WWI period was a time of notable immigration suppression. Whereas WWII brought a new understanding of America’s world leadership, and with this, a sense of necessity to aid the oppressed. Thus immigration restrictions were lightened by newer legislation. With restrictions loosened, during the period following the Korean War, Viet Nam War, and other warfare in Indochina, America again received a great new wave of immigration, refugees from southeastern Asia and those able to escape  communist China.

 See: Federal Immigration Laws and Asian-Americans

Chinese

The first Asians to come to America were the Chinese, sailing to the port city of San Francisco in 1848, and it is  estimated by 1852 twenty-one thousand Chinese had arrived. Chinese workers toiled long hours at hard manual labor, including mining and clearing the farmlands of their adopted homeland, and laboring in the rich farmlands of California. These earliest new Asian-Americans, mostly males without their families, also came seeking gold, newly discovered in California. In the 1860’s the Chinese mined in Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Montana and the hills of South Dakota.

 

When mining declined, the Chinese laid vast miles of track for the transcontinental railroad, that carried huffing steam locomotives over the Sierras and through the craggy Rockies. Truly the life would be hard. Ten thousand Chinese workers were released when the east and west tracks were finally joined at Promontory Point Some would return to China. Some went to the Midwest, and a few to eastern cities. Those who stayed, like the Irish in the East and other newly arrived peoples, settled together in ethnic communities that supported them, for better or for worse, as they transitioned into the strange new world to which they had come. During the 19th century, ninety per cent of Chinese Americans lived in the West, with two-thirds concentrated in Southern California. There like in other areas, the new closely knit Asian Communities evolved into cultural centers with many small ethnic businesses. One such group formed a their own neighborhood in New York City. Today many of those early “Chinatowns” still remain, and indeed flourish  in urban communities through North America.

 

Japanese

As America was being settled by new peoples from both the East and the West, Japan was a country where peasants newly liberated from feudal land tenure could now own property. However, taxes became a new burden and many had to sell or seek work in another country.  For those who stayed behind there was social status, as raising rice was considered important. Those who could raise food were considered more worthy than, for instance, craftsmen. Still, land would usually revert to the eldest son. Younger siblings needed to live on the property of the first born, or parents. Thus, this too caused discontent and subsequent relocation.

 Japanese immigration to the U.S. began in the 1860’s. Today only five Japanese towns remain in the United States. The first immigrants from Japan settled in Hawaii and worked on the large pineapple plantations. Later, U.S. settlements of Japanese started in northern California. The great earthquake of 1906 caused movement to other areas. The 1920’s after WWI saw rapid growth begin in Los Angles County and many Japanese moved there. Since that time until the present Los Angles County California remains the home for the majority of Japanese Americans.  The Japanese, like the Chinese, worked on the railroads, on farms and in canneries. Experienced at harvesting abalone in Japan, they also established an abalone fishing industry in Coastal California. Factories, like the vineyards of the California valleys, welcomed cheap laborers, despite public perceptions that Asians, like Native American Indians and the black slaves in the South, were racially inferior to those of European decent.

 Despite Asian bias Japanese alone grew ten percent of California’s crops. However, because of legal restrictions Japanese farmers owned only four percent of California’s farms. Ruling during the isolationist post World War I climate of the 1920s, the Supreme Court upheld legal inequities. Indeed, the Immigration Act of 1924 barred the Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians from the U.S. Among Asian peoples, Japanese American citizens would experience perhaps the most oppressive legal segregation. By law, during WW II American citizens Japanese descent were sent to internment camps. Often these were makeshift facilities with little privacy. After the war they were “relocated’ in other areas not close to U.S. military bases.

Koreans

The first Korens to come to the U.S. mainland did not arrived until 1903. In 1995 there were sixteen thousand “Komerican” residents living in America. The Koreans like the Japanese were recruited to work in Hawaii’s pineapple groves in the 1900’s following the annexation of Hawaii by the U.S. At this time, Japan occupied the Korean Peninsula. Fearing loss of needed labor the Japanese soon banned this emigration of Korean workers. Workers who did manage to immigrate to the US often raised rice, which was well suited to the cooler climate of Northern California. A few managed to buy small farms for themselves. Immigrations in the form of refugees fleeing war-related conditions increased following the Korean War. Many spouses of U.S. service men entered the U.S. after the war in Korea.

 

Filipinos

According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, in 1995, approximately fifty-one thousand persons of Philipino birth were living in the U.S. Like the Chinese and Japanese, the earliest Filipino and Korean immigrants also toiled long hard hours in the very expansive sugar cane fields and pineapple groves of Hawaii. Another crop often raised by Filipinos was lettuce. In the U.S. mainland these workers mostly followed the seasonal harvest cycles up and down the Pacific Coast. In the fall they picked the apples from Washington State orchards. In the spring they harvested strawberries in southern California.  Filipinos also worked the fish canneries of the Northwest, even in Alaska. Once able to settle in an area they too tended to develop ethnic communities such as “Little Manila” in Stockton California. More Filipinos entered the Americas in the later half of the last century.

 

Other Southeast Asians: Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, Laotians,

Because Asians would work long hours for less pay they were welcomed by employers but barred from labor unions. It was not long before economic greed and xenophobia set the stage for laws that discouraged or strongly limited Asian immigration.  In the 1970’s Asians came following the Viet Nam War, mostly as refugees fleeing general economic and political chaos in Southeast Asia. They were often described as the “Boat People” because they fled in makeshift crafts by sea. However, a great many actually came by air. During this period the greatest number were from Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Of the seven thousand plus Asian refugees, over one hundred thousand came from Viet Nam alone.  Nine hundred thousand people entered America in the thirteen year period from 1975 to 1988.  Where do the recent Southeast Asian people live? In a very widespread area of cities and states. In fact, there are several large Laotian clusters on the East Coast.  In Washington, Baltimore, Virginia and West Virginia there are almost three thousand   Laotians, and Near Philadelphia and Wilmington Delaware there are almost two thousand.

 

India

Rich in religious and artistic heritage, India Shares a large border with China.  During the zenith of European colonization, India was incorporated into the British Empire. Britain’s occupation of India contributed to the economic decline of a land that could not provide farms for all of her expanding population. Reaching San Francisco by routes that often lead first through other countries, the largest volume of Indian Immigration came in 1904 and 1905. Over seven thousand Asian Indians migrated to both Canada and the U.S. before 1920. Many who emigrated form India, mostly from the Punjab Province, sought jobs in railroads, lumbering, and agriculture.  Like the Chinese, they were also seen as an economic threat to other non-Asian workers. Asian Indian immigration was banned in 1917. Sikhs were the most prevalent religious group. An early city with a large Indian contingent was Stockton California.

 

 

This document wa s prepared for the DEAL Project.