Portside

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the “social, moral, and political effect” of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state. Government officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a “criminal element”; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as one witness put it, “more like hogs than human beings”); they were vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a years-long economic depression settled over the country and San Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white laborers must either “starve to death, or they must fall to the level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the country.”

More than ten thousand people in California and Nevada joined local “camps” of the Order of Caucasians, an organization that aimed to “protect the white man and white civilization.” In July, 1877, a rally in San Francisco erupted into days of rioting as mobs rampaged through the Chinese quarter and vandalized Chinese-owned businesses, mostly laundries, across the city. Several weeks later, the state senators sent an urgent message to Congress, warning that white residents up and down the West Coast were beginning to feel a “profound sense of dissatisfaction with the situation” and there would come a day “when patience may cease.”

A treaty between the U.S. and China guaranteed the free flow of people between the two countries, making politicians in Washington reluctant to impose restrictions. But, then as now, the nation was evenly divided politically, and the Western states were a strategic prize for both Republicans and Democrats. Winning them, it seemed clear, rested on resolving the Chinese question. As a result, in 1882, the U.S.—for the first time in its history—closed its gates to a people because of their race, when Congress passed a bill barring Chinese laborers from entering the country. (The legislation later became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.) Immigrants still found ways in, though, so Congress passed progressively more onerous laws. Restive residents of dozens of communities across the West also banded together to drive out their Chinese neighbors.

Yet the Chinese were not passive victims: in 1892, after a new law required them to obtain a certificate of residence that established their right to be in the country, leaders of the community organized a campaign of resistance. Anti-Chinese leaders, in turn, vowed mass deportations, only for the effort to founder when it became clear that the measure would be exorbitantly expensive. The Chinese community managed to persist, but it existed in a kind of permanent stress position until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an overhaul of the immigration system.

Today, economic anxieties are again fuelling overtly racist, populist appeals from politicians. A nimbus of outrage among working-class voters has propelled the MAGA movement, much like the rage that drove the anti-Chinese movement. Even Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship—scholars dispute whether this would be lawful––has a historical link to the Chinese American experience. In 1898, thirty years after the Fourteenth Amendment established the principle as a way of safeguarding the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans, the Supreme Court upheld it in a landmark case brought by a native-born Chinese American, Wong Kim Ark.

One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers. In an economic study published in 1963, the historian Ping Chiu found that in California the two groups were mostly stratified into different labor pools, with the Chinese concentrated in lower-wage jobs in agriculture and industries such as textile and cigar manufacturing. It was competition from more technologically advanced and efficient factories in the East, along with the broader shift to mass production, that were the biggest factors in the economic travails buffeting white workers in California.

Other scholarship has similarly suggested that excluding Chinese labor failed to lift the fortunes of white workers. This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states. They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940. The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence. The findings are hardly surprising. A recent study from the Brookings Institution asserts that a surge in immigration helps to explain the strength of the U.S. economy since 2022, benefitting employers who need workers and contributing to consumer spending.

In the nineteenth century, the Chinese had few public defenders. John C. Weatherred, a bank executive in Tacoma, Washington, wrote in his diary on October 1, 1885, a month before the Chinese were driven out of his town, that there were a “great many fools on the anti-Chinese subject” and that he felt like “taking up for the underdog in the fight.” He praised “the Chinaman” for his “industry, economy & sobriety.” But Weatherred and other sympathizers mostly kept their feelings to themselves. As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence. ♦