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CHINESE IMMIGRATION: LOOKING FOR GOLD MOUNTAIN (printer-friendly version) About the same time gold was discovered in California, famine hit the Guangdong Province in southeast China. Hearing about California's Gim San, Gold Mountain, many Chinese men left for America hoping to make a fortune and return home a few years later to their loved ones. Few struck it rich and the rest fought to survive. The Gold Rush in California and the Pacific Northwest increased the demand for railroads to connect these remote parts of America. Building railroads required lots of low-paid labor, which hungry immigrant Chinese provided. By 1880, there were about 300,000 Chinese in America, but few were warmly welcomed by Americans once the railroads were completed. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first time in American history that immigration restrictions were aimed at one ethnic group. In the mid-1880s, America was in a post-Civil War depression and the Chinese became a target for American frustrations. In some Western towns, mobs attacked Chinese. In 1885, 28 Chinese were killed in Rock Springs; in 1887, seven white men killed 31 Chinese miners in northeast Oregon. Some Chinese were forced onto boats returning to China and some left on their own. America's racist frenzy then subsided and the remaining Chinese settled into towns and cities to become productive citizens. Discriminatory practices by real estate agents and homeowners prompted strong Chinatowns to develop, especially in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. While most Chinese provided the base labor for fishing, canning, and laundry businesses, a few became doctors, entrepreneurs, clergy, and other higher-status professionals. In 1943, immigration law changed and the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Now, resident Chinese-American men could bring their women from home; their population until this time had been mostly male. Wartime alliances in World War II benefited the Chinese. The Walter-McCarran Act, passed in 1952, allowed first-generation Asian-Americans to apply for U.S. citizenship. More Chinese entered fields that had been closed to them: medicine, corporate business, and politics. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated blatant anti-Asian bias in U.S. immigration. Authoritarian political crackdowns in contemporary China and political uncertainty in Taiwan and Hong Kong have increased Chinese immigration to America. Today, strong Chinese communities exist in the West, especially in Los Angeles, which has become a contemporary Ellis Island for the Pacific Rim. Descendants of the first wave of Chinese immigrants now excel in such fields as engineering, fields from which their forebears were barred. This article by Lawrence Michael Fong, executive associate director at the University of Oregon Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon, is reprinted with permission, abridged from an article that appears on the Internet at http://www.ccp.arizona.edu/images/chamer/lmfong.htm |
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