Chinese Immigration to the United States in the 19th Century A Historiographical Analysis

Shellie A. Labell, JD5060: The Historical Experience

November 18, 2014

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The United States of America has been an immigrant-welcoming

country for over two hundred years. This statement’s current

veracity is questionable, but in the 19th century, millions of

people made the arduous journey to the United States from Europe

and Asia. While most European immigrants arrived on the east

coast of the North American continent, Asian immigrants sailed

primarily into western ports, mainly those on the coast of the

Californian Republic. Chinese immigration to the United States in

the 19th century was an especially controversial issue, as Chinese

men arrived by the hundreds of thousands to the western United

States within a relatively short period of time.1

Shortly after the 1848 discovery of gold in California,

Chinese men began entering the United States through the port of

San Francisco, California. They arrived in large numbers in

search of work as gold miners. By 1870, Chinese immigrants made

up thirty percent of California’s labor force, despite

constituting only around ten percent of California's total

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population. Initial reactions to this influx were mixed; some

American gold miners saw the Chinese as competition, while many

employers were pleased with this new source of cheap and

dependable labor. Some Chinese immigrants were merchants, but

most were rural farmers and working class laborers who fled China

in the 1840’s after the Sino-British Opium Wars and the resulting

unequal Treaty of Nanking. This treaty changed trade dynamics

around the world by opening five Chinese trading ports and the

cession of Hong Kong to the British.2

Legislative response to this wave of Chinese immigration was

swift: in 1850, the State of California's legislature passed the

“Foreign Miner’s Tax,” which taxed foreign miners (primarily

Chinese miners) disproportionately for gold mining licenses in

California. This forced many Chinese men out of the mining

industry into tasks that were considered women’s work, such as

cooking and laundering. The Chinese who remained in the mining

industry were limited to exhausted mines that American and

European miners had abandoned. In 1863, the Central Pacific

Railroad Company began building the first transcontinental

railroad and saw the Chinese as an opportunity for cheap labor.

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Within two years, Chinese men constituted around ninety percent

of the labor force on the transcontinental railroad project. But

as sources of gold decreased, and the railroad was completed,

unemployment in California and the surrounding territories rose.

Reactions to the Chinese presence in California varied from anti-

Chinese legislation to hiring discrimination and anti-immigrant

violence.3

Western laborers viewed the wave of Chinese immigrants as a

threat to their livelihoods, which brought deadly anti-Chinese

riots to San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1870’s. The United

States federal legislature responded to these problems on the

west coast by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This was

the first of many laws implementing restrictions aimed at a

specific nationality of immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act and

subsequent anti-immigrant acts were specifically aimed at

excluding Asians from entering the United States. These acts were

renewed several times before the federal government repealed the

Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Americans claimed that the Chinese

lowered wages, refused to assimilate, and threatened American

morals with opium use and prostitution due to the lack of Chinese

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women. Some Chinese sent some of their wages to their families in

China. These were all justifications for discriminating against

19th century Chinese immigrant laborers.4

The historiography of Chinese immigration to the western

United States started in the mid-19th century. Historians,

laymen, political scientists, economists, politicians, and

sociologists have offered myriad causal and consequential

interpretations of the mass emigration from China to the United

States in the mid- to late-19th century. Many early historical

accounts were heavily prejudiced against the Chinese and their

authors called for Chinese expulsion, but many Protestant

clergymen argued for the missionary potential of the Chinese if

they could be converted to Christianity. The end of the Gold Rush

and the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad project

changed American attitudes toward these immigrants. The American

public began to view the Chinese population living and working in

the United States as a liability rather than an asset.5

The late 19th century introduced massive globalization and

immigration to traditionally immigrant-welcoming countries, and

American scholars began to see the importance of the Chinese

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presence in the United States as an international matter of

concern. This “diplomatic history” persisted through two world

wars. Yet after World War II, conflicting interests and diverse

approaches to Chinese immigration studies in the 20th century

prevented any historical consensus within the scholarly community

regarding Chinese immigration. The post-war approaches to Chinese

immigration historiography in the United States ranged from

purely racist commentary to criticism of a perceived lack of

assimilation by the Chinese into middle-class American society.6

As in many other historical disciplines, a new history

called “social history” appeared during the societal upheaval in

the 1960’s and prompted a radical shift in perception of these

west coast immigrants. 1960’s scholars examined their stories

from a sociological, “bottom-up” perspective as well as communist

Chinese views of this mass migration over a century prior. This

approach lasted for nearly two decades. In the 1980’s, historians

introduced a “transnational” approach to the discipline. Scholars

of this era viewed Chinese-American histories not from the

traditional nationally-based viewpoint, but rather through a

global lens. This transnational approach to 19th century Chinese

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immigration soon became the most favored lens through which

historians studied the massive influx of Chinese men, and to a

lesser extent women, into the western United States. After

September 11, 2001, however, some popular and professional

scholarship moved in retrograde, and their authors correlated

early Chinese immigration with modern immigration issues in the

United States.7

The first historiographical approach to Chinese immigration

in the second half of the 19th century began almost immediately

after the massive arrival of Chinese laborers into the western

United States, primarily into the newly admitted State of

California. The pejorative term “coolie” appeared in the 1850’s,

initially referring to those Chinese who were forcibly sold into

debt-bondage. Later the term was appropriated to refer to all

Chinese immigrants. In the 1873 treatise The Coming Struggle; or What

the People on the Pacific Coast Think of the Coolie Invasion, author M.B. Starr

presented myriad arguments against Chinese immigration. Claiming

in the preface that “the war against coolieism [sic] is waged in

the name of God and our country, our wives, and our children,”

Starr put forth rhetorical questions to his readers: “Is the

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Coolie Trade Right when Viewed from a Scriptural Stand-point?”

and “What Shall We do with Them?” Claiming to argue on behalf of

“friends of the laboring classes,” and employing religious

language, Starr argued that importing “the heathen” would corrupt

American morals.8

To the modern reader, the introduction to The Coming Struggle

betrays the bigotry of the author and his assumed supporters:

All reflecting men know that the results of [the Chinese labor system] universally admitted to the United States would be more disastrous to the moral, social, and financial condition of the whole people, than to the importation of Africans and the continuation of chattel slavery ever was or ever would have been; for as China contains over one fourth of theearth’s population, and as they are among the most corrupt… it is not impossible that this combination of wealthy importers may scatter all over our chosen land…9

Not all contemporaneous writings regarding Chinese immigration

were as damning as Starr’s analysis. History professor Robert

Seager II argued in 1959 that Protestant ministers were among the

foremost champions of Chinese immigrants. Presbyterian minister

Reverend William Speer was an early scholar and supporter of the

Chinese immigrants in California. Fluent in Cantonese from his

previous missionary experience in China and armed with

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statistical data, Speer demonstrated that the Chinese were indeed

a net benefit to the United States, not a liability. Speer touted

the Chinese immigrants’ morality, arguing that it was

“immeasurably superior to any other unchristianized people.”10

While Reverend Speer and his like-minded clerical colleagues

defended the Chinese population in California, they did not

simply seek to champion an oppressed people. These ecclesiastics’

primary motive was large-scale evangelization. Believing that God

had delivered the Chinese to their shores “to be Christianized,”

these clerics believed they could send the Chinese back to China

as Protestant missionaries; they hoped to Christianize China by

proxy.11

Later scholars who studied Chinese immigration wrote

“immigrant experience” history in the early 20th century. These

accounts were often written by social scientists such as

sociologist Mary Roberts Coolidge, whose 1909 book Chinese

Immigration focused on the difficulty that Chinese immigrants

faced while adapting to their new lives in the United States.

Scholars like Coolidge were sympathetic to Chinese immigrants,

and often reminded their readers that the Chinese were quite

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similar to many other groups of immigrants in the United States.

Many authors during this era lauded Chinese attempts to

assimilate into mainstream American culture, putting special

emphasis on “their potential to become part of the American

mosaic.”12

Another type of “immigrant experience” history came from

Chinese immigrants themselves. Chinese-American diplomat and

author Yung Wing was born in China and immigrated to the United

States. He later earned esteem by becoming the first Chinese-

American to graduate from an American university, and in 1909

published his autobiography My Life in China and America. Yung was a

well-educated immigrant who lived in New England rather than on

the west coast; even so, he framed his life as a dichotomy: the

struggle of living simultaneously as both Chinese and Chinese-

American. Lower class Chinese immigrants framed their lives as

survival stories, writing of their personal experiences of

culture shock, poverty, and crime. Accounts from early Chinese-

American writers often differed depending on their language of

publication. English-language versions tended to be more subdued,

but Chinese-language memoirs were far more explicit and

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descriptive when describing the exploitation, violence, and

harassment they faced on a daily basis.13

The early 20th century also introduced a new

historiographical paradigm for studying Chinese immigrants in the

19th century known as “diplomatic history.” Growing international

activity after the First World War caused concern over foreign

relations and introduced scholars to immigration as a political

science. Interested more in the political effects of Chinese

presence in the United States than in individual lived

experiences, these historians employed a global paradigm to study

the Chinese in America. Diplomatic historians examined the causes

and consequences of the mass emigration from China to immigrant-

welcoming Anglophone countries several decades earlier. The

Chinese loss of the Opium Wars, fought in the early 1840’s

between British and Chinese forces, changed the western view of

China from “[a] tradition of Chinese power and wealth” to a

Chinese Empire that was too weak to defend itself.14

Stanford historian Payson Treat argued in his 1926 article,

“Our Asiatic Neighbors,” that “the treatment of Chinese

immigrants in our Western states and our national exclusion laws

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demonstrated a popular attitude at variance with the diplomatic

one.”15 The contrast between American popular and diplomatic

opinions regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act and the treatment of

Chinese immigrants in the 19th century was stark. Diplomats

acting on an international stage were able to see the larger

significance of the Chinese in the United States than the

American public could see from the domestic front. While Treat

paid no attention to the everyday Chinese immigrant, he argued

strongly for the international and diplomatic importance of

Chinese immigrants as an American demographic. He credited the

many wars in China around the turn of the 20th century as a

leading source of distaste that the general American population

held for early Chinese laborers living in the United States.16

Scholars other than Treat also saw the international

importance of the Chinese presence in the United States. Head

sociology professor Emory S. Bogardus of University of Southern

California argued in 1928 that Chinese immigration was only

partially a racial issue. He also asserted that immigrants were

accepted as long as they did not become too successful. When

Chinese immigrants prospered, they often faced retaliatory

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discrimination and sometimes even violence. Bogardus argued that

given too much conflict, significant numbers of immigrants would

abandon the United States and return to China. On an

international stage, this would have been a great embarrassment.

Middle-class Chinese immigrants (or children of immigrants) faced

discrimination and racist propaganda, as other middle-class

Americans saw them as competition for labor. Bogardus also noted

that

Antipathy for the Chinese is aroused not only by meeting one or a few representatives of the lower social levels, but also by anti-Chinese propaganda…. [b]efore even meeting better-class Chinese or hearing one of them speak, Americans have often formulated repulsive pictures… and may see a Chinese as a ‘villain’ in a popular movie- and the damage is done.17

In the “diplomatic history” phase of the historiography of mass

Chinese immigration, it should be noted that the United States

was not the only nation facing “The Chinese Question.” In the

1923 book Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire, the

author argued that American anti-Chinese legislation and debt-

bondage following the Gold Rush functioned as a model for other

Anglophone nations that also faced large waves of Asian

immigrants during the same period. Many “coolies” arrived in

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California already in debt to brokers or trade guilds that paid

for their passage. Britain, Australia, and Canada followed this

debt-bondage model, sending millions of impoverished laborers

from Hong Kong to the far-flung edges of the British Empire.18

The importance of immigrants as a labor force in the United

States became more complicated after the Great Depression started

in 1929. Immigration hit its lowest point in over a century; in

fact, more people emigrated from the United States than

immigrated to the nation. Upon entering the Second World War in

1941, the United States faced a labor shortage once again. In

1943, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and removed

other legal barriers for foreign workers to enter the country.

Immigration policy after the war became complicated. The United

States Congress passed the War Brides Act and the Displaced

Persons Act, which were predecessors of the Immigration and

Nationality Act of 1952, which became the primary piece of

legislation through which immigration procedures took place and

created an increasingly difficult cultural and economic situation

for the United States.19

15

Given the new influx of immigrants from all over the world

after the end of the war, the post-war decade left Americans in a

quandary regarding current and historical Asian immigration into

the United States. In the late 1940’s, popular opinion was still

dominated by racism, but as a result of growing Cold War-related

fears, the American people were also very much against the newly

formed communist government in China. But on the other hand,

scholars saw Chinese immigration in the 1940’s and -50’s as an

unbroken continuum since the first mass arrival of Chinese men

into California during the Gold Rush. The Cold War-era United

States faced issues of ideology as well as questions of gender

and race. These issues complicated and ultimately prevented a

clear consensus on how 19th century immigration from China should

be studied.20

Hart H. North, a former Immigration and Naturalization

Service (INS) employee, wrote an article for the California Historical

Society Quarterly in 1949, asserting that Chinese immigrants during

and after the Gold Rush were “fine young men in the early prime

of life,” but that “of reputable Chinese women there were only a

few.”21 The lack of Chinese immigrant women in the United States

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in the 19th century was indeed problematic; San Francisco State

College history professor Gerald T. White argued in 1950 that the

lack of Chinese women in 19th century California was a major

source of prejudice against early and contemporary Chinese

immigrants. He also claimed that the Chinese Exclusion Act and

its successors were to blame for the lack of Chinese nuclear

families, a major part of the “American dream” concept that

prevailed in the 1940’s and -50’s.22

Racism in the mid-20th century was at the root of American

popular views about the mass immigration of Chinese men into the

nation during the Gold Rush era. Sociology professor Henry Pratt

Fairchild of New York University argued that while early

reactions to the wave of Chinese immigrants revolved largely

along economic considerations and labor competition, post-war era

opinions on the “Chinese question” were split. “The whole problem

of Oriental immigration,” Fairchild argued, “lies in a more or

less distinct field. Here the stock considerations of cultural

differences and extreme discrepancies of levels of living are

supplemented by basic racial divergencies [sic]….”23 Fred W. Riggs

argued in his 1950 treatise Pressures on Congress: A Study of the Repeal of

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Chinese Exclusion that the conflict between white Americans and

Chinese immigrants stemmed from the white laborers’ fear of

“losing his self-respect should he work as an equal with members

of an ‘inferior’ race.”24

As race relations in the United States reached a tipping

point during the late 1950’s into the 1960’s, scholars developed

a new way of looking at history: examining a group of people from

the “bottom-up”. This “social history” approach focused on the

“everyman,” and included studies of the Chinese immigrant

population. Scholars studied the lives and experiences of

ordinary Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century. Earlier

historians usually focused on the Chinese immigrant population en

masse, for the most part ignoring the individual and his or her

experiences living as an immigrant in a nation fraught with

racial strife. Scholars of this era also sought to deconstruct

stereotypes of Chinese immigrants, namely their supposed

inability or unwillingness to assimilate. Historian Isabella

Black argued in 1963 that the “natural antipathy” toward Asians

living in Western countries “that made Chinese ‘unassimilability’

seem so plausible was in fact a mid-nineteenth-century

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development.”25 The social historical framework that evolved out

of the racial conflict and upheaval that dominated the mid-20th

century helped establish the study of individual Asian-Americans

who migrated to the United States in the 19th century.26

In the midst of massive social change in the United States,

Chinese-Americans developed much of this era’s literature,

emphasizing the prejudice they faced despite their attempts at

assimilation into mainstream American society. William Dudley’s

Asian Americans: Opposing Viewpoints claimed that the Immigration Act of

1965, which removed many legal barriers to immigration, had a

great impact on the historiography of Chinese immigrants of the

19th century. In her 1971 article, sociologist Monica Boyd

emphasized the importance of racial discrimination that early

Chinese immigrants faced on a daily basis. She presented social

conclusions from her analysis of immigration data by contrasting

the emigration of single men from China against the familial

migration from European countries and the fallout from these

immigration patterns.27

The history of Chinese immigration was not only looked at

from within American society, but also from the outside

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viewpoints of communist scholars in the People’s Republic of

China. From the late 1960’s-70’s, both Chinese and Chinese-

Americans wrote a considerable amount of literature about

emigration from China in the previous century. In the 1974

article “Chinese Immigration through Communist Chinese Eyes,”

University of Arkansas history professor Shih-shan H. Ts’ai

successfully argued that the Chinese in the People’s Republic of

China were not ignorant of the poor treatment of Chinese

immigrants to countries that imported “coolie” labor. Ts’ai

argued that

Though they came to the subject at different times, Communist Chinese as well as American scholars have tended to focus on the same three aspects of the problem: the motives and processes of Chinese immigration; the background of a series of treaties andlaws by which the United States managed the immigration; and the reasons for the anti-Chinese movement. The most significant different between the two groups of scholars is methodological, the Americanspreferring behavioral analyses of the causes of the anti-Chinese movement and the Chinese tending to emphasize American malevolence…28

Although Chinese studies of Chinese immigration to the United

States appeared mostly after the Communist Revolution in 1949,

Ts’ai argued that there was no American body of work that matched

20

the collection by Chinese literary historian A. Yin, entitled An

Anti-American Literary Collection on the Exclusion of Chinese Laborers. The title

alone was a powerful indicator of how the communist Chinese

viewed the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States

during and after the Gold Rush. Many Chinese works on the subject

compared the treatment of Chinese immigrants to the treatment of

black people during the era of chattel slavery.29

Employing a bi-national lens, it is easy to see the jump

that scholars made in the 1980’s: a “transnational” approach to

writing history. This approach was more holistic than previous

historical analyses; scholars once again moved away from

nationally-based historiography toward a global view of history

that transcended national borders. Transnational history was a

natural extension of a social history, as it sought to revise

American history to include marginalized groups of people, such

as the Chinese immigrants of the 19th century. Historical

syntheses and monographs appeared in large numbers in the 1980’s,

opening the door to a deeper understanding of individual early

Chinese experiences in the United States. This has often been

labelled “comparative history,” and proponents of comparative

21

history claim the field “understands Asians in America as part of

a growing number of ‘internationalized’ Pacific Rim people whose

lives do not fall neatly into specific national-historical

experiences.”30

Most scholarly publications from the last two decades of the

20th century rejected assimilationist approaches, presenting

Chinese immigrants as “settlers” rather than “sojourners,” and

reframed these immigrants as “Chinese-Americans” instead of

Chinese people who happened to live in America. Works written in

the 1980’s and -90’s rejected the traditional American

historiographical stereotype of the Chinese as a passive,

monolithic group to whom events transpired, and instead placed

the newly-dubbed Chinese-Americans on center stage as actors who

shaped their own destinies. Works like Ronald Takaki’s 1989

general syntheses Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans

and Judy Yung’s 1995 monograph Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese

Women in San Francisco displayed Chinese immigrants’ active

participation in American politics, economics, and society since

their arrival several generations earlier.31

22

The year 2000 was a watershed year for Chinese-American

historiography. Cultural historian Xiao-huang Yin’s Chinese

American Literature since the 1850s was the first all-inclusive piece of

literature about the Chinese experience in the United States. Yin

traced Chinese-American cultural history from the time the

Chinese stepped off the boat in California and followed it

through the tumultuous 20th century and into modernity. Yin’s

source base was vast; he consulted English- and Chinese-language

autobiographical writings, diaries, interviews, essays, and even

poems engraved on the walls of a turn-of-the-century California

immigration detention facility. Yin’s book included literature by

Chinese immigrants of all classes and levels of education. Like

other transnational historians, Yin’s emphasis was on “the

assertive, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated qualities of early

Chinese immigrants.”32

Historians in the year 2000 were carrying on Yin’s legacy,

writing more and more micro-histories, monographs, and

transnational comparative histories. But on September 11, 2001,

the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City created a

rift within the historiographical discipline. While many scholars

23

continued to write transnational histories of the Chinese in

America, a minority of political scientists, pundits, and amateur

and professional historians embraced strong anti-immigrationism.

Hearkening back to early American mass immigrations, such as that

of the Chinese in the 19th century, these writers demonized

immigrant labor and argued that immigration would be the downfall

of the United States. Recent works entitled Unguarded Gates: A History

of America’s Immigration Crisis and The Death of the West: How Dying Populations

and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization have shown a new

form of nativism in modern historiography.33

In Unguarded Gates, former professor Otis L. Graham Jr. framed

his argument for massive immigration reform in a historical

context. Many of his facts were correct, but the outdated and

sometimes outright inflammatory language he employed undermined

his argument for the need to restrict immigration in 21st century

America. Referring to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (the name of

which he claimed was an “inept, misleading title,”) Graham

described early male Chinese immigrants as “cheap and docile

labor” that brought along “a few female Chinese for

prostitution.”34 Graham justified the Chinese Exclusion Act by

24

emphasizing not only labor issues, but also that American and

Chinese people were “simply too different to permit large and

sustained oriental immigration.”35

Graham’s negative view of 19th century Chinese immigration

attempted to give historical continuity, and therefore

justification, to modern exclusion of undocumented migrant

workers, whom he referred to simply as “illegals.” Most

professional historians were still writing from a transnational

approach, but the post-9/11 neo-conservative backlash against

multiculturalism created a less tolerant atmosphere, especially

in popular media.36

Since the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Chinese

immigrants into the United States during the California Gold Rush

in 1848, scholars have written a plethora of literature about

these men and women. Some of the earliest accounts were positive,

as the Chinese were seen as a source of cheap and reliable labor

in the western United States. It was not long, however, before

popular and political opinion turned against them. Those who

feared the “yellow menace” interpreted the presence of the

Chinese as a threat to their livelihoods and morals. Well-meaning

25

but paternalistic religious communities saw the opportunity to

convert the Chinese to Christianity and send them back to China

as missionaries.37

Toward the end of the 19th century, many scholars wrote in

sympathetic tones and focused on immigrants’ lived experiences in

California and the surrounding territories. “Immigrant

experience” histories were written not only by white Americans,

but also by Chinese-American scholars and diplomats. After World

War One, diplomatic interpretations put these immigrants in an

international context, highlighting global events that led to the

mass emigration from China to other immigrant-welcoming nations.

Diplomatic history also examined American influence on immigrant-

restricting laws in other nations that had previously accepted

large numbers of Chinese immigrants.38

Labor shortages during the 1930’s temporarily turned public

opinion and scholarly writing toward a more favorable view of

early Chinese immigrants, but after the Second World War ended,

labor supplies became plentiful once again. Racial issues that

swept the nation in the 1950’s caused a reversal of American

attitudes toward the Chinese. “Communist history,” or history

26

from a communist Chinese perspective, presented Chinese “coolies”

as victims of a modern slave trade and recontextualized the wave

of immigration that brought the Chinese to American shores,

resulting in no clear historiographical consensus during the

post-war era.39

The 1960’s introduced a “social history” paradigm that

focused on the lived experiences of everyday Chinese immigrants,

much as early “immigrant experience” histories did. Personal

narratives largely replaced economic and racial foci, and Asian-

American studies emerged as a discipline. In the 1970’s,

sociologists and historians presented early Chinese immigration

from a socio-economic standpoint, emphasizing de jure and de facto

labor discrimination against the Chinese and the resulting

classed-based reactions.40

In the 1980’s, a holistic, “transnational” approach entered

the historiographical record. It sought to deemphasize the

importance of individual nations in favor of a global analysis,

much like early diplomatic histories. The late 20th century

showed promise for socially-based monographs and micro-histories,

not unlike the social histories written during the 1960’s, but

27

the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City opened the door

for a new form of nativism. Neo-conservative writers argued that

early Chinese immigration had opened the floodgates to a new wave

of harmful immigration. The historiography of Chinese immigration

to the United States in the 19th century has come full circle;

racism and nativism are dressed up in modern language, but the

message remains: certain nationalities of immigrants are not

welcome in the United States.41

Notes

1Isabella Black, “Labour and Chinese Immigration,” Past & Present 25 (July 1963): 59; Library of Congress, “The Chinese in California 1850-1925,” The Library of Congress: American Memory.

2William Dudley, ed., Asian Americans: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1997), 16-19.

3George Kraus, “Chinese Laborers and the Construction of the Central Pacific,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37 (Winter 1969): 43, 49; Mary Roberts Coolidge, The American Immigration Collection: Chinese Immigration (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 33, 63.

4Richard P. Cole and Gabriel J. Chin, “Emerging from the Margins of Historical Consciousness: Chinese Immigrants and the History of American Law,” Law and History Review 17 (Summer 1999): 326-29; Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 59.

5Gordon H. Chang, “Writing the History of Chinese Immigrants to America,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (Winter/Spring 2009): 138-39.

6Chang, “Writing the History,” 139; Dudley, Opposing Viewpoints, 32.

7Chang, “Writing the History,” 139-41; Kelvin E.Y. Low, “Chinese Migration and Entangled Histories: Broadening the Contours of Migratory Historiography,” Journal of Historical Sociology 27 (March 2014): 79.

8M.B. Starr, The Coming Struggle; or What the People on the Pacific Coast Think of the Coolie Invasion (San Francisco: Book & Job Printers, 1873), 11, 113-15.

9Starr, The Coming Struggle, 7.

10Robert Seager II, “Some Denominational Reactions to Chinese Immigration to California, 1856-1892,” Pacific Historical Review 28 (February 1959): 49-50; See also William Speer, An Humble Plea Addressed to the Legislature of California in Behalf of the Immigrants from the Empire of China to This State (San Francisco, 1856), 4-5, 28-29.

11Charles McClain, ed., Chinese Immigrants and American Law: Asian Americans and the Law: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 174; Seager, “Denominational Reactions,” 50.

12Chang, “Writing the History,” 138; Coolidge, Chinese Immigration.

13Haiming Liu, “Transnational Historiography: Chinese American Studies Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (January 2004): 138-40; Yung Wing, My Life inChina and America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909). Note: The author did not indicate whether the “Chinese language” referenced was Mandarin or Cantonese; presumably it would depend on the origin of the immigrant.

14Payson J. Treat, “Our Asiatic Neighbors,” The Washington Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (April 1926): 84; Chang, “Writing the History,” 138.

15Treat, “Our Asiatic Neighbors,” 85.

16Ibid.

17Emory S. Bogardus, Immigration and Race Attitudes (Boston: DC Heath and Company, 1928), 9, 17.

18Persia Crawford Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries Within the British Empire (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 27-28.

19James P. Lynch and Rita J. Simon, Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 12-13; Fred W. Riggs, Pressures on Congress: A Study of the Repeal of Chinese Exclusion (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1950).

20Ibid.

21Hart H. North, “Chinese and Japanese Immigration to the Pacific Coast,” California Historical Society Quarterly 28 (December 1949): 343.

22Gerald T. White, “The Chinese and Immigration Law,” Far Eastern Survey 19, no. 7 (April 1950): 68-70.

23Henry Pratt Fairchild, “Public Opinion on Immigration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 262 (March 1949): 191.

24Riggs, “Pressure on Congress,” 18-19.

25Black, “Labor and Chinese Immigration,” 64.

26Dudley, Opposing Viewpoints, 172; Chang, “Writing the History,” 140.

27Monica Boyd, “Oriental Immigration: The Experience of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Populations in the United States,” International Migration Review 5 (Spring 1971): 51, 60; Chang, “Writing the History,” 139-140.

28Shih-shan H. Ts’ai, “Chinese Immigration through Communist Chinese Eyes: An Introduction to the Historiography,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 3 (August 1974): 397.

29Ibid; A. Yin, An Anti-American Literary Collection on the Exclusion of Chinese Laborers. (Shanghai: NP, 1960.)

30Chang, “Writing the History,” 141; Liu, “Transnational Historiography,” 135-36.

31Liu, “Transnational Historiography,” 136; see also Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Oakland, CA: University of

California Press, 1995).

32Liu, “Transnational Historiography,” 138; Xiao-huang Yin, Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

33Otis L. Graham Jr., Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004): 9-10.

34Ibid.

35Ibid.

36Ibid., 12.

37Starr, The Coming Struggle, 7; Seager, “Denominational Reactions,” 49-50.

38Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 33; Wing, My Life.

39Ts’ai, “Through Communist Chinese Eyes,” 397.

40Boyd, “Oriental Immigration,” 51.

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