"Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown": An Architect Looks at U.S. Immigration Policy (and the Racism Supporting It)

“A long time ago, Chinese men with gold rush fever flooded into California—we call it the mountain of gold, see? Leaving behind their wives and children, working for years to complete the transcontinental railroad, saving all their pennies. And then they sent for their families to help build this beautiful Chinatown.”— Victor Wong (playing character Egg Shen)/W.D. Richter (screenwriter), Big Trouble in Little China

Social media has lately been buzzing over the United States’ inhumane treatment of immigrants, particularly those from Latin America and the Middle East. I’ve seen countless tweets asking the likes of “Is this how the U.S. treats immigrants?” and “Is this who we as Americans are?” Most of us would like to think the answers are “No,” and that what we’re seeing now is a recent aberration. Unfortunately, for most of this country’s history, this is in fact how America has treated immigrants, and it is, if not who we are, at least who we were. Racism, exploitation, isolationism, protectionism, and nativist paranoia have long characterized American attitudes about immigration. I’ve argued elsewhere how America benefits culturally and economically from immigration [1]. In this article, I want to look at how immigrants have historically been accepted (or more often not) by the United States.

While the places of origin of immigrants have varied over time, a consistent pattern has emerged: At first, specific groups of people are encouraged (or forced) to come to America to meet labor needs. This is followed by various levels of discrimination, including limited employment opportunities and legal barriers to advancement, property ownership, and citizenship. Immigrant groups are segregated into isolated enclaves, apart from the dominant American culture. Immigration restrictions follow, preventing specific groups from entering the country. Over time—sometimes a long time—the legal barriers are removed and the immigrants are more or less tolerated. Eventually, the immigrants (or more likely their children and children’s children) become accepted and, to varying degrees, assimilated into the dominant American culture (although this acceptance and assimilation can vary considerably, and can suffer setbacks, often depending on international events). To study this pattern for all groups of immigrants since the country began is beyond the scope of this article; instead, we’ll look at one specific group: Chinese Americans [2].?

Encouraged Immigration

In 1849, the California Gold Rush attracted not only the famous “49ers” from America’s east coast but also as many as 100,000 immigrants from China. That wave of immigrants continued until the early 1880s, by which time around 300,000 Chinese were living in the United States, mostly working as miners and farmers in California. In the mid-1860s, construction began on the Central Pacific Railroad, the western half of the first transcontinental railroad. This caused an acute need for cheap and reliable labor, leading railroad agents to recruit Chinese men to leave China and work on the railroad. Most of these Chinese laborers followed the railroad on its way east, over the harsh Sierra Nevada terrain and across the flatter but nearly as harsh plains of Nevada and Utah. After the completion of the railroad in 1869, many of the Chinese laborers returned to California; by 1880, Chinese people made up around 8% of California’s population [3].?

Discrimination

Despite their recognized usefulness in solving California’s labor shortage, and their proven value as resourceful, energetic, and inexpensive workers, Chinese laborers faced discrimination from the beginning. Nativism was rampant and openly expressed in 19th-century America, and led to opposition of all foreign-born people in America, including Irish, German, and Italian immigrants. Foreign-born immigrants, such as Asians, who looked different from white Americans also faced severe racism and legally enforced discrimination. For example, until 1870, Chinese were not allowed to testify against a white person (even after 1870, white juries were?permitted to ignore a Chinese person’s testimony).

Political leaders would often encourage anti-Chinese sentiments. In his 1862 inaugural address, Governor Leland Stanford said that “the presence among us of a degraded and distinct people … must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race” and called for the “repression of the immigrants of Asiatic races.” (This was just a few years before Stanford’s Central Pacific began importing Chinese laborers to build his railroad.)

Starting in 1852, the California state legislature favored white miners by imposing special taxes on foreign-born miners. In 1862, the legislature passed “An act to protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California,” also known as the “Anti-Coolie Act.” This law imposed a monthly $2.50 tax on all “Mongolian races” who weren’t already paying the existing foreign miners’ tax. (Since many Chinese workers made no more than $4.00 each month, this tax was an enormous burden.)

It wasn’t until the 1870s, when the transcontinental railroad was finished and the Chinese laborers were no longer needed, that overt legal actions against the Chinese began. With the railroad no longer employing them, Chinese laborers returned to California to find other kinds of work, usually for lower wages than white laborers, who turned to politicians for help. California passed numerous statewide anti-Chinese laws to drive the Chinese to other states.

In the 1870s, the anti-Chinese movement went national. An 1869 New York Tribune article first raised the specter of the “Yellow Peril,” warning the country of an imminent armed Asian invasion of America. In the 1876 political campaigns, both major parties took positions against the Chinese. Republicans asked that Congress “investigate the effects of the immigration and importation of Mongolians,” while the Democrats denounced “the revival of the coolie-trade in Mongolian women … and Mongolian men to perform servile labor.”

Such anti-Chinese sentiments sometimes led to violence. In the “Massacre of 1871,” a mob of 500 white men in Los Angeles murdered 19 Chinese men and boys. In 1885, unemployed white miners in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, blamed their unemployment on low-paid Chinese laborers.?This led to?the “Rock Springs Massacre,” in which at least 28 Chinese were murdered, many by being burned alive in their homes. Two years later, in the Hells Canyon area of Idaho, at least 34 Chinese miners were murdered. No one was ever arrested for these crimes.

During this time, even American-born children of Chinese immigrants were denied U.S. citizenship. This wasn’t corrected until 1898, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s The United States vs. Wong Kim Ark decision (based on the 14th Amendment, which had been adopted 30 years earlier).

Segregation

Like most immigrants to the U.S., the Chinese tended to settle in small ghettos within the larger cities. Immigrants rarely chose this segregation; instead, it was forced on them, legally and economically. Chinese immigrants—even those few who could afford better—were allowed to live only in undesirable parts of cities. This was the birth of the many Chinatowns in America. Because San Francisco was the primary port of entry for Chinese immigrants, its Chinatown was the earliest and is still the largest in America (and also the first to be called “Chinatown”). Others followed, generally moving west to east: Sacramento, Los Angeles [4], Portland, St. Louis, Chicago, and New York (with at least three Chinatowns, in Manhattan, Flushing, and Brooklyn), among many others.??

These Chinatowns were originally little more than squalid slums, and were seen by white Americans as crime- and disease-ridden. In 1900, San Francisco suffered from an outbreak of bubonic plague. Because some of the first cases occurred in Chinatown, the city quarantined the area and suspended sanitary services, making the health problems worse for Chinese Americans. The Chinatowns did allow Chinese immigrants to build strong ethnic communities, but because of the concentration of Chinese Americans in Chinatowns, the U.S. immigration service was able to more easily conduct raids to find illegal residents.

Immigration Restrictions

By 1880, Democrat and Republican politicians, reflecting the mood of the nation, firmly opposed further Chinese immigration. This led to the 1882 “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which suspended Chinese immigration for ten years. The 1892 Geary Act extended the restriction to 1902, at which time it was made permanent [5]. This led to a drop in the Chinese-American population to just 61,000 in 1920 (of whom 18,000 were citizens, or true Chinese Americans). After 1928, the Chinese-American population grew to 77,000, of whom 40,000, or more than half, were citizens. By 1940, 60% of Chinese Americans lived in the western states, with 51% in California. The majority lived in large cities, with 23% living in San Francisco, 16% in New York, 6% in Los Angeles, 4% in Oakland, 3% in Chicago, and a combined 8% in Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and Boston.

Acceptance

World War II and the years leading up to it were crucial in changing white America’s attitudes toward Chinese Americans. The change began in the 1930s, when Japan attacked China. With tensions between the U.S. and Japan growing, Americans sided with the underdog Chinese, who were clearly the victims of Japanese aggression. Also in the 1930s, positive depictions of Chinese Americans began to appear in popular culture. Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck cranked out a series of popular pro-Chinese books, such as The Good Earth, which was also made into an Academy Award–winning movie. In the same decade, the movie stereotype of the sinister Chinese villain (Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless being the most famous) was countered by such positive characters as detective Charlie Chan, who spoke in broken English and fortune-cookie proverbs but was still smarter than all the white characters. At around the same time, the urban Chinatowns changed from being dangerous ghettos to popular tourist attractions.

Following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. and China became official wartime allies, further boosting the image and altering the demographics of Chinese Americans. This change in international relations led to the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, followed by a law allowing alien Chinese wives of American citizens quota-free entry into the country. Nearly 20,000 Chinese-American babies were born during the 1940s, bringing the total Chinese-American population to 117,000. The now-adult American-born generation was beginning to expand out of the Chinatowns into the larger society. Things were beginning to look up for Chinese Americans.

But then, in the late 1940s . . .

Setback

World War II may have been over, but fighting continued in China, this time between nationalists and communists (who had temporarily shelved their differences in their common fight against the Japanese). With the communist victory in 1949, the U.S. enacted laws (including the Internal Security Act, co-sponsored by U.S. Representative Richard Nixon) that, had they been fully executed, could have resulted in Chinese-American concentration camps similar to the wartime Japanese-American camps. American fears of “Red China” led to suspicions by some Americans of Chinese-American loyalties. As recently as the early 2000s, a national poll revealed that nearly half of adult Americans believed that Chinese Americans were “passing secrets to the Chinese government,” while a third believed Chinese Americans to be more loyal to the People’s Republic of China than to the United States. Meanwhile, China’s emergence as a global economic power overtaking the United States was seen as a threat to America and reinforced some Americans’ suspicions of Chinese Americans.

The Immigration Act of 1965 removed the nation-based quota system and gave Chinese greater opportunities for immigration. This changed the demographics of Chinese Americans: Between 1970 and 1980, the Chinese-American population increased by 85%. In the 1960s, white America began referring to Asian Americans as the “model minority” for their low crime rates and academic successes. (Although intended as a positive term, “model minority” was itself a reflection of American racism, since it compared Asian Americans to other “problem” minorities.)

International events can affect a minority’s situation in the U.S. For Chinese Americans, this happened in 1972 when President Richard Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong. This gave non-Asian Americans a heightened interest in everything Chinese, including food. Until then, most Americans’ idea of Chinese food was “chop suey.” Nixon’s China trip started a “China fever” across America, and real Chinese food quickly became popular. This seemingly trivial matter reflected an overall improved status of Chinese Americans.

Assimilation

Nearly 170 years since the earliest Chinese immigrations, Chinese Americans are still struggling to assimilate into the dominant American culture. Even today, Chinese Americans are often seen as being not quite American. For example, in the early 1980s, during the controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, American-born Maya Lin, whose design won the national competition, heard veterans ask, “How can you let a gook design this?”

Popular media, especially movies and TV, are good measures of assimilation, and in those contexts, Chinese Americans still see themselves as “invisible people.” For decades, Chinese Americans have been portrayed in moves by white actors performing “yellowface.” For example, in American movies, Charlie Chan has been played by Warner Oland, Sidney Toland, Roland Winters, J. Carrol Nash, Ross Martin, and Peter Ustinov—all white guys [6]. Meanwhile, American movies and TV series that feature predominantly Chinese-American casts are literally exceptional: Flower Drum Song (1961, based on the 1958 Broadway play) [7], Chan is Missing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986) [8] [9], The Joy Luck Club (1993) [10], All-American Girl (1994–1995), Fresh off the Boat (2015–) [11], and Crazy Rich Asians (2018) [12].

This pattern of immigration—encouragement, discrimination, segregation, restrictions, acceptance, setbacks, and assimilation—has applied in varying degrees to all immigrant groups. For white immigrants (mostly from Europe), the pattern plays itself out relatively fast, and resolves itself into true assimilation. For non-white immigrants, however, the pattern can take centuries, and never reaches true assimilation in many areas of the country. But does this pattern have to apply now? And with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic being called a "foreign virus" and a "Chinese virus" by the American president, will we see still another setback for Chinese Americans? The pandemic shows how fragile assimilation can be, and how a racial misrepresentation by the so-called leader of the U.S. could result in a significant setback for Chinese Americans (and, by extension in the racists' minds, all Asian Americans).

This returns us to our opening questions: “Is this how the U.S. treats immigrants?” and “Is this who we as Americans are?” My answers, admittedly optimistically na?ve (or naively optimistic) are a hopeful “No, not necessarily,” and “Yes, it’s who we have been, and maybe who we are, but not who we have to be.” I’d like to think that at least the majority of Americans have advanced beyond 19th-century thinking. Breaking the pattern will take the collective will of Americans, governed by enlightened leaders. While it would be hard to imagine a less enlightened group of people than our current government leaders (as of October 2020, that is), that won’t always be the case. It may be a long shot and it may take a while, but it’s still possible for this country to take a sensible and humane approach to immigration. The nation will be the better for it.

Follow the author on Twitter @bill_schmwil.

Footnotes

[1] https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/everybodyfrom-everywherecomes-ricks-william-schmalz-faia/

[2] Much of the information in this article comes from three books: Rogers Daniels’s Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850; Iris Chang’s The Chinese in America: A Narrative History; and Peter Kwong & Dusanka Mi??evic’s Chinese America.

[3] Unlike most other waves of immigrants to the U.S., the early Chinese immigrants planned on making money quickly to send back to their families in China, and then returning there. As a result, those early immigrants were overwhelmingly male. In California in 1880, there was one women for every 18 men; in the rest of the country, the ratio was one women for every 30 men. Even those few women would be unlikely to marry Chinese men, since many of them were brought by railroad agents to California?as prostitutes.

[4] Los Angeles’s original Chinatown was at Alameda Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue (formerly Macy Street). By 1910, it included around 200 buildings, a Chinese opera theater, a newspaper, and a telephone exchange. The area was condemned and demolished in the late 1920s to make room for Union Station (a Los Angeles landmark). Today’s Chinatown northeast of Union Station was built in the late 1930s. Los Angeles’s Chinatown is no longer a real community, but a tourist stop of restaurants and shops; the San Gabriel Valley east of Pasadena is the new Chinatown. And about this article’s title: Yes, I know the movie Chinatown has only one scene in L.A.’s Chinatown and just two Chinese-American actors (and one Japanese-American actor), but it’s a great movie with one of my favorite closing lines of dialogue.

[5] San Francisco’s Geary Street is not named after the Geary Act’s namesake, state representative Thomas J. Geary, but after the city’s first mayor, John W. Geary.

[6] The first three movie actors to play Chan were not white: Japanese-American actor George Kuwa in the 1926 serial The House without a Key; Japanese-American actor Kamiyama Sojin in the 1927 movie The Chinese Parrot, and Korean-American actor E.L. Park in the 1929 movie Behind the Curtain. None of the movies was critically or financially successful, and none featured a Chinese-American actor.

[7] Although Flower Drum Song is about Chinese Americans, the cast is a mix of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans.

[8] Big Trouble in Little China was criticized on its release for promoting racial stereotypes. In its defense, we should note that (1) director John Carpenter intended it to be an American version of Hong Kong martial arts movies, which often celebrated Asian stereotypes; (2) the movie was truly unusual in providing Chinese American actors with leading roles; and (3) it’s a comedy and a lot of fun, for goodness sake; lighten up. Only four white actors are in the movie (including an early role of Kim Cattrall, later famous for Sex and the City). Also of note, the nominal “hero,” Jack Burton (played by Kurt Russell), is white, but is also consistently incompetent and overshadowed by his significantly more competent Chinese-American colleagues. Co-star Dennis Dun had this to say about the movie: “I’m seeing Chinese actors getting to do stuff that American movies usually don’t let them do. I’ve never seen this type of role for an Asian in an American film.”

[9] Speaking of Big Trouble in Little China and the challenge Asian-American actors face in getting roles, let’s pause to consider the remarkable career of actor James Hong. He is now 91 years old and has been acting in movies and television for 64 years. He has appeared in at least 103 theatrical movies (mostly small roles, including in Flower Drum Song) and nearly 30 made-for-TV movies, along with far more TV series episodes and animation and videogame voice roles than I’m in the mood to count. (He appeared in the Seinfeld “The Chinese Restaurant” episode and in nine Kung Fu episodes, each time playing a different character, the producers no doubt assuming the audience wouldn’t know the difference). His roles of distinction include the butler in Chinatown, Hannibal Chew in Blade Runner, Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, and the voices of Chi Fu in Mulan and Mr. Ping in the Kung Fu Panda movies.

[10] The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan heard a Hollywood producer say her book about Chinese Americans had “no Americans” in it and was therefore not marketable as a movie.

[11] Okay, the Fresh off the Boat family is Taiwanese-American, but I don’t want to get into the “which is the real China” debate.

[12] Crazy Rich Asians was a box office hit, but received zero Academy Award nominations.