Prejudice against Asians
How shall the immigrant be treated? More specifically, how should the non-citizen be treated under the law? Suppose a nation professes to establish that people possess natural rights. Are these rights extended to the immigrants it invites to labor in its fields, dig in its mines, and lay track across the mountains for the transcontinental railroad? The delegates at the 1849 Convention pondered this question when confronted with whether to adopt the following amendment:
“No member of this State shall be disenfranchised, or deprived of any of the rights or
privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his peers.
Mr. Botts moved to strike out the word “member” and insert “citizen...
...Mr. Norton suggested the word “inhabitant….
Mr. Hastings: ...Whether it is designed or not, the adoption of this section of the bill of rights would secure to certain classes, Indians and Africans (if Africans are ever introduced here,) precisely the same rights that we ourselves enjoy…The word “inhabitant” would not be proper. Indians are inhabitants but do not enjoy those privileges in any portion of the United States; they are disenfranchised.
…Mr. Botts withdrew his amendment” (Report of the Debates of the Convention of California 35-36)
This exchange shows the intent of the majority of the delegates. The Convention defined the scope of equality, democratic participation, and natural rights as only applying to those groups in California considered citizens, leaving the Native American, Black, and Chinese residents with few legal protections.
As Chinese immigrants arrived in California in the late 1840s, they found that the new Constitution gave them few rights. Fleeing the war and disruption of the Taiping Rebellion and hearing of the “Gold Mountain” in California, Chinese immigrants arrived in California to find their fortune. Many were able to make their way across the Pacific by promising to work for mining companies in exchange for the cost of their passage. By 1852, about ten percent of the non-Native population in California were Chinese. Angry with the competition from these Chinese miners working to pay off their tickets, non-Chinese miners lobbied the California legislature in 1852 to pass a foreign miners’ license tax of $3 a month, about 50% of what a miner earned a month. This tax was only levied on Chinese and Latin American miners.
Over time, Chinese immigrants settled in California cities and towns. Because only white people could become naturalized according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Chinese could not protect themselves through the vote. In 1854, in People v. Hall, the California State Supreme Court ruled that Chinese people could not testify in court “either in favor of, or against a white man.” In 1863, Chinese children were excluded from public schools (“California Anti-Chinese Legislation, 1852-1878”).
The railroad kings (Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins) organized the Central Pacific Railroad to build the western half of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. They recruited 30,000 Chinese laborers from California and China to clear the rock, build the trestles, and lay the track across the Sierra Nevada and through the desert until the line joined the Union Pacific track at Promontory, Utah, in 1869.
As the 1870s began, Chinese Americans benefited from the Reconstruction-era federal laws. Federal courts ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to non-citizens: San Francisco could not cut off male inmates’ queues (waist-length hair braid). Discriminatory taxes, such as the miners’ tax, were abolished because they violated the Civil Rights Acts of 1870, which allowed the federal government to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.
However, anti-Chinese attitudes remained severe in California, fueled by prejudice, as more Chinese immigrants came to the state. The worst manifestation of this prejudice occurred on October 24, 1871, when a mob of five hundred murdered nineteen residents of Los Angeles’s Chinatown in reaction to the injury of a police officer and the death of a white man who had come to his aid (“Forgotten Los Angeles History”). When California plunged into a recession after the Panic of 1873, many California whites blamed rising unemployment, low wages, and generally poor business conditions on the Chinese Americans’ willingness to accept low wages either individually or as part of China’s immigrant labor contract systems. Anti-Chinese public demonstrations in California and harassment and intimidation of Chinese Americans became very common.
Many Californians believed that wealthy interests used Chinese immigrants to keep laborers poor. Led by Dennis Kearney, the Workingmen’s Association of California was formed in the summer of 1877. It aimed its wrath at two foes: the monopolies and the Chinese. The party’s slogan was “The Chinese must Go!” This rallying cry led to various discriminatory measures at the Constitutional Convention of 1878-1879. Without the vote, Chinese Californians did not have the political power to help protect themselves from discrimination (Rawls and Bean, pp.191-97).
