During the late twentieth century, Chinese became one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States. By the early twenty-first century, they constituted the largest Asian immigrant group in the United States and could be found throughout the North American continent.
Although most immigration from China to the United States occurred during the twentieth century, the earliest identifiable Chinese immigrants arrived in America during the 1780’s. However, the discovery of
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The decades of the 1840’s and the 1850’s in China were full of natural calamities. The major ones were the severe draught in Henan Province in 1847, the flooding of the Yangtze River in the four provinces of Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, and the famine in Guangxi in 1849. Flood and famine in Guangdong gave way to the catastrophic Taiping Revolution (1850-1864), which devastated the land, uprooted the peasantry, and dislocated the economy and polity.
Moreover, the importation of opium deepened the social and economic crisis. As a result of the
News of the
The Chinese gold seekers, referred to by their compatriots as Gam Saan Haak (“travelers to Gold Mountain” or “Gold Mountain guests”), were mostly adult males from Guangdong Province. Gold played a significant role in the lives of the early Chinese immigrants, and the majority of these gold seekers worked in the mining areas of California. U.S. Census statistics indicate that almost all the Chinese in the continental United States lived in California in 1860. Most Chinese miners worked in placer claims. They washed the gold-bearing sand in a pan or rocker to let the heavier particles of gold settle at the bottom.
As Chinese miners became ubiquitous in the California hills, white miners felt threatened and demanded that the California legislature eliminate the competition from foreign miners. In May of 1852, the state legislature passed the
In addition to mining,
While the majority of Chinese were digging gold and building railroads, some Chinese families fished for their livelihood in the Monterey Bay region.
The anti-Chinese movement, compounded by the economic depression on the West Coast in the last decades of the nineteenth century, contributed to the redistribution of Chinese immigrants. Economic discrimination in the form of special taxes and levies targeted the Chinese. For example,
The series of Chinese exclusion laws effectively banned the entry of Chinese into the United States. The passage of the 1882
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the laundering business had been a predominant occupation of the Chinese in the United States. After the 1870’s, prejudice against Chinese immigrants from American society effectively cut them out of the rest of the labor market. Persecuted and harassed, the Chinese could not find jobs, and they were forced to rely on their own resources. When they were excluded from the gold mines in the hills, they found an equally lucrative gold mine in the city. In setting up
Like laundries, restaurants were one of the most important businesses for the Chinese in the United States. Initially, Chinese restaurants started as a service for the bachelor communities of Chinese immigrants in isolated ranches, logging camps, mining towns, and other areas where Chinese men and women were willing to cook. When the eating places that the Chinese had set up for themselves soon attracted a number of outsiders, the Chinese realized that restaurants were profitable business enterprises well suited to their temperament. During the 1890’s, Chinese restaurants sprouted in the United States in many places. Most small Chinese restaurants were run as husband-and-wife businesses; the husband served as cook and dishwasher in the kitchen, while the wife worked as waitress, barmaid, and cashier in the front.
The grocery business ranked as a distant third occupation for Chinese immigrants before the 1940’s, although it was one of the major enterprises of the Chinese in some southern and western states. Chinese grocery stores provided Chinese ingredients for cooking and other goods for Chinese communities. Unlike the Chinese restaurants, the Chinese grocery stores found their clientele primarily among Chinese and other Asian immigrants. The stores were mostly located in Chinatowns and Asian communities.
Anti-Chinese sentiment abated during World War II, when China became a member of the Grand Alliance and public images of the Chinese gradually changed. A more favorable attitude in America toward China and Chinese Americans continued after the war. Facing pressures from the public and other interest groups, Congress repealed a large number of exclusion laws, which for years had denied Chinese Americans fundamental civil rights and legal protection. On December 17, 1943, Congress passed the
In spite of the repeal of the Chinese exclusion laws, the Chinese immigrant quota designated by the American government was quite low. This figure was one-sixth of 1 percent of the number of the Chinese in the United States in 1920 as determined by the census of that year. Nevertheless, nonquota immigrants were allowed to immigrate. More Chinese scholars came to teach in the United States–an average of about 137 each year, compared with 10 per year during the previous decade. More important, under the
Many
Among the women who immigrated during this period were many so-called
The most publicized case of “getting married quick” was of the ex-soldier who enplaned to China, selected his bride, was married, and landed at the San Francisco airport the evening before his month’s leave of absence expired. His bride came later, a practice applying to many others whose admission papers could not be processed rapidly.
Whereas during the 1930’s an average of only 60 Chinese women entered the United States each year, in 1948 alone 3,317 women immigrated. During the period from 1944 to 1953, women constituted 82 percent of Chinese immigrants to America. For the first time, the number of Chinese
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the consequent influx of new Chinese immigrants contributed to the transformation of Chinese American society. The act abolished the 1924
•20 percent of total annual visas to unmarried children of citizens of the United States
•20 percent to spouses and unmarried children of permanent residents
•10 percent to professionals, scientists, and artists with “exceptional ability”
•10 percent to married children of citizens of the United States
•24 percent to siblings of citizens of the United States
•10 percent to skilled and unskilled workers in occupations “for which a shortage of employable and willing persons exists in the United States”
•6 percent to refugees
The architects of the 1965 act intended to make the immigration policies appear more humanitarian and impartial to applicants on one hand and more beneficial to the United States on the other. The new law allowed 20,000 quota immigrants from every country in the Eastern Hemisphere to be admitted to the United States each year, regardless of the size of the country. It reserved 74 percent (including 20 percent in the first preference, another 20 percent in the second preference, 10 percent in the fourth preference, and 24 percent in the fifth preference) of the total 170,000 visas annually allotted for the Eastern Hemisphere for family reunification.
The lawmakers anticipated that European immigrants would continue to be the cohort of new immigrants, since there was a very small percentage (0.5 percent of the total U.S. population during the 1960’s) of Asian Americans in the country. Two occupational preferences (preferences three and six) allowed the U.S. immigration authorities and the Department of Labor to select carefully only applicants with special training and skills who would fill the vacuum in the American job market. In the years following this act, the Chinese American population increased dramatically. In addition, the male-female ratio finally approached parity.
The
After the normalization of Sino-American relations in 1979, some Chinese who had family members in the United States were allowed to come to America as immigrants. Since many of them came for economic reasons and were determined to settle, they brought their families as allowed by U.S. immigration policies. Some resigned their professional jobs in China and started from scratch in the United States.
As of 2008, at least twenty-four national-origin groups had been officially tabulated into the U.S. Census. Americans of Chinese and Filipino ancestries are the largest subgroups, at more than 2 million each, followed by Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Japanese, whose numbers surpass 1 million each. The nearly 2.9 million Chinese Americans tend to settle in urban areas and concentrate in the West. According to the 2000 U.S. Census,
Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne, 1991. A scholarly, comprehensive survey of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Asian Indian ancestry from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980’s. Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking Press, 2003. A comprehensive account of the political, social, economic, and cultural history of Chinese Americans over a century and a half. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seattle: University of Washington, 1988. Scholarly synthesis encompassing the two pioneer Asian American groups, the Chinese and the Japanese, from 1850 to 1980. Ling, Huping. Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. The first comprehensive study of an ethnic community in the Midwest, this groundbreaking work proposes a “cultural community” model to interpret the new type of ethnic community that is defined more by its cultural boundaries than by geographical ones. _______. Surviving on the Gold Mountain: Chinese American Women and Their Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. The first comprehensive history of Chinese American women from the mid-nineteenth century to 1990’s. Explores topics such as causes of immigration, settlement patterns, family, work, and community.
Anti-Chinese movement
Bayard-Zhang Treaty of 1888
Burlingame Treaty of 1868
Cable Act of 1922
California gold rush
Chinese American press
Chinese boycott of 1905
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Chinese family associations
Coolies
Geary Act of 1892
Hong Kong immigrants
Taiwanese immigrants
