Thread: Today's Immigration Debate Mirrors Past

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_3363240
Ontario, CA, 1/2/2006

Today's immigration debate mirrors past
Historians draw parallels with 1877 hearings
By Lisa Friedman, Staff Writer

WASHINGTON - The immigrants work for peanuts, drive down wages and push Americans out of good jobs. They swarm the hospitals, jails and welfare rolls. Their neighborhoods are crime-ridden. They don't learn English. They won't assimilate.

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The sentiments could have sprung from last month's House debate on illegal immigration. But those arguments were made 128 years ago before a congressional committee investigating the heavy influx of Chinese immigrants.

"Lots of historians are drawing parallels between how we handled the rapid increase of immigration in the 19th century and how we handle it now," said Donna Gabaccia, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

"The context is different," Gabaccia said, noting that today's furor is over illegal, not legal immigration, and the post-9/11 national security concerns add a new dimension. But, she said, "the rhetoric itself shows an astonishing continuity."

The 1877 hearing of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, held at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, was one of the first major congressional panels to delve into the effects of immigration.

The report it produced, which described Chinese laborers as a "standing menace to Republican institutions upon the Pacific, and the existence there of Christian civilization," paved the way for America's first significant immigration restrictions.

The 1,287 pages of that hearing's minutes, tucked into the stacks of the National Archives, is riddled with blatant remarks reflecting the scientific racism of the period.

California Republican Sen. Aaron Sargent, for example, remarked that "there is no Ayrian or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese as a class."

And California Assemblyman Frank McCoppin, while allowing that Chinese workers "fill the menial positions of our country well," contended they "are not as strong or as brave as the white laborer."

Isolated Chinese cultural enclaves also alarmed the 1870s lawmakers.

Sargent, in his 1877 summarizing report, noted unfavorably that Chinese immigrants "still retain their peculiar costume and follow their original national habits in food and mode of life; they have no social intercourse with white people," concluding that they "are non-assimilative with whites."

Fears that immigrants will fail to assimilate into American culture remain a concern with members of Congress today.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., for example, often rails against what he calls a "cult of multiculturalism" that threatens American unity.

In a 2003 floor speech, he noted that "previous generations of immigrants expected that their children would learn English," adding that "only in the recent past have we seen a political movement that seeks to perpetuate a parallel culture that does not speak English and thus cannot participate fully in the mainstream of American life."

But the main worry of the 1877 investigating committee, much like today, revolved around wages.

"My observation has been that the labor of the Chinese who are here now and coming here tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer," James Bassett, an editor at the Los Angeles Herald, testified before the committee.

Sargent said the willingness of Chinese laborers to work for 40 cents to $1 a day reduces wages "to what would be starvation prices for white men and women."

At the same time, much of the pro-Chinese testimony mirrors the rhetoric of today's immigration advocates who say illegal aliens do jobs "that Americans won't do."

The average Chinese immigrant, California lawyer F.A. Bee testified, "comes here as a laborer. He comes here for the purpose of bettering his condition. He comes here as a law-abiding citizen. Where is the white man who will go into that ditch and work? He is not here. You can not find him."

Gabaccia said she sees striking similarities between the rhetoric of 1877 and that of 2005.

"Nobody today says, `Oh, it's those Mexicans and they're racially inferior. You don't have that kind of explicit racialization.' "

But, she said, "the rhetoric about illegal immigration right now is extremely vicious. That's where many historians feel a resonance to the 1870s and 1880s."


Lisa Friedman can be reached by e-mail at lisa.friedmanor by calling (202) 662-8731.

Ah, how very enlightening.

A. People over 100 years ago were concerned about race and immigration + B. Restricted immigration ='s C. Americans in 2006 who are concerned about immigration are racists.

I'm so sick of these moonbats.

W

Now for the rest of the story:

There were no welfare programs in 1870, so why did they include that as a reason to cut immigration 130 years ago?

There is a lot of truth that Chinese then were less likely to assimilate than European immigrants. Go to San Francisco Chinatown, and you will find the descendents of these 1870 Chinese immigrants who STILL have not assimilated!

Legal Chinese immigrants today probably assimilate faster than the descendents of these 1870 Chinese immigrants!

While I don't agree they should have totally excluded Chinese in 1882, they were right to stop Chinese "coolies", just like we need to deport low skilled, uneducated illegal aliens today. There is no difference between the coolies of 1870 and most illegal aliens today. I just hope HR 4437 becomes law like the similar Chinese (coolie) Exclusion Act did in 1882.

Now for the rest of the story:

There were no welfare programs in 1870, so why did they include that as a reason to cut immigration 130 years ago?

There is a lot of truth that Chinese then were less likely to assimilate than European immigrants. Go to San Francisco Chinatown, and you will find the descendents of these 1870 Chinese immigrants who STILL have not assimilated!

Legal Chinese immigrants today probably assimilate faster than the descendents of these 1870 Chinese immigrants!

While I don't agree they should have totally excluded Chinese in 1880, they were right to stop Chinese "coolies", just like we need to deport low skilled, uneducated illegal aliens today. There is no difference between the coolies of 1870 and most illegal aliens today. I just hope HR 4437 becomes law like the similar Chinese (coolie) Exclusion Act of 1880.