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HISTORY’S LESSONS ON ANTI-IMMIGRANT EXTREMISM  
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Michael Luo
January 5, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and
without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a
movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate
in the United States. _

, Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; Source photographs from Interim
Archives / Chinese Exclusion Act from National Archives

 

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the
anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he
takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up
through Mexico and other places
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even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of
high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B
visas consumed _maga_ world over the holidays.) The scale of what
Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent
precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a
different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of
hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the “social, moral, and
political effect” of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well
over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state. Government
officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they
represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a
“criminal element”; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as
one witness put it, “more like hogs than human beings”); they were
vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a
years-long economic depression settled over the country and San
Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the
witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs
away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white
laborers must either “starve to death, or they must fall to the
level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the
country.”

More than ten thousand people in California and Nevada joined local
“camps” of the Order of Caucasians, an organization that aimed to
“protect the white man and white civilization.” In July, 1877, a
rally in San Francisco erupted into days of rioting as mobs rampaged
through the Chinese quarter and vandalized Chinese-owned businesses,
mostly laundries, across the city. Several weeks later, the state
senators sent an urgent message to Congress, warning that white
residents up and down the West Coast were beginning to feel a
“profound sense of dissatisfaction with the situation” and there
would come a day “when patience may cease.”

A treaty between the U.S. and China guaranteed the free flow of people
between the two countries, making politicians in Washington reluctant
to impose restrictions. But, then as now, the nation was evenly
divided politically, and the Western states were a strategic prize for
both Republicans and Democrats. Winning them, it seemed clear, rested
on resolving the Chinese question. As a result, in 1882, the
U.S.—for the first time in its history—closed its gates to a
people because of their race, when Congress passed a bill barring
Chinese laborers from entering the country. (The legislation later
became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.) Immigrants still found
ways in, though, so Congress passed progressively more onerous laws.
Restive residents of dozens of communities across the West also banded
together to drive out their Chinese neighbors.

Yet the Chinese were not passive victims: in 1892, after a new law
required them to obtain a certificate of residence that established
their right to be in the country, leaders of the community organized a
campaign of resistance. Anti-Chinese leaders, in turn, vowed mass
deportations, only for the effort to founder when it became clear that
the measure would be exorbitantly expensive. The Chinese community
managed to persist, but it existed in a kind of permanent stress
position until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law an
overhaul of the immigration system.

Today, economic anxieties are again fuelling overtly racist, populist
appeals from politicians. A nimbus of outrage among working-class
voters has propelled the _MAGA_ movement, much like the rage that
drove the anti-Chinese movement. Even Trump’s recent assertion that
he would use executive action to abolish birthright
citizenship—scholars dispute whether this would be lawful––has a
historical link to the Chinese American experience. In 1898, thirty
years after the Fourteenth Amendment established the principle as a
way of safeguarding the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans,
the Supreme Court upheld it in a landmark case brought by a
native-born Chinese American, Wong Kim Ark.

One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the
immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in
direct competition with white workers. In an economic study published
in 1963, the historian Ping Chiu found that in California the two
groups were mostly stratified into different labor pools, with the
Chinese concentrated in lower-wage jobs in agriculture and industries
such as textile and cigar manufacturing. It was competition from more
technologically advanced and efficient factories in the East, along
with the broader shift to mass production, that were the biggest
factors in the economic travails buffeting white workers in
California.

Other scholarship has similarly suggested that excluding Chinese labor
failed to lift the fortunes of white workers. This past fall, a group
of economists released a working paper
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Exclusion Act on Western states. They found that it took a significant
toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada,
Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese
populations––until at least 1940. The economists also found “no
evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure
of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese
immigrants in the workforce, including the economies of scale achieved
by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that
emerged from their absence. The findings are hardly surprising.
A recent study
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the Brookings Institution asserts that a surge in immigration helps to
explain the strength of the U.S. economy since 2022, benefitting
employers who need workers and contributing to consumer spending.

In the nineteenth century, the Chinese had few public defenders. John
C. Weatherred, a bank executive in Tacoma, Washington, wrote in his
diary on October 1, 1885, a month before the Chinese were driven out
of his town, that there were a “great many fools on the anti-Chinese
subject” and that he felt like “taking up for the underdog in the
fight.” He praised “the Chinaman” for his “industry, economy &
sobriety.” But Weatherred and other sympathizers mostly kept their
feelings to themselves. As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares
for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost
of silence. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 13, 2025
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headline “Excluded.”

MICHAEL LUO is an executive editor at _The New Yorker_ and writes
regularly on politics, media, and religion. His first book,
“Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of
the Chinese in America
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will be published in April, 2025. He joined _The New Yorker_ in 2016
as an investigations editor. Before that, he spent thirteen years at
the New York _Times_, where he led a team of investigative reporters
and was also an editor on the newspaper’s race team. In the course
of three years at the _Times_, his reporters were finalists for the
Pulitzer Prize four times.

Prior to becoming an editor, he was a reporter on
the _Times’_ investigations desk. He also wrote about economics
and the recession as a national correspondent; covered the 2008 and
2012 Presidential campaigns, as well as the 2010 midterm elections;
and did stints in the _Times’_ Washington and Baghdad bureaus.

Before he joined the _Times_, in 2003, he was a national writer at
the Associated Press. He has also worked at _Newsday_ and the Los
Angeles _Times_. In 2003, he was a recipient of a George Polk Award
for criminal-justice reporting and a Livingston Award for Young
Journalists.

Luo graduated from Harvard University, where he earned a degree in
government, in 1998.

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