Immigration--specifically Chinese into and out of US

[unmerged(6473)]

How will Victoria treat the Chinese immigration into and out of the US?

The Americans brought in very many Chinese to do their work in the railroad construction period, but when the railroads were finished, then the Americans forced the Chinese to leave.

I understand that the game will handle immigration more or less automatically, but how exactly will the diplomatic model reflect this massive reverse immigration of the Chinese?

 

[unmerged(1047)]

Having studied California history quite extensively, there's two things I should point out about the Chinese immigration....

First, many Chinese came to America for economic opportunities not available in their homeland, and never intended to stay permanently. Toward the end of the period, some of them were 'seasonal' workers and returned to China during their off-seasons (places like salmon canneries and such). Even the railroads recognized this; any Chinese who perished were preserved and shipped back to China for burial.

Second, a lot of the jobs that the Chinese had occupied no longer existed at the end of the period. The railroads were generally built by 1900, and machines had started to replace them in other traditional employments such as fish-canning and clothes-washing. (Yes, all those westerns and their Chinese laundrymen are accurate.) Other sorts of immigrant laborers - Japanese, Mexican, and folks from the Phillipines - had taken over other traditionally Chinese industries as the local offshore fishing and produce-farming concerns in Southern California. By the 1920s, the Japanese themselves began to fade, as new immigration policies went into effect; however, portions of both the Chinese and Japanese groups STAYED. They were generally not well treated (evidence WWII and the 'Removal Orders') but were an integral part of the economy. The offshore fishing industry never did recover, and peroduce-farming was mainly taken over at that point by displaced farmers from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, which were experiencing a severe drought.

 

[Demetrios]

Quite a few of the Chinese were allowed to stay EB. There are many Chinese families today who trace their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in the 1870s-90s. I've also just recently read a book on the history of the Chinese in America, and the Chapters in the early 1900s certainly weren't blank. There were certainly still many Chinese here, although immigration numbers were drastically reduced and the naturalization procedures were made much more strict after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, but even then, the numbers didin't drop to 0 (in fact the numbers dropped below 1000 only for a few years). Now, I'm not saying that all were allowed to stay, but certainly there wasn't a total reverse-immigration like you are implying...

 

[unmerged(1047)]

There was never a legal, organized move to try to get the Chinese out - there were, however, some instances of race riots, which induced some of the Chinese (who, for the most part, had always planned to do so anyway) to return to China, and new immigration policies were in place preventing the entry (or re-entry) of Chinese. The result was a falling Chinese population, as many did leave and there was none coming in. The remaining Chinese population actually became *stronger* over time, because those that stayed were in a position to help when the immigration was re-opened, and in fact there was a lot of interplay with China. There was even a Chinese civilian military academy in California which sent trained soldiers to fight in the civil war in China in the 1930s. (I don't have the book close at hand, but there was a firsthand account by the author of Island on the Land, which is a history of Southern California mainly focusing on the 1920's-40's, of Sun Yat-Sen visiting these cadets in Los Angeles; the author was, at the time, an employee of the L.A. Times).

However, they were never forced out by law, and never completely vanished. The Japanese did disappear for a short time (at least in terms of the American West Coast; they were deported to camps in the interior during WWII, supposedly to prevent espionage), but they returned as soon as they were allowed.

 

[crazy canuck]

The same is generally true of the Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Canada. There were no forced deportations after the railway was built in Canada but policies - such as a head tax - were put into place to create a disincentive for further immigrants to come.

There is also an interesting theory that the criminalization of opiates in Canada had to do with an attempt to vilify the large Chinese community on Canadian west coast in order to justifiy the harsh treatment of the Chinese immigrants.

 

[unmerged(1047)]

Just doing some research here... there were anti-Chinese race riots in 1871 in Los Angeles (20 killed) and 1877 in San Francisco (in that one most of Chinatown was burned down, and the state militia had to be called out to end it).

The first legal move was a clause in the 1879 state constitution (which is otherwise a very much improved document over its predecssor, speaking as a SoCal kid) which forbade corporations and the state government from employing Chinese workers, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as contradictory with either the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1870, or treaties with China.

There was also an 1880 US-China treaty which gave the US the legal right to make unilateral decisions on immigration from China; this was followed by an 1882 law which banned new immigrants and prevented those already in the US from becoming citizens. This law was in effect until WWII, and in 1888 was amended to also forbid the re-entry of resident Chinese who left the country. However, those Chinese already in the US prior to 1882 were not legally forced out.

(Source : Chapter 15, Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Second Edition, c.1988,1996 )