My painting, “Coming to America,” depicts the worst prejudice and discrimination policies and practices in our nation’s history of immigration and expansion. Today, the nation’s focus is on brown people, but a century ago, our nation’s ire was directed at those of oriental descent.
THE YELLOW PERIL
Historians estimate that at any one time as many as 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese worked to construct the transcontinental rail road. Because records were poorly kept, that figure could be as high as 20,000.
“While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labor, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of this “yellow peril”. Despite the provisions for equal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, political and labor organizations rallied against the immigration of what they regarded as a degraded race and “cheap Chinese labor”.
Newspapers condemned the policies of employers, and even church leaders denounced the entrance of these aliens into what was regarded as a land for whites only. So hostile was the opposition that in 1882 the United States Congress eventually passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration from China for the next ten years. This law was then extended by the Geary Act in 1892. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race.
These laws not only prevented new immigration but also brought additional suffering as they prevented the reunion of the families of thousands of Chinese men already living in the United States (that is, men who had left China without their wives and children); anti-miscegenation laws in many Western states prohibited the Chinese men from marrying white women.
In 1924 the law barred further entries of Chinese; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. Also, by 1924, all Asian immigrants (except people from the Philippines, which had been annexed by the United States in 1898) were utterly excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from owning land. In many Western states, Asian immigrants are even prevented from marrying Caucasians.” –Wikipedia, History of Chinese Americans
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