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CHAPTER 3 AMERICA'S GREAT WALL ACCORDING to legend, the United States of America is a "meltingpot " ofthe peoples ofthe world. The fact is, however, that the ingredients which have gone into the pot have been carefully screened for whiteness. The Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French people, stands in New York Harbour and "lifts her lamp beside the golden door", but her inscribed invitation to the world to "send your tempest-tossed to me" has been amended by American immigration laws to be mostly valid for whites. The roots of U.S. immigration policy reach back to colonial days and beyond. To an appreciable extent, the American policy is a lineal descendant of the original doctrine of white supremacy fabricated by the European powers when they first took up the "white man's burden". When the British finally won out over their French and Spanish competitors for the privilege ofexploiting North America, it was but natural that the setders they dispatched to do the job were preconditioned to look with disdain upon the American Indian and coloured peoples generally. As we have seen, when the red man refused to work for the white man, the latter imported the black man, thinking he could pen him up as an item of livestock. Then came the Civil War, releasing the Negro from the corral, whereupon the white man promptly penned him up again behind the barbed wire ofsegregation. Still, the country was young and there was much dirty work to be done. But far from thinking in terms of inviting Mricans to enter America as free men, prodigious official and private efforts were made to ship the Negro freedmen in America back to Mrica. The slavery question having cost America so much blood and suffering, there was much sentiment in the land against any further influx ofcoloured persons. At the same time, employer interests were in the market for the cheapest possible labour. White foreign labour of certain nationalities was cheap enough, but coloured labour was even 38 JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A. cheaper. In this conBict between popular and employer sentiment, the employers had their way until they felt they had enough. A vast railroad-building boom, coupled with the California "Gold Rush" of 1849, gave impetus to the importation of Chinese "coolie" labour even before the Civil War made an end of Negro slavery in 1865. Abolition of Negro slavery by Great Britain in 1833 and the West Indies in 1838 had set this so-called "pig traffic" in motion. Although there were tremendous economic pressures inside China, 80 per cent of the migrants had to be kidnapped or decoyed into the barracoons .to be transported to distant shores, where contracts for their labour were sold in much the same manner as Negro slaves had been sold earlier. For a time many white Southern planters gave serious consideration to replacing Negro slave labour with Chinese coolie labour. A convention of planters met at Memphis in 1869 and sent delegations to China to investigate this possibility. In California, meanwhile, trends were developing which were destined to shape the course of the entire nation. As the supply of white labour in the state increased, and the mining and railroad booms subsided, sentiment developed fOI the exclusion of any further immigration from Asia and the Pacific. For 16 years, beginning in 1860, California sought to accomplish this by a series ofso-called "Hottentot Laws" (which Federal courts eventually declared unconstitutional). Approximately a third ofCalifornia's pioneer settlers had been white Southern planters, who had brought their Negro slaves and racial prejudices with them. Indians, Mexicans, Hawaiians, Chileans, Chinese, andJapanese-all were successively utilized and discriminated against by these planters. In no time, California succeeded in selling the rest of America the notion that "Chinks" were all "moon-faced lepers" who constituted a grave "Yellow Peril". And so, when Congress adopted the Naturalization Act of 1870 as a corollaryoftheThirteenthAmendmentabolishing Negro slavery,it not only made possible the naturalization (in negligible numbers) of"aliens of African nativity and persons of Mrican descent", but at the same time, at the insistence of California, limited other groups eligible (or naturalization to "free white persons". Interestingly, many Congressmen who voted for Negro suffrage also voted for Oriental exclusion, despite the fact that the arguments advanced by California (or the latter were identical with those employed by white Southern opponents of Negro enfranchisement. [18.221.208.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01...

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