Status Updates From Strangers from a Different ...

When corporate heads tell frustrated workers that foreign imports are taking their jobs, then they are acting like an agitator of a lynch mob.

To coordinate and administer its investigations, the government created the "Confession Program": Chinese residing in the United States illegally were encouraged to come forward and confess their guilt to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Confessors were required to give full disclosure of every relative and friend. A single confession could implicate scores of individuals. In return, the government would..

"It is difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by all of us," said another evacuee, "as we watched the Caucasians coming to look over our possessions and offering such nominal amounts knowing we had no recourse but to accept whatever they were offering because we did not know what the future held for us."

Even Rabindranath Tagore, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, [...] encountered bureaucratic problems when he applied to the American consul for entry, and [...] experienced racial prejudice in Los Angeles. Canceling his tour [...], Tagore commented caustically: "Jesus could not get into America because, first of all, He would not have the necessary money, and secondly, He would be an Asiatic."

In 1910, [...] Koreans, hired to pick oranges, camped on Mary Steward's farm in Upland, California. Suddenly, one night, they were attacked by white farm workers [.] Steward armed the Korean workers and instructed them to defend themselves against the white rioters. "The minority Korean people in this great country of America," Steward declared, "have a right to live and work just as the other nationalities.["]

I will not speak of love when I level the immigration station!

-Lai, Lim, Yung (eds.), Island

"The Chinese Exclusion Act was in actuality symptomatic of a larger conflict between white labor and white capital: removal of the Chinese was designed not only to defuse an issue agitating white workers but also to alleviate class tensions within white society." Now why does this all sound so familiar.

Capital used Chinese laborers as a transnational industrial reserve army to weigh down white workers during periods of economic expansion and to hold white labor in check during periods of overproduction. Labor was a major cost of production, and employers saw how the importation of Chinese workers could boost the supply of labor and drive down the wages of both Chinese and white workers. The resulting racial...