At America's Gates

At America's Gates PDF Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807863138
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

At America's Gates

At America's Gates PDF Author: Erika Lee
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807863138
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 PDF Author: Najia Aarim-Heriot
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252027758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The first detailed examination of the link between the Chinese question and the Negro problem in nineteenth-century America, this work forcefully and convincingly demonstrates that the anti-Chinese sentiment that led up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is inseparable from the racial double standards applied by mainstream white society toward white and nonwhite groups during the same period. Najia Aarim-Heriot argues that previous studies on American Sinophobia have overemphasized the resentment labor organizations felt toward incoming Chinese workers. This focus has caused crucial elements of the discussion to be overlooked, especially the broader ways in which the growing nation sought to define and unify itself through the exclusion and oppression of nonwhite peoples. This book highlights striking similarities in the ways the Chinese and African American populations were disenfranchised during the mid-1800s, including nearly identical negative stereotypes, shrill rhetoric, and crippling exclusionary laws. traditionally studied, this book stands as a holistic examination of the causes and effects of American Sinophobia and the racialization of national immigration policies.

Chinese Immigrants in America

Chinese Immigrants in America PDF Author: Kelley Hunsicker
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1429613556
Category : Chinese Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
It's 1850, and you are fleeing war and starvation in your homeland of China. You sell everything you have to go to a place in America called Gold Mountain, better known as California. Do you try to strike it rich in the gold mines of California? or ..., Will you seek your fortune in San Francisco's Chinatown? or ..., Will you work as a laborer on the Transcontinental Railroad?

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 PDF Author: Robert Chao Romero
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816508194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
An estimated 60,000 Chinese entered Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constituting Mexico's second-largest foreign ethnic community at the time. The Chinese in Mexico provides a social history of Chinese immigration to and settlement in Mexico in the context of the global Chinese diaspora of the era. Robert Romero argues that Chinese immigrants turned to Mexico as a new land of economic opportunity after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As a consequence of this legislation, Romero claims, Chinese immigrants journeyed to Mexico in order to gain illicit entry into the United States and in search of employment opportunities within Mexico's developing economy. Romero details the development, after 1882, of the "Chinese transnational commercial orbit," a network encompassing China, Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean, shaped and traveled by entrepreneurial Chinese pursuing commercial opportunities in human smuggling, labor contracting, wholesale merchandising, and small-scale trade. Romero's study is based on a wide array of Mexican and U.S. archival sources. It draws from such quantitative and qualitative sources as oral histories, census records, consular reports, INS interviews, and legal documents. Two sources, used for the first time in this kind of study, provide a comprehensive sociological and historical window into the lives of Chinese immigrants in Mexico during these years: the Chinese Exclusion Act case files of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the 1930 Mexican municipal census manuscripts. From these documents, Romero crafts a vividly personal and compelling story of individual lives caught in an extensive network of early transnationalism.

New Chinese Immigrants in New Zealand

New Chinese Immigrants in New Zealand PDF Author: Liangni Sally Liu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000474550
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This book focuses on new immigrant families from the People’s Republic of China to New Zealand and investigates how these families have adapted to New Zealand immigration policy regime, which does not accommodate their cultural preference to live as multigenerational families easily. The book analyses a three-generation framework: First-generation adult immigrants, their children and older parents. It examines how migratory mobility and intergenerational dynamics configure migratory trajectories of individual family members and shape their family lives and sense of identity. The book sheds light on how different family generations pursue their own interests and goals while maintaining family unity and cohesiveness in contexts of increasing transnational mobility opportunities and constraints. It also investigates how familial ties, transnational connections and a sense of identity and belonging are defined and redefined during the process of transnational migration. This book can serve as a heuristic reference to and meaningful comparative parameter for studying transnational family migration in other contexts. As a significant theoretical contribution to the theory of transnational family formation in contexts where restrictive immigration policies result in members of multigenerational families living across different countries, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, anthropology, race and ethnic studies as well as Asian and Chinese studies.

How Chinese Immigrants Made America Home

How Chinese Immigrants Made America Home PDF Author: Georgina W.S. Lu
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 1508181195
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Chinese immigrants first reached the shores of California in the mid 1800s. Since then, they have made significant contributions to the American economy through their work in mines, on railroads, and on farms as they earned money to send home. However, many saw them as job-stealing freeloaders. They contributed to American culture too, even as discrimination forced them to build their own communities from the ground up. The Chinese American community had no choice but to take on these stereotypes in order to survive. Written by a Chinese immigrant, readers will discover that even the xenophobia that exists today can be defeated and one's culture celebrated in the United States.

Laws Harsh As Tigers

Laws Harsh As Tigers PDF Author: Lucy E. Salyer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807864319
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Focusing primarily on the exclusion of the Chinese, Lucy Salyer analyzes the popular and legal debates surrounding immigration law and its enforcement during the height of nativist sentiment in the early twentieth century. She argues that the struggles between Chinese immigrants, U.S. government officials, and the lower federal courts that took place around the turn of the century established fundamental principles that continue to dominate immigration law today and make it unique among branches of American law. By establishing the centrality of the Chinese to immigration policy, Salyer also integrates the history of Asian immigrants on the West Coast with that of European immigrants in the East. Salyer demonstrates that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans mounted sophisticated and often-successful legal challenges to the enforcement of exclusionary immigration policies. Ironically, their persistent litigation contributed to the development of legal doctrines that gave the Bureau of Immigration increasing power to counteract resistance. Indeed, by 1924, immigration law had begun to diverge from constitutional norms, and the Bureau of Immigration had emerged as an exceptionally powerful organization, free from many of the constraints imposed upon other government agencies.

Contemporary Chinese America

Contemporary Chinese America PDF Author: Min Zhou
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592138594
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A sociologist of international migration examines the Chinese American experience.

Island

Island PDF Author: H. Mark Lai
Publisher: San Francisco Study Center
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description


Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship

Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship PDF Author: Bernard P. Wong
Publisher: Pearson
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
A massive wave of immigration is currently sweeping across the US How do new immigrants assimilate, specifically the Chinese in San Francisco? KEY TOPICS: Taking an "actor-oriented" approach which portrays the new Chinese immigrants as problem-solvers and decision makers who shape their own destinies, this book focuses on how the new Chinese immigrants use their ethnic and personal resources to make economic adaptations in the US. Sociologists and anthropologists. Part of the New Immigrants Series.