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frightened them away with a gun, then married a Hollywood producer and bought a ranch.³

      Many sojourners succeeded beyond what would have been possible at home. But the vast majority, at least for a while, were confined by law and custom in menial jobs. When they were no longer needed, they were expected to go home voluntarily or be sent home. The coercion of their labor rested on their being socially stigmatized as racially and morally inferior and the imposition of political and legal restrictions.

      The linchpin in the system of sojourner pluralism for imported workers from Asia was the Naturalization Law dating back to 1790 that made them ineligible for citizenship. Mexican workers, who came in extraordinarily large numbers illegally, were vulnerable to employer control because so many were working without authorization.

       Keeping Asian Sojourners in Their Place

      From 1850 to 1934, employers in Hawaii and on the West Coast sought laborers successively from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. They preferred single males who would work hard, fast, and cheap at the most menial jobs. During the 1870 congressional debate on the law that provided for naturalization of persons of African descent, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts proposed an amendment to permit naturalization for other nonwhites as well. But senators from western states, determined to exclude Chinese from citizenship, led an overwhelming defeat of Sumner’s motion.⁴ The Chinese were, as the Democratic party platform of 1884 later said, “unfitted by habits, training, religion or kindred … for the citizenship which our laws confer.”⁵ The writers of the platform had insisted that “the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and sanctioned in the Constitution, … makes ours the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed of every Nation,” but the Chinese were seen, as nativists saw the Irish in the 1850s, as being incapable of becoming members of a self-governing republic.

      Something else beyond “habits, training, religion or kindred” kept the Chinese outsiders. That something else was race. Popular literature, political speeches, and government reports tended to stigmatize Chinese as immoral by nature. “Celestials,” “Mongolians,” “coolies,” and “chinks,” they were portrayed as racially habituated to filth, disease, and immorality, themes stressed in a half dozen popular magazines in the 1850s and 1860s.⁶ One California senator asked, “Can we stand all the vices, all the diseases, all the mischief that infect humanity the world over and retain our American civilization?”⁷ “It is my deliberate opinion,” said one popular writer, “that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth.”⁸ An 1865 New York Times editorial said, “We have four million of degraded negroes in the South … and if there were to be a flood-tide of Chinese population—a population befouled with all the social vices, with no knowledge or appreciation of free institutions or Constitutional liberty, with heathenish souls and heathenish propensities … we should be prepared to bid farewell to republicanism and democracy.”⁹

      A state senate investigator in California in 1876 reported that five or six Chinese were sleeping in spaces only six feet wide and six feet long in rooms at the Globe Hotel in San Francisco. One policeman, who reported seeing seventy-five in a room, also told of two hundred houses of prostitution and a great many gambling houses in a six-by-eight-block area.¹⁰ One San Franciscan gave testimony that he went into places “so filthy and dirty I cannot see how these people live there.” He concluded, “the houses would be unfit for the occupation of white people, for I do not see how it would be possible to cleanse them, unless you burn up the whole quarter, and even then, I doubt whether you can get rid of the filth.”¹¹

      What the report did not add was that the Chinese were often energetic, enterprising individuals, many of whom had opened stores in cities throughout the West and in Hawaii. Many sent home remittances to support their families. Crowded quarters often housed bachelors trying to create extended families of their own. They resorted to opium and prostitutes as white American men in similar circumstances used alcohol and prostitutes, as a relief from the misery of separation from their families.

      The racist stigmatizing of the Chinese, and of the Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and Mexicans, reinforced their exclusion from political rights and their maltreatment by the legal system. An older California law that prohibited blacks, mulattoes, or Indians from giving evidence for or against a white person was interpreted by the California Supreme Court in 1854 as applying to all nonwhites, including Chinese. After all, said the chief justice, if Chinese were permitted to testify, “we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.”¹²

      The ruling and others like it, in effect, sanctioned many brutal attacks against Chinese. When, in 1869, 350 members of the Miners Union at Gold Hill, Nevada, raided the living quarters of Chinese railroad workers, the county sheriff made no effort to stop them.¹³ Another sheriff told white men around a mill camp that they were free to take the law into their own hands if they suspected any Chinese men of robbery, and they did. They hanged two to a derrick until nearly dead and, unable to obtain their confessions, drove them out of the area.¹⁴ On Thanksgiving Day in 1877 in San Francisco, seven thousand white marchers, many carrying American flags, paraded against Chinese labor. A popular poster held aloft showed a large boot in close proximity to a flying Chinaman.¹⁵ In 1886, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a night attack by 150 armed white men plundered and burned the homes of Chinese strikebreakers and killed twenty-eight.¹⁶ Chinese workers were driven from Tacoma and Seattle and from the San Joaquin Valley in California, where they were taken to the railroad station and loaded onto departing trains.¹⁷

      Eastern and southern European immigrants also were frequently harassed, and there were instances of violence, and even murder, against them, the most notable the lynching of Italian prisoners in New Orleans in 1890. But the law generally was on the side of the Europeans, and in the New Orleans case the U.S. government paid indemnities to families of the murdered prisoners.¹⁸ Chinese were often intimidated by U.S. marshals, who would surround a community, herd them together, and demand that they produce their registration certificates. Later, Japanese and Filipinos in Hawaii were systematically intimidated by the police and courts when they struck for better wages and working conditions.¹⁹

      The contrast between the treatment of Chinese sojourners as outsiders and European immigrants as potential citizens was stark. At the same time that police authorities and immigration inspectors chased the Chinese in the West, German and Scandinavian aliens in Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Nebraska were being urged to vote (seven states had laws permitting alien suffrage up to the outbreak of the First World War). At the very time the California constitution of 1878–1879 stipulated that “no alien ineligible to become a citizen of the United States shall ever be employed on any state, county, municipal or other public work in this state,”²⁰ more than fifty Irish Catholics served on the Boston police force; and, in five years, the immigrant Hugh O’Brien would be elected to the first of five terms as mayor. Keeping the Asians from citizenship and from voting also kept them from owning land or obtaining licenses. In Hawaii, where the plantation oligarchy nourished a tradition of noblesse oblige and where laws were less restrictive than in California, the head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association said in 1910 that “up to the present time the Asiatic has had only an economic value…. So far as the institutions, laws, customs, and language of the permanent population go, his presence is no more felt than is that of the cattle on the ranges.”²¹

      More than 322,000 Cantonese-speaking male peasants arrived in the U.S. between 1850 and 1882 to work on American railroads, in mines, on plantations, at logging camps, in vineyards, orchards, and ranches. By the late 1870s, it was clear that tens of thousands of them would neither return home nor be confined to servile labor. In 1882, when nearly forty thousand Chinese nationals arrived and only ten thousand went home, Congress decided to oblige employers to look elsewhere for muscle by passing the first law to exclude Chinese laborers. (In no other year in the nineteenth century would there be a net immigration of Chinese.)

      Not long after the exclusion of Chinese laborers in 1882, employers sought temporary alien workers among the Japanese, who, like the Chinese in Hawaii, worked on sugar and pineapple plantations

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