Reposted by Nicholas Stix
Forgotten Victims—American Workers Immiserated by Chinese Immigration in Nineteenth Century California
By Kathy Knechtges
September 21, 2013 at 11:05pm
VDARE
Open Borders advocates would have us believe there were no victims during past periods of rampant immigration enthusiasm. But immigrants to America were hardly innocents eventually shut out by cruel xenophobes. And the American victims of mass immigration are forgotten--perhaps deliberately in order to justify the current dispossession of the historic American nation.
One particularly enlightening episode: the nineteenth-century Chinese influx into California. Capitalists in search of cheap labor imported thousands of unskilled Chinese for the transcontinental railroad and other projects. Their numbers swelled until by 1870 they constituted one third of the male population of the state. When the railroad was finished, unemployed Chinese competed with desperate Americans from the East for jobs….
Employers did not bring the Chinese to America out of charity. Many arrived in ships as packed and filthy as those used in the African slave trade. Indeed, labor historian Vernon Briggs reports that some of the exact same slave ships were used for both purposes.
[Read the whole thing here.]
Ships being slaves from Africa and coolie labor from China were noted for their overpowering stench.
ReplyDeleteAn amazing article. At one time, America actually had some wisdom, when it finally put a limit on foreign immigration when it started hurting this country.
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