July 23, 1877

[Omaha Steve]

http://nhlabornews.com/2015/07/july-23-1877/




Anti-Chinese nativist agitators at a huge outdoor rally in San Francisco about the economic depression and unemployment organized by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States incite a two-day riot of ethnic violence against Chinese workers, resulting in four deaths and the destruction of property. Five years later, President Chester Arthur signed the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting immigration of Chinese laborers.

About Today In Labor History
The NHLN has joined with multiple other websites to help highlight some of the struggles that workers have faced throughout our history. We want everyone to know what the workers of the past had to endure for the rights we take for granted now. If you do not learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it.

[pampango]

1. "the first law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States.

It was finally repealed by the Magnuson Act on December 17, 1943." - under FDR.

One of the critics of the Chinese Exclusion Act was the anti-slavery/anti-imperialist Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts who described the Act as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination."[15]

The laws were driven largely by racial concerns; immigration of persons of other races was unlimited during this period.

On the other hand, many people strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, including the Knights of Labor, a labor union, who supported it because it believed that industrialists were using Chinese workers as a wedge to keep wages low. Among labor and leftist organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World were the sole exception to this pattern. The IWW openly opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act from its inception in 1905.

The Chinese Exclusion Act did not address the problems that whites were facing; in fact, the Chinese were quickly and eagerly replaced by the Japanese, who assumed the role of the Chinese in society. Unlike the Chinese, some Japanese were even able to climb the rungs of society by setting up businesses or becoming truck farmers. However, the Japanese were later targeted in the National Origins Act of 1924, which banned immigration from east Asia entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

We certainly need to learn from the struggles that the workers of the past had to endure. We also need to learn from their mistakes so that we can adopt their commitment and willingness to struggle in a nondiscriminatory and inclusive way.