Chinese immigration to the United States

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Chinese immigration to the United States has come in many waves. Like all the American immigration experiences, the Chinese immigration has seen both hardship and success. This experience has added richness to the American experience and is a triumphant story of the pursuit of the American Dream.

1800 to 1950

The first Chinese arrived in the United States around 1820. Subsequent immigrants that came from the 1820s up to the late 1840s were mainly men, who came in small numbers. However, due to the lack of Chinese women in the United States at that time, many of them intermarried with Americans of European descent.

The major initial wave started around the 1850s. This was when the West Coast of North America was being rapidly colonized during the California Gold Rush, while southern China suffered from severe political and economic instability due to the weakness of the Qing Dynasty government, internal rebellions such as the Taiping Rebellion, and external pressures such as the Opium Wars.

As a result, many Chinese emigrated from the poor Toisanese- and Cantonese-speaking area in Guangdong province to the United States in order to work on the railroads. They used to endure such poor living conditions in their homeland that many were willing to sign up for prepaid long-term labor contracts to work in the U.S. Many gave the sum of money to their family and did not expect to be able to return home alive. The Chinese immigrants clustered in Chinatowns, the largest population was in San Francisco. Some estimated over half of these early immigrants were from Taishan. This immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868) was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which made Chinese immigration illegal until 1943. Official discrimination extended to the highest levels of the U.S. government: in 1888, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, proclaimed the Chinese "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."

Many Western states also enacted discriminatory laws which made it difficult for Chinese and Japanese immigrants to own land or even find work. These laws were not overturned until the 1950s, at the dawn of the modern American civil rights movement.

1950 to present

With the loosening of American immigration laws in 1952 and 1965, a second wave of Chinese immigration began. There was an increase in immigration of professionals from Mainland China, which began to allow for emigration in 1977. This group of Chinese tended to cluster in suburban areas and to avoid urban Chinatowns and speak fluent Mandarin in addition to their native dialects.

A third wave of recent immigrants consisted of undocumented aliens, chiefly from Fujian province who came to the United States in search of lower-status manual jobs. These aliens tend to concentrate in urban areas such as New York City and there is often very little contact between these Chinese and higher-educated professionals. While most speak some Mandarin, they mostly use Min, which, although somewhat close but not mutually intelligible to Taiwanese or Min Nan, does not generally produce much affinity with Taiwanese Americans. The amount of immigration from this group has begun to decrease as the economic situation in Fujian improves. Typically, an immigrant from Fujian will pay a snakehead several tens of thousands of dollars to be transported to the United States, as well as room and board. The funds for the trip are provided by the immigrant's family and village. The immigrant will usually work for three years, the first two to pay off the debt and the third as profit.

Ethnic Chinese immigration to the United States since 1965 has been aided by the fact that the United States maintains separate quotas for Mainland China and Hong Kong. Absent from the list of Chinese Americans are immigrants from Hong Kong, who because of immigration law, tended to immigrate to Canada.

In the 1980s, there was widespread concern by the PRC over a brain drain as graduate students were not returning to the PRC. This exodus worsened after the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

Many immigrants from the PRC benefited from the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 which granted permanent residency status to immigrants from the PRC. One unintended side effect of the law was that the primary beneficiaries of the law were undocumented Fujianese immigrants, who unlike the Chinese graduate students, would have had no chance to gain permanent residency through normal means.

Chinese immigration to the United States

1800 to 1950

1950 to present

See also