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Although the Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century faced many hardships, they had a profound effect on America. Primarily, the Chinese supplied the labor for America's growing industry. Chinese factory workers were important in California especially during the Civil War. They worked in wool mills, and cigar, shoe, and garment industries; twenty-five occupations in all. Chinese entrepreneurs started their own factories, competing with the white people. The Chinese provided a quarter of California's labor force.
Chinese labor was also sought elsewhere in America, on the east coast and in the south to substitute for the now freed slaves.
Chinese labor was sought after mainly because they supplied cheap labor. The worldwide effort to abolish slavery was aided by the Chinese cheap labor. The Chinese were also the first to stake claims in California gold fields prompting many to relocate to the west. With the gold rush, the Chinese were prompted to exploit other western state resources, providing products of use to the American society. If you were a Lee, you pretty much knew all the other Lee families.
My great-grandfather was running a grocery store on Pell Street with my grandfather — open 7 days a week, a lot of men from the community would drop by to get their mail.
Growing up in that environment, you get a first-hand experience about what the community was like before U. My grandfather, eventually, was able to petition for his wife. They were able to reunite after 60 years. Making Best of the Situation My mother grew up in a fairly affluent family. Her father, my maternal grandfather, actually came to the U.
He had eight children — all the sons went to engineering school and all the daughters went to medical school. So my mother was a medical school graduate when she came to the United States. My mother ended up working at a garment factory as a stitcher. A Life of Public Service My life history has been about working with refugees, immigrants, minorities. After law school, I became an asylum attorney. I spent 10 years representing refugees from all over the world. After two years, I became the director of the State Office of Refugees and Immigrants and then went to Washington to become the deputy director for the U.
Office of Refugee Settlement. Department of Health and Human Services to help manage the first national initiative to eliminate health disparities. All of my work has always been about advancing social justice for marginalized populations. My apartment faced Victoria Harbor. When I was young, I would always look out the window at the harbor.
Going to college and studying abroad was a dream for me. Education was never a priority in my family. I was the oldest of two sisters and one brother.
Journal of Diabetes and Its Complications. So my mother was a medical school graduate when she came to the United States. Notify me of new comments via email. Therefore many of the non-Chinese workers in the United States came to resent the Chinese laborers, who might squeeze them out of their jobs. President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the boycott as a direct response to unfair American treatment of Chinese immigrants, but with American prestige at stake, he called for the Chinese government to suppress it. The Chinese quickly tried to flee but in doing so, many ended up burned alive in their homes, starved to death in hidden refuge, or exposed to animal predators of the mountains; some were successfully rescued by the passing train. Our mission is to provide high quality and affordable health care to the undeserved, with a focus on Asian Americans.
Being the oldest and a girl, my parents expected me to go to work and bring home money after graduating from high school but I insisted on going to college. When I was in high school, a social worker came and helped my family a lot. I found her work to be meaningful and realized it was something I could do to help others.
So at that point, I was determined to become a social worker. Hard Choices I went to social work school in Hong Kong. I was very lucky that my college collaborated with a university in America and was allowed to pursue an MSW program. I had a lot of difficulties convincing my parents that I wanted to pursue higher education. They would ask me: What about your brothers and sisters? Who will support them? So I decided to leave my family behind for higher education and to study abroad.
It was a culture shock when I moved to America, and I knew only a few classmates. I learned English in Hong Kong but never practiced. In order to improve my language skills, I blocked myself from all Chinese media and practiced by spending a lot of time listening and reading English media and materials and communicating with non-Chinese-speaking friends. Living alone in America with limited language skills and resources was hard, but I had made my choice.
American objections to Chinese immigration took many forms, and generally stemmed from economic and cultural tensions, as well as ethnic discrimination. Most Chinese laborers who came to the United States did so in order to send money back to China to support their families there.
At the same time, they also had to repay loans to the Chinese merchants who paid their passage to America. These financial pressures left them little choice but to work for whatever wages they could.
Although the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents are Latin American, recent immigrants are most likely to arrive from Asia. History of illegal immigration of Chinese to the United States go s following policy changes by the American government, but.
Non-Chinese laborers often required much higher wages to support their wives and children in the United States, and also generally had a stronger political standing to bargain for higher wages. Therefore many of the non-Chinese workers in the United States came to resent the Chinese laborers, who might squeeze them out of their jobs. Furthermore, as with most immigrant communities, many Chinese settled in their own neighborhoods, and tales spread of Chinatowns as places where large numbers of Chinese men congregated to visit prostitutes, smoke opium, or gamble.
Some advocates of anti-Chinese legislation therefore argued that admitting Chinese into the United States lowered the cultural and moral standards of American society. Others used a more overtly racist argument for limiting immigration from East Asia, and expressed concern about the integrity of American racial composition. To address these rising social tensions, from the s through the s the California state government passed a series of measures aimed at Chinese residents, ranging from requiring special licenses for Chinese businesses or workers to preventing naturalization.
Because anti-Chinese discrimination and efforts to stop Chinese immigration violated the Burlingame-Seward Treaty with China, the federal government was able to negate much of this legislation.
In , advocates of immigration restriction succeeded in introducing and passing legislation in Congress to limit the number of Chinese arriving to fifteen per ship or vessel. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed the bill because it violated U.