News Article:

The History of Chinese Immigration to the United States

by Jou Lan Debbie Kuo

Immigration to the United States from China began primarily in the middle of the 19th century. The first Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States in 1847. Three Chinese students arrived in New York City for schooling. One of them graduated from Yale in 1854 and was the first Chinese to graduate from a U.S. college. The next year, 1848, silk merchants came and the first true immigrants, two men and a woman.

The Chinese came to America for the same reasons as the Europeans. There were years of famine and poverty in China, so Chinese came to the U.S. to work and send money home. Most of the Chinese who came to America were poor male villagers. They left their wives and children expecting to make enough money to return to China.

Most of the Chinese immigrants worked in the West. By 1851, twenty-five thousand Chinese came to California to look for gold, and to work on the Central Pacific Railroad. By 1880, 25% of California’s workers were Chinese.

The Chinese were welcome in California in the mid 1800’s because there was a lot of work and not enough workers, but Chinese people had to live separately from Americans. When the economic conditions got worse, discrimination against the Chinese increased.

In 1862 the U.S. Congress passed a law forbidding American ships to transport Chinese immigrants to America. Twenty years later, because of fear and ignorance, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

The law serves as the first in U.S. history to ban a specific racial group from entering America. Only diplomats, merchants, and students were allowed access into the country and Chinese Americans were denied the right to apply for naturalization. To enforce the law, the Angel Island Inspection Station was built in San Francisco in 1910.

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