To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing
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communities, class distinctions, and social values. Although life was not without strife, my family was part of a larger community that respected our Chinese American identity and culture. We learned about and respected other cultures and languages. I learned values and approaches to life from people of all backgrounds, from my Catholic Mexican American playmates to my Jewish high school history teacher, from Navajo and German customers to the chief administrator of the local mine. In retrospect, the opportunity to hear different perspectives was clearly an advantage.
My life after high school—at U.C. Berkeley, in law school, in Chinatown, at the Buddhist church, as a legal services attorney, immigration lawyer, academic, participant in community activities, spouse, and parent—has reinforced the values I began to develop in Superior. How could I not be influenced by my African American college roommate from Texas, the jazz band we formed, People’s Park, or the all-Asian American fraternity I initially spurned but ultimately joined? Or my experience as the president of a fledgling Asian American law student group in law school? Or the Chinese immigrant children to whom I taught American folks songs at the Chinatown YWCA? Or my wife’s five-generation Chinese American family and its eleven-year struggle to build a Buddhist church? Or the diverse group of clients I’ve represented beginning at a legal aid office?2 Or the community activists I’ve met and worked with for over twenty-five years? My early life in Superior and all of these subsequent life experiences have created impressions—some would say biases—that lead to views about America and being an American that one might loosely call cultural pluralism. Since recognition of the potential biases created by one’s background is a necessary first step to wrestling with the challenge of a multiracial society, I continue to try to make sense of how that past affects my thinking today.
chapter 2 A Nation of Immigrants, a History of Nativism
“We are a nation of immigrants.” How many times do we hear this phrase? Most of us encounter it in positive terms beginning in elementary school. Take my daughter’s Fifth Grade social studies textbook America Will Be.1 Chapter 1 is entitled “A Nation of Many Peoples,” and the first paragraph contains this passage: “From the earliest time, America has been a land of many peoples. This rich mix of cultures has shaped every part of life in the United States today.” The authors continue, as a “pluralistic culture, life is exciting. People work, join together, struggle, learn, and grow.”
Today the phrase—“we are a nation of immigrants”—is invoked on both sides of the immigration debate. On one side we are told, “We are a nation of immigrants, immigrants are our strength, they invigorate our economy, they stimulate our culture, they add to our society.” On the other, “We are a nation of immigrants, but times have changed; they take away jobs, they are costly, the non-English speakers make life complicated, new immigrants don’t have our values.”
As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin opposed the influx of German immigrants, warning that “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of their learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.” A couple of years later, he expanded this thought:
[T]hose who came hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with great credulity, when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. … Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make modest use of it.
Responding to dramatic increases in German and Irish immigration in the first half of the 1800s, the Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis spoke out against further immigration and proposed a twenty-one-year residency requirement for naturalization. In his view,
[M]ost of those European immigrants, having been born and having lived in the ignorance and degradation of despotisms, without mental or moral culture, with but a vague consciousness of human rights, and no knowledge whatever of the principles of popular constitutional government, their interference in the political administration of our affairs, even when honestly intended, would be about as successful as that of the Indian in the arts and business of civilized private life. … The system inevitably and in the end will fatally depreciate, degrade, and demoralize the power which governs and rules our destinies.2
THE UNDESIRABLE ASIAN
These social and cultural exclusionist views were accompanied by economic concerns. For example, job and wage competition provided an early impetus for the anti-Chinese crusade of the mid-1800s. The Chinese worked for lower wages and seemed to make do with less; they were criticized for being thrifty—for spending little and saving most of their meager wages. At the Oregon constitutional convention in 1857, a proposal was made to exclude the Chinese because whites “could not compete” with Chinese working for $1.50 to $2.00 a day. The Chinese had frequently been politically exploited on labor issues. Mine owners threatened to let the Chinese take over the entire industry because white miners demanded $3 a day while Chinese workers asked only $1.50. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese workers were paid two-thirds the rate for white workers.3
The influence of economic nativism was quite apparent by 1870. Labor organizations—including plumbers, carpenters, and unemployed shoemakers—led a massive anti-Chinese demonstration in San Francisco that drew national attention. Labor groups held anti-Chinese rallies in Boston and New York as well.4
The hostile reception given the Chinese was of course due to race as well as to economic competition. Some parallels between the treatment of Chinese and African Americans can be drawn. For example, one of the earliest efforts to exclude the Chinese from California by state law was passed in the assembly as a companion to a measure barring entry to those of African descent. And certainly the major political parties stressed concepts of race superiority which excluded African Americans and by implication other people of color from the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. But in Congress’s 1870 deliberations over whether to liberalize the naturalization laws by extending them to all aliens irrespective of origin or color, the right to naturalize was extended to aliens of African descent and denied to Chinese because of their “undesirable qualities.”5
Republicans and Democrats alike tended toward nativism. In California, the antagonism between old stock and European immigrants subsided and coalesced. By 1876, both major political parties had adopted anti-Chinese planks in their national platforms, and the Workingman’s Party of California emerged as a leading force against Chinese immigration.6
An important element in the anti-Chinese crusade was doubt that they could successfully assimilate into American society. The assumption was that Chinese were infusible elements—an assumption that would trouble melting-pot assimilationists and certainly the more extreme supporters of Anglo-conformity. Until the coming of the Chinese, no immigrant group had differed sufficiently from the Anglo-American root stock to compromise basic social institutions such as Christian religion and ethics, monogamy, or natural rights theory. Social foundations were not negotiable to advocates of “Americanization.” The immigrant had to convert and shed foreign, heathen ways. The alternative was total exclusion of culturally distant groups. American opinion leaders may have had a real melting pot in mind prior to the arrival of the Chinese, albeit one which already excluded Native Americans and African Americans, but the idea of adding Chinese to the mix was not acceptable.
As immigrants, the Chinese posed the first serious threat to the melting pot concept. They were believed to be immutable, tenaciously clinging to old customs, and recalcitrantly opposing