Alien Land Laws

Critical Thinking Assignment: Alien Land Laws to Glass Ceiling In what ways does discrimination against Asians parallel anti-semitism? In what ways is this form of discrimination similar to, yet different from, discrimination against American Indians and Mexican-Americans? What structural factors explain the similarities and differences? To answer these questions, use the lecture notes, the textbook, and the excerpts below. Alien Land Laws Modified excerpt from: Nicole Grant. 2008. ”White Supremacy and the Alien Land Laws of Washington State.“ Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/alien_land_laws.htm First arriving on the U.S. mainland in significant numbers in 1848, Chinese immigrants were drawn by the California gold rush and soon expanded out to other Western cities.[7] In Washington State, mining, salmon canning, and agriculture attracted Chinese workers. As work dwindled between seasons, many came back to Seattle’s “China Town.” In the spring of 1886 this ethnic enclave was enveloped and destroyed by a mob of disgruntled whites. Perceiving Chinese workers as a threat to their economic interests and generally harboring hatred of differences in culture and appearance, hundreds of whites rioted against the small Chinese population, temporarily displacing the community from the city.[8] The hatred that ignited the anti-Chinese riot similarly imbued the drive for restrictive alien land laws that would culminate in the racist provisions of the Washington State Constitution. In fact, in the same year as the riot, a new law was passed by the territorial legislature that barred “aliens ineligible to citizenship from owning land.”[9] The idea that some aliens were ineligible to citizenship based on their race was commonplace. The Immigration Act of 1790 prohibited Asians from naturalization and in 1875 Congress amended section 2169 of the revised statutes of the United States regarding naturalization to explicitly state that citizenship be available only to “aliens [being free white persons, and to aliens] of African nativity and to persons of African decent.”[10] Thus Asian immigrants were not to become American citizens under any circumstances. By eschewing the “whites only” language of the naturalization laws, alien land laws were written in seemingly race neutral terms. The statute that was finally adopted in 1889 as Article Two, Section 33 of the Washington State Constitution read, “The Ownership of lands by aliens, other than those who in good faith have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, is prohibited in this state . Every corporation, the majority of capital stock of which is owned by aliens, shall be considered an alien for the purposes of this prohibition.”[11] The upper classes generally supported the Chinese and defended them during the Seattle riots. They saw the need for laborers on the rails and in the mines and knew that Chinese could often be forced to work for less than whites, driving all wages down. Plus, some upper-class whites had business and personal relationships with the Chinese merchant class in the city, in addition to personal servants with whom they interacted. Working-class organizations like the Populists, Progressives and Knights of Labor, on the other hand, tapped into the resentment of white workers and famers and feverishly propagated the anti-Chinese hysteria and spearheaded campaigns for anti-alien land laws.[12] White settlers felt a sense of entitlement, a notion that they should rightfully inherit the riches of the Northwest Territory. But by the late nineteenth century many working-class whites instead saw themselves as disinherited due to the rapid growth of corporate monopolies and the Chinese workers who they saw as unwelcome competition.[13] The popular hatred towards the Chinese that this kind of thinking resulted in led not only to laws prohibiting land ownership but ultimately to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited further Chinese immigration nationally.[15] While the Chinese Exclusion Act essentially put an end to Chinese immigration for the time being, it did not end employers’ desire for low wage labor in Washington State. With nearly seamless transition, Japanese immigrants were encouraged to come to the West Coast to work in many of the same industries that Chinese labor once dominated.[16] But the racism targeting the Japanese bore a different character, one not just of felt white superiority but also of white jealousy. It was the appearance of Japanese success, in farming and business, which enraged many whites. In comparison to their Chinese counterparts, Japanese immigrants acted less like sojourners and more like settlers. This pattern occurred for a number of reasons. Prominently among them, Japan was becoming an important economic and military force internationally. The intervention of influential Japanese diplomats helped assure the rights of Japanese living in the United States in a way that the Chinese did not benefit from. For instance, Japanese women were allowed to migrate with their husbands.[17] Immigration by Chinese women had been severely restricted because single males needed less to get by on and could be paid less and forced to move throughout the region in search of seasonal work. Regardless of their ethnicity, all women who emigrated from Asia were treated with disrespect by white society at large and often were regarded as prostitutes.[18] Japanese men were also employed as migrant laborers in the same industries as earlier Asian immigrants, but many Japanese families were different from earlier ethnic groups because they pursued agricultural labor in order to be able to settle in a community so that their children could attend school and the family could establish community ties with their Japanese neighbors. Getting started as farm laborers, many became farmers themselves, leasing their own plots of land and selling their own crops.[19] In woodsy western Washington, Japanese involvement on the farm often started in the logging stages.[20] When no whites would touch the logged land chock full of stumps, Japanese farmers would lease and clear that land to make farms. Subject to the alien land laws that prevented outright ownership, first generation Japanese, known as Issei, got their land by contract, share, or lease.[21]Later, their American born children would hold land in their names. Japanese in Seattle also formed an ethnic enclave called Nihonmachi where they set up an array of shops and businesses. By 1910 there were 70,000 Japanese and 3,000 Japanese owned businesses in the United States, a ratio of one business for every 22 people. With hotels, restaurants, barber shops, pool rooms, tailors and shoe shops, the Nihonmachi in Seattle represented a self-sustaining economic community. [22] All this success was met with white hostility, and this time the most vocal leader of the racist exclusion movement was not a member of the working class, but a wealthy publisher named Miller Freeman.[23] From 1909 until years after World War II, Freeman’s numerous publications, including the Town Crier and the Pacific Fisherman, spewed a nearly constant tirade against the “unasimilable Japanese.”[24] The largest and most mainstream organization that opposed Japanese land ownership was the America Legion. It used the “moral” argument that Japanese were taking the jobs of returning soldiers and farming land to which these soldiers were somehow entitled. The heat against Japanese residents in the Northwest sparked into flame during the economic crisis that followed World War I.[25] Pivotal to the effectiveness of alien land laws against Asians was the fact that they were not eligible for citizenship based on their race. In 1922 Japanese immigrant Takeo Ozawa fought for his right to citizenship based on the fact that he was in every way a model member of American society. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court where the Court conceded that in most respects Ozawa was an ideal candidate for American citizenship: he spoke English, practiced Christianity, and supported prohibition. However, he was not white, and in 1922 this was what counted most.[43] [Restrictions on Japanese entry into the U.S. typically followed after restrictions on other Asian nationalities.] The Gentlemen’s Agreement [1908] was an unofficial and undocumented treaty [stating that . Japan was to issue passports only to those who had previously been admitted to the United States [3]. To further restrict . general Asian immigration, . The [Immigration Act of] 1917 . created a “barred zone” in Southeast Asia.[4] “The barred zone roughly included parts of China, all of India, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, the Asian part of Russia, part of Arabia, part of Afghanistan, most of the Polynesian Islands and the East Indian Islands.”[5] . [Seven] . years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 would end Japanese immigration. This act of Congress prohibited the immigration of virtually all aliens ineligible to citizenship. While not coming out and actually saying “No more Japanese,” the act was implicitly targeted at the Japanese. Chinese immigration had already been virtually halted in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act and while Koreans, South Asians and others were affected, they were not then major sources of immigration like the Japanese. The movement in Washington State was part of a broader, national movement underway for over a decade to remove racist statues from state laws. In fact, Washington was one of the last states in the country with its alien land laws still intact. The origin of the white supremacist alien land law movement, California, had its own legislation repealed by vote in 1956.[53] Oregon’s law was fought through a court battle and repealed in 1949 when it was found that the law violated, “The principles of law which protect from classification based upon color, race and creed.”[54] Certainly a lot had changed by 1966.

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