A History of Chinese Immigration in the United States and Canada

Abstract

Introduction The transformation from an industrial to a high-tech, postindustrial economy in North America has had the effect of changing the way in which the governments of Canada and the United States view immigrants and visitors from China and other countries with substantial ethnic Chinese populations. Given the greater size of Canada's welfare system, that country's need for hard-working, well-educated, entrepreneurial, young immigrants is greater than that of the United States, but both countries are actively recruiting newcomers from the Chinese mainland. The current warm welcome to the shores of North America stands in sharp contrast to the efforts by the U.S. Congress and the Canadian Parliament in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to bar Chinese entirely This article summarizes the history of the disparate treatment Chinese have received in North America and seeks to explain variations in treatment between the two countries, each founded by settlers from the British Isles, France, and other countries in Western Europe. Trends in 19th-Century Immigration from China In 2004, there were approximately one million ethnic Chinese living in Canada and three million in the United States. Chinese are the largest visible minority in Canada, accounting for almost 4 percent of the population. The first immigrants from China arrived in British North America in the 1780s and the United States in the 1820s. They were mostly men, and their numbers were relatively small. In the 1850s, however, much larger numbers began to arrive in the United States and Canada from China. There was both a push factor and a pull factor. The pull factor was the discovery of gold in California in 1849. During the period 1851-1860 more than 40,000 Chinese entered the United States. The push factor was an increase in political and economic instability in southern China due to the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, and the inability of the Chinese government to maintain peace and order. The discovery of gold in the British colony of British Columbia in 1858 took some of that international migration north, drawing thousands of Chinese directly from China as well as from California. In 1858, China and the United States signed the Treaty of Tientsin. Under the terms of that one-sided deal, China agreed to prohibit permanent emigration to the United States. The treaty was not abrogated until 1959. The construction of railroads in the 1860s was an even larger attraction than the California Gold Rush. Thousands of men signed prepaid labor contracts that included free transoceanic passage to the West Coast of the United States. The president and the Senate encouraged and facilitated this immigration by approval of the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. More than half of the immigrants during this period came from Guandong Province's Taishan County. These immigrants were poor, came from rural areas, and spoke the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. The labor contracts typically were for five years, and the Chinese who signed them intended to return to China after their sojourn in the United States. Thousands of Chinese labored to build the western half of the Central Pacific Railroad, completed in 1869. Of the Chinese immigrants drawn to what is now Canada, many came through the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, adjoining Guandong Province. They, too, were destined for rail work. The Canadian Confederation came into being in 1867, when four eastern colonies agreed to form Canada; and just four years later British Columbia agreed to join the new confederation on the condition that Canada build a transcontinental railroad linking western and eastern Canada. Sir John A. Macdonald, the prime minister of Canada at that time, insisted that the government employ laborers from China to construct the railroad in order to reduce costs. The railways paid Chinese laborers only one-fifth of what they paid white workers for the same work. …

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