Chinese immigrants started to arrive in the United States in significant numbers in the late 1840s, specifically 1848, when the California gold rush began to make headlines. People from around the globe came to California in hopes of getting rich quick, and then returning to their home countries. By 1852, California had passed a Foreign Miner’s Tax, specifically targeting the Chinese and forcing them to pay $3 a month for a license to be able to mine for gold. Chinese immigrants were in numbers upwards of 25,000 – the largest nonwhite group there to mine. White men wanted to regulate the number of Chinese there, and keep them from taking large amounts of gold back to China and out of the United States. As time went on, the United States government
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The United States, a place meant to be built upon freedom and equality, had passed a law excluding a specific race from entering the country, a law that would be renewed six times before finally being terminated.4 Though most supported the idea that Chinese immigrants would be the eventual downfall of the US and they needed to be repressed immediately, there were groups against the exclusion laws, people who believed that these kinds of laws would threaten the nation that the United States claimed to be. “The Injustice to the Chinese,” written November 1892 by James De Normandie is a short sermon berating the government for excluding the Chinese and betraying the supposed morals of the United States. “A Note from the Chinese Minister to the Secretary of State on Chinese Exclusion and the Anti-American Boycott” is a letter written by Chengtung Liang-Cheng in 1906 to the United States Secretary of State about the unfair treatment of the Chinese and the exclusion laws. In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, both religious and political leaders called into question the fact that the Chinese exclusion laws undermined the morals of Christian followers, the basic definition of democracy, and ultimately portrayed the United States in a negative and hypocritical
The United States, a place meant to be built upon freedom and equality, had passed a law excluding a specific race from entering the country, a law that would be renewed six times before finally being terminated.4 Though most supported the idea that Chinese immigrants would be the eventual downfall of the US and they needed to be repressed immediately, there were groups against the exclusion laws, people who believed that these kinds of laws would threaten the nation that the United States claimed to be. “The Injustice to the Chinese,” written November 1892 by James De Normandie is a short sermon berating the government for excluding the Chinese and betraying the supposed morals of the United States. “A Note from the Chinese Minister to the Secretary of State on Chinese Exclusion and the Anti-American Boycott” is a letter written by Chengtung Liang-Cheng in 1906 to the United States Secretary of State about the unfair treatment of the Chinese and the exclusion laws. In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, both religious and political leaders called into question the fact that the Chinese exclusion laws undermined the morals of Christian followers, the basic definition of democracy, and ultimately portrayed the United States in a negative and hypocritical