The New Yorker:

Even Donald Trump’s recent assertion that he would use executive action to abolish birthright citizenship has a historical link to the Chinese American experience.

By Michael Luo

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent. A century and a half ago, however, a movement to cast out a different group of people began to accelerate in the United States.

In April, 1876, a California state senate committee held a series of hearings in Sacramento and San Francisco on the “social, moral, and political effect” of Chinese immigration. By some estimates, well over a hundred thousand Chinese were living in the state. Government officials, police officers, and civic leaders testified that they represented the dregs of their native land and were rife with a “criminal element”; they lived in crowded, filthy conditions (as one witness put it, “more like hogs than human beings”); they were vectors of disease and licentiousness. Perhaps most important, as a years-long economic depression settled over the country and San Francisco seethed with thousands of unemployed white men, the witnesses argued that Chinese workers drove down wages and took jobs away from Americans. A California pastor proclaimed that white laborers must either “starve to death, or they must fall to the level with the Chinese, or else they must themselves leave the country.”

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