10.4 Communities in Diaspora

European Immigration

Over the course of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, approximately sixty million Europeans sought better economic opportunities on other continents. Most came from relatively nonindustrialized or agricultural regions, such as southern Italy and Sicily. Approximately twenty-eight million Europeans and Canadians immigrated to the United States during this time, the majority between 1890 and 1914. Most were peasant farmers from southern and eastern Europe. Many also continued to arrive from Germany and Ireland, the countries that had been responsible for the greatest influx of immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century. Along with those fleeing poverty came victims of religious persecution, especially Jewish people of the Russian empire. They had faced discrimination and anti-Semitism, which often culminated in waves of violence called pogroms that left people dead and their property destroyed. Political dissidents and craftspeople displaced by industrialization made up the rest.

After the United States, it was Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay that received the largest numbers. Some 4.5 million emigrants went to Argentina, where at one point they made up 30 percent of the population. Latin America attracted many Italians and Germans as well as Spanish and Portuguese settlers. Canada was the destination of approximately 5.1 million people between the 1850s and the 1920s. Other common landing places for European immigrants were Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Particularly attractive after gold was discovered there were Australia in 1851 and South Africa in 1886.

Once in their new homes, European immigrants performed a large variety of jobs. Many worked in factories. Jewish people were especially active in the garment industry in places like New York City. In the United States, Polish people and other eastern Europeans worked in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and in Chicago’s stockyards. The Portuguese often worked in the fishing industry or, in New England, alongside French Canadians in textile mills. Italian immigrants did a variety of work in agriculture, mining, and the building trades. The Welsh found jobs as miners in the West. Irish immigrants worked in mines, built railroads, and labored in factories throughout the United States. Women from all these ethnic groups entered domestic service.

The response of the countries where immigrants settled often depended on the newcomers’ ethnicity. In the United States, the “foreign” ways of Germans and eastern European Christians might be mocked but were largely accepted. Irish newcomers, most of whom were Roman Catholics, had been rejected when they first began to migrate to the largely Protestant United States in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, they and their children had established themselves as politicians, business owners, and police officers. Jewish people and Italians, however, who were more recent immigrants, often faced discrimination, and anti-Semitism was prevalent.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many native-born Protestants of northern European ancestry in the United States began to call for changes in immigration laws. These calls were met in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which set a quota on the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States from outside the Western Hemisphere. In addition, the act limited the number of immigrants of each nationality to 2 percent of the number already living in the United States in 1890. Thus, a person might be turned away if the permitted number of immigrants of that particular nationality had already been admitted, even if the total limit had not been reached. Before 1890, most immigrants had come from northern and western Europe and relatively few from southern or eastern Europe. Thus, the 2 percent quota allowed far more English, Irish, and German people to enter than Italian, Polish, or Russian Jewish people. Immigration from Asia, with the exception of the U.S. territory of the Philippines, was banned.

In Latin America, the situation was much different. Argentina and Uruguay, for instance, had never had large populations because they lacked their neighbors’ mineral wealth and climates conducive to the growing of sugar and coffee. The arrival of European immigrants there was thus a welcome boost. Brazil and Venezuela deliberately sought out European immigrants to make their predominantly African, Native American, and biracial population more White.

Asian Exodus

In the nineteenth century, many people of East Asia and India left home to seek work abroad, just as many Europeans did. Most who left China were escaping poverty. Primarily men, they came largely from the southern provinces, especially Fujian, where the quality of the land had always made agriculture difficult, and Guangdong. In the middle of the nineteenth century, many Chinese people fled hardships occasioned by the deadliest civil war in the history of the world. From 1850 to 1864, more than twenty million Chinese people died in the Taiping Rebellion, an uprising led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be “God’s Chinese son” and sought to impose a new moral order on society. The war’s destruction of towns, farms, livestock, and crops left millions dead or dying from famine.

The Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century was perhaps the widest of any ethnic group, dispersing emigrants around the globe. Chinese laborers came to the Kingdom of Hawaii to work on sugarcane plantations. They sought work in the United States building railroads, mining, and working as agricultural laborers and in service occupations. Thousands of Chinese people performed similar jobs in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Chinese people also immigrated to Europe, primarily Britain, as well as to Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and South Africa. They were hired as contract laborers in South African gold mines when the owners realized they would work longer hours for lower wages than would native Africans, who often left the mines after a few years.

Large numbers of Chinese people also sought opportunities in South America and the Caribbean. In Peru, the abolition of slavery in 1854 left the country desperate for workers, and the government subsidized the importation of laborers. Approximately 100,000 Chinese people immigrated as contract laborers between 1849 and 1874 to fill the need for workers to mine guano (bird and bat excrement used as fertilizer), build railroads, and toil on sugarcane and cotton plantations. Their contracts typically bound them to work for four to eight years. During that time, they were subjected to harsh punishments, including whipping and confinement in plantation jails. When their contracts ended, those who did not find themselves trapped in debt bondage often moved to the cities.

Chinese people emigrated to other places in Latin America and the Caribbean as well. Many built railroads in the Spanish colony of Cuba; concerned that they were being mistreated, China signed a treaty with Spain in 1896 to end all labor contracts that bound Chinese laborers. In the 1870s, Mexico’s president Porfirio Diaz encouraged Chinese people to immigrate to Mexico and settle in the northern part of the country. Diaz had first invited European and White U.S. settlers to Mexico to build railroads as part of a plan to “civilize” the northern part of the country, with its largely Native American and mestizo (biracial European and Native American) population. When these laborers found life in the desert undesirable, Diaz invited the Chinese to settle instead.

In Japan, economic depression also led many young men and women to seek their fortunes abroad. Unable to pay their taxes or purchase food because of a decrease in the price of their rice, farmers were desperate. One response was to allow sons, and sometimes daughters, to go to the city to look for work that, if found, paid wages too low to live on, let alone send to families left behind in rural villages. In the eyes of many Japanese, leaving the country completely for a new life elsewhere made more sense. For families that had to sell their farms to pay their debts, it may have seemed the only choice.

The Japanese government encouraged emigration and entered into contractual agreements with other countries to provide labor. In 1885, it selected men and women most likely to promote Japan’s reputation as a respected, civilized nation and instructed them on how to behave when abroad. Japanese immigration was largely confined to the Pacific region and to the Americas. In 1868, Japanese contract laborers were sent to Guam and the Kingdom of Hawaii. Others went to Australia and the Philippines. Hawaii remained a major destination after it was annexed by the United States, because the owners of sugarcane plantations sought laborers. Many Japanese also settled on the West Coast of the United States and in the Canadian province of British Columbia (Figure 10.15).

Figure 10.15 Japanese Emigration to Canada. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canada attracted many Japanese laborers. These men waiting to debark on Vancouver Island would most likely have sent for their wives to join them later. The marriages were arranged for them by their parents in Japan. (credit: “Passengers arriving in Vancouver” by UBC Library Digital Collections/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Like the Chinese emigrants, Japanese emigrants also went to South America in substantial numbers. Japanese immigration to Peru began in 1899. In 1907, Japan reached an agreement with the United States to limit the influx of Japanese people to that country. The Japanese government then signed an agreement with Brazil in 1908 allowing for the immigration of laborers to work on coffee plantations. Brazil had initially sought Italian laborers in an effort to make its population more White, much as Diaz had done in Mexico, but the Italians and other European workers found the wages too low and the living conditions too difficult. Many early Japanese immigrants to Brazil had sought to earn money and then return home, but they often found themselves trapped in debt bondage to their employers and so remained even after their contracts expired. In the twenty-first century, the largest concentrations of Japanese people outside Japan are in Brazil and Peru.

Indians also found their labor in high demand during the Second Industrial Revolution, and many were driven by poverty to become indentured laborers, primarily on plantations growing sugarcane. Some 3.5 million Indians worked on plantations in Africa. In East Africa, Indians also built railroads. They grew cash crops in South America and the Caribbean, to which they brought cannabis, called ganja, which they preferred to alcohol as a means for relaxation. They also became part of the labor force in other island nations. In 1879, the first Indian laborers entered Fiji to grow sugarcane; so many immigrated there that they now form a substantial portion of the country’s population.

Asian immigrants found themselves more unwelcome than European immigrants were. In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the country. The Johnson-Reed Act banned all immigration from Asia, with the exception of people coming from U.S. territories in the Pacific. Although Canada did not ban Asian immigration, in 1885 it placed a tax of $50 on all Chinese people entering the country to work. Students, scientists, merchants, and government officials were exempt, but in subsequent years, the tax was raised.

Asian immigrants to South America also faced hostility. Violent attacks on Chinese people took place in Peru in the nineteenth century, as they had in the United States before Chinese immigration was banned. Portuguese-speaking Brazilians regarded the Japanese people, who resisted becoming bilingual and maintained schools and newspapers in their own language, as unassimilable, and in 1923 the government imposed a strict quota on immigrants from Japan.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Australia also wished to limit immigration to only Europeans. In the 1850s, it tried to discourage the entry of Chinese people by prohibiting the arrival of the families of those already in the country. It also imposed a tax on Chinese immigrants. At the urging of members of the working class, who believed the willingness of the Chinese people to work for low wages hurt them, Australia required that all furniture made by Chinese workers bear a label stating that fact. All this was part of the White Australia Policy, a movement to exclude Asians and Pacific Islanders from the country.

The White Australia Policy culminated in the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, excluding anyone who could not pass a dictation test administered in a European language. This specification automatically disadvantaged Asians and Pacific Islanders, which the Japanese people heartily protested. Since the law gave them the discretion, examiners were also careful to choose languages that test takers were unlikely to know.