Don’t get mad at me for what I am going to bring to the forum.
Yes, some people should have not come over this country at all. But should be judge all of them equal for the deeds of a few? Those whom you call criminals today could be compared, somehow to others in the past. My point is one: Somehow, somewhere, somebody has to step in to help those who are marginalized, criminally generalized by this country’s politicians or their own citizens.
Immigrants, be them Chinese, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, have had their share of criminality or being called such names. Among them, rose some very good people, most of them were good people I guess. Sounds familiar? Things have changed, and acts deemed criminal now, were the normal things in the past, who knows.
For example: Chinese were used and abused and “somebody” had to stand for their rights at some point in history. I hope you have read the following essays I found, it speaks volumes of the hatred, discrimination against Chinese, and their skills to survive in a foreign country. And, allow me to copy a small portion of this long post so you can see that somehow, we, as immigrants have done something close to being a criminal act. Read the following paragraph:
Most significantly, the destruction of city records allowed many Chinese men to claim they were citizens whose records had burned in the fire (SF earthquake). As citizens they had the right to bring wives and children to the U.S., and sold citizenship rights to young men in China who became their “paper sons.”
This is history in the make:
"Immigrants from China first arrived in the 1840s, driven by poverty, hunger, and harsh economic conditions in the southern part of China where most of them originated. Most Chinese immigrants entered California through San Francisco and found work in railroad construction, mining, and agriculture.
Chinese immigrant laborers first began working on the transcontinental railroad in 1865, when fifty were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad on a trial basis. Railroad officials soon realized they could pay Chinese workers less than their Irish counterparts and began recruiting heavily from the mining camps. Railroad owners began advocating for more generous immigration policies towards China. One investor, Leland Stanford, a one-time candidate for governor who actively denounced Chinese immigration during his campaign, openly advocated for the immigration of 500,000 more laborers from China. Many Chinese workers lost their lives from overwork and accidents while blasting the railroad through the Sierra Nevadas. Fed up, thousands of Chinese railroad workers went on strike in 1867 to protest their wages and hours. When business officials cut off the strikers’ food supply, they were forced to give up.
After the completion of the railroad in 1869, ex-railroad workers joined ex-miners in flocking to San Francisco’s Chinatown seeking other employment. Like other immigrant communities past and present, the Chinese established their own institutions and businesses in the growing Chinatown. They became a “bachelor society,” since immigration laws seeking to bolster the business owners’ supply of cheap labor actively discouraged the formation of families by severely restricting the immigration of Chinese women. By the 1880s, men in Chinatown outnumbered women by approximately 20 to 1. The gender imbalance encouraged prostitution rings that preyed upon young women from China, who were often forced into sexual slavery."
Economic depression in the 1870s intensified prejudice against the Chinese. Resentful white workers, spurred on by labor organizers like Denis Kearny, fought to keep Chinese laborers out of California. Racist sentiment also fueled the passage of discriminatory taxes and other practices, utilizing the 1790 Naturalization Act that restricted citizenship to “white” persons. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration from China. It was renewed in 1892, and finally made permanent in 1902.
The 1906 earthquake and fire proved both disastrous and fortuitous. Chinatown itself was leveled. While efforts were made to move the Chinese sector away from San Francisco’s lucrative central district when it was rebuilt, the courts finally ruled that the Chinese had the right to build on sites they owned. Most significantly, the destruction of city records allowed many Chinese men to claim they were citizens whose records had burned in the fire. As citizens they had the right to bring wives and children to the U.S., and sold citizenship rights to young men in China who became their “paper sons.” Many of these immigrants came through the Immigration Station on Angel Island, in operation from 1910 to 1941, and spent up to several years being detained in cramped quarters and closely cross-examined about their “family connections.”
The exclusion acts were repealed in 1944, when the U.S. needed China as an ally in World War II. Immigration was still effectively restricted by tiny quotas, until the 1965 Immigration Act which repealed all quotas in favor of a family-based reunification policy. Since then, many Chinese immigrants have come to San Francisco, revitalizing not only Chinatown but creating new Chinese neighborhoods in the Richmond and Sunset Districts. Many have come seeking refuge from political instability in China, in the wake of the Revolution of 1949, and most recently from Hong Kong, where the handover of the former British colony to China in 1997 prompted many to migrate. Chinatown is unique in San Francisco for being a homogeneous neighborhood that has remained Chinese for a century. With the recent changes, however, there has been growing diversity of immigrants from different parts of China and Chinese territories, creating some friction between old-timers and newcomers.
–courtesy Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, from an immigrant history walking tour conducted Sept. 20, 1997.
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinese_Immigration
Chinatown’s Opium Dens
Historical Essay
by Dr. Weirde
“SF Police Opium Squad,” c. 1900
And it takes little but little imagination to smell the sweet, cloying vapors of opium drifting from places below sidewalk level…
–Samuel Dickson
The first shipment of Chinese opium fifty-two boxes in all arrived in San Francisco in 1861 aboard the clipper Ocean Pearl. By 1864, “the Year of Opium” in San Francisco, huge shipments were arriving regularly, and the City’s first three big drug busts occurred: On January 16th and April 22nd, shipments from the ships Derby and Pallas were seized, and on June 19th a shipment of eggs turned out to have something other than white and yolk in the shells.
Despite occasional crackdowns, the opium trade was never seriously menaced by law enforcement. Chinatown itself was hardly ever visited by police, and the opium dens were almost completely ignored. An English journalist wrote in the 1880’s: “Occasionally, when the police are short of funds, they make a descent on some of the dens but, as a rule, the proprietors are left unmolested.” (The same situation prevails today, except that with asset forfeiture laws the police are legally allowed to keep and sell the property they seize during drug busts, even if the arrestee is later judged innocent.)
The police, who occasionally did find themselves short of funds, encouraged the passage of anti-drug legislation with tirades about the evils of opium. One of the milder ones came from New York Police Chief George W. Walling, who wrote: “Reveries, dreams and stupefaction do not come with one pipe. Again and again the smoker cooks his lump of opium, packs it into the bowl and lazily watches the smoke curl up around the lamp. After awhile the pipe drops from his nerveless hand and there is a glaze on his eyes which are half-shut like a mad man’s. His head falls upon his breast and he is in the opium trance which is either paradise or hell according to the degree of his indulgence in the narcotic.”
The clergy, who were peddling their own opiate-of-the-masses, joined in the anti-opium chorus. Reverend Frederic J. Masters described a San Francisco opium den thus: “The air is sultry and oppressive. A stupefying smoke fills the hovel through the gloom of which the feeble yellow light of three or four opium lamps struggles hopelessly to penetrate. There are two or three wooden beds covered with matting and each is furnished with lamp and pipe. Three Chinamen lie in different stages of stupefaction. The room is about fifteen feet by ten feet, ceiling and walls black with years of smoke. We have been in this den about five minutes and no one has spoken a word. It is like being in a sepulcher with the dead.”
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinatown's_Opium_Dens