The Chinese immigrants to this country in the mid-nineteenth century had several motivations for leaving their homeland. Some came to the United States to escape the turmoil of the Opium War that had taken over China at the time. This conflict between China and Great Britain exploded when the Chinese government outlawed the importation of opium and ordered the destruction of British opium stored in the city of Canton, at which Great Britain immediately declared war on

Many other Chinese immigrants found work building the Central Pacific Railroad. The railroad company figured they need approximately five thousand workers, but the most they ever had just using white workers was eight hundred. In fact, the demand for workers was so large that the Central Pacific Company had hired eleven

To these impoverished Chinese immigrants, enduring the horrible conditions was a small price to pay to reach America. These immigrants wanted to escape the poverty and conflict of their own land and flee to the United States in order to work for a few years, return to China wealthy, and live a life of luxury. Unfortunately, these aspirations for wealth and return to homeland China rarely came true.

...many saw this as an opportunity to escape the extreme poverty of the time. Many peasant families were forced to sell one of their children, usually a girl, in order to survive. Paying forty dollars cash or signing a contract to repay one hundred and sixty dollars for passage, thousands were packed into ships for the voyage to the Golden Mountain, as they called California. Lying on their sides in eighteen inches of space, mortality ran as high as twenty five percent on some ships (Chugg 1).

Once they got past the borders, most of the Mexican immigrants settled in the southwest. They found work in any number of occupations that required little or no skill. Mexican immigrants became the main source of labor for the agricultural industry, but they also found jobs in manufacturing, food processing, textile production, and railroad construction. These immigrants were welcomed into the work force during the labor shortages of World War I and the booming economy of the twenties, but their position in the country fell with the crash of the economy in the 1930's.

Hundreds of runners, usually large greedy men, swarmed aboard the ships grabbing immigrants and their bags trying to force them to their favorite tenement house and then exact an outrageous fee for their services. (www.kinsella.org)

Anti-Chinese feelings rose even more after the completion of the transcontinental railroad and as the economy faltered. The culmination of this hatred occurred in 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only law in history to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race. Anti-Chinese sentiment was so strong that this law remained in effect until 1943 when World War II brought China as an

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Approximate Word count = 2862
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)