VDARE — Open Borders advocates would have us believe there were no victims during past periods of rampant immigration enthusiasm. But immigrants to America were hardly innocents eventually shut out by cruel xenophobes. And the American victims of mass immigration are forgotten–perhaps deliberately in order to justify the current dispossession of the historic American nation.
One particularly enlightening episode: the nineteenth-century Chinese influx into California. Capitalists in search of cheap labor imported thousands of unskilled Chinese for the transcontinental railroad and other projects. Their numbers swelled until by 1870 they constituted one third of the male population of the state. When the railroad was finished, unemployed Chinese competed with desperate Americans from the East for jobs.
Employers did not bring the Chinese to America out of charity. Many arrived in ships as packed and filthy as those used in the African slave trade. Indeed, labor historian Vernon Briggs reports that some of the exact same slave ships were used for both purposes. He writes… [Read More]
