“As an emboldened Trump Administration prepares for a new crackdown on immigrants, history offers lessons on the cost of silence,” writes Michael Luo in the New Yorker, drawing parallels with Chinese exclusion efforts in the U.S. in the late 1800s.
“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,” he writes in his piece, “History’s Lessons on Anti-Immigrant Extremism.”
Luo notes that much of the anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1800s in the U.S. was driven by economic anxiety experienced by white workers in the West.
But he cites studies showing that the removal of Chinese workers did little in the way of helping those workers.
“One of the tragedies of Chinese exclusion is that the anger toward the immigrants was likely misplaced. Chinese workers were not usually in direct competition with white workers.”
This past fall, a group of economists released a working paper on the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on Western states, noted Luo.
“They found that it took a significant toll on the economies of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming—the states with the largest Chinese populations––until at least 1940.”
The economists also found “no evidence that the average white worker benefitted from the departure of the Chinese” and concluded that the positive effects of Chinese immigrants in the workforce, “including the economies of scale achieved by their presence, outweighed any employment opportunities that emerged from their absence,” the article noted.
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 