The 'Chinese Exclusion Era' shows how Trump's mass deportation plan could unfold

Document with photograph certifying that a certificate of identity was issued from the 1900s.

/ National Archive Catalog

Donald Trump promises to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants once he returns to the White House. If he follows through, the scale of it would be unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes.

Many supporters of Trump's mass deportation agenda say expelling unauthorized immigrants will help the US economy. But a look back at America's first major immigration crackdown suggests otherwise.

On this episode, host Adrian Ma and his colleagues from NPR's The Indicator podcast look at that immigration crackdown during the 'Chinese Exclusion Era,' and the economic impact it had on the West.

For a deeper dive into the economic history of the Chinese Exclusion Era, check out the latest installments of Planet Money's newsletter. In Part One, NPR's Greg Rosalsky covers the economic circumstances that led to a populist anti-Chinese movement. In Part Two, he explains the ways (both legal and extralegal) that movement succeeded in driving Chinese immigrants away from the U.S. and the economic fallout that ensued.

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Transcript

ADRIAN MA, HOST:

President-elect Donald Trump is promising a nationwide effort to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants once he returns to the White House. If he follows through, the scale of it would be unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes. But America's history gives us some clues as to what we might expect. The first major crackdown on immigration happened in the 1880s, during a period historians call the Chinese exclusion era.

NANCY QIAN: I was born in China. I grew up in America, and I actually didn't know very much about this.

MA: Nancy Qian is an economist at Northwestern University, and she recently co-wrote a paper looking at the economic impact of the Chinese exclusion era.

QIAN: And when we started looking into it, it was just such a big deal.

MA: Picture this - it's the mid-1800s, a time economic historians call the Age of Mass Migration.

QIAN: People were coming to the U.S. from all over the world, mostly Europe on the East Coast and on the West Coast, mostly the Chinese. So the first wave of the Chinese came in the 1850s during the San Francisco gold mine rush. When the gold ran out, that halted a bit, but then it picked up really quickly because America was building the transcontinental railroad.

MA: The Transcontinental railroad would be a transportation revolution, the first strip of track to connect the Eastern United States to the West. The problem was the company building the western section of that track - the Central Pacific Railroad - could not find enough white workers to do it because many were off fighting in the Civil War. So the company instead recruited Chinese laborers. At the peak of construction, roughly 90% of its workforce were Chinese. They chopped trees for lumber, laid down tracks and tunneled through granite mountains with hand tools and explosives.

It was backbreaking, dangerous work, but in just six years, the transcontinental railroad was finished. But it wasn't all good news because the completion of the railroad fueled an economic bubble in railroad investment and land speculation. And when that bubble burst, the U.S. entered what many historians consider the first Great Depression. Nancy says the western half of the U.S. was especially hard hit by this.

QIAN: There's a lot of discussion about what do we do about this? And some people say, well, the Chinese are taking our jobs. That's one of the reasons why we're suffering. And if we kick out the Chinese, then the rest of us will have more jobs, more opportunities. So let's just do that.

MA: CONSIDER THIS - many supporters of Trump's deportation agenda say expelling unauthorized immigrants will help the U.S. economy. But what happened during the Chinese exclusion era suggests otherwise.

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MA: From NPR, I'm Adrian Ma.

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MA: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. In downtown San Francisco, there's a museum, the California Historical Society. It has all kinds of artifacts that tell the story of the state. And one of those artifacts is a photo album of sorts.

ERIN GARCIA: It's actually a ledger book, a bound ledger book, and inside are small photographs of Chinese people who are living in Sierra County.

MA: Erin Garcia is the museum's director of exhibitions. She says these pictures - which were taken around the late 1800s - were compiled by a local justice of the peace. And the ledger notes residents' names, occupations, ages, height.

GARCIA: And also any identifying marks. We see some interesting entries that say things like crooked right finger or mole over left eye, things like that.

MA: Basically, it was a form of government surveillance.

GARCIA: What's really chilling about the album is that the album goes from about 1890 to 1930, and so sometimes we see at the end of an entry something like gone back to China for good or dead.

MA: Some of these entries have updates like gone to China, 1904, or gone to China, not to return. These people were among the tens of thousands of immigrants who left the U.S. during a decades-long stretch where Chinese immigrants were the target of populist anger and legalized discrimination. Now, the people who supported this anti-immigrant movement used an economic rationale. The immigrants are taking our jobs, they said. Banning Chinese workers was supposed to benefit native-born workers. But did that happen? My colleagues, Wailin Wong and Darian Woods from NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator, take it from here.

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DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: In 1880, the Chinese were the biggest group of immigrants in the western U.S. They accounted for around 20% of all immigrants in the region. This was a time of open borders. Basically, if you had enough money to make the trip, you could come to the U.S.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: And Chinese immigrants arrived in the West in two big waves, first during the California gold rush of the 1850s and then to build the transcontinental railroad about a decade later. The new arrivals were mostly working-age, able-bodied men. Nancy Qian is a professor of economics at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

QIAN: The interesting thing about the Chinese is that they were very organized in the way they came to the U.S.

WOODS: She says that most of the Chinese immigrants came via U.S.-based companies run by Chinese merchants who spoke English. They recruited workers in China, handled all the paperwork and hired out teams of laborers to American employers.

QIAN: They were able to go to very peripheral places and be productive. A whole group or a company of men would go to the frontier where they're building railroads or taking down trees or reclaiming land, and they would be self-sufficient.

WONG: For example, the workers figured out their own housing and food.

QIAN: And so American employers really liked working with them because, you know, it's - you pay a price, and then it's not much hassle.

WOODS: But the Chinese workers also faced racism and suspicion. Nancy says anti-Chinese sentiment gained momentum in the 1870s. There was a recession in the U.S. that hit western states more than eastern ones.

QIAN: When economic opportunities are less plentiful, I think there is often, and unfortunately, this desire to pin it on someone.

WONG: Lawmakers in western states started to restrict how Chinese immigrants could work and live. They were banned from owning farmland or getting access to fishing grounds. State and federal legislation also made it difficult - if not impossible - for Chinese men to enter interracial marriages or bring over their wives from home.

WOODS: These policies snowballed into the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law banned all Chinese-born laborers from entering the U.S. for 10 years. It also prevented Chinese already in the U.S. from becoming citizens, and these restrictions were extended and tightened over time.

QIAN: The stereotypical immigrant story for America is you come from our country to America for better opportunities, and the Chinese Exclusion Act basically made that impossible to do for the Chinese.

WONG: The exclusion laws also enabled an atmosphere of targeted racist violence. In what's now Wyoming and Oregon, white men massacred dozens of Chinese laborers. So Chinese immigrants left the U.S. in large numbers, and, of course, there were very few new Chinese migrants.

WOODS: Nancy and several researchers recently published a working paper about the economic impact of the exclusion policies on the western U.S. They calculated that the Chinese Exclusion Act reduced the Chinese labor supply by 64%. And remember, competition for jobs was one of the main justifications for the law. So Nancy wanted to study what happened to white U.S.-born workers in western states.

QIAN: And, you know, honestly, we thought we would find that they benefited. We thought this was going to be a story of winners and losers. But what we found was this was a story of losers and losers.

WONG: Here's what Nancy means. She found that the white male labor supply in the West was reduced by 28%. Basically, in places that Chinese immigrants vacated, white workers also left, and there weren't enough new workers moving from eastern states to fill the gap.

WOODS: A possible reason for the decline in white workers, Nancy says, is that the loss of the Chinese immigrants might have drained some towns of their economic vitality.

QIAN: The Chinese got really into services. They would run a bar, a motel. Everyone eats there. Everyone sleeps there. The Chinese leave, they shut down the motel, they shut down the bar, they shut down the restaurant. All of a sudden, your town is a lot less attractive for everyone.

WOODS: During the Chinese exclusion era, one sector where local white workers did appear to swap in for departing Chinese workers was mining. But Nancy says that's an exception to the broader trend. Like, take manufacturing. There, her paper documents a slowdown, and this happened both in terms of output and in the number of businesses.

WONG: Overall, Nancy says the number suggests that the Chinese Exclusion Act was a drag on economic growth in the western U.S. until at least 1940. The act wasn't repealed until 1943. That's after China joined the Allies in World War II.

WOODS: Today, the issue of immigration and competition for jobs is central in the presidential election. Former President Donald Trump has talked about launching the largest deportation program in American history if he's elected.

WONG: Nancy says her research on the Chinese Exclusion Act shows the danger of enacting wide-sweeping policies. The legislation wasn't explicitly a deportation program, but it did lead to Chinese immigrants leaving the U.S. in large numbers. The law had far-reaching consequences that Nancy says weren't anticipated by lawmakers.

QIAN: Even if we believe that immigration policy is there to serve the economic interests of American citizens, we want to think through the immigrants that we want to ban or that we want to reduce. What are they doing? Is it something that Americans value? And if they go, who's going to do the job? And at what price will they do it for? And what will Americans have to pay for that?

MA: That was Nancy Qian, an economist at Northwestern University. She spoke to Wailin Wong and Darian Woods, who - along with myself - co-host NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. If you want to learn more about the economic history of the Chinese exclusion era, check out the most recent editions of the Planet Money newsletter written by NPR's Greg Rosalsky. We'll have a link to that in our show notes.

This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Kate Concannon and Tinbete Ermyas. Greg Rosalsky contributed reporting. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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MA: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Adrian Ma. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.