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Problems in america chinese exclusion act
The role of Christianity in American culture
Chinese immigration in America
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Recommended: Problems in america chinese exclusion act
Imagine being in a situation of leaving all your belongings and family in search of better economic opportunity in a different country. Many of the Chinese did just that and beyond, but there was one restriction called the Chinese Exclusion Act that was eventually passed that excluded them from American territory. Despite all of this, there was people who understood why the Chinese sought American soil and opposed Chinese Exclusion. James De Normandie’s “The Injustice to the Chinese: A sermon Preached to the First Church” and Liang-Cheng’s “Note from the Chinese minister to the Secretary of State on Chinese Exclusion and the Anti-American boycott” show two different perspectives from two authors while still showing opposition of Chinese exclusion. …show more content…
A majority of United States citizens considered themselves to be Christians. The passage of the Geary Law of 1882 undermines the Christian nation’s goal of spreading the Word of God. Offering spiritual offers in one hand and a picture of political and social life full of falsity and dishonesty did not accomplish that. By treating the Chinese people poorly, they fail at drawing more people to the Christian religion. According to De Normandie, The Golden Rule is a fundamental rule that should be followed by Christians daily. All followers of Christ must obey The Golden Rule, but in 1882, it was a strict question of who actually followed it. There was a strict hypocrisy issue because of the fact that these actions were not Christian-like! De Normandie referenced Chinese philosopher, Confucius, in his sermon continually. Confucius emphasized upon the necessity of good men in office. By having poor leaders in office who have no sense of honor between nations, a nation can end up with this type of discriminatory leadership. The United States’ goal of spreading the gospel as a Christian nation, was undermined because of the decision of excluding the Chinese from the United States. By enforcing Chinese exclusions Christians are not being …show more content…
James De Normandie preached that the United States should seek to be a Christian nation. The natural action of going out and teaching all nations is one of those who are sympathetic with their fellow people. This is true because the mission of Christianity is to spread the gospel with other nations. De Normandie said that “sincerity is one Christian grace that must be greatly given hope to public and private life.” The United States can be the righteous nation it ought to be if it seeks sincerity and openness of other perspectives. Chentung Liang-Cheng argued that the United States must seek fairness and equality. With heavy immigration regulation and racism against the Chinese, the United States is not the land of the free, home of the brave. The United States must earn trustworthiness by following its own Constitution and Bill of Rights. They fail to do this due to the fact that they violated the treaty of 1880 in numerous ways including increased regulation and discrimination of the five exempt classes of Chinese. The United States must seek to be a Christian nation with good morals and must follow their own Constitution and Bill of
One particular ethnic group that suffered severe discrimination was the Chinese people. They first came to America for several reasons. One of them was the gold rush in California in 1849, in which they were included in a group of immigrants called the “Forty-Niners” (179). From gold mining, they switched to other jobs with resulted in the rise of anti-Chinese sentiments. People felt that Chinese people were taking the jobs away from them, because Chinese people worked for much smaller salaries that businesses preferred. This mindset gave way to the creation of The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, which prohibits more Chinese immigrants from coming to America. In addition, the act states “no State or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship”. Like the Naturalization Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act was created to hinder Chinese people from becoming citizens so that America could remain homogenously white (186). It also aimed to stop Chinese people from establishing a bigger community in the country in hopes of eliminating the threat of competition to their white counterparts (186). Like African-Americans, Chinese people were considered racially inferior and have struggled to prove that they were worthy to be called true Americans, rather than
...s undeniable to many who had simply been living in compliance with the established codes, never questioning or investigating them. It was one factor in the many following movements for freedom of speech, contributing to the separation of church and state of today.
Neglect the “Nations of the World” and instead focus on the “Nation of God”. Christians path in life can be boiled down to giving their full allegiance to the Kingdom of God. In doing so they need to denounce the coercive and violent ideologies of the natural world. Translating this to the Christian call to action, we must follow the Kingdom of God in transforming the world, rather than using politics as a means towards such a transformation. This is based upon his destroying of the notion that America is a Christian Nation: “What gives this understanding of the kingdom of God such strong emotional force is the long standing myth that America is a 'Christian nation. ' From the start, Americans have been inclined to believe that God’s will was manifested in the founding of our country and is yet manifested in the global activity of our nation. Throughout our history, most Americans have confidently assumed our nation’s causes and wars were righteous and just and that God was 'on our side. ' In our minds, and often in our churches, the cross and the national flag have gone hand in hand. Consequently, the conservative church has, to a large extent at least, tended to view itself as the religious guardian of all that is godly in our culture. America is a holy city 'set on a hill, ' and the church’s job is to keep it shining” (Reknew). Remove the temptation and allegiance to the natural world and it can and will distract
With the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first significant restrictive immigration law in United States history was instituted that would provided a framework to be used to racialize other threatening, excludable aliens. Furthermore, this marked the first time that groups of immigrants were excluded based on their race and nationality. At the time, America could be identified as being an Anglo-Saxon dominated nation where native-born citizens had the ultimate say in government and societal issues. The influx of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century posed a problem for many of these nativists. The Chinese immigrants were coming to America at an astounding rate and willing to work for less money, thereby, endangering American values and civilization. Additionally, they were deemed as a threat to the white supremacy in the West. In order to bring this racial threat to light, many Anti-Chinese activists’ compared the new immigrants to African Americans in that both were believed to be inherently inferior savages only suitable for degrading labor in which they were often employed (Lee 34). However, the strongest argument against the Chinese focused on them being unwilling and incapable of assimilating into society. In the ...
Americans “thought [the] Chinese had some kind of superpower since they worked for such low wages and lived in small crowded areas” (“The Chinese Experience in 19th Century America”). The Chinese just wanted to have a better life since that was the reason they came to America and they were just working hard to achieve their American Dream of living a better life than the one in their country. They did not mind working hard for what they wanted and they did, but they were just thought of as different and as exorcists for doing this. There were Yellow Peril novels written about how the Chinese wanted to take over the American government so they could put in place their own culture. On the other hand there were groups of people who did feel the Chinese were welcomed. At the very beginning, “The Chinese were welcome in California in the mid 1800’s because there was a lot of work and not enough workers, but Chinese people had to live separately from Americans. When the economic conditions got worse, discrimination against the Chinese increased” (The History of Chinese Immigration to the United States). Yes the Chinese were welcomed at first, but the Nativists only used them for a little and wanted the Chinese gone. Once they saw things getting worse within the country and started calling them exorcist and demonic because they worked really hard and put up The Chinese Exclusion act so they
According to Lee, Erika, and Reason (2016), “The Chinese Exclusion Act ...barred Chinese laborers for a period of 10 years and allowed entry only to certain exempt classes (students, teachers, travelers, merchants, and diplomats” (p. 4). The Chinese immigrants were excluded from certain rules and laws like Blacks and other minority groups. Also, they were not permitted to request citizenship or settle in the United States. For decades, the Chinese laborers did not have legal rights to enter into the United States until the decision was overturned. Lee, Erika, and Reason noted, “Chinese activist turned their attention to opening up additional immigration categories within the confines of the restrictions…some 300,000 Chinese were admitted into the United States as returning residents and citizens” (p. 4). The activists fought for the rights of the Chinese people to overturn the decision for leaving and entering as pleased to the United
As gold discoveries slowed down and the Civil War gradually came to an end, the First Transcontinental Railroad was finally completed between Omaha and Sacramento. Over time, unemployment began rising across the country, especially in California, where a vast majority of Chinese immigrants resided in. The welcoming of Chinese immigrants slowly began to wear off as the white working class perceived a threat to their livelihood that these immigrants could potentially cause, leading to an increase in racial tensions. These growing tensions culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and eventually closed U.S. borders to all Chinese laborers, with the exception of ethnic Chinese individuals. This paper highlights the significant impact of large-scale Chinese immigration to California during the Gold Rush, the lasting contributions made by the Chinese towards Western ...
The first Chinese immigrants to arrive in America came in the early 1800s. Chinese sailors visited New York City in the 1830s (“The Chinese Experience”); others came as servants to Europeans (“Chinese Americans”). However, these immigrants were few in number, and usually didn’t even st...
A nativist minister during the 1870’s gave this testimony during a Congressional hearing on Chinese immigration, “Coolieism, with very slight exceptions, leaves the Chinese just what they were in their native land, with all their idolatry, immorality, vice, and heathen customs, habits, dress, tastes, prejudices, and most unacquirable language a large, distinct class of people, adverse to all that is American.
...ent “this problem is too important to be treated with indifference” and must be solved before the United States turns into “practically provinces of China rather than States of the Union.”
Railton, Ben. The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
In chapter thirty five, author Shelley Sang-Hee Lee explains that “Immigration is an important part of our understanding of U.S. social experience” (Hee 128). Asian immigrants bring their diverse culture, language and custom from various Asian countries. They help improve American economic development. Also, they play an important role in American society. The first Asian immigration flow is the Chinese Immigration in the mid-19th century to work in the gold mines and railroads. The Asian immigrant population grew rapidly between 1890 and 1910 (Hee 130). The increasing of population of Asian immigrants have brought a lot of problems. Many of them were facing the issue of ethnicity, discrimination, and the process of assimilation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers and proscribed foreign-born Chinese from naturalized citizenship and the Asian Exclusion Act League in 1907 which limited the entry of Asian immigrants have reshaped the demographic of Asian immigrants in the U.S (Hing 45). With the rise of anti-Asian movements, many Asian immigrants were rejected from entering America or deported to their homeland. In the early history of immigration in America, the issue of deportation is an important part of the Asian American experience in the
Kwong, Peter. 1999 “Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor” Publisher: The New Press.
In the history of the United States of America, immigration has always been involving racial discrimination, especially towards the Chinese people. From the time when Gold Rush started in the West Coast, the Chinese immigrants were experiencing both physical and verbal offenses from Americans. As the Jean Kwok writes in the book Girl In Translation, the narrator Kimberly and other main characters living as Chinese immigrants indeed profoundly experience all kinds of inconspicuous discrimination in both of their educational path and their careers even though the political policies that directly discriminated the Chinese people have already been alleviated.
Chang, King- yuh, The Impact of the Three Principles of the People on China (Taipei, _____Taiwan, Republic of China, National Chengchi University, 1988) pp.vii