“Ought we to exclude them?”
- Senator James G. Blaine, 1882
“We have this day to choose...whether our legislation shall be in the interest of the American free laborer or
for the servile laborer from China...You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beer,
alongside of a man who can live on rice. It cannot be done.”
- Senator James Blaine (R-ME)
“They spread mildew and rot throughout the entire community, permit them to enter and you plant a cancer in your own country that will eat out its life and destroy it.” “There is no common ground of assimilation.” |
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“Alien in manners, servile in labor, pagan in religion, they are fundamentally un-American.” “The Chinese immigrant is 'loathsome...revolting… monstrosity… [who] lives in herds and sleeps like packs of dogs in kennels.'” |
“Chinese were inhabitants of another planet, machine liked...of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional...and herd together like beasts.”
- Senator John F. Miller (R-CA)
“The dread of an injury to our labor from the Chinese rests on the same fallacy that opposed the introduction of labor saving machinery, and which opposed the coming of the Irishman, and the German, and the Swede.”
“That they do not incline to become Christians or republicans may be accounted for by the treatment they have received. They are excluded by statute from the public schools. They have no honest trial by jury. What incentives would Chinese have to pledge allegiance to America when California's constitution contained [such] provisions.” |
“I think that their presence here affords to white men a more elevated class of labor. As I said before, if you should drive these 75,000 Chinamen off you would take 75,000 white men from an elevated class of work and put them down to doing this low class of labor that the Chinamen are now doing, and instead of elevating you would degrade the white labor to that extent.” |
“We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed...The self-evident truth becomes a self-evident lie.” |
“Nothing is more in conflict with the genius of American institutions than legal distinctions based upon race or occupation. The framers of our Constitution believed in the safety and wisdom of adherence to abstract principles. They meant that their laws should make no distinction between men except as were required by personal conduct and character.” |
“It is scarcely forty years since the Irishman, who has been such a source of wealth and strength to America, began his exodus across the sea. There are men in this body, whose heads are not yet gray, who can remember how the arguments now used against the Chinese filled the American mind with alarm when used against the Irishman.”
“It is impossible...that a blow at the dignity of human nature, a blow at the dignity of labor,
a blow at men, not because of their individual qualities or characters,
but because of the color of their skin, should not fail to be a subject of deep regret and repentance to the American people in the nineteenth century.”
“If as a nation we have the right to keep out infectious diseases, if we have the right to exclude
the criminal classes from coming to us, we surely have the right to exclude that immigration
which reeks with impurity and which cannot come to us without plenteously sowing the seeds of
moral and physical disease, destitution, and death.”
- Senator James Blaine in a New York Tribune article
Andrew Gyory, author of Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act
“In order to protect our laboring classes, the gates must be closed.”
-Congressman Edward Valentine, March 1882
“Chinese were a class wholly unworthy to be entrusted with the right of American citizenship.”
Other politicians claimed that Chinese lacked sufficient brain capacity to furnish motive power for self-government, having “no comprehension of any form of government but despotism.”
- Horace Page, Rep of CA, 1875
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“In enacting the 'anti-Chinese bill' in 1882, politicians not only closed the gate on an entire group of people by also set the standard for how Americans would frame the immigration debate in the years that followed and come to accept greater and greater restrictions on foreigners seeking refuge and freedom in the United States.”
- Andrew Gyory, author of Closing the Gate, Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act