The 'Chinese Exclusion Era' shows how Trump's mass deportation plan could unfold
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
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
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| 0:00.0 | President-elect Donald Trump is promising a nationwide effort to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants once he returns to the White House. |
| 0:08.2 | If he follows through, the scale of it would be unlike anything we've seen in our lifetimes. |
| 0:13.8 | But America's history gives us some clues as to what we might expect. |
| 0:18.4 | The first major crackdown on immigration happened in the 1880s. |
| 0:21.9 | During a period, historians call the Chinese exclusion era. |
| 0:25.8 | I was born in China. |
| 0:27.1 | I grew up in America, and I actually didn't know very much about this. |
| 0:32.1 | Nancy Chen is an economist at Northwestern University, |
| 0:35.0 | and she recently co-wrote a paper looking at the economic impact of the Chinese exclusion era. |
| 0:40.0 | And when we started looking into it, it was just such a big deal. |
| 0:44.1 | Picture this. It's the mid-1800s, a time economic historians call the age of mass migration. |
| 0:50.9 | People were coming to the U.S. from all over the world, mostly Europe on the east |
| 0:55.4 | coast, and on the west coast, mostly the Chinese. So the first wave of the Chinese came in the |
| 1:01.0 | 1850s during the San Francisco gold mine rush. When the gold ran out, that halted a bit, |
| 1:07.7 | but then it picked up really quickly because America was building the transcontinental |
| 1:11.8 | railroad. The transcontinental railroad would be a transportation revolution. The first strip of |
| 1:19.3 | track to connect the eastern United States to the west. The problem was the company building |
| 1:24.8 | the western section of that track, the Central Pacific Railroad, |
| 1:28.0 | could not find enough white workers to do it, because many were off fighting in the Civil War. |
| 1:32.8 | So the company instead recruited Chinese laborers. At the peak of construction, roughly 90% of |
| 1:38.9 | its workforce were Chinese. They chopped trees for lumber, laid down tracks, and tunneled through granite mountains with hand tools and explosives. |
| 1:47.9 | It was backbreaking, dangerous work, but in just six years, the Transcontinental Railroad was finished. |
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