This Day in Labor History: July 20, 1885
By 
On July 20, 1885, the British crown gave royal assent to the Chinese Immigration Act in Canada, which placed a $50 tax on Chinese workers and which reinforced the general global oppression of migrating Chinese workers around the world at this time.
Chinese workers started getting out of their home nation in the 1840s in large numbers. This was strictly around the incredible levels of poverty in that nation. Those who could leave often did. They migrated all over the place–throughout much of Asia, down into Australia and New Zealand, and across the Pacific. I have explored the history of Chinese migration to the United States in depth in this series. To say the least, whites did not like it. When they came out for the Gold Rush, they didn’t expect diversity and they hated it all. White violence was the result, against not only the Chinese, but Mexicans and Native people as well. But the fact is that there were not the women to do a lot of traditional gendered labor and Chinese might have been evicted from the goldfields but they could carve out economic niches in laundries and restaurants. They also were the favored employees of the railroad barons, who treated them as nonhuman labor they could kill at will. This did not help white labor accept the Chinese. Ideas of interracial solidarity were nearly unthinkable for white workers in these years and especially not to people who seemed so different as the Chinese. This all led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and then acts of organized violence through the rest of that decades, including in the timber towns of the Northwest and the mining camps of the Rocky Mountains, culminating in the Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming in 1885.
Well, we Americans too often ignore Canada and its history. The story there was more or less the same. Canadian rail companies saw the Chinese as just as delightfully exploitable as their American counterparts. About 17,000 Chinese workers entered the nation to work on the Canadian Pacific. This was successful. The rail was completed in 1885, when it was expected to take until 1891. Yet this hardly led to an outpouring of support for the workers who brought the country together.
British Columbia led the freakout against the Chinese, as California did in the U.S. There were proposals to limit Chinese migration going back to the early 1870s and as the laborers arrived in larger numbers to work on the railroad, they gained in popularity. The BC legislature worked toward a law that would ban further immigration, issue a poll tax on any Chinese voters, and ban them from owning Crown lands. This became the same kind of movement in Canada as it did in the U.S. as well, in the sense that Canadians who had never even seen a Chinese person began to freak out and politicians moved to restrict the Chinese to undermine this movement that threatened them if they did nothing about it.
So, in 1885, a royal commission was created to deal with the problem. Support was far from universal, largely because the employers and politicians knew how profitable the Chinese were for them. Prime Minister John MacDonald was one of those who did not initially support this, but he completely caved when it became in his interests to do so. The commission did interview a couple of Chinese people, but these were elites and not any regular Chinese workers. It did interview some people who supported Chinese immigration, but really there was no chance the commission would create a report that actually supported the Chinese. Most testified of how the Chinese were undermining the Canadian worker and destroying Canadian culture through their strange Asian ways. I mean, soy sauce are you kidding me what fresh savage hell is that?
The commission recommended a $10 head tax on every Chinese immigrant coming to Canada. The government decided that was too soft and squishy and raised it to $50. The final law also stipulated that any ship coming from China to Canada could transport one Chinese person per fifty tons of overall weight. There was a law on the books a bit like this for European immigrants too, but it was one person for every two tons of weight, so the discrimination was pretty obvious for all to see. This also discriminated heavily against Chinese women, denying anyone who was thought could be a prostitute (which basically meant in effect anyone without a man to claim her upon arrival) and anyone with questionable health.
Like in the United States, the Chinese Immigration Act really didn’t stop Chinese migration. Interestingly, Canada was already becoming a conduit for immigrants wanting to get around the American law and Canada was pretty indifferent. In fact, an 1887 addendum to the law waived the fee for any Chinese seeking to pass through Canada to a different country and since there was only one country you could pass through from Canada…
But because unlike the U.S. law, this was not an outright ban, Chinese immigration continued to Canada, especially after 1900. There was simply a huge demand for labor and not enough other people to fill it. So future Canadian laws attempted to crack down on this more later, with a few different laws in the first half of the twentieth century, but even here, with vastly increased head tax rates, employers just starting paying it for the workers since it was the only way they could get workers at all.
If you want to read the Chinese Immigration Act and its subsequent amendments, you can do so here at the website of the Canadian Museum of Immigration. The Canadian government also has a good site where you can research Chinese immigrants. It’s almost as if, despite its checkered history on immigration, Canada isn’t governed by completely racist scumbags determined to return its nation to an imagined 19th century. I wonder what’s the like to live in.
This is the 572nd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.