The data used behind this project is census data that Dr. Kane provided from IPUMS, the “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series,” for both Albany County, New York and Sacramento County, California from 1850-1900. The visuals I created demonstrate a change in demographics over time in these two capital counties in the United States.
Another data set I used is of both state and federal level immigration legislation from 1850-1900. I compiled this list together of 11 state and federal laws. This data is a bit skewed and incomplete because the only state level laws I was able to find for this time period were for California specifically. The state laws for both California and New York are collected in bound, printed editions from the state legislatures and only some of them have been digitized and made available on the InternetArchive.com and the Hathitrust.org., which is where I was able to find some data for California state.
The data presented represents not only a microcosm of the change in demographics but also immigration patterns during this time period on the East and West coast of the United States, and how certain immigrant groups were affected by both state and federal immigration legislation.
I specifically began with the year 1850 because California was not admitted as a state until then, and therefore was not listed on the United States census before that time. The decision to end with the year 1900 was mostly historiographical. Prior to 1900, immigration law was disputed between local, state, and federal levels. In 1891, the Bureau of Immigration was created and became strictly a federal issue. From 1891-1900, we see the beginning of the bureaucratization of immigration policy and practices as the federal government absorbed local and state officials and administrators previously in charge of controlling immigration. Historians Mae Ngai, Erika Lee, Lucy Sayler, and Hidetaka Hirota look extensively at this bureaucratization effort by the federal government from the late-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, focusing on a range of immigrant groups from Filipinos to the Irish.
One thing that immigration historians debate is how effective the Page Act of 1875 was at preventing Chinese immigration to the United States. Many historians claim that it was not effective, but that it still holds prominence as one of the first immigration policies to restrict legislation based on class and race. The charts I created, however, show that the 1875 Page Act did actually prove effective in preventing most Chinese women from immigrating and settling in the United States, particularly in Sacramento, California, which you can see in my population pyramids below.
I was interested in looking at this data specifically because of my research interests in Chinese immigration during the nineteenth century. California politicians were able to pass a number of state laws that aimed at preventing Chinese immigrants from settling in the state. New York state was not as aggressive in their immigration policies, at least towards Chinese immigrants and other immigrant groups from Asia, yet newspaper reports after 1875 citing fears of “yellow peril” in New York skyrocketed. This term was used by racist politicians, law makers, laborers, and others to vilify Chinese and Asian immigration to the United States. I had previously done work with the California census from the 1800s, but never looked into New York census data. To try to piece together why there was such a rise in anti-Asian, and specifically anti-Chinese, sentiment in New York, I turned to the data to see if there was a significant amount of Asian immigrants living in the capital district at the time or not. The total population is shown below in accordance to immigration legislation.
Instead of looking at the two biggest immigration centers for California and New York, which would be San Francisco and New York City, respectively, I wanted to look at the counties in which the state capitals were located. The immigrant stories of San Francisco and New York City are well-known within immigration historiography and those that study American history. Asians migrated mostly to the West Coast through San Francisco’s immigration center at Angel Island, while Europeans migrated to the East Coast through New York City’s immigration center at Ellis Island. What is less researched are the stories and numbers surrounding immigration in these capital districts.
Unsurprisingly, the data does not represent something much different than what immigration historians have already identified for cities in San Francisco and New York City, aside from the gendered effects of legislation. These graphs serve to show that immigration patterns during this time for major cities also held true for smaller cities on their respective coasts. These graphs and charts support this historiographical understanding of the national immigration patterns, but at the smaller, county levels of Sacramento and Albany. However, what the data also displays is that immigration laws like the 1875 Page Act had more of an effect in preventing Chinese, female immigration than historians typically acknowledge.
Bibliography:
- Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
2. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Sophia Foster, Ronald Goeken, Jose Pacas, Megan Schouweiler and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 11.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V11.0
3. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 4.Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.
5. Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
6. Ngai, Mae. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
7. Salyer, Lucy. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants in the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.