Introducing people for this symposium. I have to say that about a year ago when we had our last conference, chuck and i sat down and with jillian berk wits here from Ohio University press because she publishes the books that come out of these series, we sat down and talked about what should we do next year. We thought, lets go a little bit off of the chronology because we had been doing civil war and reconstruction and the lead up to the civil war for now more than a decade. And we thought we needed a break. And i said, well, immigration is always an interesting issue. And little did we know how interesting immigration would be in the next 12 months. So i want to thank all of the current political candidates and no longer running political candidates for making this conference into an even more relevant and important conference than we thought it would be. As one of our concert participants told me yesterday, immigration is always an important topic and i think that is indeed the theme
[ inaudible ] when it passed in congress in 1882, it passes overwhelmingly. The vote in the house of representatives is Something Like 25037. There is a lively debate and several people, several congressmen, several senators speak eloquently against it. There is one senator from massachusetts, George Frisbee hore, almost forgotten today, he leads the fight against it. And he does for his whole life in the senate for the next 20 years. But every time it comes up for a vote in 1882, 92, 1902, it has fewer and fewer defenders and it becomes national policy. Yeah. Im struck by the dichotomy of the culture which is kinder to the chinese, and the politics. So can you talk about how that was so different, because you would think that the one would influence the other. Thats an extremely complicated question. What happens is the chinese, many chinese are coming to america, in late 1800s, and white workers accuse them of working for lower wages. And being imported here, meaning being carried in
Congress, 150 years ago in 1866, when congress is debating what becomes the 14th amendment, the 14th amendment begins by saying all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to their jurisdiction, ie, not the children of diplomats, are citizens of the United States. And there was a strong attempt by the delegation from california and oregon to amend that to say all persons except chinese would be citizens of the United States. And to the great credit of the United States congress, then in the hands of the antislavery Republican Party that had just led the nation to both saving the nation and ending slavery, the majority of congress simply said, no, all persons means all persons, were not going to get into the business of excluding particular groups of people. And so that in part explains the subsequent conflict over chinese immigration and chinese rights, because the 14th amendment meant their children would be citizens of the United States, even when the naturalizat
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