Serfs’ Dreams Denied

Some of you may recall a story I mentioned once in passing. I was a young reporter dispatched to cover the shocking discovery of a mass grave in Northern California. That was a quarter of a century ago, and there was a momentary gasp in the land. Word spread about a mass killer.

Then the truth emerged, and people lost interest. Turned out that the bodies were just old bones of Chinese workers dating back to the 19th century. Most likely, these immigrant laborers had been summoned for payday, which occurred every six months or so. They were told to dig a pit. Then they were massacred to keep business expenses down.

Historians told me that California is dotted with such secret graves. Some of those Chinese snuff bottles and artifacts that you see in antiques stores today are the booty taken from the victims.

Pardon me for being melodramatic, but this old nightmare leaps to mind when I hear about a new “guest worker� program that U.S. business is clamoring for.

Companies are starving for workers today, we hear. American citizens simply won’t stoop to do the necessary work, at least not for the wages that U.S. business is willing to pay. Thus we reach beyond our borders for the serfs to do our drudgery so we can prosper without having to pay an extra 50 cents for a hamburger or quarter for a head of lettuce.

The same reasoning fetched 200,000 Chinese laborers onto our shores between 1852 and 1875. America got a transcontinental railroad--and a legacy of shame so brutal that we can hardly bear to look it in the eye. Not only were these workers treated worse than mules, but they aroused a racist backlash as soon as the economy went sour. Street riots broke out, and Congress passed exclusionary laws that lasted for another century.

Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese immigrant worker named Wan Lee: “Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian schoolchildren.�

I’m speaking of low-cost immigrant labor and citizenship. Chinese were forbidden U.S. citizenship until 1943.

Does this history hold a lesson for us now? Doesn’t all history?

Immigration is the glory and the gore of America’s heritage. It has never occurred smoothly. In wave after wave, it has aroused prejudice and economic friction as newcomers strive to realize their dreams.

But there is one kind of immigration that stands apart. It is the immigration in which the American Dream is denied: the immigration brought on intentionally to suppress wages, to provide the human chattel to do the tasks that others supposedly won’t do. This is the immigration of labor, not the immigration of new citizens. This is the horror of slavery--the forced immigration of Africans as plantation slaves. This is the economic enticement of impoverished Chinese from Guangdong province to build our railroads. This is a program we now call “guest workers.�

The cotton barons of the 18th century and the railroad barons of the 19th century used the same justification that we hear from the business barons of today. Nobody else would do the work. But isn’t it odd that we kept producing cotton after slavery was abolished? That the country still flourished without serfs to dig their own graves?

What America has not overcome, however, is social division that smolders as a consequence of using someone else’s ready sweat to advance its prosperity. All these years later, African Americans and Chinese Americans remain too much like islands in the crazy quilt of our nationhood.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) dropped by the newsroom the other day to talk about how desperate the country is for cheap labor. Why, his brother’s restaurant on the shore couldn’t get anybody to wash the dishes “because the beach boys didn’t want to do it.� Hastert’s answer, and one of the immigration “solutions� gaining steam in Washington, is to expand the underclass of noncitizens, of inferiors--a servant class, people who would do our work but not share in our dreams.

Oh, but those Mexicans want the jobs, we are told. They are happy to do it. See ‘em smiling. Why, surely old Abe Lincoln didn’t mean Mexicans when he talked about this nation being “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.� And, pssst, they’ll like it better if we call them “guests.� It’s better than “second-class citizens,� because if Hastert gets his way, of course, they won’t have a chance to be citizens.