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Rept. Ford
Committee
on Contract
Labor.

50th Cong.,
1st Session,
Misc. Doc.
No. 572.

Rept. Indust.
Com.,

to care for himself or herself without becoming a public charge," and did much to relieve our prisons, asylums, and poorhouses of an undue burden. It did not, however, attempt to prevent the degradation of our economic standards by the competition of employees engaged abroad to work at European wages. The agitation against contract labor undertaken by the Knights of Labor and other trade unions came to a head in 1885. The Alien Contract Labor Law rendered it unlawful for an employer to prepay passage or in any way to assist or encourage the immigration of XV, 647-671. foreign laborers under wage contract. The enforcement of this law has been attended with considerable difficulty. Some eight thousand laborers were excluded between 1890 Rept. Indust. and 1900. It is probable that rigid inspection of immigrants on this account prevents the negotiation of many such contracts, but it does not materially check the importation of laborers under the infamous padrone system. Thousands of Italians, Greeks, and Syrians come to this country under binding obligation to men of their own race, who prepay their passage and, under various pretexts, farm out their labor, collecting a percentage of the wages paid. This form of peonage is difficult to discover and to punish.

Powderly,
Ch. X.

Com.

XV,

430-446.

The Italians in Chicago.

Smith,
Emigration
and Immi-
gration,
Ch. XI.

On the Pacific coast, agitation against the degrading influence of alien laborers has been directed against the Chinese. The 233,000 Chinamen admitted to California between 1848 and 1876 had performed all the rough work of the pioneer period, but their diligence, thrift, and industrial skill rendered them dangerous competitors, and the immorality inevitable under the abnormal conditions of a coolie's life was a social menace. Unable under constitutional and treaty limitations to rid their state of the dreaded Celestials, the Californians appealed to the Federal authorities. A joint committee of Senate and House investigated the situation in 1876 and recommended that Congress legislate "to restrain the great influx of Asiatics to this country." Not, however, until 1882, when modification of the treaty with China made such action legitimate, was a law passed suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years. The Exclusion

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Com.,

Act was subsequently extended to 1902 and reënacted at that Rept. Indust. date. The severe enforcement of the provision that a XV, 747-759. Chinese laborer who leaves the country is thereafter debarred has called out protests from the government of China and roused an organized effort on the part of the great commercial companies to exclude American goods from Chinese markets. Sales of cotton cloth to China, our most important foreign purchaser, shrank from $16,000,000 in 1902 to $4,000,000 in 1904. Some modification of the law is urged by the textile interests of the East and South as well as by the grain-dealers of the Pacific coast.

The number of Chinamen now resident in the United States is but 82,000. Their place in the labor supply of the Pacific coast is being taken by the Japanese. There were 25,000 Japanese in the United States in 1900, and they have come over at the rate of 13,000 a year in the past five years. Eighty per cent of these men are agricultural laborers. They come under contract to immigration companies made responsible by the Mikado's government for their safe transportation and subsequent welfare. They, too, are thrifty and industrious and are accustomed to earning but one tenth of the wages paid to American laborers of corresponding skill. Exclusion of these new competitors cannot be so readily undertaken or enforced, because the Japanese government is stronger than the Chinese and is able and ready to guarantee to its citizens the liberties allowed to any European people.

Rept. Indust.
Com.,

XV, 757.

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