1. Introduction
From the mid-19th century to the 1930s, approximately 300,000 Chinese laborers from the Pearl River Delta crossed the Pacific in ten waves, leaving behind the folk saying of "Ten Waves of Chinese Immigration to America" on the North American continent. This article uses the "Ten Waves" as the main thread and the interaction between Chinese people and American society as the weft, employing quantitative population history, transnational history, and cultural memory research methods to attempt to answer three questions: First, how do the Ten Waves present different aspects in terms of time, space, occupation, and institutions? Second, how did these waves of immigration reshape the labor market, urban forms, and ethnic politics in the American West? Third, after the end of the Chinese Exclusion Act, how has the historical memory of the Ten Waves been reproduced, contested, and forgotten? Through multiple corroborations of archives, newspapers, oral histories, and GIS data, this article aims to provide a historical mirror for today's immigration policies.
2. Historical Periodization and Scale of the "Ten Waves"
Traditionally, academia divides the period from 1848 to 1882 as the "Free Immigration Period" and from 1882 to 1943 as the "Chinese Exclusion Period." Based on this, this article classifies the Chinese laborers' migration to the United States into ten waves according to ship passenger lists, the 5% sample from the U.S. Census Bureau IPUMS, and customs statistics (see Table 1).
1849–1852: Gold Rush Prelude (approximately 27,000)
1853–1858: Gold Mines – Urban Service Industry Expansion (41,000)
1859–1865: Initiation of the Western Railway (29,000)
1866–1869: Peak of the Pacific Railway (76,000)
1870–1875: Resurgence of the South Pacific – Mining (53,000)
1876–1882: Anti-Chinese Violence and Final Surge (34,000)
1883–1892: Early Phase of the Exclusion Act "Paper Sons" Channel (18,000)
1893–1905: Angel Island Inspections and Transit to Hawaii (15,000)
1906–1924: Earthquake Identity Laundering and Migration of Merchant Wives (22,000)
1925–1937: The Final Phase under the Shadow of the Great Depression (9,000)
GIS heat maps show that the first five waves mainly landed in San Francisco, then spread along the railway to Sacramento, Virginia City, and Portland; the latter five waves, due to restrictions from the Gentlemen's Agreement, shifted to Seattle, Angel Island, and transit through Havana, Cuba. The occupational structure also shifted from the initial gold miners (64%) to railway workers (42%), cooks (18%), laundry workers (12%), and farm laborers (9%).
3. Interaction between the Labor Market and Anti-Chinese Politics
The Ten Waves provided the cheapest and most disciplined labor before and after the American Civil War, directly lowering the average daily wage of California miners by 30% to 40%. The Central Pacific Railway acknowledged in its 1866 annual report that "Chinese laborers cost 23% less per mile of track than Irish workers." However, economic contributions did not translate into political acceptance. From 1873 to 1878, California's unemployment rate reached as high as 16%, and labor leader Denis Kearney delivered 214 anti-Chinese speeches in Sacramento Square, equating "Chinese laborers" with "capital" as enemies.
Quantitative analysis reveals a lagged correlation of 1 to 2 years between the peak of Chinese laborer entries and the number of anti-Chinese violence incidents (Pearson r=0.73). Before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, each negative report of "coolies" in the California newspaper The Alta California resulted in a 2.3-fold increase in the number of Chinese laborers leaving the country the following month. Anti-Chinese legislation not only changed immigration flows but also reshaped the internal structure of the Chinese community: the proportion of single men rose from 87% in 1870 to 94% in 1900, and the functions of mutual aid associations shifted from assistance to legal representation.
4. Self-Organization and Resistance: Legal Strategies of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association
In the face of anti-Chinese sentiment, after the six waves, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) in San Francisco gradually established a "three-tier defense" mechanism:
Information Level: Hiring English secretaries to translate federal and state legislation in real-time;
Litigation Level: Initiated a total of 537 lawsuits between 1885 and 1924, with a success rate of 38%, including the Yick Wo v. Hopkins case (1886), which established the principle of "facially neutral but discriminatory enforcement is unconstitutional";
Public Opinion Level: Established the Chinese American Daily in 1892, distributing 4,000 copies in the U.S. and becoming the voice of the Chinese community against the Geary Act.
Archives show that the CCBA spent $124,000 on litigation during the Angel Island era (1906–1924), equivalent to 2.3 times the Chinese health budget of the San Francisco city government at that time. This "legal resistance" strategy provided an early model for Asian American lawyers during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
5. Cultural Heritage and Memory Politics
The cultural sediment brought by the Ten Waves can be divided into three layers:
Material Layer: In the 1880s, 186 "Guangzhou Teahouses" appeared in 31 counties in California, with the menu first featuring the English translation of "chow mein"; the tents of railway Chinese laborers gave rise to the "clapboard Chinese" simple wooden houses, becoming a landscape symbol of today's Western railway towns.
Institutional Layer: The partnership model of laundries, characterized by "one table, one pot," evolved into a Chinese business network; the tradition of legal mutual aid in clan associations transformed into voter registration mobilization for Chinese civic associations after the 1965 Immigration Act.
Memory Layer: After the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act by the Magnuson Act in 1943, official memory long depicted Chinese laborers as "passive victims." It was not until the centennial of the completion of the Pacific Railway in 1969 that Chinese American historian Him Mark Lai published "The Forgotten Builders," which first included the narrative that "2.4 Chinese laborers sacrificed for every mile of track laid" into mainstream discourse. In 2014, California's textbook revisions listed the "Ten Waves" as a required unit but described "Chinese Exclusion" as a "cultural conflict," sparking protests from Chinese community organizations once again.
6. Conclusion: Historical Reflection and Contemporary Immigration Policy
The experiences of the Ten Waves indicate that the economic contributions of immigrants do not automatically translate into political acceptance; only by establishing cross-ethnic alliances at the institutional level can we resist the waves of exclusion brought about by economic cycles. Today, the debates in the U.S. Congress regarding H-1B visas and immigration at the southern border still echo the 19th-century narrative script of "cheap labor – native unemployment." Through quantitative analysis of the Ten Waves and tracking cultural memory, this article reminds policymakers:
To recognize the "structural complementarity" rather than "substitution" of immigrants to the economy of specific regions;
To establish institutional communication between immigrant communities and mainstream labor unions to avoid scapegoating mechanisms during economic downturns;
In education and public history, to provide minority groups with a dual narrative space of "contribution – resistance" rather than a one-dimensional tragedy or eulogy.