Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island by Anna Pegler-Gordon

Author:Anna Pegler-Gordon [Pegler-Gordon, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781469665726
Google: wbVhzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-09-15T20:31:19+00:00

Changing Alliances during the Depression and World War II

During the 1930s, sailors often struggled to find work. As a global industry, shipping was deeply affected by the global economic crisis. Limited employment opportunities “on land as well as at sea” meant that desertions were reduced.166 Some unions such as the ISU expanded their campaigns against Asian sailors, describing Chinese sailors as “coolies” to suggest that they were not free workers and that their low wages undercut white sailors.167 Other newly established unions such as the NMU, founded in 1935 under the auspices of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, allied with the CSU to organize all workers in a given industry regardless of their rank or race.168

Depression-era concerns about labor competition led to new restrictions on Asian sailors, as well as new alliances to resist such restrictions. The 1936 Merchant Marine Act introduced a requirement that 90 percent of crew members on U.S. merchant ships hold U.S. citizenship. As a result, even though it is not clear that these quotas were met, as many as 4,000 Filipino merchant mariners were discharged from their positions in 1937.169 According to historian Peter Kwong, “Chinese workers were systematically laid off by the shipping companies—fired with no warning, dropped off at any convenient port, and left to make their way home.”170 Many of these discharged sailors settled, some temporarily and others longer term, in the Navy Yard area of Brooklyn and in lower Manhattan.

In the same years, 3,000 Chinese seamen joined the NMU’s 1936–37 seamen’s strike for better working conditions, an equal wage scale, and equal rights to shore leave for Chinese seamen. Although the NMU’s demands for working conditions were met, the labor action did not end the discriminatory denial of shore leave. One year later, the CSU led a strike to protest Dollar Lines’ layoffs as a result of the Merchant Marine Act. Gaining the support of the NMU, the strike was successfully resolved with the company agreeing to pay six months’ compensation to laid-off workers.171 These successes were part of a gradual shift as more Americans started to see Chinese as potential allies.

Wartime conditions led to new restrictions on sailors, but also accelerated changing understandings of Chinese nationals, including Chinese seamen. In 1942, immigration officials noted that the “control of alien seamen has continued to be one of the Service’s most difficult problems.”172 However, the control of Asian alien seamen was no longer the Immigration Service’s primary problem. Officials were now focused on enemy alien seamen, particularly Germans and Italians. As early as 1939, two years before the United States entered the war, German and Italian seamen became stranded in New York because of war in Europe. These “distressed seamen” were the first individuals to be detained at Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) internment camps that were later used to house Japanese and other enemy aliens. At the height of the internment program, the INS held a total of 1,285 Italian seamen as well as German and other enemy seamen.173

As attitudes against America’s enemies hardened, allies were viewed more favorably.

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