A minority in the leadership of the workers movement at that time took an internationalist stand, from Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs to the early Communist Party in the 1920s. They approached immigrant workers as fellow fighters and advocated organizing them into unions as the only effective way to combat the bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics.

In the mid-1870s, amid depression conditions, the Workingmen’s Party of California, fell into the bosses’ trap. While professing a socialist perspective, it campaigned around the slogan “The Chinese Must Go.” As the employers scapegoated Asians for the economic crisis, they joined in anti-Chinese pogroms in California and other parts of the West where Chinese immigrants comprised a significant component of the workforce. A three-day racist riot in San Francisco in July 1877, for example, led to the death of 22 Chinese workers and destruction of much of their property and homes.

In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration to the United States. It remained in effect for six decades, and restrictive immigration quotas continued to limit entry of Asians until those were lifted in 1965.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) officialdom sought to limit unions to a relatively privileged layer of workers, the labor aristocracy. Turning their backs on the vast majority of workers, they promoted narrow craft unions, often all-white job trusts.

Under Samuel Gompers, AFL president from its founding in 1886 to 1924, the federation campaigned for excluding Chinese workers from the country. In 1878, for example, Gompers decried the presence of these immigrants, labeling them “Chinese strikebreakers” and “a menace to our trade [that] federal legislation alone could remedy.”

In 1902 Gompers lobbied before the Senate Committee on Immigration for “the exclusion of Chinese laborers from the United States.” He presented Congress an AFL document titled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion. Meat vs. Rice. American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism. Which Shall Survive?”

The following year the Japanese-Mexican Protective Association (JMPA), a union composed of 800 Japanese and 400 Mexican farm workers, waged a militant strike in Oxnard, California, against the Western Agricultural Contract Company. When the union then applied for membership in the AFL, Gompers rejected the request on the basis of its Japanese-American members.

Terence Powderly, the main leader of the Knights of Labor, one of the main union organizations in the late 19th century, adopted a similar chauvinist course. In 1887, when Chinese assemblies of the Knights of Labor were organized, Powderly ordered their dissolution, declaring that Chinese and Japanese were “unfit to reside in the United States.”

The dominant leadership of the U.S. Socialist Party also promoted these immigration restrictions. It submitted a resolution to the 1907 World Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, campaigning against “the willful importation of cheap foreign labor calculated to destroy labor organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working class, and to retard the ultimate realization of socialism.” Right-wing SP leader Morris Hillquit argued that these workers are “a pool of unconscious strikebreakers.” He asserted, “Chinese and Japanese workers play that role today, as does the yellow race in general.”

The SP resolution, which was defeated at the Congress, drew condemnation from Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. “This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the ‘civilised’ countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity,” Lenin wrote after the congress. In a November 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League, a left-wing formation within the American SP, Lenin emphasized, “One cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in favor of such restrictions.”

Even Mother Jones, an outstanding working-class fighter for the rights of coal miners and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), backed the union officialdom’s anti-Chinese campaign. In a speech at the September 1921 UMWA convention, she spoke glowingly about how in previous decades the union officialdom had “made the government in Washington come out and put a stop to the Chinese coming in to invade the American labor movement.” She added, “I had a hand in that Chinese agitation: we kept it up and stopped the Chinese coming over.”

Since the elimination of immigration quotas 40 years ago, the United States has seen an unprecedented wave of immigration, especially from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This has helped strengthen the working class and break down the racist divisions the capitalist rulers constantly foster among working people. Rejection of anti-immigrant scapegoating and, instead, organizing foreign-born workers into the unions is a life-and-death question for the future of the labor movement.
 
 
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