Hidden in Plain Sight: Global Labor Force Exchange in the Chinese American Population, 1880–1940

Abstract

Despite a once-conspicuous presence in the Western United States, little is known demo-graphically about the Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States. The widely accepted model of a declining male "sojourner society," beset by draconian restrictions on immigration and the impossibility of family formation, is seemingly contradicted by the continuous economic vitality of urban Chinatowns in the United States. This article tests the largely unexamined demographic structure of the Chinese population in the United States through the application of cohort-component projection on census data from 1880 through 1940, including data recently made available as part of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The results fail to support the model of passive population decline, suggesting instead that the Chinese actively engaged in a collective strategy of long-distance labor exchange to maximize economic productivity among Chinese workers in the United States. Copyright 2004 The Population Council, Inc..

The Revolving Door to Gold Mountain: How Chinese Immigrants Got around U.S. Exclusion and Replenished the Chinese American Labor Pool, 1900–1910

“…In the second row, the simulation‐based range (−3,126 to −2,052) was produced by varying the vital rates incorporated in the cohort‐component projection within ranges implied by estimates for other contemporaneous subpopulations (Chew and Liu, 2004: Appendix 2). Higher death rates, for instance, reduced the number of out‐migrants needed to achieve the observed decade‐long decline in total Chinese Americans.…”

“…We both bring a fresh perspective to standard data (the CGI summaries) and introduce two new sources of data (from the census and steamship manifests). To the extent that the migration system operating a century ago was an early manifestation of the Chinese diaspora that extended throughout the Pacific Rim and persists today (McKeown, 2001; Chew and Liu, 2004), any clarification of the demographic pathways through which Chinese American communities sustained themselves will also have contemporary relevance.…”

“…In the second phase, census micro data and demographic simulation were used to construct a second, independent estimate of the mean yearly volume of net migration, by age. The simulation, based on cohort‐component projection, is described in detail elsewhere (Chew and Liu, 2004). Yearly levels were deduced through linear interpolation of the decade total.…”

“…Contrary to conventional historiography, the 60‐year period of Exclusion (1882–1943) saw the emergence of a male‐dominated society that was not so much aging as it was “perpetually young.” Chinese American age–sex pyramids from the censuses of 1880 and 1900, reconstructed from newly released census data (Chew and Liu, 2004), show this unexpected phenomenon.…”

“…Surprisingly, at the 1900 census, though somewhat older overall, Chinese Americans were still overwhelmingly comprised of males in the prime working ages (Figure II). As Chew and Liu’s (2004) population simulations show, this paradoxical persistence in youthful age structure can only be explained by sustained migratory exchange, with younger in‐migrants systematically replacing older out‐migrants. Whereas net migration for the total population must have been zero or negative, this “revolving door” pattern was made up of net gains at the younger ages and net losses at the older ages (Figure III).…”