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

Abstract

This study provides a quantitative perspective on the Chinese American migratory system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the magnitude of various means for evading the U.S. embargo on Chinese immigration. Three sources are explored, including federal immigration summaries, census microdata, and a sample of person‐voyage records for steamship arrivals at the port of San Francisco (n = 5,707). Whereas parameter estimates vary among the sources from nearly twofold (gross migration) up to fourfold (net migration), all results are consistent with a revolving‐door system in which young male workers arrived as replacements for departing older male workers.