ABSTRACT
The decennial census revealed that America’s population expanded greatly during its first 130 years – from four million in 1790 to one hundred and six million in 1920. American industry grew rapidly following the Civil War, and workers were actively recruited abroad. Chinese workers had helped develop agriculture in the American West as well as the railroads. When Chinese immigrants were barred by law, employers sought new sources of labor, especially for agriculture in the American West. American interventions abroad opened new sources of labor in the Far East – first in Japan, from which workers began to emigrate. The internment program survived judicial review, although it applied only to Japanese Americans and not to German Americans or Italian Americans, whose ethnic homelands were equally at war with the US. The groups most affected by the immigration restrictions that were imposed between 1882 and 1924 – Asians, Catholics, and Jews – had racial credentials that were suspect to American nativists.
