Chinese Exclusion and the Origins of Immigration as Class Warfare
Scott Smith
Abstract
This article examines the 19th-century Chinese Exclusion Act as a turning point in the use of immigration policy as a tool of class warfare in the United States. Scott P. Smith argues that Chinese laborers, recruited to build the transcontinental railroad under brutal and exploitative conditions, became central to a broader capitalist strategy of labor discipline and racial division. The essay demonstrates how the state, capital, and sections of organized labor colluded to transform migration into an instrument for depressing wages and fragmenting working-class solidarity. Through detailed historical analysis — from the Chinese railroad strikes and anti-Chinese pogroms to the exclusion campaigns of the Knights of Labor and the AFL — Smith reveals how labor leadership’s embrace of racial exclusion fatally undermined proletarian internationalism. Extending this analysis to the present, the article contends that modern immigration enforcement, guest-worker programs, and ICE raids continue to reproduce the same dynamics of division under new forms of financialized capitalism. Smith concludes that overcoming this legacy requires rejecting both nationalist protectionism and liberal “open borders” ideology, replacing them with a revolutionary internationalism rooted in class unity and worker control over migration itself.
Keywords
Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration, class warfare, labor movement, racial division, proletarian internationalism
