Chinese Immigration Research Articles

“Diversity” on Main Street? Branding Race and Place in the New “Majority-Minority” Suburbs

The emergence in the United States of an increasing number of spaces across the socioeconomic spectrum with majority nonwhite populations merits close attention because of these spaces' potential in reconfiguring historical and contemporary claims to place. In an era in which the neoliberalization of urban development has spurred local governments toward more active involvement in defining relationships between race, ethnicity, consumption, and space, “majority-minority” suburbs are particularly important sites of study. In the late 2000s, two branding campaigns in majority-Asian American and Latina/o municipalities in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley—a densely populated region popularly known as a “suburban Chinatown”—put forth specific discourses of race, ethnicity, and culture in attempts to actualize specific visions and claims to place, identity, and history. In doing so, these campaigns illuminated and reinforced larger racial, geographic, and ideological divides. “Diversity” on Main Street embraced pluralist multicultural discourses of the nation, while the “Golden Mile” proposal sought to showcase the transformation of a central thoroughfare by ethnic Chinese capital and immigration. A close examination and comparison of these two campaigns shows how struggles over race, geography, and history are intertwined in the contemporary identities of places and integral to the shaping of civic landscapes.

Beyond the 2nd generation: English use among Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area

The concept of immigrant generation is complex. Americans use the ordinal designations first-, second-, third-, even ‘1.5’-generation to refer to individuals' varying relationship to their family's moment of immigration. But these terms are much more fluid in practice than the rigidity of the numbers implies, and the nature of that fluidity is changing over time. Furthermore, different waves of immigration mean different experiences of generation identity; a first-generation immigrant in the 1880s entered an American community that was drastically different than the one a first-generation immigrant enters today.One example of these shifts in the meaning of immigrant generation is among Asian Americans across the country, particularly those in California. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between language and immigrant generation with respect to Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, the region of the United States with the longest history of Chinese immigration and settlement. We focus in particular on the pronunciation of English, drawing on data collected in the Bay Area from 2008–2009 to argue that Chinese cultural and linguistic practices are gaining currency in the wider community. Our discussion looks at the experiences of third and higher immigrant generations, especially as they interact with more recent waves of immigrants, and the resulting dominance of Chinese and other Asian identities across the Bay Area. The layered and rapidly shifting Chinese American experience suggests potential future directions for the study of other immigrant communities in the United States.

The “Chinese Question” and the Canada–US Border, 1885: “Why don't Governor Squire send his troops to Semiahmoo to prevent the twelve or fifteen thousand pagans from crossing our borders from British Columbia?”

This article explores the significance of Chinese immigration on the formation of the Canada–US border during the fall of 1885. The fear of a flood of Chinese immigrants from Canada turned into a campaign to drive Chinese communities out of Washington Territory, as white workers sought to “enforce” the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882. In turn, developments in the United States caused Canadians to reexamine their own “Chinese Question” and the meaning of the Chinese Restriction Act 1885. For Chinese laborers in Canada, the growing significance of the Canada–US border in the debate over the “Chinese Question” only diversified migratory patterns and methods. This migratory diversification tested the parameters of both the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Chinese Restriction Act and pushed the application of the legislation into a new bureaucratic reality. By the end of 1885, the debate over the Chinese Question had forged a new Canada–US border.

The Page Act of 1875: In the Name of Morality

The Page Act of 1875 is usually characterized as an anti-prostitution law that helped pave the way for the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Most scholars also describe the Page Act as an example of lawmaking restraint, as Congress refrained from broader immigration restrictions out of respect for the existing Burlingame Treaty with China. This Article suggests that such an understanding is inaccurate or at best, questionable. Though the Page Act’s text may be focused on the protection of American morals, a review of newspaper articles, legislative debates, and other historical records indicate that the true driving force was the protection of American labor. Furthermore, while the text maybe have complied with the Burlingame Treaty, the Act’s application was a de facto violation of Chinese immigration protections. The focus on prostitution was thus a strategic victory: the emphasis on morality successfully masked what would otherwise be questionable restrictions on Chinese immigration. The Page Act is thus an early example of legislation purposefully couched in the name of morality in order to avoid legal or political backlash. It should be remembered not as a footnote to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, but as an important episode in the development of both immigration and foreign treaty law.

Chinese Ethnicity and the American Heroic Artisan in Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go (1879)

Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go appeared at peak of vitriolic anti-Chinese sentiment that broke out in California in 1870s. (1) This racial drama touched on national debate over the Chinese question and used theatrical performance as persuasive ideological force to advocate exclusion of Chinese immigrants from United States. According to David Roediger, this farce provided a way for men to carouse after at Anti-Coolie Club, white working-class male preserve for communal bonding. (2) Unlike most of nineteenth-century yellow-face performances that distorted Chinese immigrants mainly for comic effect, Grimm's play enunciates rigorous dialectical criticism of Chinese. Drawing upon work of recent scholars such as Yong Chen, James Moy, and Floyd Cheung, who have used Chinese language sources such as newspapers, letters, diaries, diplomatic writings, and Chinese government reports in order to explicate what was done to Chinese and how Chinese reacted to it, this essay examines place of Chinese workers in late nineteenth-century American ethnic/gender hierarchy. (3) I explore issues concerning Chinese immigrants by assuming various perspectives along spectrum from Euro-American to Chinese, arguing from such vantage points that ethnicity and gender play significant role both in reiterating negative stereotypes and in complicating or resisting them. While James Moy claims that Grimm's farce indicates that earlier American construction of deceitful Chinese was required to rationalize strategy that white Americans would later employ in their dealings with Asians, (4) I would suggest that Grimm's melodrama criticizes not only Chinese supporters but anti-Chinese agitators as well. The play's satire on white workers may partially explain why, in fact, there is no record of performance of play at any established theater in San Francisco, (5) while later production at Bird Cage Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, outside California where play is set and characters are satirized, is known to have received thunderous applause. (6) Floyd Cheung maintains that Grimm's play articulates American racial stereotypes that waver between frighteningly feminized and menacingly masculine. He observes that play's depictions of Chinese as threatening reveal an underlying Euro-American anxiety about masculinity. (7) Cheung's reading corrects Dave Williams's assertion that late nineteenth-century American playwrights portrayed Chinese only as effeminate, powerless, and comical, rather than as economically or culturally dangerous. (8) Yet Grimm's play manifests not only an ambiguous gendering of Chinese, but an equivalent contradictory gendering of white workers. While seeming to be masculine in driving off Chinese with violence, for instance, white worker could be regarded as feminized because of his failure to compete legitimately for respectable work. In The Chinese Must Go, contradictory gendering of both Chinese and white laborers stems not only from Euro-American gender anxiety, but from misconceptions of Chinese immigrant experience in United States. I. Feminization of Chinese Laborers Grimm's portrayal of Chinese workers appears to convey populist antagonism against Chinese. The play depicts Blaine family in San Francisco and their reliance on Chinese helpers for their daily housework. William, tailor, and his son Frank blame Chinese labor for their financial tribulations and attempt to justify their ill treatment of Chinese by claiming that they are deserving of punishment. Not coincidentally, their surname--Blaine--is likely to allude to contemporary politician, James Gillespie Blaine (1830-93), Speaker of United States House of Representatives, known to have strongly favored Exclusion Acts against Chinese immigration. (9) The title of play, in fact, was borrowed from slogan of Workingmen's Party of California, white labor union that sought anti-Chinese legislation. …

Editorial Comment: Representation/Reception/Nostalgia

Editorial CommentRepresentation/Reception/Nostalgia Catherine A. Schuler I fully intended to begin my editorial comment with profound observations about the newest trends in current theatre and performance studies scholarship or the general state of the profession or even insolvent universities and defunded theatre programs. Each time I started that editorial comment, however, my mind’s eye turned to Beth Kattelman’s article “Magic, Monsters, and Movies: America’s Midnight Ghost Shows.” Call me shallow, but I have reached the age—my late fifties—where the mere mention of low, popular entertainment from my pre-teen years causes sensuous waves of nostalgia to wash through me. Every weekend my brothers and I sat in front of a monstrous tube television set to watch the local broadcast of Shock Theatre, which came to our little farming town of Dixon, Illinois, from the Quad Cities. We loved this grisly program hosted by a shabbily costumed local crazy with a bad Transylvanian accent. Shock Theatre shaped my identity: it was here that I learned to love both Bela Lugosi and tuxedo tails. Who would have guessed that Shock Theatre would become the object of serious cultural analysis? I suspect others of my generation will also get a tiny thrill of recognition from Kattelman’s article, but this general issue of Theatre Journal offers a profusion of delights both high and low for readers of all tastes and ages. Indeed, this issue might well be titled “from lowbrow to highbrow with station stops at middlebrow and the avant-garde.” Broadway is the venue for three of the five articles. In “Trying on The Yellow Jacket,” Ju Yon Kim traces the trajectory of this “American classic” from moderately successful Broadway commodity to proto-Brechtian avant-garde object d’art. Hoping to redeem the corporate Broadway product, Anne Beggs uses the enormously profitable Urinetown to argue that the popular does not necessarily preclude the subversive. Shane Vogel’s “Jamaica on Broadway: The Popular Caribbean and Mock Transnational Performance” probes the radical implications of a calypso musical intended for Harry Belafonte, but re-narrated and re-purposed for Lena Horne. Broadway’s long shadow also fell—albeit briefly—on Tall Horse, an unlikely contender for the Yankee dollar. Needless to say, Kattelman’s monsters did not appear on Broadway, although they surely touched the US psyche in profound and mysterious ways. Representations of race on the commercial stage are rarely unproblematic, and “Jamaica on Broadway” and “Trying on The Yellow Jacket,” the articles bookending this issue of Theatre Journal, reveal the dynamics of the reflexively signifying commercial commodity. In this context, I understand reflexive as “unthinking”—but without implications of innocence. The creators of Jamaica and The Yellow Jacket hoped to profit from new trends in culture and society: in the first instance, the “bomb” and the calypso craze that swept New York in the 1950s; and in the second, Chinese immigration and a backlash against naturalism. Distance from the productions and greater sensitivity to racial representation and reception indicate just how racially loaded they were. Although rescue and reintroduction of these rather obscure classics of the Broadway stage are significant acts of recuperation, the light shed by Vogel and Kim on the dynamics of race, representation, and reception is surely more interesting and important. Shane Vogel’s “Jamaica on Broadway: The Popular Caribbean and Mock Transnational Performance” begins thus: “Lena Horne almost didn’t star in the Broadway production of Jamaica.” How different this exemplar of Broadway Caribbeana would have been without her. With a book by black-listed lyricist Yip Harburg (and Fred Saidy), Jamaica was supposed to be a sharp social satire featuring calypso idol Harry Belafonte. When Belafonte suddenly dropped the project, his replacement was the not-Jamaican, not-calypso, not-male Lena Horne—then a popular nightclub singer with no experience in book musicals. Belafonte’s unlikely replacement required a new narrative, which obviously changed the [End Page ix] musical’s purpose and identity. Although marketed as a “folk” musical, Jamaica’s dubious Jamaican authenticity was further compromised by Horne’s presence, and whatever folk qualities the musical might once have had vanished along with Belafonte. Nonetheless, Vogel argues that Jamaica—a...

Containing “Contamination”: Cardinal Moran andFin de SiècleAustralian National Identity, 1888-1911

Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884–1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to “Christianise” the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation building. As the nineteenth century closed, Moran's aims were also complicated by the more insidious threats represented by a challenge to religious faith by fin de siècle ideas — a modernism manifesting as both a general challenge and a specific doctrinal relativism that might erode the Church's authority, and the threat Moran felt was posed to the development of the liberal Australian state and the Catholic Church by radical political alternatives. Concern that a mood of religious apostasy and secularisation might spread to the Catholic community also influenced Moran's support for the fledgling Australian Labor Party, which Moran believed could develop as an instrument to reinforce a moral and inclusive sense of Australian identity for the Catholic working class. Like his pro-Chinese views, Moran's advocacy of “the rights and duties of labour” was defined by an imagined alliance of evangelism and nation building, stimulated by the fear, as he expressed in 1891, of “an unchristianized world.”

Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon by R. Gregory Nokes

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 4 Those questions aside, Gray Whaley has produced a compelling and thought-provoking study that raises important questions about the complexity of the colonial process in the Pacific Northwest and about the worldview and actions of the historical actors — both Native American and Euro-American — who shaped and were shaped by this process.As the author makes clear, the long-term consequences of Euro-American colonization remain with us today. As such, he makes the case for a sober assessment of this complex history in order to reach a better understanding of both past and present: “The fact that Euro-Americans attempted genocide as a central component of settler colonialism makes it a crucial topic for historical analysis, one that should not be denied, buried in guilt and shame, or left to racist, archaic histories like [Francis Fuller] Victor’s to explain” (p. 226). Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University, New Hampshire Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon by R. Gregory Nokes Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2009. Notes, bibliography, index. 208 pages. $18.95 paper. In the summer of 1887, the bodies of three Chinese miners were discovered in the Snake River, drifting with the current from the mouth of Hells Canyon. Shot and mutilated, they were the first indication of the most deadly attack on Chinese in the history of the American West. The event received scant mention at the time in the press, and the local judicial system was less than zealous in pursuing and convicting those responsible. Across time, the massacre faded into rumor and legend, a circumstance largely favored by the inhabitants of Wallowa County. In Massacred for Gold, R. Gregory Nokes unveils the story of over thirty Chinese massacred at their placer mining camp on Deep Creek, a tributary of the Snake River in northeast Oregon, and the theft of their gold. The author’s attention was first drawn to the little-known tragedy when the County Clerk of Wallowa County discovered in an unused courthouse safe a cache of long-lost legal documents related to the massacre. The author sets the stage for the story with the arrival of the Chinese miners in Hells Canyon and contemporary accounts of the discovery of the tragedy.What little is known of the victims,the Chinese miners at Deep Creek, is paired with what is known of the murderers, a strange mix of Wallowa County rustlers and “adventurous” school boys (p. 24). In part 1, “The Dead,” Nokes provides a brief overview of Chinese immigration from southern China’s Guangdong Province and their subsequent labors and entrepreneurial activities in the West. The remainder of part 1 moves among placing the Deep Creek murders within the context of similar acts of violence against Chinese in the Far West in the late nineteenth century, the author’s firsthand visit to the remote scene of the attack, and the reaction of the Chinese government to the massacre. Part 2, “The ‘Innocents’” traces the eventual investigation and indictment of the killers. It is a tangled legal web. The lawmen of Wallowa County first pursued the leaders of the attack on the Chinese at Deep Creek for their horse rustling activities, not for the murders. The plot involves jailbreaks at gunpoint, hurried departures to other states, new identities, and changing testimony from witnesses who claim not to have taken part in the shootings. Throughout is the question of the gold. How much was taken from the camp at Deep Creek? Which of the gang made away with the modest wealth of the murdered miners? In the first two parts of Massacred for Gold, the author pulls together previously known accounts of the massacre and carefully sorts a  Reviews century of local lore and legend from the facts. In part 3,“P.S.Keeping Secrets,”Nokes recounts his efforts across ten years of researching the book to build relationships with county officials and historians with the hope of discovering further information on the massacre. Even a century after the tragic event at Deep Creek, he discovers a reticence in this close-knit community . Only three generations separate his pursuit of the story from the murders, and...

Les Chinois au Royaume-Uni, ou l'illusion de l'immigration choisie

Ethnographic research conducted in both China and the United Kingdom shows that the public policy of the British state in the area of immigration is not a rigid constraint externally imposed on migrants. On the contrary, it is incorporated by the latter into their strategies, which leads them to migratory, employment and survival practices that produce the social phenomena (false asylum claims, illegal work, etc.) against which the aforementioned public policy claims to act. Far from reflecting the individual qualities possessed by a given candidate for migration, moreover, screening criteria (legal residence, educational background and so on) are merely administrative statuses supplied to clients by professionals in China and the United Kingdom in exchange for hard cash. Official rhetoric concerning “selective” migration only results in limiting the number of entrants, with no effect on their “quality”. Finally, it turns out that Chinese immigration to the United Kingdom tends to leave the ethnic sector and enter a “neo-proletarian” sector that plays a transitional role on the road to integration into the mainstream labor market, although conditions are sometimes more difficult for employees there. ■

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

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.

Chinese Ethnic Settlements in Britain: Spatial Meanings of an Orderly Distribution, 1981–2001

This paper focuses on Chinese immigration and its spatial manifestations in Britain in the past two decades. The 1980s can be recorded as a turning-point in the history of Chinese immigration to Britain, marking a substantial increase in the number and diversity of Chinese immigrants. The same decade should also be considered a landmark in contemporary British urban history, as it featured a major transformation in the Chinese urban landscape. Systematic analyses of census data reveal that, since the 1980s, Chinese immigration to Britain has undergone a process of dramatic structural transformation that has facilitated the decentralisation of the Chinatown enclave economy and the spatial diffusion of Chinese residents. The spatial configuration of ‘new-wave’ immigration has been a regular rank-size relationship of residential distributions. This urban system contains many small and diffused clusters, a lesser number of medium-size Chinatowns, but a few large Chinatowns. The systematic distribution of different Chinese settlements signifies the Chinese representation in different industrial sectors, as well as the equilibrium outcome of the organisational forces of these sectors.

Tusans (tusheng) and the Changing Chinese Community in Peru

Since their arrival in Peru 160 years ago, the Chinese have struggled to form a community. Faced with hard living conditions, scattered in haciendas, deprived of Chinese women and suffering from racism, mistreatment and restrictive immigration laws, the task of keeping alive seemed insurmountable. Paradoxically, the emergence and consolidation of the Chinese community came about through mestizaje and conversion to Catholicism. This mestizaje allowed them to rebuild the Chinese family structure, though an internal hierarchy appeared depending on the degree of mestizaje . The Catholic Church also played a role as artisan of Chinese identity by helping at the very beginning with the organization of associations and by strengthening the sense of belonging and recognition of the Tusans ( tusheng in Mandarin) or “local born” as part of the Chinese community. However, the new immigrants from China, arriving since the 1980s, have contested the legitimacy of the Tusans and posed new challenges to the local Chinese community. How and to what extent has this new Chinese immigration changed the community life and reinforced/weakened the Tusan identity? This article describes the historical development of the old Chinese community and analyzes the interaction between the Tusans and the recently arrived Chinese.

Historical Trends and Sociological Implications of Chinese Immigration

Historical Trends and Sociological Implications of Chinese Immigration

Equality and Exclusion: the Racial Constitution of Colonial Liberalism

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local habitat wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism.

Unskilled Labor Migration and the Illegality Spiral: Chinese, European, and Mexican Indocumentados in the United States, 1882–2007

This article explores the historical production of immigrant illegality in the United States as a set of interrelated yet distinct racial projects. The passage of nineteenth and twentieth century immigration legislation, which instituted requirements for immigrant identification, transformed unskilled labor movements from China and Europe into unauthorized or improperly documented immigration. This illegality was differently racialized. Excluded as a group, Chinese entrants became wholesale associated with illegality. In contrast, though it far surpassed the numbers of unauthorized entrants from China, European illegal movement was quickly forgotten. Unauthorized immigration from China and Europe were met with tightened immigration law and enforcement. Set in motion by the regulation of Chinese and European immigration, this “spiral of illegality” created the context for the transformation of Mexican laborers into indocumentados in the twentieth century and continues to shape the conditions under which twenty-first century immigrants arrive and live in the United States. While Mexican nationals have been the largest group to have arrived undocumented in the United States, today they constitute about half of the undocumented population, which hails from everywhere in the world, including nations in Asia and Europe. Recognition of such intersections among undocumented immigrant groups questions widespread assumptions about the existence of sharp distinctions between contemporary and historical immigration, and it also contributes to emerging forms of cross-ethnic activism for immigrant rights that complicate notions of indocumentados as nationals of one particular country.

Chinese Immigration to Western Manitoba Since 1884: Wah Hep, George Chong, the KMT, and the United Church

Very little attention has been paid to Chinese settlements outside of large urban centres in Canada. In this essay, the author introduces the history of Chinese immigration to Western Manitoba since 1884. In telling the story of two of the earliest laundrymen in the region, the author explains the roles of the Zhongguo Guomindang (KMT) and Protestant Christian churches in helping Chinese immigrants assimilate and achieve social status in Canada.

Text as Discourse: The Chinese in Canada in Historiographical Perspective

As a historiographical analysis, this essay seeks to understand the idea of historical layering through the topic of Chinese immigration to Canada. It considers the following four works: In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia (1974) by James Morton, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia (1978) by W Peter Ward, From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (1982) by Harry Con et al., and The Concubine's Children (1994) by Denise Chong. It does so in an effort to compare and contrast their approaches with regard to consensus and specialist histories, top-down and bottom-up approaches, as well as passive and active historical representations.

Reconciling with History: The Chinese-Canadian Head Tax Redress

apology to Chinese Canadians at the Parliament of Canada for the imposition of the head tax and expressed sorrow for the subsequent exclusion of Chinese immigrants as a result of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act. It took 121 years after the first head tax was levied on Chinese entering Canada and 83 years after the passing of the 1923 Act before Canada officially recognized the historical wrongdoings to the Chinese. Despite intense lobbying by Chinese-Canadian community organizations and individuals since the first Chinese Canadian filed a claim in 1983 to have the amount of the head tax returned to him, it was only after seven prime ministers had taken office, and many negotiations and court proceedings had taken place, that a settlement was reached in 2006. Why did the Canadian Chinese head tax redress take so long to materialize, especially in view of the 2002 apology offered by Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand, to New Zealand Chinese on account of a similar head tax? This report traces the history of the Chinese head tax redress in Canada and examines the factors that contributed to its settlement. Origin of the Chinese Head Tax in Canada 1

The Chinese Must Go

Some labor historians and social historians of race are tempted to try to explain Chinese American racial oppression in the US purely by appeal to economic factors, especially the role that Chinese American men played in the US labor market. In this essay, I argue that such reduction is not possible. I briefly describe the history of Chinese immigration to the US, focusing on key changes in US law governing immigration and citizenship as they affected the Chinese. I then refute two economic reductionist views of Chinese American racial oppression. I conclude by suggesting a third, alternative understanding of this oppression that appeals to economic factors among others.

Containing Discontent: Anti-Chinese Racism in the Reinvention of Angus Cameron

Angus Cameron is usually remembered as one of the pioneers of labour representation, a carpenter elected to the New South Wales parliament in 1874 who became a leading advocate for legislation to stop Chinese immigration. Historians have seen this link as evidence that racism was pushed from below by the working class. This article shows that Cameron turned to anti-Chinese agitation at the very point he broke with the labour movement, and argues that he most likely did so in the hope of saving his political career. In particular it looks at Cameron's infamous Select Committee Report into Common Lodging-houses, and the crisis in Cameron's parliamentary career that preceded the establishment of the select committee. It also suggests that key members of the Sydney ruling class had an interest in deflecting attention from the appalling condition of rental housing in Sydney, and that Cameron's report relieved some of the pressure on them.