By Argiris Malapanis

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Michael Luo, April 2025, published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY.

“Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan­ — Gold Mountain,” says a brief summary in the title’s hardcover book jacket.

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“Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race. In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy.

“Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country’s history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals. At the book’s heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country’s first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.” [Emphasis added.]

This book documents the shameful history of institutionalized racism, enforced by incredible violence, in what could be described as pogroms against Chinese immigrants.

The federal government jumped on the bandwagon of bigotry. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which became law in May 1882. It prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The Act also denied Chinese residents already in the United States the ability to become citizens. Chinese people traveling in or out of the country were required to carry a certificate identifying their status or risk deportation. It was the first major U.S. law implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States. It helped shape U.S. immigration policy in the 20th-century.

The prolonged economic crisis that unfolded from 1873 to 1879 was used by demagogues to justify the scapegoating of Chinese workers by perpetrating the myth that Chinese immigrants were taking increasingly scarce jobs from “real Americans.” These immigrants were employed in the most physically demanding jobs, constituted about 90% of the labor force that laid the rail for the intercontinental railway, and were concentrated in the southwestern states. Yet during the decade from 1880 to 1890, the Chinese population in the United States was approximately 0.2% of the total.

The Chinese Exclusion Act remained in place for more than 60 years and was not repealed until December 1943. During those long decades, reactionary demagogues, including top government officials, insisted they were “only enforcing the law” while carrying out widespread racist discrimination against U.S. residents of Chinese descent.

The history described by Luo — a writer for the New Yorker magazine — is echoed in what millions of working people face in the United States today.

U.S. president Donald Trump and his supporters now demagogically scream about an “invasion” of the United States by undocumented immigrants — the majority of whom are currently Latinos. Government officials and their backers made similar untrue and shrill claims about Chinese immigrants during the historical periods Luo examines in his book. Similar scare tactics and fear mongering about crimes perpetrated by “immigrant aliens” were prevalent then, as we hear today.

However, as Luo explains, “The Chinese in America were not simply the victims of barbarous violence and repression; they were protagonists in the story of America.” [Emphasis added.]

The same can be said about our immigrant brothers and sisters today.

This book is a must read for anyone supporting immigrant rights. Buy it. Read it. Pass on the information, or the book itself, to friends, relatives, fellow students, coworkers, and anyone else you know who may be interested.

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