The History of Asian Immigrants in the United States during the 20th Century

The story of early Asian immigration to the United States is also one about race legislation and discrimination at a time when global populations were moving with more frequency and merging ahead of their ability to practically assimilate. The greatest involuntary migration in history took place as some 12.5 million black African crossed the Atlantic as slaves.[1] In the New World, the advent of abolition created a knock-on labor crisis that was filled in many instances by contract or indentured labor from India and China while at the same time opportunist migration was taking place from the old cultures of Asia and Europe to the New World and the emerging European colonies.

The first Asian immigrant group to make landfall in North America, besides those that crossed the land bridge many thousands of years ago, were the Chinese. The first documented presence of Chinese in the United States were those that landed in the ship Pallas on August 9, 1785 in the port of Baltimore. The ship was owned and operated by Captain John O’Donnell who sailed her regularly between the East Coast and various ports in China, and this, his last voyage, left his crew stranded in the United States. Three among them were Chinese and thirty-three were lascars whose home ports were scattered across South Asia. O’Donnell married and settled on an estate on the outskirts of Baltimore that he named Canton in fond memory of a lifetime of mercantile engagement with the coast of China. A record exists of a petition to Congress submitted by the three Chinese for funds to return home although not of any monies paid. The fate of the three Chinese and thirty-three lascars is unknown.

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