Immigrants do what most wouldn’t
In the 1860s, crews on the railroad from California east to Utah that would stitch the United States into one massive country, sea-to-shiny-sea, enjoyed mild California days and nights until freezing came with winter.
The colder a day was, the smaller the workforce. Sometimes, too few workers meant no work was done.
During freezing cold days, some construction workers tossed cans of frozen normally liquid nitroglycerin to others without thinking about it; it saved steps and frozen “nitro” was safe. Only as liquid was it dangerous; it could explode by accident. American workers never threw cans of the frozen explosive around. American workers didn’t like it anyway; they preferred dynamite.
Winter slowed construction because workers quit rather than suffer. A solution was needed. China!
As California Gov. Leland Stanford, co-founder of the Central Pacific Railroad company, said when questioned if he was serious about bringing Chinese workers to build the railroad: “They built the Great Wall of China, they could easily lay railroad tracks.” Or words to that effect.
Stuffed into ocean-going ships, 13,000-15,000 Chinese came. Winter didn’t bother them. Zero temperatures that froze nitroglycerin made work easier. White supervisors would watch and appreciate a long line of Chinese tossing frozen cans of nitro, man to man, up the side of a mountain because that saved time and time was money.
Winter in the Sierra Nevada always ends. How did people know? A day would come without a blizzard, without clouds, with a clear beautiful day disturbed only by a huge explosion. Everyone, including the Chinese, knew what that meant — one can of nitro, one too many was tossed from one Chinese worker to another on a day when the nitro started to thaw.
Meet the thousands of Chinese immigrants brought to the U.S. to work because Americans refused to do the work that was considered too dangerous on bitterly cold, icy California mountains.
Most of the railroad construction workers from the East were Irish Americans, hired off of boats in New York or Baltimore. Their flatland jobs weren’t as difficult as the Sierra Nevada job. Americans wanted more money than the Irish who walked off of boats. Thus, an Irish workforce.
Once Stanford’s railroad was finished, more railroads were started, but there weren’t enough construction workers. Mexicans were recruited. A map of United States railroads with overlapping lines on where Mexicans live and one can see who filled the railroad construction employment gap.
Likewise, Mexican farmworkers have dominated the Western agricultural workforce for over 150 years.
Congress, including Sen. Leland Stanford, R-California, basically ended immigration from
China in 1882. Mexicans were untouched until 1924 when the almost all-White (one Black) Congress imposed visa requirements on Mexicans. It cut off immigration from Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. By design, Congress limited Roman Catholic and Jewish immigration by imposing tiny quotas.
It was extreme ethnic discrimination. Those quotas lasted until the end of WWII in 1945 and in the 1950s and ’60s.
What didn’t change, however, was immigrant desire to work at jobs Americans refused. Half of our farm workers today are working illegally. These 400,000 mostly Mexican men feed us.
Then, there is the recent Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore.
Six dead or missing: Dorlian Cabrera, 26, Guatemala; Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 25, Mexico; Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, 38, Honduras; Jose Mynor Lopez, 35, Guatemala; Miguel Luna, El Salvador; the sixth man, unidentified from Mexico.
“One of the reasons Latinos were involved in this accident is because Latinos do the work that others don’t want to do,” says Lucia Islas, president of the Baltimore Latino Committee, a nonprofit group.
The story of immigrants who do what others won’t continues.