Hundreds of Chinese people immigrated from China to the United States from 1882 until 1943. The reason they came to the United States was because they wanted to have a better life and to support their families who were left behind in China. Instead, they were treated with prejudice and faced racial discrimination.
Young mean were usually immigrated in United States and they worked as a mining labor and other industries . Chinese laborers build the Central Pacific Railroad, which was connected to the Union Pacific in Utah, to export and trading products to another countries The Chinese immigrant workers received just twenty-six to thirty-five dollars a month for twelve-hours a day and they had to provide their own food and shelters (www.gliah.uh.edu/historyonline/china1.cfm). They were significant contributors in laying tracks and digging rocks on the mountain for vast transcontinental railroad between 1860 and 1870 The work was grueling, performed almost entirely by hand. With pickaxes, hammers, and crowbars, workers chipped out railbeds. Dirt and rock were carried away in baskets and carts. Tree stumps had to be rooted out, tracks laid, spikes driven, and aqua ducts and tunnels contructed (www.gliah.uh.edu/historyonline/china1cfm). During the winter of 1865-1866, when railroad carved passages through the summit of the Sierra Nevada, three thousand lived and worked in tunnels dug beneath forty-feet snowdrifts. Accidents, avalanches, and explosions left as estimated one thousand and two hundred Chinese immigrant workers dead.
Chinese immigrants became also the victims of violence from the White working class in California. Americans accused them of unfair competition in business, lowering wages and also required to work longer hours than White workers. In some instances, they were victims of mob violence .They also couldn't gain citizenship, the right to vote, and hold political office. During the 1870's, however, the immigration of Chinese coincided with an economic depression, and the Chinese were made the scapegoats .
