California Joint Immigration Committee
The Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was formed in San Francisco, California in May 1905, two months after the California State Legislature passed a unanimous resolution requesting that Congress “limit and diminish the further immigration of Japanese.”[1] The resolution passed within a week after the San Francisco Chronicle began printing a series of anti-Japanese articles.
[1] The league was dedicated to excluding Japanese people from the United States and was funded mostly by the California Building and Construction Trades Council, a prominent labor union.
The Japanese Exclusion League was a pressure group representing the interests of nativists, veteran's organizations, women's clubs, labor unions, and farmers.
His testimony included the following remarks: “Japanese are less assimilable and more dangerous as residents in this country than any other of the peoples ineligible under our laws…They do not come here with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity…They never cease being Japanese…In pursuit of their intent to colonize this country with that race they seek to secure land and to found large families…They have greater energy, greater determination, and greater ambition than the other yellow and brown races ineligible to citizenship, and with the same low standards of living, hours of labor, use of women and child labor, they naturally make more dangerous competitors in an economic way.” [4]After the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, McClatchy took formal leadership of the Japanese Exclusion League, which was reorganized and renamed the California Joint Immigration Committee, in part because of “the prejudice which the name of the [earlier] organization created.
[6] The general aim of the CJIC at this early stage was to gain broad support for the maintenance of the new law, which did not allow for a quota of immigrants from Japan.
The California department of this military veterans organization was concerned by potential Japanese aggression and had maintained an anti-Japanese position since its founding.
The groups against exclusion and the CJIC's activities consisted of various national and regional clergy associations, businessmen, institutes of higher education, and peace activists.
Led by former U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham, NCAJR was founded in 1921 by Sidney L. Gulick, an educator who spent twenty-five years as a missionary in Japan before returning to the United States.
Once the Immigration Act of 1924 had been passed, NCAJR distributed pamphlets written by Gulick and fellow missionary William Axling [fr].
Gulick argued that excluding Japanese immigrants was damaging relations with Japan and that the only way to address the problem was to institute a quota.
A 1924 study conducted by the Japanese Foreign Office found that of nineteen California newspapers, ten were anti-Japanese and five were pro-Japanese, with the rest holding a neutral stance.
In a special issue of the English-language newspaper The Japan Times and Mail published five months after the passage of the immigration act, prominent Japanese citizens expressed their dissatisfaction with the exclusion clause.
In response, the CJIC issued a pamphlet in which McClatchy argued that the Gentleman's Agreement had been “inefficient” and that the exclusion clause of the 1924 act was not due to racial prejudice.
Rather than continue to pursue a political solution, the FCCCA would work to educate the public and gain influential supporters throughout the country.
[19] With the onset of the Great Depression, business interests on the West Coast created their own pro-quota movement in hopes of stimulating more trade with Japan.
McClatchy protested by publishing another anti-quota pamphlet composed as an open letter to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce leader Wallace M.
Starting in the late 1920s, the CJIC advocated the exclusion of Mexican immigrants on the basis that they were not white or black and therefore could not become citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1790, revised in 1870.
