Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2011
Document Type
Article
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:3 (Summer 2011).
Abstract
Mark Wyman presents the conflicting and often contradictory ways our government has dealt with immigration to satisfy the demands of western growers who have claimed since the late 1880s that there was a shortage of available labor to harvest crops. In the process of meeting the challenge of ripe crops going to waste, local entities used children from reform schools and Native Americans from boarding schools to perform agricultural labor cheaply. Congress, in banning Chinese immigration under the Exclusion Act of 1882, kept the door cracked open to admit Japanese and Hindu workers to do some of the more advanced tasks in viniculture such as pruning and carefully picking delicate fruit without bruising the skin.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.