The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin
2017-08-06 · Guest: Gabriel Jack Chin (Professor of law at UC Davis) · 48:53
The historical war on Chinese restaurants
Bob Zadek and Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin discuss the historical “war” on Chinese restaurants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They explore how labor unions and nativist groups used violence, boycotts, discriminatory licensing, and police harassment to stifle economic competition from Chinese immigrants, drawing parallels to modern regulatory hurdles like certificates of need.
Topics: Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration history, economic protectionism, labor unions, occupational licensing, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, Elsie Sigel murder, war on drugs, certificates of need
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Gabriel “Jack” Chin
Introduction to the War on Chinese Restaurants [00:28]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. I am, as always, your host, Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning.
Momentous weekend it is. On this day in 1861, President—newly elected President Abraham Lincoln proposed and got enacted into law the first—ugh—the first income tax. It was temporary. Lots of laughs there. It was temporary, lasted for 10 years, it taxed other things as well, and then it went away only to come back several decades later in 1913. We ended up with an income tax for good.
Also on this day in history, quite a momentous day, the Continental Congress sat down to work on the United States Constitution. The first draft of the Constitution was debated on this day in history, 1787. Would that I could have been there to hear that discussion.
With that introduction to this morning’s events in history, this morning we’re going to talk about yet another “war on.” Our recent history is replete with war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terrorism. Less known is perhaps our first “war on” in American history. That “war on” happened somewhere around the end of the 19th century, and of all of the threats to life in America as we know it, America declared war on—are you ready?—Chinese restaurants. In one of the uglier parts of American immigration history, the United States—the state and the federal government and the people—all declared war on Chinese restaurants.
Introducing Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin [01:40]
Bob Zadek: Why? What was the goal? What threat were Chinese restaurants to life in America? I thought you’d never ask. To help us understand that, I am delighted—so delighted—to welcome to the show this morning Professor Jack Chin. Jack is a professor of law at UC Davis, has written extensively on immigration issues, and Jack’s article in Regulation magazine entitled “The War on Chinese Restaurants” had to get my attention. I became very curious. Jack tells an important story relevant today on the United States’ war on Chinese restaurants. If it weren’t so sinister, it would appear a bit silly, but it was hardly silly, quite sinister, quite mean-spirited. So Jack, what was the war on Chinese restaurants? What was the problem with Chinese restaurants in the late 19th century that our country initiated a concerted war on them?
Jack Chin: Yeah, it’s kind of amazing because now you think of Chinese restaurants as—you know, they’re pretty tame. There are Chinese restaurants in practically every town and city and village in America. You know, in a certain way, they’re as American as apple pie, right? Chinese restaurants are everywhere, and they certainly aren’t thought of as dangerous, as harmful, as locations of vice or crime.
But at the turn of the century, at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, Chinese restaurants were thought to present a couple kinds of problems. One problem was that there was suspicion of these Asian people. What are they doing? Are they selling opium? Are they trying to seduce white women? It sounds ridiculous now—it did to me when I started doing this research, I couldn’t believe it—but at the time, there was this fear that who knows what these Orientals are up to in these restaurants. And there was just a thought that it could be dangerous. That was one thing.
Competition and the Cooks and Waiters Union [03:50]
Jack Chin: But I think the more important problem that people saw with regard to Chinese restaurants was that it was competition. The main group that opposed Chinese restaurants in this period was the Cooks and Waiters Union, later the Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees Union, which was part of the American Federation of Labor. And white restaurant workers and restaurant owners looked at these Chinese restaurants and said, “You know, they’re taking our business. We don’t want to compete against them,” because the Chinese restaurants were inexpensive. And so the Cooks and Waiters Union thought this is a problem that has to be stamped out.
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is you use the phrase that one hears quite often today: “They took my job, they took my business.” Where in the world did Americans, did any worker, develop the concept that something is your job, your business, your product? It isn’t any of that. You only have the right to offer your goods and service to the public, and if you can persuade the public that you have a good product at the right price, then and only then is it yours. But you have no birthright to make a sale. I find that whole concept of “taking my job” to be so abhorrent and, yes, anti-American, if by American you mean America with our free market roots. So there they are, they’re taking our business. And of course, part of it, I guess, was that Chinese obviously looked different, and the difference itself triggers all kinds of visceral feelings of racism, distrust, dislike, misunderstanding and the like. That had to play a part in it. After all, it wasn’t a war on Italian restaurants, even though Italians looked different than the Northern Europeans. But part of that had to be, I can’t help but feel, because the Chinese had a different culture and they were just plain different.
Jack Chin: I think that’s right. There was a feeling at the time, which I think has been disproved by history, that Asians couldn’t assimilate, they could not become Americans. You know, other groups from around the world could assimilate, even though they might speak Swedish or Italian or German now, in a few years or months, they or their children will blend into society, American society, and so they’re really sort of Americans in waiting. But the feeling was different about Asians, and I think that was untrue.
As you well know, Bob, at this time, up until the 1920s, there were no numerical limitations on immigration. And so these white unions were saying, “We don’t want this competition,” but any number of immigrants from Germany or Sweden or Italy or Ireland could come to the United States. So it wasn’t immigration competition that they were concerned about. So I think you’re right, it was a race thing. It was—the problem was that they didn’t want to compete against people of a particular race because they thought of—they did think of America as a white country and as being a place that was specially consecrated for the benefit of white people.
From Violence to Boycotts [05:55]
Bob Zadek: Now let’s get to—so now we have the unions fearing or opposing plain old economic competition from, of all places, Chinese restaurants. And what were the tools that they and all Americans who felt that way started to use to attack—and I really do mean attack—the Chinese restaurants? Because it’s the tools, it’s the tactics that are as relevant today as they were in the 1880s and 1890s when they were directed towards the Chinese restaurants. So tell us the escalating use of tools. What were the strategies and weapons that the unions specifically and white Americans who feared what was then called the “yellow peril”—what tools did they use to try to eliminate the peril of Chinese restaurants?
Jack Chin: So at first, the war against Chinese restaurants wasn’t a metaphorical war. It was actual violence. In a number of towns across mainly the West, groups of whites—union members or not, but often union members—would warn the Chinese community, and sometimes particularly targeting restaurateurs, also sometimes targeting laundries, which was another Chinese business in this period. They would sometimes say, “Look, 48 hours, you better go. If you don’t, we’re going to kill you.” And they did. Sometimes they just burned the Chinese out if they didn’t take the word to the wise and leave on their own. So in scores of instances in California, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, the Chinese were simply driven out. That was pretty effective, and in Montana, for example, the Chinese population was substantially reduced.
But there was a little bit more law and order starting in the early 1900s, and actual riot, race riot, arson spree was going to be less acceptable to the communities there. And so the next technique was boycott. And the unions asked their members and all other members of the community to boycott Chinese restaurants. The unions would impose fines on their members for going to Chinese restaurants, and they would picket. And so this wasn’t just a “gee, we would like you not to go to the Chinese restaurants.” They would stand in front of Chinese restaurants and heckle, push, confront people who intended to go to a Chinese restaurant. So they made it difficult for people to actually go there.
And in a number of jurisdictions, Chinese restaurants went to court to get injunctions against this sort of physical blocking of people going to the Chinese restaurant. And you know, it was complicated because Chinese were not considered to be—you know, they were foreign and exotic and all this, and they were not treated as full members of the community by any means. But people wanted to eat Chinese food. The food was good and it was inexpensive.
Bob Zadek: It was very good and very cheap.
Jack Chin: And cheap. And cheap. There was a judge in Cleveland who issued an injunction. And this judge had been president of a union, he had been in Congress before he became a judge, so he was somebody who was very familiar with the ways of the world. And in his injunction, he wrote: “The law of competition in business controls business relations as immutably as the law of gravity controls matter. If a Chinaman can furnish better food at less cost than a white man, he will be patronized, and I know of no law that will compel or force any patron to pay a higher price for inferior food merely because it is prepared and served by a white man.” And I think he was right.
Bob Zadek: What beautiful language. What beautiful language.
The Elsie Sigel Murder and Moral Panic [08:53]
Jack Chin: So the boycotts didn’t work because people wanted to eat Chinese food. And so the unions came up with an idea. And again, you know, it seems crazy at the time, but as I put in my article, you know, this is documented. There was a nationwide effort to introduce legislation to prohibit white women from visiting Chinese restaurants as employees and or as patrons. And a bill to that effect that would keep white women out of Chinese restaurants because of the danger to their—the moral and economic danger that was presented by white women patronizing Chinese restaurants was introduced in a number of states, and the newspapers reported that it was actually adopted in Los Angeles.
And this particular tactic was driven forward by a notorious murder in 1909. In 1909, a young missionary woman named Elsie Sigel was murdered by her Chinese boyfriend. And this fellow was a worker in a Chinese restaurant, and he lived above a Chinese restaurant in New York, and he killed this young woman and left her body in his apartment above the Chinese restaurant. And this generated a nationwide reaction and fear of Chinese restaurants. Now, there was activity against Chinese restaurants for decades before, but this generated a new concern and a new tactic, namely the concern was that Chinese restaurants presented a particular moral danger to women. And the White Women’s Labor Act, keeping women out of Chinese restaurants, was actually—the 1913 American Federation of Labor national convention resolved that every jurisdiction in the country, every state and every city in the country, should prohibit white women from working in Chinese restaurants for moral and economic reasons.
Bob Zadek: What a gift that murder was, such a public relations gift to those people who were opposing Chinese restaurants. And Jack, if I may, it is vaguely, it is eerily reminiscent of the event in San Francisco when the illegal immigrant who was released instead of turned over to customs official—was released by San Francisco sheriff and he then killed a white woman on that pier in the Embarcadero. And that again became a cause célèbre and proof of all of the evils of immigration. So it’s an astonishingly similar event, how one event is used to support a very heinous policy against immigration, and it happened in San Francisco.
Jack Chin: Well, that San Francisco murder was a terrible thing, and I have been a prosecutor in my legal career and I am not soft on crime. But overall, as you well know, immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit less crime than similarly situated other people because they come here to work for the most part. Obviously, there’s a distribution; there are some people in every group who are bad. But if you’re an undocumented migrant, you better keep your head down, you better not commit any crimes, or you’re going to be gone. So they have an intrinsic disincentive to committing crimes that maybe is greater than other folks. So overall, if we look at the overall statistics, they are more law-abiding. We can look at individual terrible things, as with the San Francisco case and as with the New York murder of Elsie Sigel. It’s not as though Chinese restaurant workers were going around murdering white women in the early 20th century. You know, you have one horrible, tragic, notorious case, but it’s not a basis for making public policy all across the board. As a general matter, in 1909, you didn’t have to look at Chinese restaurant workers and say, “They’re probably going to kill white women if they have the chance.” That was a failed leap of logic, but it was one that a lot of people made because of this racial suspicion.
Discriminatory Licensing and Yick Wo v. Hopkins [11:13]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m speaking with Jack Chin. We are discussing a little-known but very important part of American history: our first “war on,” war on Chinese restaurants, born of the then-called, identified as the “yellow peril,” the fear of Asian immigrants into this country.
Now Jack, the unions and the public, they tried burning out the Chinese with some effect, burning out the restaurants. They tried boycotting, but that didn’t work because the food was too good and the prices were too low. So the boycott didn’t work. They then went to the legislature and, as you had explained before, statutes were proposed and in some cases enacted prohibiting white women, delicate white women, from eating what was then called chop suey and other faux, perhaps, Chinese dishes. They couldn’t go into Chinese restaurants by themselves. But that had only limited effect as a weapon in the war. Then, I think after that, where they then—they being the opponents of Chinese restaurants—looked at, oh how I hate to say the word, licensing statutes and tried to license them out of exhibit—out of existence. So tell us about how they attempted to use the state’s power to license to punish and eliminate Chinese restaurants.
Jack Chin: So during this period, there were various sorts of health regulations that were coming into existence and various sort of bureaucratic licensing schemes. To some extent, various kinds of things had been unregulated before, and 1880s, 1890s, early part of the 20th century, now you couldn’t open a restaurant without a license. You couldn’t sell liquor without a license. And you see all over the country newspaper reports and ordinances that make clear that the regulatory officials had a policy against Chinese restaurants. They would say, “You know, we don’t think that there need to be any more Chinese restaurants in Boston. We don’t think that there need to be any more Chinese restaurants in Pittsburgh.” And they would just say, you know, any applications for licenses are going to be denied.
In other instances, they had these facially neutral, you know, health and building codes, but they would say, “We’re going to pay special attention to the chop suey joints. We’re going to make sure that they follow the letter of the law.” And it was clear that these enterprises were targeted. Now, there’s a Supreme Court case from 1886 called Yick Wo v. Hopkins, I’m sure you’ve talked about on this show, that says that it’s unconstitutional to discriminate in the issuance of licenses. And that had to do with laundries in San Francisco. But the thing is, in order to challenge discriminatory enforcement, you have to have a lawyer. You have to go to court. You have to sue. And I saw lots of instances in the research of things that struck me as, even at the time, illegal. So for example, Chicago passed an ordinance that said we’re not going to issue any building permits to Chinese. Sorry, too bad. Now, even in I think that was 1905, that would have been unconstitutional. But you gotta get a lawyer, you gotta go to court, maybe the local courts share the hostility that the Chicago City Council had towards Chinese, so you gotta appeal, hope to get to the Supreme Court somehow, maybe. So we’re talking about working people here. We’re talking about small business people who have very limited amounts of capital to start their businesses. And so in many instances, it appears that the probably illegal denial of licenses, probably illegal selective enforcement, was nevertheless effective.
Certificates of Need and Modern Parallels [13:13]
Bob Zadek: Now what’s interesting is all these entrepreneurial Chinese wanted to do was sell a product that people enjoyed buying at a very low price. That’s all they wanted to do, and look at all of the effort by all of the power establishment that was done just to prevent an immigrant from offering a good-tasting food product at a low price. And how scandalous that is to use the power of government in that way.
Also, Jack, as I mentioned in the beginning, your story is so important because it’s not a story for the 1880s. It keeps on repeating itself. You mentioned a second ago about how the government would make a determination, “We are not going to issue any more licenses for Chinese restaurants because we have enough in Boston.” And I have done more than one show on certificates of need and what is called a “competitor’s veto,” where in the moving industry, in healthcare industry, there are statutes—there were statutes recently struck down in Kentucky and in Tennessee—that said you cannot open up a new moving company unless there’s a certification by your competitors that they need more competition. So that technique used a hundred and something years ago is still being used today. We are still trying to simply bar competition. America, who prides itself on loving to compete, the love of athletics, we fear competition in many ways, and Jack’s story tells us about that going back 120 years. So they tried to use licensing and what is now called certificates of need to keep out Chinese restaurants with, I guess, somewhat limited success but not much, Jack?
Jack Chin: Well, these Chinese people needed to live. They needed to work. And there was a lot of other forms of discrimination against them. For example, they were not allowed to naturalize. They couldn’t—the federal law restricted naturalization on the basis of race. And so Chinese immigrants couldn’t naturalize. And if Boston isn’t going to—you know, so you can’t naturalize and become a doctor because a lot of the professions were restricted to U.S. citizens. So there were all kinds of regulations that made it difficult for people to make a living. You know, as you say, I mean, we’re in a situation where because of all these bureaucratic regulations, the ability of Chinese to make a living was really in the discretion of the governmental authorities. And if they decided that they didn’t want you to be able to work, they had many tools to encourage you to go somewhere else. And you know, that’s what Chinese did. It was, if you can’t start a restaurant in Boston, then you’re going to go to Springfield and see if they will give you a chance.
And as you say, people wanted the Chinese food. In any given community, there would be some people who on the one hand didn’t want the competition because they were restaurateurs or restaurant employees, but there were other people who’d say, “You know, it’s not a bad thing to be able to go get Chinese food occasionally, particularly because of the price.” All of the histories of Chinese restaurants in America that I’ve seen have emphasized that the key competitive technique that Chinese restaurants used was offering inexpensive food, good portions, inexpensive food, and I believe that that’s true to this day. So Chinese would move and start a restaurant or a laundry somewhere else.
Police Harassment and the Opium Connection [15:15]
Bob Zadek: And what’s astonishing and what I find to be almost thrilling is how, look at the power disparity between immigrant Chinese with little or no capital, all they wanted to do was sell food or, in the case of laundries, inexpensive laundries. And look at the power that was lined up against them, and yet they overcame even that and survived then and of course survive now.
Now we had the—as we say—the police started to behave very badly as well after all of these attempted legislative weapons started to fail. They were unconstitutional, they were ineffective. So now we have the police kind of taking matters into their own hands, aren’t they?
Jack Chin: There were a number of instances, particularly after the Elsie Sigel murder, but also in other cases, where the police in the early 20th century would just say—they would just decree—“No white women are going to work in Chinese restaurants. It’s a public health danger. White women, leave.” Or they would just block off Chinatown in Washington or New York and say, “All whites have to leave by midnight. Any white person who wants to come in here that is a potential customer for a Chinese restaurant has to explain what they’re doing, and if they don’t have a sufficient justification, we’re going to send them back.”
So, you know, I was amazed. I mean, I was a lawyer in New York, a criminal lawyer in New York, and I have some familiarity with the police department there, and nevertheless, I was amazed that the New York Police Department in 1910 and 1918 would simply take it upon itself to make decisions about who was going to be allowed to walk the streets and what streets they could walk. But in this period, it looks like the police felt that they had this authority to maintain order, and if that meant we’re going to restrict access to particular areas by particular races, they would just do it.
Bob Zadek: And without any statutory authority and with lax oversight. And what’s also—in telling this story as you did in your piece—it’s also interesting how we bring in somewhat through the back door the “war on drugs,” because there is an opium component to all of this, wasn’t there?
Jack Chin: It’s true. There was a fear that people were going to Chinese restaurants to buy opium. And you know, admittedly, there was some opium use in the Chinese community at this time. But of course, we have to remember that at this time—I mean, you know, 1909 plus or minus—opium was a legal product at that point. Cocaine was a legal product at that point.
Bob Zadek: It was legal. It was not illegal. It was a lawful product. Right.
Jack Chin: Exactly. You could go to a pharmacy and ask for a patent medicine that contained opium, that contained morphine, that contained cocaine, without a prescription, and take it and walk out. And lots of people in America of all races consumed these patent medicines, and America seemed to function reasonably well at the time. But this combination of, you know, the fear of economic competition of Chinese, fear that these Chinese were going to do something nefarious to white women, plus their use of opium, led to a 1909 law, same year as the Elsie Sigel murder, prohibiting importation of smoking opium. And that led over time to more and more federal regulation and restriction of drugs. That is to say, opium didn’t seem to be considered such a serious problem when it was mainly white women who were using it on their own. But when it somehow became associated with Chinese, it became a more important target of regulation, and that’s rolled out in a fairly similar way since.
The Regulation of Private Booths [18:31]
Bob Zadek: Now then there was almost this amusing attention given to a practice in Chinese restaurants of having private booths in the restaurant, and that got the attention of the public, didn’t it?
Jack Chin: It did. It did. So Chinese restaurants—and there’s still a few examples of these around in if you go to an old Chinese restaurant, I mean old, 80, 90, 100 years or more in various cities, you can still see these—but it used to be absolutely typical for Chinese restaurants not to have tables out in public, but they would have private booths, little rooms with a curtain or a door that would close so four or six or two people could sit around a table and eat and drink in privacy. And this was thought to facilitate all kinds of bad things. And again, in some cases, I’m sure it did. But I’m also confident that the danger was exaggerated and the danger was inflamed in the minds of people who were otherwise hostile to Chinese and Chinese restaurants.
And so across the country, there were ordinances that prohibited private booths. In 1917, the U.S. Public Health Service drafted a model ordinance, a model public safety ordinance, and one of the features of it was to prohibit private booths. And it said that it was doing this because of the danger presented by chop suey restaurants. And so this is a legacy that still exists today. Now you see in restaurants private rooms, you know, a little room that seats 15 or 30, you know, it’s not the main dining room, it’s off to the side. But you don’t see private rooms for two or four or six very much, and that used to be very common, and unfortunately, the experience with the Chinese restaurants led to the prohibition of those in many jurisdictions. And it seems pretty clear that the first restaurant ordinance that I was able to find, the first private booth ordinance, was in Ogden, Utah. And it seems pretty clear that the competitors of Chinese restaurants, the so-called American restaurants, generated this ordinance to force their competitors to engage in expensive renovations of their facilities. Now obviously, if you’re in business and you can tell your competitors, “Oh you know, we want you to buy new equipment, you can’t use your current building, you need a different building,” that’s a good way to harm your competitors. And I don’t think that in Ogden, Utah, which was a wide-open town at the time, that some of these restaurants were really concerned with public health and safety. I think they were concerned with “we want to stick it to these Chinese restaurants and take their business.”
Bob Zadek: There are two restaurants, as an interesting total non-sequitur Jack, there are two restaurants that I frequent in San Francisco that have private booths. Tadich’s, the oldest restaurant in San Francisco, has a bunch of really cool private booths, and so does Sam’s on Belden Court. These restaurants go back 150 years and they have private booths. And until this show, I didn’t know the genesis of that. And now, thanks to you with this interesting restaurant history, I have learned why Tadich’s and Sam’s have private booths, and it goes back—it has a long rich history. So thank you so much for that.
The End of the War and the 1924 Exclusion Act [20:13]
Bob Zadek: Now, in the war on Chinese restaurants, did it peter out? What happened? There’s no war on Chinese restaurants today. I grew up in the ’50s eating, of course it was faux Chinese food, it was spare ribs and sweet and sour pork, all this faux Chinese food, which is what we ate in the ’50s. But what happened to the war on Chinese restaurants? Did it peter out? Did people get distracted? Did the courts beat it out of existence? What happened to it?
Jack Chin: Well, first let me say, I think you were eating real Chinese-American food. There’s Chinese food all over the world, and all over the world these Chinese cooks adjust the recipes, adjust the ingredients to conform to the tastes of the people who are there. Because, you know, the nature of Chinese food is—at least a lot of it is—you know, that it’s a business, and if people won’t come and eat your food, then what is the point of having a restaurant? So I would say it’s not—you know, what we have in many places in America, even if it’s not what they serve in China, it’s real Chinese-American food.
But what happened to the war against Chinese restaurants? You know, obviously there are plenty of Chinese restaurants. The war against Chinese restaurants at one level failed. I think these union workers really did want to drive their competitors out of business. They really did want to have the economic opportunities for themselves. That wasn’t just talk. It didn’t happen. What did happen? Well, a lot of these efforts—the laws, the ordinances, the protests, the boycotts—were designed—you know, they didn’t work, but they were designed to keep the political pressure on. They were designed to send the message that we don’t want to compete with Asians, we are afraid of the yellow peril, and we want it to stop. And that worked.
So the reason that the war against Chinese restaurants stopped is that in 1917 and more comprehensively in 1924, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had come in in 1882, was extended to all other Asian races. And so there were strict controls, strict prohibition, strict exclusion of Asian competitors. And at that point, the unions breathed a sigh of relief. You know, they were afraid that there would be millions of immigrants from China competing, and India and Japan and other Asian countries, competing not only in restaurants but in every other field of endeavor. And these unions didn’t want to do it. And after 1917 and after 1924, they didn’t have to worry about it because the yellow peril problem was solved. There was a permanent solution to the threat of economic competition with Asians, or so they thought. And after that, after that, it’s kind of amazing that the attitude towards Chinese restaurants changed. You know, it’s like you start to hear almost immediately praise of Chinese restaurants. They’re clean. They’re not dirty, they’re clean. You know, it’s great that people have the opportunity to get an inexpensive meal in our town, you know, because there was no longer any risk that this was, you know, the leading edge of a yellow peril invasion. There aren’t going to be any more Chinese. There aren’t going to be any more Asians. So let’s enjoy Chinese food, let’s enjoy Japanese food, without having to worry that this is the beginning of a dramatic change to our society.
State vs. Federal Immigration Authority [21:42]
Bob Zadek: And what our listeners have to always bear in mind—I know that they do, but they have to always bear in mind—that all of these forces, the powers of unions and government and the police and licensing authority, they had one goal: to prevent a business person from selling a product that lots of Americans wanted, were willing to pay for, and enjoyed. They were denying Americans the freedom to buy a product they wanted at a price they wanted to pay. What could be more anti-freedom than that?
And there is a principle in economics which we’ve talked about many times on the show called “concentrated benefit and diffused detriment.” Here, the benefit of excluding Chinese restaurants was vested in a few people: the union workers, the restaurateurs, and those who owned other restaurants. And therefore, they got a substantial benefit, and it made sense for them to work very hard and spend a lot of money to get rid of the competition. The benefit of Chinese restaurants is diffused and it’s not really felt. People aren’t aware of the fact that there isn’t a Chinese restaurant nearby. So nobody is going to rise up and start picketing because we want a Chinese restaurant. So the people suffering the detriment, everyday Americans, are not in the position to resist, and therefore those with the concentrated benefit have everything going for them. And this story that Jack tells us is a perfect example of exactly that. And thank heaven it’s past us, and we now have, as a fun fact, Jack I think you pointed it out, there are more Chinese restaurants in America than there are the total of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried and I think Burger King. So they are ubiquitous in America, part of American life, and you said as American as apple pie, I would say if I may, as American as fortune cookies.
Now Jack, we have a few minutes to go. You have spoken and written a lot about this really interesting issue, and if you can give us just a few minutes of your wisdom on it. There’s a lot of activity going on in Arizona and at the state level in attempting to regulate—it’s pretty ugly—attempting to regulate immigration. And most of your story that you told us this morning involved activity at the state and local level, not at the federal level. So tell us if you will, we only have a few minutes, how the constitutional authority to regulate immigration and to affect immigration is divided between the federal government and state and local governments.
Jack Chin: For the most part, the authority to regulate immigration is vested by the Constitution in the federal government. It’s the federal government that has the authority to naturalize, it’s the federal government that has the authority to decide who can come in and who has to leave and how many, what categories. The states have limited authority with respect to things like licensing. They’re not allowed to discriminate against lawful immigrants very much. They’re not allowed to essentially have their own immigration policy by saying, you know, since the ’70s, the 1970s, by saying, “Gee, we only want doctors who are U.S. citizens, we only want lawyers who are U.S. citizens.” They’re much more restricted in their ability to do that than they were in the time period that I’m talking about.
Nevertheless, you see a lot of activity in the states with attempts to regulate immigration which, like the White Women’s Labor Law, have been held unconstitutional. So for the most part, these state immigration laws, courts say, “You can’t do this, it’s unconstitutional.” But just like the war against Chinese restaurants, the state activity isn’t pointless. It has a political point. It keeps the issue on the front burner. It makes sure that federal elected officials see this as something that’s worth their time to get involved with. And I think we saw the effect in the last election that a lot of people who supported President Trump did so because they wanted to limit immigration. I myself think that it’s misguided, that for the last 200 years there have been nativist groups that have said essentially, “You know, the old immigrants were great, they were terrific, they fit in, they made a contribution, but the new immigrants are different. They are not going to make a contribution, they create serious problems, and we have to keep them out.” And every single time that has proved to be wrong, and I think it’s going to prove to be wrong this time as well.
Bob Zadek: Jack, how can our friends out there follow your writing and all of your scholarship?
Jack Chin: You can go to www.jackchin.org. www.jackchin.org and that’ll take you to my faculty page at the University of California Davis School of Law, and my writing and scholarship and other activities are available there.
Bob Zadek: Jack, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and that wonderful story, “The War on Chinese Restaurants,” yet another failed “war on.” Thank you so much Jack, and we’ll just go to closing right now and say so long for now, I’ll be back again next Sunday. Jack, thank you so much for spending your time with us.
Jack Chin: Thanks Bob, pleasure.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot.