Source: Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, U.S. Congress, 1877.
"The Chinese have been of great service in the early development of the industries of the Pacific coast. They have built railroads, reclaimed swamp-lands, and performed agricultural labor... but their presence has also prevented the immigration of white laboring populations, who would otherwise have settled the country and built up permanent homes."
Which of the following trends in the post-Civil War West is most directly reflected in the excerpt?
- AThe shift of the western agricultural sector away from commercial market crop production toward localized, self-sufficient household farming.
- BThe reliance of western developers on a strictly laissez-faire economic system that received no federal subsidies or land grants.
- The integration of the western economy into national markets through infrastructure projects that relied on diverse immigrant labor, despite growing social hostilities.Cevap
- DThe success of urban Progressive reformers in securing federal protections for immigrant workers in western industries.
Cevap
The integration of the western economy into national markets through infrastructure projects that relied on diverse immigrant labor, despite growing social hostilities.
The correct option is correct because the economic development of the post-Civil War West was accelerated by infrastructural projects like the transcontinental railroads, which relied heavily on immigrant groups, such as the Chinese. However, this reliance coexisted with severe nativism and social hostility from white workers who claimed immigrant labor depressed wages and hindered the establishment of white settlement, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
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Anahtar Kavram
Immigrant labor, infrastructure building, and nativist backlash in the Gilded Age West