Book Review

Despite a century of legal and social gains for American workers, today "modern-day coolies" still toil under almost incomprehensible hardship within the United States. Hunter College historian Peter Kwong unveils this dark side of the thriving American economy in Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor, a work that examines the plight of Chinese labor and prescribes legal reforms and labor organizing to treat the growing problem. Among the figures Kwong profiles is Zhen, a former schoolteacher from outside the seacoast city of Fuzhou, in southeast China. Smugglers, appropriately known as "snakeheads," brought Zhen to New York City at a cost to him of roughly $30,000--which he and illegal immigrants in similar predicaments are required to pay back in three years time. In Chinatown, Zhen works any jobs he can find, depending upon a corrupt employment agency where he competes with hundreds of other undocumented immigrants. Fourteen-hour days at Chinese restaurants or sweatshops barely provide Zhen with the money both to live and pay back the snakeheads. The threat of retribution against either him or his family constantly hangs over Zhen should he fail to meet his payments. He shares an apartment with over a dozen illegals and subsists on a diet of fermented bean curd and cheap steamed buns. While Zhen regrets his decision to come to the United States, his alternatives seem limited. China today, thanks to the state-directed capitalism of Deng Xiaoping, is undergoing an economic upheaval that has left nearly one million unemployed.	1
Kwong is particularly effective in depicting the complicated journey of the Chinese migrants, the overwhelming number of whom hail from Fujian Province. The journey--vividly described as a sort of baseball game, where one moves from base to base--carries migrants first to Southeast Asia, onto Central America or Mexico, then finally to the United States, and ultimately to the outskirts of New York City's Chinatown, where the Fuzhounese live by the thousands. The struggle then becomes one of eking out a living, paying off the snakeheads, and avoiding the authorities.	2
As a historian who has written extensively on the Asian-American experience, Kwong delves deeply into the background of the issue. The same forces of capitalistic exploitation at work in present-day New York City, Kwong asserts, operated from the late mid-nineteenth century to draw Chinese immigrants to America to work long and hard days for low wages. Despite hardships and a reputation otherwise, Kwong insists that Chinese immigrant labor eagerly sought opportunities for joint action to improve their work conditions. When they found opportunities, such as in a railroad strike in the high Sierra Mountains in 1867, they acted militantly and with determination, despite the hostility of other working-class Americans to their cause. Present-day Chinese-Americans have the same capacity for militancy, claims Kwong. He points to the activism of the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, who aggressively have challenged the tightly knit world of New York City's Chinese restaurants. Such community-based labor organizing is one answer Kwong offers to the horrific conditions he so vividly portrays.	3
Alongside organizing, Kwong's other prescription relates to law. Immigration law, he argues, not only has failed to address the needs of Chinese immigrant workers, it has made the problem worse. Chinese smugglers appear to have little trouble circumventing immigration laws. The 1986 passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRAC) only further opened the tides to illegal immigration and employer abuse of illegals. Snakeheads made a cottage industry of producing backdated paperwork, at a hefty price, proving that Chinese aliens had resided in the country before 1982, thus allowing them to gain permanent status. Likewise, employers willing to risk hiring illegal aliens, and putting themselves in legal jeopardy under IRAC, tend to be more exploitative. For Kwong, the only alternative to a system that has made the problem worse is granting to illegal workers all the rights and privileges awarded to legal workers. The author is silent as to exactly how this could be accomplished, but his point that labor abuses are inevitable in the shadowy world of undocumented labor makes sense. He is equally persuasive in his discussion of the failure of the INS and legal system to deal effectively with the situation.	4
As Paul Kennedy and others have warned, the growing global disparity between the haves and the have-nots, with the have-nots eager to join the haves through immigration, presents a grave threat to international stability. Realistic answers to these problems are illusive, but the conditions depicted by Kwong should not be tolerated--especially in a country enjoying our current level of prosperity. One hopes that under the right conditions and with the right encouragement the potential Kwong depicts for Chinese collective action might hold some of the answers to this crisis. At the very least, immigration law policy and enforcement should be reoriented so as not to contribute directly to the problem, but rather to point to future solutions.	5
Edmund F. Wehrle Eastern Illinois University

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