Partly as a result of expansion and the Gold Rush of 1849, West Coast industry stepped up the importation of Chinese and Japanese laborers in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, these foreigners were often ill-treated and ill-fed by their employers, and many of them died from work-related injuries and illnesses to which they had no natural immunity. Those who survived became an important ingredient in the building of the first intercontinental railroad, as well as in mining, agriculture, canneries, logging, fishing, meatpacking, and salt production. Asian workers quickly earned a reputation as steady, efficient, dependable workers. These qualities, however, worked to their disadvantage by bringing them into competition with whites, who soon pressed for laws granting citizenship to only whites and nonwhites of African descent. Thus, California's Alien Land Act of 1913 declared Asian Americans ineligible not only for citizenship but also for property ownership. A 1920 law prevented anyone who owned land from selling it to Asians or leaving it to Asian heirs. To circumvent outright disenfranchisement, Asian-born entrepreneurs deeded new purchases to the Nisei, their American-born offspring, or Kibei, Japanese Americans who were educated in Japan.
Urban Japanese often found successful careers in food service, laundries and tailor shops, domestic employ, gardening, shopkeeping, hotel service, bathhouses, and barber shops. To strengthen their financial base, family-run businesses networked with other Asian-American suppliers, laborers, and small loan companies. Such community-based connectedness became the lifeline of immigrants who found large, white-owned banks closed to their needs. To assure a stable population, Issei, or native-born Japanese, sought Japanese brides, some by mail order from Japan and others from Hawaii. They developed their own law enforcement, insurance, fraternal, burial, and educational associations, as well as their own worship centers. Thus a sense of unity strengthened and enlarged a closed community which rapidly rivaled the less cohesive white population.
