PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



65 



tate to anybody in the cities of the State as to whom he shall employ. 

 You want simply to be permitted to attend to your own business in your 

 own way, make your own profit and build up the State out of your 

 own prosperity. 



Now, I have written and distributed quite generally over California 

 a memorial to the Congress of the United States which condenses all 

 that I have said. I am going to leave some copies here ; you may take 

 them ; you may attach signatures to copies ■ you may have them signed 

 and send them to me, and I will send them to the President and to the 

 Congress of the United States. This is the memorial : 



To the Congress of the United States, Washington, D. C: 



Your memorialists, land-owners, farmers and producers of California and other 

 Western States, beg respectfully to request the earnest attention of your honorable 

 body and of the Department of Commerce and Labor, to the following statement of 

 our needs and of the economic issues involved in the supply of Asiatic labor in the 

 rural industries which we represent. 



Long trial and earnest effort have proved the impossibility of inducing reliable 

 white labor to engage in the primary processes of production in the orchard, vine- 

 yard, asparagus, sugar-beet, onion, celery, and other great industries in which tens 

 of millions of dollars are invested. In California especially much of this primary 

 labor has to be under fixed climatic conditions which the Asiatics alone will willingly 

 endure. It is labor performed under a high temperature, in a stooping or squat 

 position, which white men will not do. With your memorialists it is not a question 

 of cheap labor, but of reliable labor that will save these valuable crops of perish- 

 able property, worth millions in the market. The Chinese Exclusion Act has depleted 

 Chinese labor, and extension of the exclusion policy to the Japanese leaves these 

 imperiled industries exposed to enormous losses, and threatened with ultimate 

 extinction. The opposition to Asiatic labor is found in the cities, due largely to 

 the efforts of agitators who are themselves of alien blood. They and the class they 

 influence will not do the work done by the Asiatics, at any wage. They are repelled 

 by the physical conditions and limitations. For many years every inducement has 

 been offered to them to enter into this service, and they decline to do so. It is 

 evident, therefore, that the labor which is willing to enter the service which they 

 refuse, does not compete with them. On the other hand, such Asiatic labor, by 

 performing the primary processes which it alone is willing to undertake, by passing 

 the product into commerce, furnishes work at high wages to many forms of white 

 labor, under conditions agreeable to it and possible of performance. 



Your memorialists are aware that heretofore the voices uttered and the objections 

 urged from the large cities have been taken as the sentiment of the whole people. 

 We find now that our silence has pernlitted the achievement of an exclusion policy 

 in nowise beneficial to those who have urged it, and at variance with correct eco- 

 nomic principles. We get no benefit from the European immigration which crowds 

 the Atlantic seaboard. If that immigration reaches these far states, it is under the 

 same limitations as the white labor that is already here and shuns the work in the 

 primary processes of the industries we represent. Our only resource is Asiatic 

 labor. We affirm that there is absolutely no evidence that these states ever suf- 

 fered industrial or economic injury from the presence of the Chinese here, prior 

 to the exclusion law. 



We present the foregoing reasons for our demand that the Chinese exclusion law 

 be modified and that a fixed and liberal number of Chinese and an equal number 

 of Japanese be permitted admission, annually, under the same restrictions as to 

 sanitary and other proper conditions as are put upon immigrants from Europe. 

 We reject the theory of assimilation, holding that non-assimilating labor to engage 



5— FGC 



