The Armenian migration began with the monstrous Kurdish atrocities of recent years, instigated and supported by the Turkish government. Armenians are a primitive branch of the Christian religion, and at an early date became separated from both the Greek and Roman churches. They are among the shrewdest of merchants, traders, and money-lenders of the Orient, and, like the Jews, are hated by the peasantry and persecuted by the government. Like the Jews also, religious persecution has united them to the number of five million in a racial type of remarkable purity and distinctness from the surrounding races.
=Asiatic Immigration.=--Utterly distinct from all other immigrants in the nineteenth century are the Chinese. Coming from a civilization already ancient when Europe was barbarian, the Chinaman complacently refuses to assimilate with Americans, and the latter reciprocate by denying him the right of citizenship. His residence is temporary, he comes without his family, and he accumulates what to him is a fortune for his declining years in China. The gold discoveries of California first attracted him, and the largest migration was 40,000 in 1882, the year when Congress prohibited further incoming. In 1906, 3015 Chinamen tried to get in, and 2732 were admitted, mainly as United States citizens, returning merchants and returning laborers. One-half of the 1448 admitted as "exempt" were believed by the immigration officials to have been coolies in disguise.[55] Within the past ten years the Japanese have taken his place, and 14,000 of his Mongolian cousins arrived in 1906.
The immigration of the Japanese has taken a peculiar turn owing to the annexation of Hawaii. While these islands were yet a kingdom in 1868 this immigration began, and in 1886 a treaty was concluded with Japan for the immigration of Japanese contract laborers for the benefit of the sugar planters. Many thousand were imported under this arrangement, and "the fear that the islands would be annexed to Japan was one of the prime factors in the demand for annexation to the United States."[56] With annexation in 1900 contract labor was abolished, and the Japanese, freed from servitude, indulged in "an epidemic of strikes." The Japanese government retained paternal oversight of its laborers migrating to foreign lands, which is done through some thirty-four emigrant companies chartered by the government. Since opening up Korea for settlement Japan has granted but a limited number of passports to its citizens destined for the mainland of America, so that almost the entire immigration comes first to Honolulu through arrangements made between the emigrant companies and the planters. But the planters are not able to keep them on the island on account of the higher wages on the Pacific coast. Since the alien contract-labor law does not apply to immigrants from Hawaii, a _padroni_ system has sprung up for importing Japanese from that island. As a result, the arrivals at Honolulu are equalled by the departures to the mainland, and Hawaii becomes the American side entrance for the Japanese.[57] This evasion has been stopped by the law of February 20, 1906.