The Campaign for Japanese Exclusion in Mukilteo
Everett labor organizers cite local industrial hiring practices as a threat to the American standard of living.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A news dispatch in the Seattle Times of last Sunday gave the startling information that ten million dollars was being sent back to Japan by the Japanese on this coast from the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu each year. We need go no further than Mukilteo to see what Japanese labor can do to a community. There is a large industrial plant where 150 of the 'little brown men' are working where the same number of white men should be employed. It is useless to point out what a like number of white workmen with families could do towards building up that little city. The very firm who are responsible for the blight cast over the town through the employment of Japanese labor is the leading spirit in the Chamber of Commerce that wants to locate 'more factories.' We do not believe in exclusion simply because they are an alien race of people, but because there is no other way to preserve American institutions.
“We need go no further than Mukilteo to see what Japanese labor can do to a community.”
This article highlights the virulent anti-immigrant sentiment that characterized the early 20th-century labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. Today, Mukilteo and Everett have vastly different demographics, but the rhetoric linking economic insecurity to the presence of migrant workers remains a recurring, if evolving, theme in American political discourse.
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