The Candidate Who Wanted Cheap Labor
As Tacoma debated the anti-Chinese movement, a political rival accused Democratic mayoral candidate Alexander Parker of opposing it for a very practical reason: he wanted cheap labor.
Colonel J. M. Steele, regarding Alexander Parker’s stand on the Chinese question: “Some of the Tacoma people opposing the movement against the Chinese did so because the movement was contrary to the treaties with China. Parker opposed the movement, I remember, because he wanted cheap labor; he thought the country could best be developed with cheap labor and that wages could be paid at cheap rates rather than high rates.” Alexander Parker, the Democratic candidate for mayor of Tacoma, talked at the Murphy meeting and at the same time was renting a beer saloon. The old man is considerable of a fraud.
“Parker opposed the movement, I remember, because he wanted cheap labor.”
The 1885–86 expulsions made the Chinese question a defining issue in Washington politics, and candidates were forced to declare where they stood. Parker’s alleged preference for cheap labor over exclusion exposes the economic logic that often lurked beneath the era’s racial politics—and echoes today’s fights over immigration and labor.
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