When it came to translating bionomic insights into eugenic policy, California was ahead of the curve. Chinese exclusion made the country’s racial health a question of border security, and the West was the edge of whiteness. At the same time, agricultural employers in the West needed a regular (though not constant) supply of labor, preferably with high skills and low wages. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s strategy of importing vulnerable workers from abroad became integral to California’s particular mode of production. Growers paid their workers by race, segregating them according to pseudo-scientific ideas about capacity and the intricate matrix of legal rights allotted to Americans by race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and national origin. When new profit opportunities arose, growers gathered foreign laborers; when the profit rates attenuated, the state expelled them. For example, in 1897, soon after Californians embarrassed the nation by forcing Chinese exclusion and abatement, a new American sugar duty (secured by a new American sugar trust) boosted West Coast sugar beet production, and the trust began importing Japanese agricultural workers by the tens of thousands.vii These skilled gardeners transformed the industry, making the regional beet business the nation’s most profitable, and since beet labor was seasonal, the surplus of cheap skilled harvest labor made the further spread of off-season intensive (and expensive) crops such as strawberries possible. The value of California cropland exploded.

By 1907, the Japanese workers, who had just recently commanded the lowest field wages of any ethnic cohort, became the highest paid and began accumulating their own plots, which they made considerably more productive. However, as soon as they started getting their own land, “the Japanese ceased to be desirable aliens,” writes Carey McWilliams in his masterly study of California agriculture, Factories in the Field.33 As the most productive proprietors, small Japanese farmers could pay more than white farmers to buy and lease land, and the industrial growers began to resent the challenge to their position. The old fears that Chinese and Japanese workers would “under-live” Americans morphed into a new anxiety about being outbid.viii San Francisco exclusionists attempted to segregate Japanese children out of the city’s schools, causing an international crisis necessitating the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who got the school board to back down and negotiated a deal with the Meiji emperor to confine the immigration of Japanese laborers to Hawaii. “The infernal fools in California, and especially in San Francisco, insult the Japanese recklessly, and in the event of war it will be the Nation as a whole which will pay the consequences,” Roosevelt told his son, presciently, but California’s Anglos kept pushing.34