Leadership Quote by Denis Kearney

Kearney’s line is doing the dirty work of nativist politics in plain clothes: it turns people into contraband. “Smuggled” is the tell. It collapses human migration into criminal trafficking, so the audience can feel righteous about hostility. The phrase “a few Chinese” sounds almost casual, but it’s a rhetorical feint; minimizing the number makes the claim harder to disprove while still planting the image of an ongoing infiltration. What matters is not the count, but the sensation of porous borders and a nation being quietly cheated.

The geography is strategic. By naming British Columbia and Mexico, Kearney draws a pincer around the United States, implying invasion from both flanks and suggesting that law and sovereignty are failing at the edges. It also launders West Coast racial anxiety into a broader national concern. This isn’t just San Francisco’s problem; it’s an American problem, creeping in from everywhere.

The context is the late 1870s, when economic collapse and labor unrest in California fueled scapegoating of Chinese workers. Kearney, a leading agitator of the Workingmen’s Party, built power by framing unemployment and wage pressure as the fault of an imported, expendable workforce rather than of employers or economic structure. The subtext is a demand for exclusion, enforced not only by law but by public permission to treat Chinese people as illicit goods. The sentence is short because it’s meant to travel: a portable justification for surveillance, expulsion, and ultimately policy like the Chinese Exclusion Act.