Love & Passion Quote by Denis Kearney

Kearney’s line is a masterclass in agitation: it doesn’t argue about wages or policy so much as it manufactures a villain you can feel in your gut. The Chinese worker is painted as an “imported” commodity, not a neighbor, which lets the speaker shift blame from employers and economic upheaval to a racialized outsider. Notice the passive construction and the hidden hand: “imported by companies.” Capital recruits and exploits, but Kearney’s fury lands on the laborer, not the boss. That’s the trick. It turns class anger into xenophobia while leaving the real power structure intact.

The imagery is deliberately feudal and absolutist: “serfs,” “slaves.” It’s a moral shortcut that borrows the language of human bondage to indict contract labor, implying a humanitarian concern while advancing exclusion. Then he adds a more poisonous move: “go back to China with all their earnings.” This taps the era’s anxiety about “coolie” labor and remittances, framing Chinese immigrants as incapable of belonging because their money, like their loyalty, supposedly never circulates locally. The phrase “in every place” does the rest, inflating visibility into invasion.

The most telling sentence is the weird one: “they seem to have no sex.” It isn’t about biology; it’s about denying personhood. By flattening men and women into interchangeable machines - “boys work, girls work; it is all alike” - Kearney suggests an alien workforce that doesn’t obey the sentimental norms of family, femininity, and domestic life. In 1870s California, amid depression, labor unrest, and white workers’ insecurity, that dehumanization wasn’t incidental; it was the emotional groundwork for the Chinese Exclusion Act logic: if they’re not fully human, you can bar them without guilt.