It was sometimes said that America’s streets were paved with gold. One quarter million immigrants “lived” one might say in the United States and they were mostly made up of people from an Asian decent. Most immigrants came to America because it offered the chance to to improve their lives through hard work and determination. Chinese immigrants differed from Italian and Russian based immigrants greatly therefore they were targets of suspicion and even hostility. Asian immigrants often found that the path to acceptance was especially difficult. Some immigrants did get rich, but most spent their lives carving out a decent life for themselves and their families. Life for an immigrant was ghettos, physical exams, and never being truly accepted. Crop failures, famine, rising taxes, shortage of land and jobs, and religious and political persecution were all pushes for immigrants to level their home land.. Life for an immigrant was hard but being a Chinese immigrant was harder. In the mid 1800’s American railroad companies recruited a quarter of a million Chinese workers. Many Chinese immigrants had to work to pay of the debt of their passage and upkeep. The main Chinese occupations during this time included mining, farming, fishing, factory work, food preparation, and laundering. American labor unions fought really hard to exclude Chinese immigrants. Chinese accepted low wages so they affected the rates of all the workers, so most were getting aggravated. The unions maintained that if Chinese laborer kept coming to California wages would continue to drop. Other groups claimed The Chinese simply were not worthy of being Americans.Anti Asian movements claimed that Asians were physically and mentally inferior to white Americans. These claims spread racism toward Asian immigrants. The Chinese exclusion act was passed in 1882 which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country. It didn’t however prevent those who had previously established homes in the United States from entering. The federal government then built an immigration center in San Francisco Bay. Here Chinese newcomers had to pass medical checks and prove that they should not be excluded. The Chinese were greatly chewed on for their ethnicity. Chinese immigrants dealt with much more than the European immigrants did. Not only were jobs and homes very hard to gather for them but even being included in anything was a hardy task. The chance to come to the United States was indeed a golden opportunity.