At first the Japanese were welcomed as unskilled laborers.  They found employment on the railroads, in lumber mills and salmon canneries, in mines and on farms, and in domestic service.  But they soon showed a keen propensity for owning or leasing land.  The Immigration Commission found that in 1909 they owned over sixteen thousand acres in California and leased over one hundred and thirty-seven thousand.  Nearly all of this land they had acquired in the preceding five years.  In Colorado they controlled over twenty thousand acres, and in Idaho and Washington over seven thousand acres each.  This acreage represents small holdings devoted to intensive agriculture, especially to the raising of sugar beets, vegetables, and small fruits.

The hostility which began to manifest itself against the Japanese especially in California brought that State into sharp contact with the Federal Government.  In 1906 the San Francisco authorities excluded the Japanese from the public schools.  This act was immediately and vigorously protested by the Japanese Government.  After due investigation, the matter was finally adjusted at a conference held in Washington between President Roosevelt and a delegation from California.  This incident served to re-awaken the ghost of Mongolian domination on the Pacific coast, for it occurred during the notorious regime of Mayor Schmitz.  Labor politics were rampant.  Isolated instances of violence against Japanese occurred, and hoodlums, without fear of police interference, attacked a number of Japanese restaurants.  Political candidates were pledged to an anti-Japanese policy.

In 1907 the two governments reached an agreement whereby the details of issuing passports to Japanese laborers who desired to return to the United States was virtually left in the hands of the Japanese Government, which was opposed to the emigration of its laboring population.  As a consequence of this agreement, passports are granted only to laborers who had previously been residents of the United States or to parents, wives, and children of Japanese laborers resident in America.  Under authority of the immigration law of 1907, the President issued an order (March 14, 1907) denying admission to “Japanese and Korean laborers, skilled or unskilled, who have received passports to go to Mexico, Canada, Hawaii and come therefrom” to the United States.

Anti-Japanese feeling was crystallized into the alien land bill of California in 1913.  So serious was the international situation that President Wilson sent Mr. Bryan, then Secretary of State, across the continent to confer with the California legislature and to determine upon some action that would at the same time meet the needs of the State and “leave untouched the international obligations of the United States.”  The law subsequently passed was thought by the Californians to appease both of these demands.[49] But the Japanese Government made no less than five vigorous formal protests and filled a lengthy