Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

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.