This is the resource page for How America Was Really Built zine
Railroad labor :
Estimates of Chinese laborers on the transcontinental railroad range from about 12,000 to 20,000, mostly recruited from Guangdong Province, working 1863/1865–1869. The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed in 1882.
Stanford’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project
U.S. Dept. of Labor Hall of Honor
National Park Service
Bracero Program :
Ran 1942–1964 under the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, signed August 4, 1942. Roughly 4.5–4.6 million contracts were issued (not unique workers; many braceros returned on multiple contracts).
Texas State Historical Association
Latino ag/restaurant labor:
General framing draws on the above Bracero sources plus widely reported labor-economics context on immigrant labor concentration in U.S. agriculture and food service;
Restaurant/food service industry: Immigrants make up 22% of all U.S. workers in food services, including 46% of chefs specifically, according to a UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center/One Fair Wage report. The American Immigration Council independently cites the same 22% figure, and notes that in states with dense independent-restaurant scenes (California, Texas, New York) the share exceeds 30%.
Sources:
UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center & One Fair Wage (2025)
American Immigration Council
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act:
Signed by LBJ on October 3, 1965; ended the national-origins quota system, created preference categories including one for skilled workers, and is widely linked to Cold War competition for scientific talent and the “brain drain” of Asian professionals to the US.
Modern tech immigration:
The H-1B visa was created by the Immigration Act of 1990, initially capped at 65,000 visas, and has been dominated by Indian applicants since its inception, with the majority in tech, healthcare, and research.
Immigration Act of 1990 history
Partition displacement:
Bengal was partitioned in 1947 alongside Indian independence, splitting it along religious lines into West Bengal (India, Hindu-majority) and East Bengal (Pakistan, Muslim-majority; later East Pakistan, then Bangladesh in 1971). The overwhelming majority of those displaced from East Bengal into West Bengal were Bengali Hindus, while Muslims in West Bengal faced pressure to move the other direction, though scholars note migration ran both ways at different points and was not a single clean one-way exodus. An estimated 2.5 million people moved from East Pakistan into India, roughly 1.5 million into West Bengal specifically. (numbers vary according to source)
Wikipedia “East Bengali refugees,” cross-checked against TISS Patna working paper tiss.ac.in