The Brief

Please note: this story includes racist quotes from the 19th century.

On May 10, 1869, the eyes of America focused on a makeshift ceremony in the middle of nowhere.

Two railroad companies had spent six years on one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects of the 19th century: the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. One company had built from the east. The other from the west. This was the day they finally met up and linked their tracks together.

The meeting point was a place called Promontory Summit in the desolate desert of northwest Utah. A thousand people — politicians, journalists, railroad executives and workers — traveled there for the monumental occasion.

This historic moment would not have been possible without the sacrifices of Chinese immigrants. They had played a crucial role in constructing the western part of the railroad — the most difficult and dangerous section to build. As many as 1,200 Chinese immigrants died constructing it. However, on this day of celebration, railroad executives decided to exclude their Chinese workers from the official ceremony and photographs. Ouch.

Railroad workers celebrate at the driving of the Golden Spike Ceremony in Utah on May 10, 1869 signifying completion of the first transcontinental railroad route created by joining the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads.

(

Bettmann

/

Getty Images

)

But Chinese Americans had reason to be hopeful in the wake of the transcontinental railroad's completion. Since they began arriving in America a couple decades before, they had been the target of discriminatory laws and violence. But now national news reports praised them as skilled and productive workers making invaluable contributions to America's economy.

"The Chinaman is a born railroad builder, and as such he is destined to be most useful to California, and, indeed, to the whole Pacific slope," read one nationally circulated news report. The Daily Alta California, then the most popular newspaper in the state, declared that Chinese workers "do a better, neater, and cleaner job, and do it faster and cheaper than white laborers from the East."

Political winds also seemed to be blowing in favor of Chinese Americans. In 1868, the United States signed the Burlingame Treaty, which strengthened diplomatic and trade relations with China and encouraged "free migration and emigration" between the two countries. In the decade to come, the Chinese population in America would swell by about 50 percent.

Even more, this was the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, when Radical Republicans were amending the U.S. Constitution and fighting for the civil rights of freed slaves. Many hoped that new constitutional amendments and civil rights laws would apply to other excluded groups — including Chinese immigrants. Back then, the only immigrants who were allowed to become American citizens and obtain equal rights were "free white persons."

In 1870, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts), one of America's leading voices for abolition and civil rights, fought to open up a pathway for Chinese and other non-white immigrants to become citizens. But Western politicians, including in Sumner's own more racially progressive Republican party, saw this proposal as politically radioactive.

In making his case against Sumner's bill to open a pathway to citizenship for Chinese immigrants, Senator William Morris Stewart (R-Nevada) warned that the West Coast would be "overpowered by the mob element that seeks to exterminate the Chinese" if it passed, and that "they will be slaughtered before any one of them can be naturalized under your bill."

The effort to expand citizenship and civil rights to Chinese immigrants failed to pass Congress. But the "mob element" — as Senator Stewart called it — would nonetheless make life miserable for Chinese Americans.

In an omen of the horrors to come, just one year later, a white mob in Los Angeles lynched 17 Chinese men and boys in a raid on Chinatown. It was one of the largest — if not the largest — mass lynching in American history. It became known as "the Chinese Massacre of 1871."

All of this was before "The Panic of 1873," a financial crisis that would plunge America's economy into a long and miserable depression. In the depths of despair, white working-class Americans on the West Coast would rally around a new populist slogan: "The Chinese must go!"

The Long Depression And The Rise of Racist Populism

The completion of the transcontinental railroad may have, ironically, contributed to the coming populist backlash. For one, excitement over the transcontinental and other railroads led to a speculative bubble. Investors overestimated the money-making potential of railroads, and once the transcontinental railroad was up and running, reality began to set in about how much money railroads and related investments would actually make. When the bubble burst in 1873, it took the whole economy with it.

The transcontinental railroad also integrated what had been effectively two separate American economies into one. Like the adoption of container ships during the globalization era of the 20th and 21st centuries, the transcontinental railroad increased competition in the economy by making it easier and cheaper to distribute and sell products to faraway places. This bigger, more competitive market was great for consumers, economic efficiency, and the nation's long-term economic growth. But, with the railroad now serving as a new pipeline for products, West Coast industries were suddenly forced to compete with the more efficient and mechanized industries of the East Coast. Nancy Qian, an economist at Northwestern University, says this made the economic downturn that followed the Panic of 1873 much worse in the West.

Even more, during and after completion of the railroad, Chinese immigrants became a more sought after workforce, which effectively put a target on their backs. Increasing numbers of white workers began to resent them. They saw them as a culturally alien workforce, willing and able to do all sorts of jobs for less pay. And it wasn't just railroads. Chinese immigrants now worked in all sorts of West Coast industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, woodcutting, and mining. "While the Chinese constituted less than 10 percent of the population of California in 1870, they accounted for approximately 25 percent of the workforce," writes Beth Lew-Williams in her book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

As the economy cratered after the Panic of 1873, a scarcity of jobs led to a zero-sum mindset amongst white workers. Demagogues began to blame the labor competition posed by increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants for the miseries of white joblessness and meager pay. They painted Chinese immigrants as the servile tools of monopolistic corporations, which were becoming increasingly powerful in the rapidly industrializing United States. The mighty railroad companies — which now owned valuable land across the United States thanks to federal legislation that funded the transcontinental railroad — were a prominent example. Populists began to rail against big corporations for employing the cheap labor of Chinese immigrants instead of the labor of white people — many of whom, by the way, were also recent immigrants themselves.

In late 1877, an Irish immigrant in San Francisco named Denis Kearney founded The Workingmen's Party of California. Kearney articulated a populist politics that combined pro-labor and anti-corporate rhetoric with virulent anti-Chinese racism.

In one famous demonstration, in October 1877, Kearney led a mob to Nob Hill, a fancy part of San Francisco where the West Coast railroad barons had built mansions. Kearney gave a fiery speech to 2,000 people in front of the home of Charles Crocker, an executive at Central Pacific Railroad who had been instrumental in recruiting Chinese workers to build the transcontinental railroad.

"The Central Pacific Railroad men are thieves, and will soon feel the power of the workingmen," Kearney said. "When I have thoroughly organized my party, we will march through the city and compel the thieves to give up their plunder. I will lead you to the City Hall, clean out the police force, hang the Prosecuting Attorney, burn every book that has a particle of law in it, and then enact new laws for the workingmen. I will give the Central Pacific just three months to discharge their Chinamen."

In another speech, in front of a crowd in Boston, Kearney said, "The capitalist thief and land pirate of California, instead of employing the poor white man of that beautiful and golden State, send across Asia, the oldest despotism on earth, and there contracting with a band of leprous Chinese pirates, brought them to California, and now uses them as a knife to cut the throats of honest laboring men in that State."

In rabble-rousing speech after speech, it was Kearney who popularized the slogan, "The Chinese must go!"

Kearney and the Workingmen's Party would fail to achieve lasting political power, but their ideas proved to be popular on the West Coast. By the late 1870s, the writing was on the wall for both national political parties: if they wanted to win elections in West Coast states, they would need to clamp down on Chinese immigration.

The Rise of Chinese Exclusion

Back in those days, Washington — which didn't have much experience actually trying to regulate immigration — viewed immigration policy as something you cordially worked out with the origin countries of immigrants. American political elites also hoped to remain friendly with China, which they viewed as economically and geopolitically important. And so, in 1880, the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes delicately worked with China to amend the Burlingame Treaty, which had encouraged the free flow of immigration between the two countries. This new treaty, the Angell Treaty, allowed the United States to "regulate, limit, or suspend" the flow of Chinese laborers to the country. Congress could now act.

In 1882, after a presidential election, they did just that. Congress passed a forceful bill halting immigration of Chinese workers for twenty years and requiring Chinese immigrants already in the United States to register with the government and obtain "passports" so they could prove their legal status (similar to a "green card" today).

Facing a national outcry, Congress went back to the drawing board a few weeks later. And they passed a watered-down version of the bill, which President Arthur signed into law on May 6, 1882.

This 1882 law is now popularly known as "the Chinese Exclusion Act." It banned both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US for ten years. Symbolically and politically, this bill was a big deal: it was the first significant crackdown on immigration in American history, a message that the federal government opposed Chinese immigration, and a reaffirmation that Chinese immigrants already in America could never become citizens.

However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants — and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.

In the years after the Act's passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against "illegal immigration" — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal.

But the growing discontent with the first iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't just about its lack of enforcement and loopholes. For many white Americans, simply preventing the flow of new Chinese immigrants wasn't enough. They wanted expulsions and deportations of the Chinese people who already lived here — even though the vast majority of them were here legally.

And soon white vigilantes would take matters into their own hands.

However, President Chester A. Arthur — who had only recently been elevated to the presidency after James Garfield was assassinated — objected to the law and decided to veto it. He believed it was too harsh. In his veto message, Arthur said the law would damage diplomatic and trade relations with China, which he and many others believed were vital to American interests. He objected to provisions requiring Chinese Americans to register with the government and obtain documents to prove their legal status, calling it "undemocratic and hostile to the spirit of our institutions."

Even more, Arthur said, America "profited" from the work of Chinese immigrants — a belief held by many of the West Coast's business elites.

"They were largely instrumental in constructing the railways which connect the Atlantic with the Pacific," President Arthur said. "The States of the Pacific Slope are full of evidences of their industry. Enterprises profitable alike to the capitalist and to the laborer of Caucasian origin would have lain dormant but for them." Arthur contended that the Chinese immigrants could continue to help develop and enrich America and, basically, do jobs that white people didn't want to do.

Arthur's veto, however, proved to be a political disaster. Many Americans erupted with anger. The Knights of Labor, a growing national labor union, organized thousands of workers to protest it. Across California, townspeople burned and hanged President Arthur's effigy. Members of Arthur's own Republican party worried his veto meant that they would fail to win elections on the West Coast for the foreseeable future.

Facing a national outcry, Congress went back to the drawing board a few weeks later. And they passed a watered-down version of the bill, which President Arthur signed into law on May 6, 1882.

This 1882 law is now popularly known as "the Chinese Exclusion Act." It banned both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US for ten years. Symbolically and politically, this bill was a big deal: it was the first significant crackdown on immigration in American history, a message that the federal government opposed Chinese immigration, and a reaffirmation that Chinese immigrants already in America could never become citizens.

However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants — and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.

In the years after the Act's passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against "illegal immigration" — because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal.

But the growing discontent with the first iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't just about its lack of enforcement and loopholes. For many white Americans, simply preventing the flow of new Chinese immigrants wasn't enough. They wanted expulsions and deportations of the Chinese people who already lived here — even though the vast majority of them were here legally.

And soon white vigilantes would take matters into their own hands.

Vigilante Expulsion

By 1885, anti-Chinese forces in the West had become emboldened by the federal government's actions declaring that Chinese immigration was, in fact, a problem that needed to be solved. But they were also frustrated that Chinese workers seemed to keep coming into the country. Even more, they were angry about the continued presence of Chinese people in their communities and workplaces.

The first purges of Chinese Americans in towns across the West began spontaneously in response to inciting incidents. But what began as a movement characterized by sporadic outbursts of violence would soon morph into a premeditated political strategy of ethnic cleansing.

In Eureka, California, on February 6, 1885, two Chinese men got into a dispute and began firing guns at each other. One of them accidentally shot a white city councilman crossing the street. Shortly after, a mob of white residents stormed into the city's Chinatown chanting "Hang all the Chinamen!" and "Burn Chinatown!" City leaders, including the mayor, sheriff, and a Christian minister, intervened to prevent arson and murders, but white gangs looted Chinatown. And, within about 48 hours, local vigilantes rounded up Chinese residents — hundreds of people — forced them onto steamships bound for San Francisco and told them to never return again. It became known as "the Eureka method" of expulsion and was soon copied by neighboring cities.

Later that year, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a fight broke out between some Chinese and white miners that quickly exploded into horrific violence. Both groups were employed by the Union Pacific Coal Company (the same Union Pacific that built half of the transcontinental railroad). White miners, themselves immigrants, had grown to resent Chinese miners. On numerous occasions, Union Pacific had brought in Chinese workers after white workers went on strike for better wages, leading the white miners to view their Chinese counterparts as low-wage scabs. (Union Pacific, however, had also brought in Scandinavian immigrants in a similar way, but that didn't seem to elicit the same level of rage.) This particular fight was over whether Chinese or white workers would get to work in a particularly lucrative mine. It got very ugly very fast. After the dispute, a white mob descended on Chinatown, murdered 28 Chinese miners and wounded 15 others, drove the whole Chinese community out, and set their homes and stores ablaze. The incident was dubbed "The Rock Springs Massacre."

In Tacoma, Washington, a couple months later, residents took a more methodical, premeditated approach. "The violence of Tacoma differed from incidents at Eureka and Rock Springs," writes Lew-Williams. "The Tacoma expulsion was not a spontaneous act by a mob angered by a triggering incident. Rather, it was cold and deliberate collective action that was publicly announced well in advance." Nonetheless, while it may have been more orderly and less sudden, it resembled "the Eureka method." White vigilantes — including Mayor Jacob Weisbach and other local political leaders — forcibly expelled all of Tacoma's Chinese residents, this time putting them on a train instead of boats. They then demolished Tacoma's Chinatown.

"The Tacoma Method" of Chinese expulsion

(

Courtesy Washington Historical Society

)

Truckee, California, took a different approach to Chinese expulsion. Truckee sits in the basin underneath the Sierra Nevada peaks where Chinese rail workers had painstakingly built tunnels to allow passage for the transcontinental railroad (see Part 1 of this story). It boomed in population during and after the railroad's construction, and many Chinese rail workers made it their home. By 1870, around a third of Truckee's population was of Chinese descent. It had one of the biggest Chinatowns in the United States.

White residents of Truckee had long made life difficult for its Chinese residents. In 1876, for instance, white militants — part of a secretive group called "The Caucasian League" — murdered a Chinese woodcutter and wounded others and then, despite a trial, were found innocent (these types of acquittals for racist thugs and vigilantes were common in the West back then). Over the years, Truckee's Chinatown was burned in a series of mysterious — but actually not so mysterious — fires. In fact, after one such fire, the town forced their Chinese residents to build a new Chinatown across the Truckee River. This new Chinatown had no bridge, so they had to cross the river by ferry.

But this wasn't enough for the white residents of Truckee. They wanted Chinese people gone from the area completely. In the winter of 1885-86, a local lawyer and newspaper owner named Charles McGlashan was inspired by the cascade of purges across the West Coast. However, by then, there seemed to be some growing political and legal blowback for these extralegal expulsions. The town of Eureka, for example, was being sued by their former Chinese denizens for reparations. National politicians condemned violence in places like Rock Springs.

It was within this context that McGlashan pioneered what became known as "The Truckee Method," a relatively non-violent — but still violent — boycott and harassment campaign against Chinese businesses and white businesses that employed Chinese people. The aim was to starve the Chinese out by eliminating their local economic opportunities and making their lives miserable. The campaign proved successful in ridding the town of Chinese residents and was copied by numerous other towns up and down California. McGlashan became a leader in an anti-Chinese boycott movement across the state.

Over the course of 1885 and 1886, more than 160 communities across the West Coast would expel their Chinese inhabitants. And they made it abundantly clear to national politicians: many Western voters were not satisfied with the 1882 law.

In 1888, President Grover Cleveland — hoping to carry Western states in his upcoming reelection battle — signed into law another Chinese Exclusion Act that had more teeth than the first one. This one prohibited all Chinese laborers from coming into the country — whether or not they had resided in the United States previously. It was a policy that was easier to enforce and administer. It was also quickly implemented, leaving thousands of Chinese immigrants who had traveled abroad stranded and unable to return. It was also a policy that angered China and marked the beginning of an age in which the United States set restrictive immigration policy unilaterally.

After President Cleveland signed this legislation into law, many white westerners took to the streets to celebrate. This was only two years after the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, which proclaimed that America was a refuge for "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Four years later, with the Geary Act, Washington renewed Chinese exclusion for another ten years, expanded the power of the federal government to enforce anti-Chinese immigration laws, and implemented the registration and "passport" system that President Arthur had called "undemocratic and hostile to the spirit of our institutions."

The Chinese Exclusion Acts — and the mob violence, pogroms, boycotts, and other forms of expulsion — had their intended effect. In 1890, the US Census Bureau recorded 107,488 Chinese people living in the United States. In 1900, that number dropped to 89,863. And by 1910, it was 71,531. The restrictions on Chinese immigration would not begin to be lifted until World War II.

The Economic Effects of Chinese Exclusion

Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.

Eureka, California faced all sorts of economic problems. "For most white residents, the financial loss was immediate," writes Jean Pfaelzer in her book Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. Businesses lost workers. "Some went into debt to pay higher salaries to new white employees." Landlords lost tenants. Stores lost customers. Chinese entrepreneurs had run the laundries in the town, and now people were stuck with dirty clothes. Chinese vegetable growers had provided the town with its produce and their disappearance meant no more fresh veggies. "White residents tried their hands at growing their own vegetables but complained about their poor results, the lack of variety of food, and the rotting produce that was shipped north from San Francisco," writes Pfaelzer.

It was similar in Truckee. "The Chinese were renters, shoppers, and low-paid laborers, and white agents made money from their legal, real estate, and commercial transactions," writes Pfaelzer. Charles McGlashan, the leader of the anti-Chinese boycott, sought to replace Chinese laundromats with an "expensive steam laundry," but it was "simply too large and expensive for the needs of the small railroad town, and the Truckee Laundry Association was sued by its major investors." Truckee businesses desperately recruited white workers with advertisements, but "cheap white labor did not emerge, and mountain inns and hotels faced a summer season without food, while lumber camps could not staff their cookhouses."

Across California, near the start of the spring of 1886, "large-scale farmers, food processors, and cannery owners realized that they would not be able to carry on their businesses without the Chinese," writes Pfaelzer.

Of course, all of these are just anecdotes about local effects. And, until recently, we've had no rigorous economic study of the effects of Chinese exclusion on the American economy. But in a new study, economists Nancy Qian, Joe Long, Carlo Medici, and Marco Tabellini provide just that.

The title of their working paper is "The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the economic development of the Western United States," but Nancy Qian, an economist at Northwestern University, says their study's estimated effects really include all the anti-Chinese laws, discrimination, and purges that affected Chinese Americans after 1882. "If vigilante violence and discrimination had been milder, then the anti-Chinese legislations would have probably had a smaller negative effect on the US economy," Qian says. Namely, these laws would have reduced the inflow of Chinese immigrants, but they would not have caused as many Chinese Americans to flee communities, workplaces, and, more broadly, the United States.

In this way, Qian and her colleagues' study may provide some insight into the effects not only of the restricted inflow of immigration — the official intent of the Chinese Exclusion Act — but also of mass deportations since many Chinese were forced out of communities and ultimately left the country.

Chinese immigrants had been vital to many West Coast industries. "By 1882, the Chinese had spread out across a lot of different sectors, and they were taking the skills that they had learned, mining, building the railroad, and also the ones they brought from China — they were applying it to lots of different things," Qian says. This, she says, made the economy better for just about everyone.

"The sad punchline" of their study, Qian says, "is that very few people benefited from the Chinese Exclusion Act" and later laws and community actions. Western businesses suffered, and cities and towns across the West that saw their Chinese populations decline or disappear became less economically vibrant. For example, Qian and her colleagues find there was a slowdown in Western manufacturing, a sector in which many Chinese immigrants had worked.

The crackdown against Chinese immigrants, Qian says, hurt most of the white population in the West. And, further, it made West Coast towns and cities that had large Chinese populations in 1882 less of a magnet for white workers from the East because economic opportunities in these places shriveled. The economists find that Chinese exclusion, in its many 1882 and post-1882 incarnations, slowed down the economic growth and development of the West.

But Qian and her colleagues find there was at least one clear group of workers who benefited from Chinese exclusion: local white miners. It's interesting because the first wave of Chinese immigrants who came here, after 1849, came to America with the hope of finding gold. And the first discriminatory laws they faced were at the local level and aimed to discourage Chinese immigrants from mining. It also provides more context for the resentment and rage of white miners that exploded in the Rock Springs massacre.

Mining is maybe more zero sum than other parts of the economy. There's a fixed level of stuff in the ground and one person's gain in finding valuable minerals is another person's loss.

But Qian's study suggests most of the economy didn't work this way. It was not zero sum. Chinese workers actually improved the economic lives of most white workers and businessmen.

As a concrete example, she points to Chinese woodcutters. "So the Chinese workers — who were chopping down trees and making them into planks for the railroad — were now chopping down trees and making them into planks for the construction of houses and bars and hotels in western towns," Qian says. "This is a very valuable skill. Now, all of a sudden, they leave. That doesn't just affect the lumber mill. But you have to think about all the people who are relying on using the wood. So now the doctor's office, the barmen, the hotel men, the railroad, everyone now has to pay more for wood. I mean, this is just a very important material for the whole economy."

So, if there's a lesson from Qian's study, it's that, yes, maybe immigration restrictions and expulsions or deportations can actually help some native workers. But, really, the cost is tremendous — not just for the immigrants themselves but also for almost everyone else.

The Recent Movement To Honor Chinese Victims

The story of what happened to Chinese immigrants is horrific. And in recent years, towns on the West Coast that purged their Chinese populations have begun to memorialize this dark period of history and honor the Chinese people who were kicked out of their towns.

For example, the city of Tacoma worked with the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation, a nonprofit, to create a park, which is called Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park.

Since 2021, an organization called the Eureka Chinatown Project has done various projects around Eureka to "honor the history and culture of the first Chinese people in Humboldt County, California" (the county Eureka is in).

Earlier this year, Truckee unveiled a plaque to commemorate the two Chinatowns that once existed in the town.

Many Americans remain ignorant of this history, and the organizers behind these projects want to educate them about it — with the hope history won't repeat itself.

When researching this history, we read a number of illuminating books. We thank the historians for their work. You can check them out yourself: 

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad by Gordon H. Chang

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans by Jean Pfaelzer

The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams

VAN, Turkey — It has been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 10,000 targets. But U.S.- and Norway-based human rights groups estimate that at least hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed.

The war has also widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.

"There is difficulty [with the bombing], but we are not that weak," says one Iranian woman from Tehran, traveling to Turkey for a short break, given that her work has stopped due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of the capital city. "In the past few years, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] has proved to us that we cannot trust them. But we were in war with Israel in the summer [during the 12-day war], and we saw how precise their targeting was, so we trust them."

"We are going to build a nuclear bomb now, because there's no fatwa against it anymore," interjects an Iranian man, overhearing her remarks, referring to a rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons issued by Iran's former supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated with U.S. help at the beginning of the war in late February.

Like all the Iranians in this story, the two people asked to remain anonymous. They have received texts from the Iranian government and have seen signs coming out of Iran warning them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.

A microcosm of divergent opinions

Just across the border with Iran, in eastern Turkey, the Turkish city of Van is just as full as during prewar times, with thousands of Iranian workers, consulate employees, students and tourists, who are traveling despite the war in their home country. Van has also become a microcosm of the full range of divergent opinions that Iranians have about the war.

"There is no such thing as hardship in Iran," says one Iranian man, who crossed into Turkey for his job last week. "Everyone lives freely, woman or man."

Next to him, a second Iranian man looks at him, wide-eyed and shaking.

"In two days, the government killed 40,000 people," the man says, referring to a government crackdown in January on protesters. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths, but many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher.

NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, so it has been interviewing Iranians traveling through border areas, including in eastern Turkey.

The dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed transiting through Van may not be representative of all Iranians in the country. Many Iranians in Van are those wealthy enough to travel. But there are also poorer Iranians working, often under the table, in Turkey. A few Iranians I met and interviewed say they are heading off to study abroad.

The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go.

"Our pain is something you have to feel for yourself [to understand]," says one Iranian man who has been working in Turkey for the last year. He spent the previous seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic. "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain. They are pain incarnate," he says, so much so, he is willing to lose all he has, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.

"The war should never have started," says one Iranian university student. "But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," she says, meaning toppling Iran's regime.

"Met with bullets"

Some Iranians who support the war against their own country say their perspectives are indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year's killings of demonstrators finally made them realize, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never change their government.

"Three of my own friends were killed" in the crackdown, says one Iranian man. He crossed into Turkey last week to earn money, more than he could make in Iran. "My friends were all young. I knew them all my life. Yet the government killed them so easily."

"Every two years, there is a big protest," he says. Research from Stanford University published this year found thousands of instances of dissent over the last decade and a half, averaging to one protest every three days inside Iran.

But this time, his hometown, in Iran's western Kermanshah province, was brutally punished by government paramilitary groups for people in his town participating in January's protests.

"It is as if my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it," he says. "I see no future for my children in Iran." His only hope now, he says, is a foreign intervention. "Our only hope is Trump. Our only hope is that Trump and Bibi [Israel's prime minister] make the right moves."

"We are scared of the bombing," an Iranian woman says. "But we are happy thinking that there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January, they were met with bullets. With slaughter. With executions."

Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Migration data from the United Nations shows fewer Iranians are leaving Iran for Turkey than before the war.

"We are not fleeing," says one young Tehran resident. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she is going back to Tehran in a few days. "We are determined to rebuild our country, and if the government changes, I will work, for free if needed."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Before taking his last steps on the moon, NASA astronaut Gene Cernan made sure to scratch his young daughter's initials into the lunar dust.

He had some parting thoughts for the rest of humanity, too.

"We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind," the Apollo 17 commander said before departing for Earth.

That was December 1972. Now, more than half a century later, NASA may be about to fulfill Cernan's wishes.

Watch the launch live stream, set to start at 12:50 p.m. ET, here.

As early as Wednesday at 6:24 p.m., an Orion capsule seated atop a 322-foot rocket will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will carry four astronauts around the moon and back — sending humans the farthest they've ever been from our home planet.

The mission will be the first launch in the Artemis moon program to include a crew. It follows the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, which sent an empty Orion capsule on a three-week ride around the moon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

This time, the Artemis II astronauts will first orbit Earth to check out key systems on the spacecraft, and then trace a figure-eight path around our lunar neighbor and back. The entire journey is expected to take just under 10 days.

This mission is a crucial step toward NASA's goal of once again setting foot on lunar soil, and eventually establishing a permanent lunar presence — including a moon base — with the help of international partners.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron, said there was an 80% chance of favorable conditions for launch day, though they were keeping a close eye on the weather.

Jeff Spaulding, senior NASA test director, is a veteran of many launches. He said that for his part, the reality that humans would soon be flying to the moon would probably set in during the final minute before ignition.

"That's when it really starts to hit home that, you know, we really got a shot at making it today," Spaulding said at the briefing. "And I know a lot of people are thinking the same thing, because you can hear a pin drop in that firing room as you count from 10 down to T-zero."

"After that, though," he said with a smile, "it may get a little bit noisier."

Copyright 2026 NPR

President Trump is set to address the nation on the Iran war at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday night, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying he would be providing "an important update," without providing further details.

On Tuesday, Trump said he expected the conflict to be over in two to three weeks, adding, "we'll be leaving very soon," and promising gas prices would then "come tumbling down."

Trump shrugged off what would happen to the blockaded Strait of Hormuz – which has cut off one fifth of the world's oil supply – saying, "we're not going to have anything to do with it." He said that it wouldn't affect the U.S. and would be something for other countries to deal with.

"They'll be able to fend for themselves," he said, having previously told European allies who have refused to enter the war to "go get your own oil!"

The assertion to wrap up the war quickly comes just days after Trump threatened to up the ante if there was no deal and Tehran didn't reopen the strait. He said he could seize Iran's oil and blow up all of their Electric Generating Plants and desalinization plants. He also said he was considering an invasion of Iran's key oil export terminal, Kharg Island.

But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed his boss's latest comments on the war being over in a matter of weeks, saying the main goal of preventing Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon had been achieved.

Rubio has expressed frustration in recent days over news reports accusing the administration of lacking clear objectives in Iran.

He said the objectives were: the destruction of Iran's air force, the destruction of its navy, the "severe diminishing" of its capability to launch missiles, and the destruction of its factories.

Regime change, previously touted by the administration as a goal, was not mentioned. Earlier this week Trump said he considered regime change had been achieved, despite the fact that it remains a hardline theocracy led by the son of the previous ayatollah.

Here are more updates on day 33 of the Iran war:

Fighting overnight | World leaders | Iran | American journalist kidnapped| Hegseth visits troops | Aid hold up | Peace plan

Regional Fighting overnight

The Israel Defense Forces said they hit 230 targets in Tehran while also widening an invasion into Lebanon. Meanwhile, Iran is striking back at Gulf neighbors, especially military bases used by the U.S. this week. One of those attacks injured as many as 20 U.S. service members in Saudi Arabia.

Since the war began over a month ago, 13 U.S. service members have been killed. Iran says more than 1,700 people have been killed in Iran.

People take cover in a bomb shelter as air raid sirens warn of incoming Iranian missile strikes in Bnei Brak, Israel, Wednesday, April 1, 2026.

(

Oded Balilty

/

AP

)

Also overnight Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed missile attacks on Israel, which the Israeli military intercepted. The Houthis have vowed an "escalation" in attacks.

Israel's emergency services reported Iranian missiles fired at central Israel had injured 14 people, including children.

At Kuwait's international airport, Iranian drones hit fuel depots, causing a huge fire, a day after a Kuwaiti oil tanker off Dubai was hit.

In Qatar on Wednesday, a missile launched by Iran hit an oil tanker leased to QatarEnergies, which said no one was injured and reported no environmental impact.

UK, Australia leaders speak

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed the nation on Wednesday about how the rising cost of living caused by the conflict will affect British citizens and what his government is doing to try to mitigate that.

He repeated a previous vow that the U.K. will only take "defensive" action against Iranian attacks in the Middle East and would not get drawn into the war. He also announced his foreign secretary would organize an international summit on the Strait of Hormuz aimed at restoring freedom of navigation.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also gave a national address on the war on Wednesday.

Earlier this week Albanese announced his government would halve the fuel tax for three months to give Australians some respite from the rising costs.

He urged Australians to use public transport and not to hoard fuel. He also warned that "the reality is, the economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months."

'Hospitality' is over, says Iran

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iranian Parliament's National Security Committee, said on X in a message to Trump that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen "but not for you."

People sift through rubble in the aftermath of a drone attack on a residential building in which one civilian was killed on March 31, 2026 in eastern Tehran, Iran.

(

Majid Saeedi

/

Getty Images Europe

)

Referring to the period since Iran's 1979 revolution, he added: "47 years of hospitality are over forever."

Iran this week approved a bill to charge vessels for crossing the vital economic waterway.

"Trump has finally achieved his dream of 'regime change' — but in the region's maritime regime!" Azizi said.

It's not just vessels that are now trapped near the Strait of Hormuz.

An estimated twenty thousand seafarers are onboard — in an active warzone — and the U.N. is trying to extricate them.

Most seafarers are from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India and some vessels are reportedly running low on food and water.

The U.N.'s International Maritime Organization is negotiating with all sides to try to evacuate them.

American journalist kidnapped in Iraq

American freelance reporter Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday, according to Al-Monitor, a Middle Eastern news site for which she has written.

Iraqi security forces said they intercepted a vehicle that crashed and arrested one of the suspected kidnappers, but are still searching for the kidnapped journalist and other suspects.

U.S. officials say they're working to get her released.

"The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible," Dylan Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, said on social media.

He said Americans, including media workers, have been advised not to travel to Iraq and should leave the country. The statement did not condemn the kidnapping or express concern.

Johnson said Iraqi authorities apprehended a suspect associated with Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, believed to be involved in the kidnapping.

Press freedom organizations expressed deep concern. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on "Iraqi authorities to do everything in their power to locate Shelley Kittleson, ensure her immediate and safe release, and hold those responsible to account."

Based in Rome, Kittleson has reported on Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan, for years, according to Al-Monitor.

Reporters Without Borders said she is "very familiar with Iraq, where she stays for extended periods."

"RSF stands alongside her loved ones and colleagues during this painful wait," the organization said.

Al-Monitor said in a statement it is "deeply alarmed" by her kidnapping. "We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work," it said.

U.S. defense secretary visits troops

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an undisclosed trip to the Middle East to visit troops on military bases over the weekend. He did not divulge the location for the troops' safety.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Tuesday, March 31, 2026.

(

Manuel Balce Ceneta

/

AP

)

"I spoke to Air Force and Navy pilots on the flight line who every day both deliver bombs deep into Iran, but also shoot down drones defending their base. Many had just returned from the skies of Iran and Tehran," he told reporters in a briefing Tuesday.

He said he "witnessed an urgency to finish the job" and tried to draw a comparison with America's earlier drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the U.S. is improving bunkers and layered air defenses as a priority to protect troops and aircraft.

This comes after more than a dozen U.S. service members were injured, several severely, and U.S. aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes on a base in Saudi Arabia last Friday. The Pentagon says 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 300 wounded in what it calls Operation Epic Fury.

He repeated the administration's assertion that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran, despite Iranian officials' denial that talks are happening.

Aid hold up

The World Food Program says tens of thousands of tons of food aid are stuck in ports as a consequence of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The WFP says there is a whole disruption in the global supply chain with carriers not able to use the Strait of Hormuz and choosing not to use the Suez Canal through Egypt out of concerns of attacks there, too.

The agency says this is adding a month to shipping time and costing more because of spikes in fuel prices from the war. It noted that as people around the world pay more for fuel, more families will struggle to put food on the table.

Some 45 million additional people will fall into acute hunger around the world if current conditions continue through June- reaching 363 million globally, the WFP said.

Pakistan, China release statement

Pakistan's and China's foreign ministers issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling for talks to the war on Iran as part of a broader peace plan. The statement called for a halt to fire, an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure, and reopening of the State of Hormuz.

For days Pakistani officials had said they hope to help mediate talks to end a war that has seized up the global economy, pushed up the price of fossil fuels, and key commodities like fertilizer — and that has killed thousands of people, mostly Iranians and Lebanese.

The joint statement with China came after high-ranking Pakistani officials led a flurry of meetings with regional powers. China is Iran's biggest customer for oil — and it's seen as sympathetic to the country.

Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, Diaa Hadid in Mumbai, Quil Lawrence in New York, Giles Snyder, Michele Kelemen in Washington, Emily Feng in Van, Turkey, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, and Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg contributed to reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Stay up to date with our Politics newsletter, sent weekly.

Justices are hearing arguments this morning in a case that almost certainly will result in a historic ruling: At issue is President Trump's challenge to a constitutional provision that has long been interpreted to guarantee American citizenship to every child born in the United States.

Listen to arguments and live NPR special coverage beginning at 10 a.m. ET:

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. So, on Day 1 of his second term, he issued an executive order barring automatic citizenship for any baby born in the U.S. whose parents entered the country illegally or who were here legally, but on a temporary, or even a long-term visa.

"We are the only country in the world that does this with birthright," Trump said as he signed the executive order. "And it's absolutely ridiculous."

That actually is not true. There are nearly 33 countries, mainly in North and South America, that have birthright citizenship — including, among others, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Can't see the video above? Watch it here.

D-Day for Trump's attack on birthright citizenship

But Trump has long been determined to rid this country of its longstanding protection for birthright citizenship. Wednesday is D-Day in that effort, and to understand the issues, it's worth taking a stroll through American history.

While citizenship was not defined at the nation's founding, the colonists were largely pro-immigrant, according to University of Virginia law professor Amanda Frost, author of American Birthright: How the Citizenship Clause made America American, due out in September.

The founders "wanted to populate this mostly empty continent," she observes, adding that, in fact, one of the complaints against the British king in the Declaration of Independence was that the British "were discouraging immigration."

Indeed, she notes, after the Revolutionary War, even those who had been loyal to the king but wanted to stay in America were granted U.S. citizenship.

Trump's view of the 14th Amendment

Birthright citizenship didn't make it into the Constitution, though, until after the Civil War, when the nation enacted the 14th Amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision — a ruling that in 1857 declared that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States.

To undo that decision, the post-Civil War Congress passed a constitutional amendment that defines citizenship in broad terms. It says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

President Trump, however, maintains that the constitutional amendment was intended to be more limited than it has been in practice. "This was meant for the slaves … for the children of slaves," Trump said last January. "I'm in favor of that. But it wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." 

But as the University of Virginia's Frost notes, the framers of the 14th Amendment had more than one explicit purpose. They wanted a clear, bright line definition of citizenship; they wanted the former slaves and their children to be citizens, and they wanted to include immigrants, many of whom were the targets of great hostility.

"I like to remind my students that between 1845 and 1855, approximately 2 million people from Ireland fled to the United States," Frost observes. They were fleeing from famine and harsh British rule. And while "there certainly was some prejudice and discrimination and xenophobia," she says, "their children soon would automatically become American citizens" when born on U.S. soil after enactment of the 14th Amendment.

Trump's interpretation of the 14th Amendment is avowedly far more restricted. What's more, it has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years.

The counterargument

"The president's executive order is attempting a radical rewriting of that 14th Amendment guarantee to all of us," says Cecillia Wang, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Indeed, even as both Republican and Democratic administrations have sought in modern times to deport large numbers of individuals who have entered the country illegally, the notion of birthright citizenship has remained so entrenched that during World War II when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in U.S. detention camps, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. And Congress later codified that understanding in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

At the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the justices are likely to focus on some of the key court decisions that have protected birthright citizenship during the past century and a half. Perhaps most important among these is the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants who ran a small business in the city. Back then, immigrants like Wong's parents were largely free to enter the U.S. without any documentation, but his parents eventually returned to China. And after their son visited them in 1895, officers at the port in San Francisco refused to allow him back into the United States, contending that he was not a qualified citizen.

Wong challenged the denial and, in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. By a 6-2 vote, the justices interpreted the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship. The court noted that only three exceptions were specified in the amendment: The children of diplomats were not deemed to be U.S. citizens because their allegiance was to another country; the children of occupying armies were similarly excepted, as were the children of Native American tribes. Of these three exceptions, the only one that still applies is to the children of diplomats, as there are no invading armies, and Native Americans were granted automatic citizenship in 1924.

The Trump administration, however, argues that Wong Kim Ark's situation was very different from many of the children who become automatic American citizens today, because Wong's parents, though undocumented, were here legally, by virtue of having a permanent residence in the U.S. And the Trump administration points to language in the 1898 Supreme Court opinion that assumes the parents had legal status in the country because they had a permanent residence in San Francisco.

The Trump administration makes an even broader argument. "An individual who is naturally born in the United States is only considered a citizen if their parents have allegiance to the nation," says Daniel Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, the organization founded by the architect of Trump's immigration policies, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff. "It is a misdemeanor to come into the United States without authorization. That is a crime," he says. "That is strong evidence that you don't kind of meet the traditional notion of allegiance."

"We do not punish children for the sins of their parents"

Countering that argument, the ACLU's Wang will tell the Supreme Court that the men who wrote the 14th Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent.

"And the idea — that actually goes back to the founding — is that in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all Americans, all the same," Wang says.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is supporting the president's position, along with 11 other GOP senators, and 16 House members, who signed on to the America First brief.

"As a policy matter, birthright citizenship is stupid," Cruz says, "because it incentivizes illegal immigration. It makes absolutely no sense that someone breaks the law and they get rewarded with a very, very, precious gift, which is American citizenship."

Can an executive order trump a constitutional amendment?

The ACLU's Wang counters that Trump is trying, by executive order, to change the meaning of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, a measure that was approved overwhelmingly by the Congress in 1866 and, after a great public debate, ratified by more than three-quarters of the states. She argues that the consequences of such a dramatic change by executive fiat would have untold consequences.

"What will immediately happen is that every month, tens of thousands of U.S.-born babies will be stripped of their citizenship. They may be stateless because their parents' country of nationality may not consider them to be citizens. And so you'll see a permanent underclass of people who have no nationality, who are living in the United States, who can't pass on their nationality to their children born in the U.S.

In a separate brief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stresses the problems that would be created by generation after generation of children who are stateless, with no country to call home, and no citizenship to pass on to their children.

"The children … would be the ones to bear the brunt of this," says Bishop Daniel Flores, vice president of the bishops conference. "I have people asking this now in my diocese. 'Bishop, am I going to get into trouble if I give food to somebody that I'm not sure of their documentation? … Can we help these people? Because we think we need to, because they're people and they were born here."

The Trump administration counters that birthright citizenship raises two other problems: a generic potential threat to national security and the problem of so-called "birth tourism."

In fact, even birthright defenders concede that a cottage industry has long existed in which women pay money to come to the U.S. and have their children here. But the numbers are consistently very small. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors limited immigration, estimates only 20,000 to 26,000 birth tourism children are born in the U.S. each year, compared to the overall birth count of 3.6 million babies born each year.

Daniel Epstein of America First Legal contends that numbers are not important. "I view just one illegal act as illegal, and birth tourism is illegal and it's against the law, and the law matters."

Population experts say that if automatic birthright citizenship were to be voided, the consequences would be profound — and counterintuitive. The Population Research Institute at Penn State, for instance, estimates that a repeal of birthright citizenship would result in 2.7 million more people living here illegally by 2045, people who previously would have been entitled to birthright citizenship, but now have no such citizenship for themselves or to pass on to their children or the generations thereafter.

Also likely to come up at today's Supreme Court argument are practical questions, like those raised by Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year in a related case. How would a hospital know that the parents of a child are illegally in the country? What would hospitals do with a newborn? What would states do? The answer from Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, was "Federal officials will have to figure that out."
Copyright 2026 NPR