You should be aware of the death toll for the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. It's not something we can legally replicate.
If you can show that the railroad was built on blood, I'd be interested.
That's hardly people flocking to the railway jobs.
> The Central Pacific hired some Canadian and European civil engineers and surveyors with extensive experience building railroads, but it had a difficult time finding semi-skilled labor. Most Caucasians in California preferred to work in the mines or agriculture. The railroad experimented by hiring local emigrant Chinese as manual laborers, many of whom were escaping the poverty and terrors of the war in the Sze Yup districts in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in China
It's like saying Bangladeshi workers flock to hard labour in Qatar because, sure because working in Bangladesh might be worse, not because the terrible conditions of working on infrastructure in Qatar as a Bangladeshi is some kind of standard for labour conditions or rights we should all aspire to.
Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.
I grew up in Omaha, the end of the transcontinental railroad that Californians tend to forget about. I'm very sorry that so many Chinese immigrants died working on the railroad. I am also saddened by the many others who died, even though they were not immigrants of Chinese extraction. I'm also saddened by the atrocious conditions these immigrants escaped in China and compelled them to the US (I assume they did not desire to come to the US, and it's worth noting many no doubt landed elsewhere).
While the CRPP may have preferred Chinese labor, I do not find evidence that they did "most of the work". Indeed, the main employer of the Chinese was the CRPP, which laid 690 miles of the 1912 miles of track. The Union Pacific labor was primarily sourced from the remains of the Union and Confederate armies.
It is correct that 80% of the CRPP labor force was eventually (not initially) Chinese. It is also correct that the CRPP laid 36% of the rail by distance. First order approximation would suggest that the Chinese fraction of the built distance is between 15 and 29%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...
If you have evidence of Chinese slave ships coming to the US, I'd like to see it.