In February 1881, a furious debate raged in the United States Congress when California senator John F. Miller, known for anti-Chinese sentiments, introduced a bill to bar Chinese immigration for the next twenty years. His arguments, intended to damn the Chinese with scorn and disgust, today read like a reluctant paean to the Chinese work ethic, conceding the substantial contributions the Chinese had already made to the building of the American West. Comparing the Chinese immigrants to “inhabitants of another planet,” Miller argued that they were “machine-like … of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and blood; they are patient, stolid, unemotional … [and] herd together like beasts.” According to Miller, America belonged to white people and white people only. His vision of America was a land “resonant with the sweet voices of flaxen-haired children.” Pleading with his colleagues to preserve “American Anglo-Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration … [from] the gangrene of oriental civilization,” Miller asserted that group discrimination on the basis of ancestry was natural and sensible. “Why not discriminate? Why aid in the increase and distribution over … our domain of a degraded and inferior race, and the progenitors of an inferior sort of men?” (Chang 130)