In the Color of Politics: Race and the Mainspring of American Politics Michael Goldfield notes:
"NO whites were known to complain when Central Pacific head Leland Stanford used thousands of Chinese to tunnel through the Sierra Nevada range in the winter of 1866, killing UNTOLD numbers in snow drifts and cave ins."
Goldfield also helpfully notes that some of the great champions of African Americans also contributed to anti Chinese campaigns, including the Knights of Labor at one point. The comparison between Gomper's utterly repulsive racism and Debs' open mindedness is eye opening.
Goldfield's book is well researched and written, and while facing up squarely to racism, including in the working class, he does not write off white workers as part of a Leninist labor aristocracy as does J Sakai in Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, an underground Maoist publication. Goldfield himself however seems to have been influenced by Harry Haywood, author of Black Bolshevik who abandoned a Soviet style for a Chinese style marxism
See also Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration.:
The export of labor from China throughout Southeast Asia and the British Empire generally was known as the buying and selling of pigs, in all probability in refernce to the English word for the pigtails worn by Chinese men. The coolies referred to the transport vessels as floating hells.
In the US at some point there were more Chinese who worked in the mines than any other ethnic group; Chinese made up 90% of the Central Pacific Railroad's 10,000 person workforce in its final stage of construction.
Not only was the work physically hard and dangerous, Chinese coolies were exploited again by Chinese businessmen who controlled workers through secret syndicates and credit ticket systems and by a virulent American racism, manifested in Exclusion Acts.
Peter Kwong has a recent book on contemporary Chinese migrant labor in the US; his earlier books on American Chinatowns are very illuminating, especially about the functional equivalents of the operation of such syndicates today.
yours, rakesh