,
the Japanese immigrants were increasingly depicted
as people of alien ways whose tireless labors depressed
the wages of California workers and gathered more and
more of the region's agricultural wealth into their own hands.
Although pre-1941 they always constituted less than one percent of the population of the United States and two percent of California's population, respectively, many of the JAs who had originally served in menial capacities such as farm workers and domestic servants as well as merchants, gardeners, florists and commercial fisherman, had become relatively prosperous. Daniels said that they were "the most upwardly mobile nonwhite minority in the United States." According to Goodwin, although they controlled less than 200,000 acres in California or about one percent of the arable land, JAs "produced more than 40 percent of the total California crop." By using intensive methods of cultivation, Japanese farmland was worth an average per acre of $279.36 in 1940 as compared with a general average of $37.94 pe
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