The “problem” was Hawaii itself — or rather, the people inhabiting it. The Russians had been told they were coming to Hawaii to work the sugar fields, but they would also provide the valuable, if considerably more passive, contribution of making the islands more white.
Importing Siberian labor was part of a desperate, last-ditch effort to turn the demographic tide in Hawaii, orchestrated by the sugarcane planters, the island elite, and a U.S. congress that feared Hawaii would do the unthinkable and send an Asian senator to Congress. But the weirdest immigration scheme ever proposed by a U.S. territory, also turned out to be the most disastrous. The Russians never provided anticipated relief from Asian workers, because they refused to work at all.
