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The article focuses on the development of a single global market. Economy and culture have interacted in the formation and maintenance of migrant communities. This basic insight can be used to advance the understanding of international migration. The present study uses a diaspora perspective to investigate Chinese migration to the United States from the 1880's through the 1940's. On the basis of population simulation and newly reconstituted census data, it is argued that substantial unrecorded Chinese migration must nonetheless have occurred. Moreover, the composition of these clandestine flows strongly suggests overt coordination by large-scale collective bodies-organizations that were specific to the culture of southern China, from where the vast majority of Chinese Americans originated. Thus, it is argued that exclusion-era Chinese migration was an early diaspora contributor to globalization. The findings of the study presented in this article challenge the demographic assumptions, arising from conventional migration theory, that have been integral to analyses of the Chinese presence in the United States during the exclusion period.