You may be interested in Moon-Ho Jung's Coolies and Cane. It's been a little while since I read it, but as I recall the claim was that a number of southern planters turned to Chinese "coolie" labor in the wake of emancipation because of an assumption that Chinese laborers would be as tractable as they believed black slaves to have been. Once Chinese laborers actually started arriving in places like Louisiana for work in the sugar fields, they didn't fulfill the fantasy of the slavishly obedient easterner, and plantation owners had to come up with new (or adapted) strategies. This sort of racialized labor strategy was very common at the time, and manifested itself in a number of different places. Plantation owners in Hawaii, for example, turned variously to Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and other groups on the momentary assumption that they had FINALLY found a racial group that would blindly follow orders indefinitely -- but of course such a group doesn't exist.

Oh, and as far as recruitment -- not as difficult as you imagine. Chinese labor recruiters working as middlemen supplied Western firms with candidates.

Hopefully others will be able to offer additional examples. There was a global labor trade emerging from China in the 19th century, and sugar plantation work is just one example.

I am not a historian, but IIRC until the Chinese exclusion act of 1882, there was no legal basis for keeping Chinese immigrants out.

Your question makes it sound like the US was going out of its way to "get" Chinese to the US and instead should "get" Latin Americans. The issue is that the US was not actively trying to "get" people from those places, but rather that more Chinese than Latin Americans chose to come to the US.