Asian American Immigration and US Policy

Race and national origin, writes History Now contributor Madeline Y. Hsu, “have been the main determinants for legal immigration and citizenship.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the record of discrimination faced by Asians seeking to pursue the American dream. In this issue of History Now, our scholars provide a history of the discrimination against Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants. They also examine the complex circumstances and the global politics that led to the exclusion and ultimately to the inclusion of Asian immigrants. In our own times, the rise in violence against Asian Americans compels us, as historians and concerned citizens, to explore a history of discrimination that must not recur.

Asian immigration restriction began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law to seriously restrict mass migration on the basis of racial or national differences. As Jane Hong writes in her essay, “The Repeal of Asian Exclusion,” this restriction was expanded in immigration acts in 1917 and again in 1924. The 1924 Act barred all Asians from permanent settlement in the US on the grounds that they were “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” (Students of nineteenth-century African American history will note the similarity to the Dred Scott decision’s rationale that African Americans had no right to sue in court because they were ineligible for citizenship.) The ban on Asian immigration rested, Hong notes, on Asia’s weakness relative to Western powers. But during World War II, American groups opposing Chinese exclusion argued that repeal of these laws was essential to winning the war with Japan. The result was the Magnuson Act, known as the “Chinese Exclusion Repealer.” Later, the Cold War and the rise of communism in China prompted American politicians to court the loyalties of Asian and African nations. In 1946, the Luce-Celler Act granted small immigration quotas to Indians and to Filipinos seeking to come to the US. Then, in the midst of the Korean War, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asian exclusion, although quotas remained. But it was the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that transformed Asian immigration. By the 1970s, 35 percent of all immigrants came from Asian countries, and current projections are that by 2050, one in ten Americans will be of Asian descent. Hong reminds us that all of this progress was intimately tied to American foreign policy and diplomacy.

Madeline Y. Hsu offers a portrait of Chinese immigration in her essay “The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority.” Despite the restrictive immigration laws, the US had, for decades, made exceptions for Chinese students. These students, usually from an elite social class, were recruited to university and college campuses and provided with scholarships. Until World War II these American-educated Chinese usually returned to their home country, but global war altered this pattern. They could not return home during the Japanese invasion or the Chinese Civil War, so Congress authorized them to remain and work in the US. This was not simply a humane gesture; it ensured that accomplished individuals—architects like I. M. Pei and scientists in critical fields—would remain in America. In other words, criteria such as social class and rare talent were factors in this new, more liberal policy. As Hsu points out, the criteria used to select or reject immigrants reflect “our fundamental national values regarding who we think we are as a people and the kinds of qualities we welcome or reject in potential fellow citizens.” In this case, race and nationality—the primary determinants for legal immigration—were trumped by the exceptional talents and intellectuality of immigrants like Pei. This opened the door for thousands of others.

Chinese immigrants are not the only Asians whose histories we must consider. Kira Donnell, Soojin Jeong, and Grace J. Yoo introduce us to the history of Korean migration in “파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States.” The first wave, the authors note, came in 1903–1905, and was comprised primarily of Korean men who worked as contract laborers in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii or as migrant farm workers in California. In 1908, a Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan, which controlled Korea, and the US ended all migration of Korean laborers. But between 1910 and 1924, the wives of the resident Korean men arrived to join their spouses. Known as “picture brides,” they married the men, sight unseen, by proxy in order to come to the US. Korean family life thus took hold in America. A second wave, from 1945 to 1965, arose due to the Korean War. In this case, some 100,000 “war brides”—women married to US soldiers—came to the US. Some 15,000 students also arrived through educational exchange programs. The majority remained after their schooling was completed. The third group in this wave were Korean children, orphaned or abandoned, who were adopted by American families. In the third wave, the Immigration Act of 1965 dramatically increased Korean immigration. The fourth wave, from 2010 to 2020, brought a decline in Korean immigration. Those who did come were often drawn by the American K–12 educational system. In recent years, the authors point out, Korean pop culture has captured the imagination of Americans. Korean films, music, TV, and food have made the Korean community in the US more visible—and more accepted.

Sherally Munshi introduces us to Indian immigration in her essay, “Indians in the United States: Movements and Empire.” Just as in the Chinese story and the Korean story, the Indian story begins with the American demand for cheap labor. Soon after the US closed its borders to Chinese immigrants, shipping companies brought over Indian workers who found employment in agriculture and the lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest. They became targets of brutal violence, however. In 1907, White laborers in Bellingham, Washington, attacked Indian workers, burned their homes, and forced them onto trains to Canada. Calls in California arose for a “Hindu” exclusion bill, but, because Indians were British subjects, they had the same rights as White British subjects, and this limited the actions of the US government. By 1917, however, exclusionists found a way around diplomatic restraints. Instead of a law based on race or religion, they invented a geographic restriction, barring immigration from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Place of origin replaced race. The ban affected Indian migration, and later the US Department of Justice took things a step further in a campaign to cancel the citizenship of almost every Indian man who was a naturalized citizen. The rationale was that Indians were “racially ineligible” for naturalization. It was not until the Act of 1965 that this bar was lifted, although preference was to be given to immigrants with valuable skills and family ties. In recent years, roughly 75 percent of all visas allocated to high-skilled workers have gone to Indian men, mostly drawn from the upper castes of Hinduism. Munshi ends this essay with a reminder that Islamophobia remains, as do caste distinctions and patriarchy within Indian communities in the US.

The essays in this issue are accompanied by classroom-ready materials from the archives of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, including an online exhibition on immigration, spotlighted primary sources from Gilder Lehrman Collection, and videos on aspects of Asian American history. The issue’s special feature is a presentation by Jane Hong, “Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion,” given on Zoom as an installment of the Institute’s Book Breaks series on July 11, 2021.

Nicole and I wish you a happy, productive New Year!

Carol Berkin, Editor, History Now
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now, and Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History