Asian Immigration

Asians journeyed primarily across the Pacific in reaching a United States that had been founded by transatlantic travelers from Europe.  Asians thus confounded the narrative of westward expansion and migration that is widely understood to be a defining characteristic of the developing United States.  As racial minorities presumed to hold starkly different modes of civilization and cultural values, Asians became ready targets for the earliest systematically enforced immigration restrictions and exclusions from citizenship.

Chinese were the first to arrive in significant numbers, drawn by the gold rush but also by the burgeoning economic opportunities of the newly established state of California in the form of trade, commercial agriculture, domestic services, a variety of light manufacturing industries, and infrastructural projects such as railroads, dikes, and land reclamation.  Congress had already determined that Asians were “aliens ineligible for citizenship” by passing the 1790 Nationality Act which permitted only “free white persons”–in practice, white male property owners—to gain citizenship through the legal process of naturalization.  Mexicans had gained citizenship rights with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by which the United States annexed northern Mexico and granted citizenship to Mexican residents while African Americans formally gained citizenship with the Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1868.  Asian immigrants, however, remained “aliens ineligible for citizenship” until 1952.

Barred from citizenship and already stereotyped as irrevocably foreign and inferior even as Darwin’s theories of evolution and “survival of the fittest” seemed to vindicate beliefs in racial differences, Asians made ready targets for early attempts at immigration restriction.  Congress began with limited regulations that banned the entry of Chinese as coolies, contract laborers, and prostitutes.  During the 1870s, pressures mounted for more extensive laws with the nation riven by economic contractions, unemployment and labor unrest, and increasing immigration.  By 1876, both major political parties courted the swing state California’s electoral votes, which required an anti-Chinese platform.  Even so, what came to be known as Chinese exclusion took six more years to legislate after some jousting between the White House and Congress about how to enact laws that singled out Chinese without offending the Chinese government and renegotiation of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty which had previously secured rights of free migration by Chinese and Americans in order to maintain the access of U.S. employers to Chinese workers.  Passed in 1882, “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese” chiefly targeted Chinese laborers and identified Chinese by race as barred from entering the United States apart from six exempt classes: merchants, merchant family members, diplomats, tourists, students, and returning laborers.  Through efforts to enforce this law targeting Chinese, the federal government defined its sovereign and plenary powers over immigration, the agencies charged with carrying out these goals, and limited legal protections and status for unauthorized immigrants, or excludable aliens, who were subject to being rounded up, detained, and deported.

Chinese evasions and manipulations of U.S. immigration law, primarily by crossing both the northern and southern land borders and fraudulent identity claims, led federal authorities to assert expanding powers over excludable aliens.  The 1888 Scott Act abolished legal entry for returning laborers, an exempt category subject to high levels of fraud.  The 1892 Geary Act extended the Chinese Exclusion Law for ten more years and required Chinese in the United States to carry a Certificate of Residence to verify legal entry or face detention and deportation.  Chinese challenged each reduction in their legal status and protections in court, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of equal protections and due process but the Supreme Court ruled that in matters pertaining to immigration, the U.S. federal government held “sovereign and plenary powers.”  Present-day vulnerability of unauthorized immigrants to detention and deportation trace back to these laws and court cases concerning Chinese in the 1880s and 1890s.  The only right secured by Chinese immigrants came with the 1898 Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court case, which established the Fourteenth Amendment principle that any person born in the United States, regardless of race or parents’ status, held U.S. citizenship by birth.  This landmark case still stands as the primary means available to unauthorized immigrants to gain a permanent toehold in this country.

As numbers of Chinese immigrants diminished, Japanese arrived in greater numbers recruited to replace them in agricultural labor on the west coast and Hawaii, domestic service, lumberyards, and on railroads.  Continued violence and agitations by California’s Anti-Asiatic League led President Theodore Roosevelt to broker a diplomatic arrangement, the Gentlemen’s Agreement, with the Japanese government whereby Japan self-restricted the emigration of Japanese laborers to the U.S. to avoid the humiliation of being barred from entry.  Other Asian countries received less consideration, as the 1917 Immigration Act summarily banned from entry persons originating from the so-called “Barred Zone” which extended from the Middle East to Southeast Asia from which no persons were allowed to enter the United States.

During the 1920s, the United States continued to harden its line against immigrants with the Supreme Court affirming in the 1922 Ozawa v. U.S. and 1923 Thind v. U.S. cases that Asian immigrants were racially ineligible for citizenship, regardless of high levels of acculturation and the classification of Indians as Aryans, or white.  The 1924 Immigration Act banned altogether immigration by all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” thereby greatly offending the Japanese government, and imposed an inegalitarian system of national origins quotas that shrank European immigration several fold, thereby making clear that the United States welcomed chiefly immigrants from northern and western Europe. National origins quotas remained the main principle of immigration restriction until 1965.  Despite coming from a U.S. territory, Filipinos also became subject to immigration restriction with the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which granted the Philippines eventual independence and an annual immigration quota of only 50.

The racialization and treatment of Asians as inassimilable foreigners reached extremes during World War II with the mass incarceration of about 130,00 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born citizens.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were categorized racially as “enemy aliens.”  As suspects for potential espionage and treason, even though no evidence was ever uncovered, Japanese Americans became subject to the principle of “military necessity” and placed under curfew orders before being rounded up and confined in incarceration camps away from the coast.  Court challenges such as Korematsu v. U.S. upheld the principle of military necessity for such treatment and still stands to this day.  The case of ex parte Endo, which was not decided until December 1944, paved the way for the release of those Japanese American citizens whom the U.S. government found to be “concededly loyal.”  Japanese immigrants, who could not legally naturalize however, were still aliens and confined in the camps until the war’s end.

Even as the United States imposed its most draconian system of immigration restriction, international students constituted a welcomed and growing form of circulatory migration.  Educated elites, intellectuals, and potential political leaders from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, and Korea gained entry to some of the most elite universities and colleges in the United States, often with the active support of the U.S. government and other Americans sympathetic to elite Asians who might wield influence friendly to the United States in their home countries.

These kinds of considerations fostered the rollback of Asian exclusion.  World War II followed by the Cold War applied tremendous pressures to fortify alliances with key partners in Asia, regardless of racial differences.  With the 1943 Repeal of Exclusion, Chinese became the first Asians to gain naturalization rights and also a small immigration quota of 105.  Other Asian allies, Indians and Filipinos followed suit in 1946 through the Luce-Celler Act.  Through immigration restriction and limited opportunities, the population of Asians had remained at low levels that presented few problems domestically, especially in comparison to much larger populations of African and Mexican Americans.  Congress realized that it need not enact offensive outright exclusions of racialized groups, but could impose low numeric limits on their legal immigration.  The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act implemented this version of limited reform by retaining the national origins quotas, providing quotas to all countries, but some with very low quotas.  Japan had the highest Asian quota at 185.  Even as Asians remained the only group tracked by race through the Asian-Pacific Triangle, which capped overall immigration at 2,000 per year, they finally gained naturalization rights with the abolishing of racial restrictions.  The 1952 Act made provisions for the Attorney General to admit refugees on a parole basis and for the first time implemented a preference system that favored “skilled” or knowledge workers and family reunification.

These new priorities for immigration admission enabled several tens of thousands of Asians to immigrate as refugees, albeit through piecemeal refugee legislation.  Growing numbers of international students legally found employment after receiving their graduate degrees and pathways to legal permanent residency and citizenship.  By the mid-1960s, the phenomenon of educated elites from developing economies immigrating to the United States became known as “brain drain,” and was chiefly associated with highly educated Asians in technical fields.

In the aftermath of World War II, racial barriers targeting Asians began crumbling earlier than for other minority populations of color.  Legislation for the admission of military spouses and fiancées sanctioned mixed race families a couple of decades before the Supreme Court banned antimiscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia (1967), as did practices of transnational, transracial adoptions that became acceptable starting with the Korean War.  Asian Americans gained access to mainstream employment sectors, particularly through educational credentials, thereby gaining the image of “model minorities.”  This new stereotype drew on the increasing visibility of Asians on university and college campuses and employed in professional and technical fields while ignoring the reality that many Asians gained entry to the United States through higher education and employment preferences in immigration laws.

The 1965 Immigration Act solidified these demographic changes by providing three main pathways to legal immigration through an expanded system of preferences that allocated 75 percent of immigrant visas for family reunification, 20 percent for employment, and 5 percent for refugees.  [Pathways to legal immigration since 1965] Although its proponents believed the emphasis on family reunification would preserve the predominance of European immigrants at a time when 85 percent of the U.S. population was white, those most motivated by economic and political instability to immigrate came from poor and politically unstable nations in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world.  Each country in the eastern hemisphere received a uniform cap of 20,000 immigrant visas per year.  Of these, disproportionate numbers of Asians immigrate through the employment preferences and must be processed by an employer and certified by the Department of Labor.  These systems favor the highly educated employed in fields designated as needed in the United States, chiefly in the sciences and technology. [Most common immigrant jobs by state, 2015]

The Asian American population of the United States has increased at geometric rates and now includes over 40 different nationality groups who arrive initially through employment preferences or as refugees, which then opens the door to more immigration through family reunification.  Refugee admissions after the Vietnam War contribute to this diversity and have produced almost entirely new communities of Southeast Asians who struggle more for socioeconomic integration and educational attainment because most arrive without such credentials.  In aggregate, the Asian American population is about 70 percent foreign-born, with attributes closely shaped by immigration regulations.

The Immigration Act of 1990 has further exacerbated “model minority” characteristics by enacting the H-1B visa program that grants temporary work visas for “skilled workers” but can provide a pathway to citizenship with the cooperation of employers.  A majority of recipients work in the computer industry and come from Asia, particularly India and China.  Because their numbers before 1965 were so low, and the growth in their population by immigration has been so steep, Indian Americans exhibit the highest statistical adherence to the model minority attributes in the form of household incomes, percentages of college graduates and those holding graduate degrees, but also rates of foreign-born.

The “model minority” stereotype operates so powerfully that when Asians became the fastest growing immigrant group in America for the first time in 2009, overtaking Latinos who had held the lead since the 1950s, little public outcry or alarm ensued.  The economic downturn contributed to this shift.  Nonetheless, compared to the 1870s when but a trickle of Asian migration produced the onslaught of fear and racial anxieties that produced Asian exclusion, contemporary acceptance of Asian immigrants reveals how effectively U.S. immigration policies and institutions have limited their immigration in ways that satisfy general values concerning economic competitiveness and national security.  Immigration laws and bureaucracy are now effective enough in maintaining Asian immigration at acceptable levels that primarily admit those seen as bearing sufficient economic or political advantages to justify their admission and settlement.  Immigration as model minorities, despite its comparative advantages, nonetheless burdens Asian Americans with the necessity of achieving beyond national averages in order to gain admission and acceptance in the United States.