Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
have long played an important role in the social fabric of our society. But they have also witnessed a long history of
violence, discrimination, and bigotry as well.
This journal decries the increasing anti-Asian violence directed against
our fellow Americans and joins others who call for our educational system to step
up and face our history in all its
complexity and to reflect on how knowledge can affect our beliefs and
actions.
These concerns were also reflected recently on the Facing
History and Ourselves website, a website that this journal has often shared on
our site. Facing History and Ourselves “uses lessons of
history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and
hate” and came to recognize their lack of a deep understanding of the experiences
of the Asian American population in their curriculum. Writing about recent events, they call for a shared
rethinking. They write:
And yet, our education system — and
our own curriculum at Facing History and Ourselves — does not do enough to
address both recent and historic violence directed against Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders. In truth, we do not fully know and have failed to face the
complexities of the histories of API peoples, their countries of origin, the
richness of all they have contributed to the fabric of North America and the
United Kingdom. This omission from our learning and teaching contributes daily
to the erasure and oppression of our API neighbors, colleagues, friends, and
students. This is a moment of reckoning where we are being called to account.
All of us within education must work together to place focus on the proud
history and traditions of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and
to understand how that history is entwined with the histories of other
communities too often held on the margins of our society.
To begin this task in deepening our understanding,
we are reprinting an article below by Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld from the University
of Massachusetts Amherst, entitled, “United States Immigration Laws and the Exclusion
of Asian Pacific Islanders.” Readers may
also be interested in reading one of the articles published in the current
issue of our journal entitled, “How Historical Context Matters for Fourth andFifth Generation Japanese Americans,” by L. Erika Saito.
United States
Immigration Laws & the Exclusion of Asian Pacific Islanders
By Warren J. Blumenfeld
Since the beginning of the Coronavirus
pandemic and former President Trump’s insistence on calling it the so-called “China
virus,” anti-Asian Pacific Island hate crimes in the U.S. have spiked sharply.
Within the past year, approximately 3800 crimes have been reported, with the
majority perpetrated against Asian Pacific Island women.
Though investigators have not released
the motive of the Georgia man who went on a murder spree killing eight women,
six of whom were Asian, these incidents bring to the public’s attention in
stark detail the fear felt within the Asian Pacific Island community over the
past year.
It also calls on us to reflect on how
the United States has not held out its collective hand of welcome to members of
Asian Pacific Island communities.
Immigration as
Official U.S. “Racial” Policy
Beginning the first day Europeans
stepped foot on what has come to be known as “the Americas” up until this very
day, decisions over who can enter the United States and who can eventually gain
citizenship status has generally depended on issues of “race.” U.S. immigration
systems have reflected and have served as this country’s official ‘racial’
policies at any given point in time.
Europeans on the North and South
American continents established their domination based on a program of
exploitation, violence, kidnapping, and genocide against native populations.
For example, the ‘Puritans’ left
England to the Americas to practice a ‘purer’ form of Protestant Christianity.
They believed they were divinely chosen to form ‘a biblical commonwealth’ with
no separation between religion and government. They tolerated no other faiths
or interpretations of divine precepts. In fact, they murdered and expelled
Quakers, Catholics, and others.
The “American” colonies followed
European perceptions of “race.” A 1705 Virginia statute, the “Act Concerning
Servants and Slaves,” read:
[N]o negroes, mulattos or Indians,
Jew, Moor, Mahometan [Muslims], or other infidel, or such as are declared
slaves by this act, shall, notwithstanding, purchase any christian (sic) white
servant.
In 1790, the newly constituted United
States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites
from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans,
the later whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even
though they had inhabited this land for thousands of years.
The Congress did not grant Native
Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian
Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship
status.
Central to the European-American
conquest of territory was the concept of “Manifest Destiny”: Providence
destined U.S. expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific (“from sea to shining
sea”) by the so-called “Anglo-Saxon race.” This justified in the mind of the
European the theft of Indigenous people’s territories and a war with Mexico.
In reaction to increasing numbers of
European immigrants into the country in the 1850s, a movement calling itself “The
American Party” (also known as “The Know-Nothings”) formed to “purify” the
country by limiting or ending Irish Catholic immigrants and others, and also
ending the naturalization of those already here.
The American Party established itself
as a “Nativist” anti-Irish Catholic movement by instigating fear among the
larger population that the U.S. will soon be dominated by Irish and German
Catholics unless their immigration was ended.
The movement perpetuated the illusion
that the Pope had been plotting to control and dominate the U.S. While a small
movement in relative numbers, its primary supporters were European-heritage
Protestant men.
In 1875, Congress passed the Page Law,
which specifically reduced immigration of women from Asia.
The editor of a newspaper in Butte,
Montana wrote: “The Chinaman’s life is not our life, his religion is not our
religion.” He belongs not in Butte?
The U.S. Congress passed the first law
specifically restricting or excluding immigrants based on “race” and
nationality in 1882. In their attempts to eliminate entry of Chinese and other
Asian workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the
western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to restrict
their entry into the U.S. for a 10-year period, while denying citizenship to
Chinese people already on these shores.
The Act also made it illegal for
Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans. In addition, the 1882
act excluded categories deemed “undesirable.” It prohibited entry of “any
convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or
herself without becoming a public charge.”
The so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement”
between the U.S. and the Emperor of Japan of 1907 was signed to reduce tensions
between the two countries. It was passed expressly to decrease immigration of
Japanese workers into the U.S.
The Immigration Act of 1917 further
prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred
zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russia, the
Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.
Between 1880 and 1920, in the range of
30-40 million immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe migrated to the
United States, more than doubling the population.
Fearing a continued influx of
immigrants, legislators in the United States Congress in 1924 enacted the
Johnson-Reed [anti-] Immigration Act (“Origins Quota Act,” or “National Origins
Act”) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Asia, and Eastern and
Southern Europe, including those of the so-called “Hebrew race” (the law placed
restrictive quotes on Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slaves (the acronym
J-PIGS). The law, however, increased immigration from Great Britain and
Germany.
Jews continued to be, even in the
United States during the 1920s, constructed as nonwhite. The law, on the other
hand, permitted large allotments of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and
Germany. This law, in addition to previous statutes (1882 against the Chinese,
1907 against the Japanese) halted further immigration from Asia and excluded
blacks of African descent from entering the United States.
It is interesting to note that during
this time, Jewish ethno-racial assignment was constructed as “Asian.” According
to historian Sander Gilman: “Jews were called Asiatic and Mongoloid, as well as
primitive, tribal, Oriental.” Immigration laws were changed in 1924 in response
to the influx of these undesirable “Asiatic elements.”
The National Origins Act of 1924
established quota percentages based on the census population in 1890. The
number of immigrants to be admitted annually was limited to 2% of the
foreign-born individuals of each nationality living in the U.S. in 1890.
This severely restricted immigration
rights almost exclusively to northwestern Europeans to “protect our values [as]
a Western Christian civilization.” It functioned to prevent Catholics, Jews,
Hindus, Muslims, and other non-Protestant groups from immigrating to the United
States.
In the Supreme Court case, Takao
Ozawa v. United States, a Japanese man, Takao Ozawa filed for citizenship
under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed white persons and persons
of African descent or African nativity to achieve naturalization status.
Asians, however, were classified as an
“unassimilateable race” and, therefore, not entitled to U.S. citizenship. Ozawa
attempted to have Japanese people classified as “white” since he claimed he had
the requisite white skin. The Supreme Court, in 1922, however, denied his claim
and, therefore, his U.S. citizenship.
Following U.S. entry into World War
II, at the end of 1942 and reflecting the tenuous status of Japanese Americans,
some born in the United States, military officials uprooted and transported
approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans to Internment (Concentration) Camps
within several interior states far from the shores.
In Korematsu v. United States,
323 U.S. 214 (1944), the landmark United States Supreme Court decision ruled
6-3 constitutional, Executive Order 9066 “as a matter of military urgency,”
ordering Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II “regardless”
of citizenship.
Not until Ronald Reagan’s
administration did the U.S. officially apologize to Japanese Americans and paid
reparations amounting to $20,000 to each survivor as part of the 1988 Civil
Liberties Act.
Though the Magnuson Act of 1943 gave
Chinese immigrants a path toward citizenship and the right to vote, until 1952,
federal policy disqualified immigrants from most other Asian countries
citizenship status and voting rights.
Finally, in 1952, the McCarran-Walters
Act (Sen. Pat McCarran and Rep. Francis Walters) overturned the “racially”
discriminatory quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. It passed despite President
Truman’s veto.
Framed as an amendment to the
McCarran-Walters Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural
origins” as the basis of U.S. immigration legislation.
The 1965 law increased immigration
from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds, permitted
170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere (20,000 per each country),
120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, and accepted a total of 300,000 visas for
entry into the country.
Ruthless
Americanization
Immigrants who enter the United States
are pressured to assimilate into a monocultural Anglo-centric culture (thinly
disguised as “the melting pot”), and to give up their native cultural
identities. Referring to the newcomers at the beginning of the 20th century CE,
one New York City teacher remarked: “[They]
must be made to realize that in forsaking the land of their birth, they were
also forsaking the customs and
traditions of that land.”
An “Americanist” (assimilationist)
movement was in full force with the concept of the so-called “melting pot” in
which everyone was expected to conform to an Anglo-centric cultural standard
with an obliteration of other cultural identities. President Theodore Roosevelt
(1907) was an outspoken proponent of this concept:
If the immigrant who comes here in
good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself (sic) to us he shall be
treated on an exact equality with everyone else....But this [equality] is
predicated on the man’s (sic) becoming in very fact an American and nothing but
an American....There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is
an American but something else also, isn’t an American at all....We have room
for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we want to see
that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality,
and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.
Many members of immigrant groups
oppose assimilation and embrace the concept of “pluralism’: the philosophy
whereby one adheres to a prevailing monocultural norm in public while
recognizing, retaining, and celebrating one’s distinctive and unique cultural
traditions and practices in the private realm.
The Jewish immigrant and sociologist
of Polish and Latvian heritage, Horace Kallen (1915), coined the term “cultural
pluralism” to challenge the image of the so-called “melting pot,” which he
considered inherently undemocratic.
Kallen envisioned a United States in
the image of a great symphony orchestra, not sounding in unison (the “melting
pot”), but rather, one in which all the disparate cultures play in harmony and
retain their unique and distinctive tones and timbres.
Social theorist Gunnar Myrdal traveled
throughout the United States during the late 1940s examining U.S. society
following World War II, and he discovered a grave contradiction or
inconsistency, which he termed “an American dilemma.”
He found a country founded on an
overriding commitment to democracy, liberty, freedom, human dignity, and
egalitarian values, coexisting alongside deep-seated patterns of racial
discrimination, privileging white people, while subordinating peoples of color.
The human rights organization, Amnesty
International, states that “Racial profiling occurs when race is used by law
enforcement or private security officials, to any degree, as a basis for
criminal suspicion in non-suspect specific investigations.”
Racial profiling constitutes a form of
discrimination, based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and other
identities, which, Amnesty International declares “undermines the basic human
rights and freedoms to which every person is entitled.”
If we learn anything from our
immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a
great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,”
nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but
rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion, and equity.
Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is author of The
What, The So What, and The Now What of Social Justice Education (Peter
Lang Publishers), Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice
(Purple Press); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon
Press), co-author with Diane Raymond of Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life (Beacon
Press), and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice
(Routledge) and Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression
in the United States (Sense).
Dr. Warren Blumenfeld: Permission granted to forward, post, or
publish this commentary
*I acknowledge that my home &
university stand on stolen Nonotuck land & other Indigenous nations:
Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Mohegan, Pequot, Mohican, **Abenaki.
