Top Quotes: “The Making of Asian America: A History” — Erika Lee

Pre-Independence

“Beginning in the sixteenth century, Spanish trading ships known as “Manila galleons” brought Asian sailors, slaves, and servants to present-day Mexico as part of the creation of Spain’s Pacific Empire.”

“The rise of the British Empire led to the movement of South Asian indentured laborers from British-controlled India to British colonies in the Caribbean while Chinese coolies were sent to Cuba after the end of the African slave trade.”

“Gender discrimination added another layer of complexity for Asian immigrant women, for both their right to enter the United States and to stay in the country were linked to their husband’s or father’s immigrant status. U.S. citizenship had a gendered dimension as well. Barred from becoming naturalized citizens, Asian Americans could only gain U.S. citizenship through birth in the country. But for some years, native-born Asian American women lost their U.S. citizenship if they married Asian immigrant men, a consequence that did not apply to Asian American men.”

“Representing the first migrations of Asians to the Americas, some 40,000 to 100,000 Asians from China, Japan, the Philippines, and South and Southeast Asia crossed the Pacific from Manila and landed in Acapulco during the 250-year history of the galleon trade. Among the very first may have been Filipino crewmembers on Friar Urdaneta’s trailblazing voyage to New Spain in 1565. Also, a small number of Filipino crewmembers were likely on the Manila galleon that made a brief stop in Morro Bay, California, in 1587, where they battled with locals before heading back out to sea. According to some reports, Filipinos were also among the first settlers of Alta California after it became a province and territory in the Viceroyalty of New Spain in 1769. Others – mostly sailors, servants, and slaves – also came during the two and a half centuries of the Manila galleon era.”

“The perilous and long journey, unfair wages, and harsh working conditions convinced many sailors that their fortunes lay in the New World. To prevent desertion, ship captains paid sailors only a portion of their wages when they sailed out of the Philippines toward America. Only on their return to the Philippines was the rest of their promised pay to be given. The outbound journey was so horrendous, however, that many sailors opted to forfeit their pay rather than suffer through another ship voyage. Many even came prepared with a few bundles of Asian fabrics to sell. On one ship alone in 1618, only five out of an original crew of seventy-five Asian sailors returned to their ship for the journey back to Manila. The remaining seventy easily blended into local society with their ability to speak Spanish. Some married and settled down.

Some Asian servants also accompanied their Spanish masters across the Pacific to New Spain. The galleons carried a good number of Spanish passengers traveling across the Pacific as returning residents, new settlers, colonial and church officials, soldiers, and travelers. Their Asian servants catered to their needs on the sea voyage and in the new homes.

After sailors, slaves made up the next largest group of Asians coming to the Americas. The importation of Asian slaves began in Manila with Portuguese slave traders traversing Portugal’s extensive Southeast Asian empire. European travelers in Asia and Spanish officials in Manila regularly recorded Portuguese ships arriving in Manila with both spices and slaves in their holds. These ships brought African slaves as well as slaves from Macao, the Malabar Coast of India, Pegu (Burma), Malacca, Java, and other areas where they conducted trade in the Indian Ocean.”

“In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Manila became a center of transpacific slave trading. Facilitated by the Manila galleon trade, Asians constituted another pool of slave labor in New Spain, albeit much smaller than the African population. Colonial merchants, priests, and military and civil officials involved in the trade all profited handsomely. In 1604, Father Pedro Chirino observed that slaves from India, Malacca, and Maluco fetched the highest prices, because “the men are industrious and obliging, and many are good musicians; the women excellent seamstresses, cooks, and preparers of conserves, and are neat and clean in service.” An estimated 6,000 entered the colony each decade during the seventeenth century.”

“Spain tried to restrict transpacific slavery, but the trade continued for many decades. In 1626, a tax of 4,000 reales was levied on every slave brought from the Philippines. In 1672, Asian slaves were emancipated in New Spain, and in 1700 a royal order prohibited the Asian slave trade. Only then did the number of Asians transported as part of the transpacific slave trade drop dramatically.

Historians estimate that the first Asians – collectively known as los chinos – landed in Acapulco in the 1580s. Small but stable populations of chinos, the indigenous women they married, and their descendants formed communities along the Pacific coast in cities and pueblas like Acapulco, Coyuca, and San Miguel. The towns of Guerrero, Jalisco, and Michoacán were also popular settlements, as were the large settlements along el camino de China that connected Acapulco on the west coast to Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz on the east coast. According to historian Edward Slack Jr., Asians could be found in almost every corner of colonial Mexico during the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, from Loreto in Baja California to Mérida in Yucatán.”

“On a visit to Mexico City in the 1620s or 1630s, Dominican monk Thomas Gage marveled at the number of “people of China” who had converted to Christianity and excelled in goldsmithing. They had “perfected the Spaniards in that trade,” he observed. And Asians so dominated the field of barbering in the city that Spanish barbers filed a petition in 1635 complaining of unfair practices and competition.

Filipinos were notably successful in making palm wine, or tuba, a liquor made from palm trees that was popular in the Philippines. In 1619, Philippine official Hernando de los Ríos Coronel reported that “Indian natives of the Filipinas Islands” who had arrived in Mexico as seamen had deserted their ships and were now turning a profit making the wine along the coast. Palm wine was so popular, Ríos observed, that the indigenous peoples in the colony were now drinking “none except what the Filipinos make.””

Early Independence Years

“On February 22, 1784, the Empress of China set sail from New York as excited crowds gathered to witness the first U.S. vessel to travel to Canton under the United States flag. From the same harbor on the same day, another ship departed for London to deliver the congressional ratification of the Articles of Peace between the United States and Great Britain. The timing of the two launches had great significance. Finally free from King George Il’s grasp, Americans were eager to voyage to the “golden regions” of the East Indies, where they had long been forbidden to go. Through China, Americans believed that the economic prosperity and the promise of the new nation itself would be secured. The Harriet and the Empress of China did not disappoint. The Harriet’s captain traded the ginseng for tea. When the Empress returned in 1785 after a fifteen-month voyage, it brought a cargo hold full of Chinese teas, silks, porcelains, and fans and made a handsome profit. China was now open to the United States. Within six years of American independence, fifty-two ships sailed from the United States into the Indian Ocean and beyond.”

“The first recorded Chinese woman to arrive in the United States was brought into New York harbor in November 1834 aboard the Washington, a trading vessel owned by two U.S.-China traders, brothers Nathaniel and Frederick Carne. The ship’s hold was full of new Chinese goods aimed at the American middle class (shawls, lacquered backgammon boards, snuffboxes, walking canes, fans, and baskets), as well as nineteen-year-old Afong Moy, advertised as a “beautiful Chinese Lady” with bound feet whom the Carnes hoped would attract buyers for their wares. Within three weeks of her arrival in New York, the brothers had secured an exhibit space and placed Moy in a re-created “Chinese Saloon” with paper lanterns, gold and red satin drapes, Chinese furniture, and paintings. Newspapers reported widely on Afong Moy’s arrival and upcoming appearances. Soon tickets were on sale to viewers eager to see the exotic traveler from the Far East.”

“Wearing her “national costume,” or richly embroidered robes that fit a “lady of her rank,” Moy was on display for eight hours a day, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and then again from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Viewers watched her use chopsticks and listened to her speak in Chinese. An interpreter helped viewers communicate with her, and Afong Moy was instructed to walk around the room to display her bound feet, which were the source of great fascination among men and women alike. The cost for viewing her was 50 cents. Afong Moy’s exhibit sent a clear message: China and the Chinese were exotic, different, and as Moy’s bound feet further illustrated, degraded and inferior. By relegating her to an exotic curiosity, the Carne brothers and all who came to gawk at her reaffirmed the West’s superiority as well as the great differences between the United States and China. Moy eventually departed New York and embarked on an East Coast tour that took her to New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans, and Boston. During her visit to the nation’s capital, she even met with members of Congress and paid a visit to President Andrew Jackson in the White House. By 1848, Afong Moy was sharing an exhibition space with Tom Thumb and working in a P. T. Barnum show. But two years later, she was cast aside when Barnum promoted a show featuring another “Chinese Belle” in New York. Afong Moy’s fate remains unknown.

By the early nineteenth century, small pockets of Asians had settled in the southern United States as well. Some may have arrived through Mexico as early as the late eighteenth century. The earliest documented settlement dates back to the 1840s, when the Filipino fishing village of St. Malo, near the mouth of Lake Borgne in Louisiana, was founded. In 1883, Padre Carpio, one of the original inhabitants, told two journalists from the New Orleans-based Times-Democrat and Harper’s Weekly that he had been a sailor, but had deserted his ship to settle in St. Malo for its good harbor and excellent fishing and shrimping. Living in houses on stilts on the banks of the lake, the 100 male residents of St. Malo endured long, hot summers and cold winters with only mosquitoes, fleas, sand flies, alligators, and poisonous snakes for company. They worked long, hard hours to send alligators, fish, and shrimp to New Orleans for export to Asia, Canada, and South and Central America. Isolated enough to be ignored by the U.S. Postal Service and tax collectors, St. Malo residents still regularly sent money and letters to the Philippines and maintained relationships with the larger Filipino community based in New Orleans. Another Filipino named Jacinto Quintin de la Cruz founded a larger fishing village called Manila Village in Barataria Bay, and a number of Filipinos settled in New Orleans between 1850 and 1870. Long before the Philippines had become a U.S. colony in 1898 and U.S. imperialism launched a larger wave of mass migration from the Philippines during the early twentieth century, these Filipinos, or “Manila men,” had carved out a strong community for themselves.”

Indentured Servitude

“While small numbers of Asian immigrants were beginning to form communities in the United States in the early nineteenth century, a much larger migration of peoples was taking place between South Asia and China to Latin America. Between 1838 and 1917, more than 419,000 South Asians went to British West Indian plantations in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica as “coolies,” or indentured laborers bound under contract. An estimated 140,000 Chinese men also went to Cuba as coolies from 1847 to 1874, and 90,000 more went to Peru from 1849 to 1874. In all of these locations, they entered worlds of hard, bitter labor.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Asian indentured laborers had gone to Cuba, Peru, British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica in addition to other places around the Americas.”

“In 1807, Great Britain abolished the trade throughout the British Empire. The United States followed the year after, and by 1817 the slave trade had been banned in Spanish America north of the equator as well.

As a consequence, the cost of African slaves increased, and their dwindling numbers created a labor shortage in the West Indies, Cuba, Brazil, and Peru at a time of economic expansion. Sugar continued to drive many economies, especially in Cuba, which by 1870 produced over 40 percent of the world’s sugarcane. Throughout the Caribbean, the southern United States, and Latin America, the demand for minerals, raw materials, coffee, cotton, rum, tobacco, and guano fertilizer also kept the demand for labor high. In the West Indies, Cuba, and Peru, planters, labor recruiters, and politicians all looked to India and China to provide the labor needed to maintain the plantations that sustained both local and imperial economies.

It began in the British West Indies. There, the African slave population experienced a steep decline in the two decades after the end of the slave trade, from 800,000 in 1808 to 650,000 in 1830. Planters watched in dismay as estates closed and the entire economy suffered. In Jamaica, one planter described streets overgrown with weeds and abandoned houses that “look as though something much less than a hurricane would level them with the ground.” In 1802, planters began an experiment to bring Chinese contract laborers to their overseas colonies. One hundred ninety-two Chinese men landed in Trinidad that year. In 1810, several hundred Chinese tea growers were taken to Brazil by the Portuguese. About 2,947 Chinese were brought to Brazil from 1810 to 1874.

The formal end of British slavery in 1834 placed the West Indies’ sugar economies in a precarious situation. Freed Blacks left the plantations in droves to find other occupations, purchase small plots of land, and even organize to bargain for higher wages and better working conditions. Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana experienced the greatest losses. Large numbers of freed men and women continued to work as wage laborers on sugar plantations, but planters complained that they insisted on working shorter hours and fewer days. Sugar production fell drastically, and a number of plantations shut down.

To solve their problems, planters turned to foreign immigration. The goal was, in the words of John Gladstone, one of the largest slaveholders in British Guiana, to make the planters “independent of our negro population… as far as possible.”® European immigrants were preferred, and many governments, including that of British Guiana, subsidized the cost of European immigration to encourage the “whitening” of their populations. But the Europeans who came fell far shy of satisfying the demand for labor, so planters turned to Asia instead.”

“British imperial rule transformed South Asia. Economic policies contributed to a century of economic dislocation. The colonial government built railroads, roads, and irrigation canals to aid colonial projects, but it was the local population who funded them by paying new and increased taxes. The British also instituted major economic changes that were geared toward the development of products, crops, and raw materials for British consumption or for British markets and manufacturers. These changes mostly benefited Great Britain while exploiting local farming families and subjecting them to diminishing economic returns. The self-sufficiency traditional village communities eroded while exploitation by landlords and moneylenders increased. Conditions worsened even more as the region’s population exploded to 100 million over the nineteenth century.

These social and economic pressures were felt most acutely in the northern provinces of Bengal, Bihar, Assam, and the United Provinces, and Madras in the south, and it is from these regions that the earliest migrants came. In later years, migrants came from the Punjab. Known as the region’s breadbasket, the Punjab had once been one of the most fertile regions in South Asia. But by the mid-nineteenth century, it mostly supplied raw materials and cash crops to the British Empire, while local farmers suffered the effects of overcrowded and overused farmland, high rents, and famines.”

“As the South Asian indentured labor system became established and planters sought to stabilize the overwhelmingly male labor force, new efforts to recruit women began. In 1855, a new ordinance required a ratio of 33 women to every 100 men on board the ships sailing abroad. From 1868 onward, women made up a little over 40 percent of those heading overseas as indentured laborers.

But not all women were acceptable. Planters and colonial officials only wanted “virtuous” women (i.e., docile and “moral” women who were widowed or who came with their husbands or parents) who could tame the mostly male population. Single women were purported to be “shamelessly immoral” and likely to encourage prostitution, competition for sexual partners, worker unrest, and loss of worker productivity.”

“Between 1857 and 1862 the mortality rate on ships heading to British Guiana was 10.9 percent. By the 1870s, it had decreased to between 2 and 3 percent.”

“Their contracts generally bound them to five years of indenture working nine to ten hours a day, six days a week.”

“In some colonies, like Trinidad and British Guiana, for example, return passage was granted only after workers had worked an additional five years in the colony after their contracts had expired. And the entire system was inhumane. Some of the first workers to arrive in British Guiana were treated with severe brutality just like the African slaves they had recently replaced. The first reports out of British Guiana described conditions of “unalleviated wretchedness” and “hopeless misery.” The workers had a mortality rate of almost 25 percent.”

“By 1891, they were over 80 percent of the workforce on British Guianan sugar plantations, and the terms “sugar worker” and “Indian” became almost synonymous in British Guiana and Trinidad.

Work on the sugar plantations was divided according to sex, age, ability, and experience. Gangs of men, for example, took on the heaviest and hardest work of forking and cutting sugarcane. They sometimes worked alongside freed blacks who also performed the heaviest manual labor. Monotony and brutal labor were the norm. “Sahib, we are not donkeys to work so hard, give us time,” Jhangir Khan protested to his overseer on the Rose Hall estate in British Guiana.

Women were supposed to be in the fields as many hours as the men, and they kept up their work even when they were in the advanced stages of pregnancy. They earned less than their male counterparts and were prohibited from working in the higher-paying and higher-status positions on the plantations. And when their work in the fields ended, their work at home began: cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the men and children in their own homes. Their double duty often meant waking before dawn and toiling until the late hours of night.

Female indentured workers were additionally vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Overseers commonly kept “Hindu and Muslim females as paramours or concubines,” according to a government commission. In the 1840s, a medical doctor even reported to the governor of Trinidad the scandalous case of seven indentured women on one plantation simultaneously pregnant with the estate manager’s children. On another estate, South Asian women were regularly brought in by the South Asian overseer to serve as prostitutes for the male workers.”

“Indentured laborers inherited old slave quarters that were often sparse, lacked latrines, and suffered from leaky roofs, bad ventilation, and poor drainage. Colonial authorities and plantation managers justified the poor conditions by claiming the quarters were “much more sanitary than that of the houses in an ordinary Indian village.”

South Asian workers who had been recruited for their supposed subservience turned out to be quite militant. Strikes, mass marches, violent demonstrations, mass desertions, and organized work stoppages – even though they were illegal – were common throughout the years of the indentured labor system in the West Indies. Usually, these protests were sporadic, small-scale, and quickly repressed. But occasionally, worker-led riots and work stoppages took place on a larger scale and spread across plantations. For example, one hundred strikes occurred between 1886 and 1889 alone, and another 141 erupted between 1900 and 1913.

Even though the indentured labor system had been designed to bring South Asian laborers to the West Indies on a temporary basis and then return them to their homeland to be replaced with a fresh crop of laborers, the majority chose to remain. Some had failed to acquire the wealth and riches they had hoped for and did not wish to return home in disgrace. Others had married partners of different castes and believed that these unions would not be accepted in their home villages. Still more tried to find economic opportunities in the islands after their contracts ended. They reindentured themselves, sometimes for two, three, or four one-year terms. Others hired themselves out as wage laborers or became landowners themselves,

By 1920, South Asians represented 33 and 42 percent of the populations in Trinidad and British Guiana, respectively. Replacing Africans as the largest part of the population in the islands, they transformed the fabric of everyday life in the Caribbean, becoming part of the callaloo (mixed) societies there. A small middle class also formed, and community activism around the general welfare and rights of South Asians became more noticeable. Some of this activism centered around abolishing the entire indenture system. Critics had consistently railed against it from its earliest days. But between 1900 and the beginning of World War I, opposition to the indentured labor system grew in South Asia, Britain, and elsewhere as the suffering of indentured laborers and the discrimination that South Asians faced worldwide was tied to the plight of India under British colonialism.”

“Connecting the indenture system to growing nationalist sentiment in India, Hardinge strongly urged the total abolition of the system in order to “remove a racial stigma that India deeply resents. In 1917, the Indian government suspended emigration altogether. By 1920, the entire indenture system was abolished and outstanding indentures were terminated.”

“Just as British imperialism influenced modern migration from South Asia, the growing presence of European powers in China similarly resulted in Chinese migration abroad. Ruled by the Qing Empire since 1644, China was already suffering from weak political leadership and corruption, a population explosion, regional factionalism, and economic instability before Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal sought to carve the nation up in the nineteenth century. When unequal economic relationships between China and European powers caused even greater instability in the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese began to move around the world in ever greater numbers.”

“In the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, economic, political, and social conditions set the stage for mass migration. By 1850, the country’s population had grown exponentially to 450 million from 150 million in 1700. And a seemingly endless stream of natural disasters struck southern China beginning in the early nineteenth century. Droughts, storms, typhoons, earthquakes, plagues, floods, and famines all took their toll on the Chinese people. High taxes and dissatisfaction with the Qing led to a number of rebellions and civil unrest in the form of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the Red Turban uprisings (1854–1864), and feuds between the Punti and Hakka ethnic groups. At the same time, unequal treaties between China and Western imperial powers resulted in higher taxes on local peasants.

Chinese who could no longer make a living as farmers or laborers increasingly began to leave their home villages and head to larger cities in Guangdong province. This migration from the rural areas to the cities became the first stepping-stone to migration abroad, and 96 percent of Chinese came to the Americas from Guangdong. From 1801 to 1900, an estimated two and a half million Chinese migrated to Southeast Asia as well as to the United States, the Pacific islands of Hawaii, Tahiti, and Western Samoa, and to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, South America, and Africa. The most widely dispersed group of Asian migrants, Chinese worked and lived abroad on almost every continent on earth by the 1940s.

Chinese migration was more varied than migration from South Asia. In general, there were three ways to go abroad. The first was to pay one’s own way across the Pacific, a choice reserved for only the most prosperous. The second was to borrow the necessary funds from family members or from a moneylender with the promise to pay back the loan with interest after arrival. This was known as the credit-ticket system and was the primary way that Chinese made it to the United States, Canada, Southeast Asia, and Australia. The Chinese who were able to pay their own way or use the credit-ticket system were not the poorest of the poor; as a rule, they had resources and saw migration as a way to remain upwardly mobile. The third way, which 11 or 12 percent of emigrants leaving Hong Kong chose, was to migrate as indentured laborers.”

“Eighteen forty-seven was the first year that Chinese were sent to Cuba as part of the coolie trade. By 1874, 142,000 Chinese had been brought to Cuba. From 1849 to 1874, another 90,000 Chinese went to Peru. La trata amarilla (the yellow trade) of Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba was horrific in its barbarous recruitment and transportation practices as well as its exploitation of laborers on the plantations. Unlike in South Asia, where the indenture system was regulated (if somewhat negligently) by British colonial officials, the Chinese coolie trade was largely unregulated. That Chinese coolies were introduced into Cuba while African slavery was still in full swing (it would not be abolished until 1886) meant the latter also greatly influenced the experiences of the former.”

“Profits motivated foreign and Chinese labor recruiters to use deception and force to fill coolie ships. Chinese commissioners investigating the abuses of the coolie system in Cuba concluded that 80 or 90 percent of all Chinese laborers had been brought there against their will. Indentured laborer Ren Shinzen wrote a lengthy petition for the commissioners that described how Cuban recruiters were “crafty in their hearts and greedy and cruel in their nature…. Their ships go into China and collude with wicked civilians [who] pointed falsely at a gold mountain and promised to show the way.” Cheng A-mou and other workers explained that they had been “induced” to go to Macao “by offers of employment abroad at high wages.” They were even told that “the eight foreign years specified in the contracts were equivalent to only four Chinese [years]” and that then they would be free.

Recruiters were also deliberately vague about the types of work and the exact locations that Chinese were headed to. The 400 Chinese on board the Robert Browne heading out of Amoy on March 21, 1852, for example, believed they were heading to San Francisco and the promise of the gold fields. Instead, they were destined for Peru, where they were to work as coolies on the guano islands. When this news was revealed on board the ship, they organized a mutiny.”

“Portuguese-controlled Macao was the main center of the Chinese coolie trade in Asia. New recruits were sent there and were restrained in “pigpens” while awaiting sale to European and U.S. ship captains in a process that the Chinese called “the buying and selling of pigs.” One such pigpen was a wooden shed “like a slave baracoon,” 120 feet by 24 feet, holding 500 nearly naked and suffocating men. White letters were stamped or painted on their chests to indicate their intended destination. A “C” meant California, a “P” meant Peru, an “S” referred to the Sandwich (or Hawaiian) Islands. The kidnapped, deceived, and voluntary migrants were all mixed up together, and it was sometimes impossible to distinguish among them. Over the next four to eight months, they slowly made their way across the Pacific to the Americas on American, British, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and French ships that were often nothing more than overcrowded prisons.

Ships heading to Cuba took a westward route from China sailing through the Indian Ocean, around Africas Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Atlantic. Ships heading to Peru sailed across the Pacific on journeys lasting 80 to 140 days. To control the passengers – especially those who were victims of kidnapping or deceit – ships were commonly outfitted with “iron gratings over hatchways, walls between crew and coolie quarters, armed guards, [and] cannons trained on hatchways.” There was insufficient food and water, and coolies were often crowded together and chained in the suffocating hold. They were frequently beaten and killed. One hundred seventy-three men were chained with foot irons and 160 men were stripped and flogged with rattan rods during the journey that brought Huan A-fang to Cuba. Three hundred died of thirst on Chen A-sheng’s ship. Twenty men cast themselves overboard to escape the misery on Liu A-san’s ship. During a twenty-six-year period, approximately 16,400 Chinese, or one third of all Chinese coolies destined for the Americas, reportedly died from physical violence, suicide, and thirst on European and American ships to Cuba. The Chinese began calling them “devil ships” and others referred to them as “floating coffins.” The mortality rate on the coolie ships rivaled those on African slave ships, when an average of 20 percent of all Africans died during the Middle Passage from 1590 to 1699.”

“Coolies in Cuba and Peru were legally free men who signed labor contracts. Unlike slaves, who were considered property, coolies were legally bound to eight years’ servitude (three years longer than South Asians in the British West Indies) and could become free upon the completion of their contracts. They could enter into marriages, assume parental control over their children, and could not be separated from spouses. They could also buy and sell property and bring charges against their patrones, the owners of their contracts. They were supposed to receive a monthly wage, adequate food and health care, lodging, and one day of rest on Sundays, plus holidays. These elements made coolie labor unique from both slavery and the free labor system. Freedom was theoretically an option, and coolies had certain rights during their terms of indenture that were denied to slaves.

In reality, however, the daily experiences of Chinese coolies in Cuba did not follow the terms of their contracts or reflect their status as free laborers. Whatever freedoms they had were temporary and arbitrary. Coolie life on the plantations revolved around backbreaking work, routine beatings and intimidations, little or poor-quality food, and exploitation by cruel overseers. They worked daily for twenty to twenty-two hours, from 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. until midnight.”

“The status of Chinese coolies and African slaves — Cuba would not abolish slavery until 1886 — often overlapped. They worked alongside each other and often lived in close proximity. They lacked the same basic freedoms and were subjected to the same systems of control. Coolies were required, for example, to “renounce the exercise of all civil rights which are not compatible with the compliance of contract obligations.” Thus, marriage and any buying and selling of property had to be approved of by the patrón, and coolies had little freedom of movement. They could not leave the plantation without written permission, and if they were caught without it, they could be arrested as runaways, beaten, and even killed. As one Chinese laborer told visiting Chinese commissioners in 1874, “The police are bent solely on profit and oppress the Chinese… you could die easily like an ant.”

Even their punishments were the same. The 1849 regulations issued by the Spanish government to guide the coolie system lifted — almost verbatim — language from existing Cuban slave codes. Chinese indentured laborers who did not follow orders or who ran away could be flogged, shackled, and confined. The consequences were horrific. “There are shackles on my feet and chains around my neck,” one coolie testified in 1874. Due to mistreatment and malnourishment, over 50 percent of Chinese coolies in Cuba perished before their contracts ended.

Moreover, the terms of the contracts, which were subject to interpretation by masters, were routinely ignored or manipulated to further exploit the laborer. For example, regulations allowed Chinese coolies to purchase their contracts at any time, but they had to pay their masters back for their purchase price, any value added to their contract since the time of purchase, including clothing and sick days, and the cost of finding a replacement laborer. Owners set the terms and price of these costs.”

“Like South Asian laborers in the British West Indies, the Chinese in Cuba and Peru found ways to challenge exploitative work conditions. They routinely slowed the pace of their work, refused to work, committed acts of sabotage, and stole from their plantations. Chinese coolies also took their rights to sue employers very seriously. They filed protests and complaints against patrones who mistreated them and local authorities who failed to enforce the laws. Chinese often tried to escape their indentures by running away, and in extreme cases Chinese attacked their overseers and patrones.”

“Many histories of Cuban independence tell the inspiring tale of Chinese indentured laborer Bu Tak (José Bu), who joined insurgents in 1860 and eventually rose up the ranks to become a celebrated Cuban freedom fighter. In 1869, Bu guided Cuban forces through treacherous terrain in order to deliver orders to a Cuban general. He was known for charging into battle ferociously waving a machete and shouting in Spanish, “For Cuba! Spanish go to hell!” Bu fought in all three wars for Cuban independence from Spain over a thirty-year period and eventually became a lieutenant colonel.”

“After African slaves were emancipated in 1065, southern planters championed coolie labor in order to revitalize the southern economy and to counter the effects of black enfranchisement. Political battles between federal officials and Louisiana planters and merchants over the status of coolies erupted in the late 1860s. In the end, the United States outlawed coolie labor and U.S. involvement in the coolie trade in 1862. The Coolie Trade Act of that year became the first step in the eventual exclusion of all Chinese laborers that occurred in 1882.

By the 1870s, condemnation of the coolie trade had spread internationally. On December 27, 1873, the Portuguese governor of Macao closed the colony to the coolie trade. The last coolie ships set sail to Latin America three months later. In 1874, an international commission traveled to Cuba to investigate coolie conditions. Representatives from China, Britain, and France heard 1,176 oral testimonies and read 1,665 written petitions. One after another, Chinese coolies described their experiences, begged for help, and called attention to the abuses and exploitation of the coolie system, or what one called “a hell on earth.” As a result of the commission’s findings, the Chinese emperor issued a decree calling for the immediate end of the coolie trade in 1875. In 1877, Spain and China signed a treaty terminating all contracts of Chinese laborers still under indenture in Cuba and established a Chinese consulate general in Cuba to protect the interests of Chinese still there. Peru and China reached a similar treaty in 1876.”

“Freedom, however, remained elusive for Chinese coolies in Cuba. Even after the coolie trade was abolished, slavery remained in place until 1886 and affected the mobility of all slave, indentured, and free laborers. Laws, such as one that required coolies to reindenture themselves or leave Cuba within two months at their own expense, also forced some to continue their terms of indenture. And many patrones refused to give the papers documenting a coolie’s freedom at the end of his contract period.

Those who were able to secure their freedom found limited opportunities available to them. Some organized themselves into cuadrillas, or contract work gangs under Chinese management, and were slowly able to transition into agricultural wage work. A small number of Chinese became engaged in retail and truck farming. A larger number concentrated in the laundry business or as domestic servants, like their compatriots in the United States and Canada.

By the 1860s and 1870s, a large community of free Chinese had settled in Havana. Two former coolies, Chung Leng and Lan Si Ye, are credited with establishing Havana’s Chinatown near Zanja Street by opening up a café and grocery store in 1858. Other businesses followed. By the early 1870s, a recognizable barrio chino had been formed around the market plaza.

Other former Chinese coolies remigrated within the Americas to countries like Panama, Mexico, and the United States.”

Early Chinese Americans

“When railroad construction jobs dried up in the western U.S. after 1869, thousands of Chinese laborers drifted into San Francisco, where they helped to expand the city’s emerging industries in shoes, textiles, and cigars. By 1872, nearly half the workingmen employed in factories were Chinese. They were paid low wages, and in shops where they worked alongside whites performing the same work, Chinese were paid less than their white counterparts. The charge that Chinese competed unfairly with white workers would become one of the central arguments in the anti-Chinese movement by the 1870s.

The demand for Chinese immigrant labor was not just in the West. Chinese were also recruited to work in shoe factories in North Adams, Massachusetts, and on plantations in the South. By 1880, there were small communities based in New Orleans and in Mississippi. In the racially segregated South, Chinese occupied an in-between, “partly colored” place among blacks and whites. They had more freedom of movement and other privileges that were denied to African Americans. But they were never accepted as equal to whites.

In California, Chinese also turned to agriculture. In the Sacramento-San Joaquin River deltas, they were hired to construct irrigation channels, levees, dikes, and ditches. Working with shovels in waist-deep water, they drained the swamplands and turned them into some of the most productive and fertile farmland in the country. Chinese immigrants also constructed roads, cleared land, planted, pruned, and harvested grapes for the Napa and Sonoma valleys’ wine industry.”

“In 1920, 48 percent of the Chinese in California worked in small business. In spite of the stereotypes, these enterprises were in no way traditional Chinese occupations. “The Chinese laundryman does not learn his trade in China,” laundryman Lee Chew explained in 1906. “There are no laundries in China. The women there do the washing in tubs and have no washboards or flat irons.” Nor did the Chinese particularly like this kind of work. Rather, the Chinese became laundrymen, writer and activist Wong Chin Foo explained in 1888, “simply because there is no other occupation by which they can make money as surely and quickly.”

It all seemed to start with a man named Wah Lee, who hung up a “Wash’ng and Iron’ng” sign over a storefront at the corner of Dupont and Washington Streets in San Francisco in 1851. With so few women, including washerwomen of any ethnic background, in Gold Rush California, the city faced an acute shortage of launderers. It cost $8 to wash and iron a dozen shirts. At one point, the cost of cleaning clothes was so high that some resorted to shipping their laundry to Honolulu, which was actually less expensive than having it done in San Francisco. The one downside was that it could take several months to get the clean clothes back. Lee and others capitalized on an opportunity. By 1860, there were 890 Chinese laundrymen in the state. Ten years later, almost 3,000 Chinese were recorded as washing and ironing clothes for a living.

Chinese restaurants had similar origins. Gold Rush era California was filled with few women and even fewer men who were willing to cook and feed others. Like the entrepreneurial Wah Lee, Chinese immigrants seized on the opportunity to support themselves and worked as camp cooks and as operators of small eating establishments.”

“Early immigrant women — including both the prostitute at one end of the social and economic ladder and the merchant’s wife at the other — lived circumscribed lives. They often spoke no English and were confined to the enclosed world of their families and communities by their husbands and fathers and by the patriarchal values in both Chinese and American societies. “Poor me!” one Chinese immigrant woman complained. “In China I was shut up in the house since I was ten years old, and only left my father’s house to be shut up in my husband’s house in this great country. For seventeen years I have been in this house without leaving it save on two evenings.””

“In 1902, Chinese student and social reformer Sieh King King stood before a packed San Francisco crowd and introduced the idea that the emancipation of Chinese women was central to the emancipation of China. An ardent believer in the reform movement in China, which viewed modernization as a way to free China from foreign domination, Sieh made history by being the first Chinese woman to introduce feminist ideas to San Francisco’s Chinatown. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Sieh “boldly condemned the slave girl system, raged at the horrors of foot-binding, and declared that men and women were equal and should enjoy the privileges of equals.’”

“In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape went to enroll their daughter Mamie in San Francisco’s Spring Valley School. Citing state education codes that allowed schools to exclude children who had “filthy or vicious habits, or children with contagious or infectious diseases,” school officials and the San Francisco School Board refused their application. Characterizing all Chinese children as dangerous or diseased, the School Board trustees used these codes to maintain a strict policy of racial segregation in the public schools. The Tapes launched a legal battle for equal access to education. In a letter of protest to the board, Mary Tape wrote: “I see that you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out of the Public Schools…. Is it a disgrace to be born a Chinese? Didn’t God make us all!!! What right! Have you to bar my children out of the school because she is of chinese Descend.” The Tapes eventually sued the San Francisco School Board and argued that as a native-born citizen of the United States, Mamie was entitled to the free education that was every American’s birthright. A San Francisco superior court judge agreed, but the San Francisco School Board refused to allow Mamie to attend school with whites and established a separate Chinese primary school in the Chinatown district. Although it was not the outcome that the Tapes would have liked, Mamie and her younger brother, Frank, were the first two students to show up for class when the school opened in April 1885. The Tapes’ legal challenge had affirmed that Chinese children in the United States had the right to a public education.

Wong Kim Ark was a native-born American citizen of Chinese descent whose 1898 Supreme Court challenge affirmed the constitutional status of birthright citizenship for all persons born in the United States. A restaurant cook and native of San Francisco, Wong was twenty-four in 1894 when he returned to California after a visit to China. To his surprise, he was denied reentry into the United States. John H. Wise, U.S. collector of customs in charge of immigrant processing in San Francisco, claimed that Wong, though born in the United States, was not a citizen because his parents were Chinese nationals who were ineligible for citizenship under the Chinese exclusion laws. A self-described “zealous opponent of Chinese immigration,” Wise attempted to apply the exclusion laws as broadly as possible, including to second-generation Chinese Americans. Wise ordered that Wong be “returned” to China.”

“Wong and his lawyers challenged the decision with a writ of habeas corpus. He claimed that he had a right to be readmitted into the United States based on his status as a United States citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment. The question for the court was: how does the United States determine citizenship-by jus soli (by soil) or by jus sanguinis (by blood)? The District Court for the Northern District of California ruled for Wong, but the U.S. attorney appealed the decision and the case was argued before the United States Supreme Court in March 1897. With a majority opinion by Justice Horace Gray, the court ruled in Wong’s favor. United States v. Wong Kim Ark affirmed that all persons born in the United States were, regardless of race, native-born citizens and entitled to all the rights of citizenship.

Other Chinese in America, like writer and activist Wong Chin Foo, used the public sphere to challenge discrimination in the U.S. Born in 1847, Wong was twenty years old when he came to the United States with an American missionary woman who, with her late husband, had taken care of him in China after his family fell on hard times. He studied in schools in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania before returning to China to marry and start a family. But when he began to criticize the Qing Empire, he was expelled from China and returned to the United States in 1873. The next year, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Federal laws prohibited the naturalization of Asian immigrants, but they were not enforced rigidly around the country until after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed and explicitly spelled out the prohibition against naturalized U.S. citizenship for Chinese.) Wong lectured throughout the country on topics related to China and the Chinese in the United States. As the anti-Chinese movement grew during the 1870s and 1880s, he defended the Chinese community, attacked anti-Chinese leader Denis Kearney, and established the Chinese American, the first Chinese newspaper in New York City. During the next decade, he formed the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1892 and continuously spoke out against the Chinese exclusion laws, including when he testified before the U.S. Congress in 1893 (likely the first Chinese person to do so). His was an unequivocal voice for justice. “We claim a common manhood with all other nationalities,” Wong’s Equal Rights League stated in an 1892 appeal, “and believe we should have that manhood recognized according to the principles of common humanity and American freedom.” Wong continued to push for Chinese American citizenship rights until his death in 1898.”

“The Immigration Act of 1924 explicitly excluded “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” a reference to all Asians, and the 1922 Cable Act revoked the citizenship of women who married “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The main victims of this law were Asian American women who married Asian male immigrants. Once a woman lost her citizenship, her rights to own property, vote, and travel freely were also revoked. This law would not be changed until 1931.”

“One cartoon titled “A Statue for Our Harbor,” published in 1881 in the San Francisco-based magazine The Wasp, seemingly captured all of white California’s fears about Chinese immigration. A statue of a grotesque Chinese male coolie in San Francisco Bay mocks New York’s Statue of Liberty, then under construction. His ragged robes, rat-tail-like queue, stereotypical facial features, and opium pipe symbolize the unassimilability and immorality of the Chinese. The message that Chinese immigration would bring destruction to California and the entire nation is made clear with the skull upon which the statue rests his foot, the rats scurrying around the pedestal, the capsized ships and crumbling statue foundation, the slant-eyed moon, and the rays of light emanating from the coolie’s head informing readers that Chinese bring “filth,” “immorality,” “diseases,” and “ruin to white labor.” With the wide dissemination of such racist images in mainstream popular culture, the anti-Chinese movement spread.

By the time that this cartoon was published, Californians had tried to regulate Chinese immigration for decades. As early as 1850, anti-Chinese sentiment in California became part of state law in the form of a foreign miner’s tax. Although the law was aimed at all foreigners, it was primarily enforced against the Chinese. In 1870, the state had collected $5 million in taxes from the Chinese alone, an amount that equaled a quarter to half of California’s entire revenue. In 1854, Chinese were officially granted unequal status along with other racial minorities when the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans, were prohibited from giving testimony in cases involving a white person. In support of its decision, the court argued that Chinese immigrants were a “distinct people… whom nature has marked as inferior.””

“By the 1870s, vigilante anti-Chinese violence was common throughout the West in cities big and small. On October 24, 1871, seventeen Chinese were lynched in Los Angeles after a policeman was shot by a Chinese suspect. A mob of nearly 500, which represented nearly a tenth of the population of Los Angeles at the time, went on the attack and dragged Chinese out of their homes while others hastily built gallows downtown to hang the victims. Police did little as a broad cross section of Angelenos, including women and children, assisted the mob in what would become the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.

During the 1880s, the violence increased. In February 1885, the entire Chinese population of Eureka, California – 300 in total – was rounded up within forty-eight hours after a city councilman was accidentally killed in the crossfire between two Chinese rivals. On September 2, 1885, twenty-eight Chinese miners were killed and another fifteen were wounded in Rock Springs, Wyoming, before the rest of the Chinese population in the town —numbering in the hundreds – were driven out into the desert. On November 3, 1885, a mob of 500 armed men descended upon the two Chinese neighborhoods in Tacoma, Washington, and forced all 800 to 900 Chinese residents out of the city. Some were dragged from their homes and were forced to watch as their businesses were pillaged and their belongings thrown into the street. By the afternoon, Chinese residents were marched out of town in the heavy rain to the Lake View Junction railroad stop, part of the Northern Pacific Railroad that Chinese laborers – possibly some who had just been forced out of Tacoma – had built. Others walked, some as far as 100 miles, to Portland, Oregon, or British Columbia – anywhere but Tacoma. Three days later, Seattle also demanded that all Chinese leave town.”

“In 1888, a second law, known as the Scott Act, imposed further restrictions. Laborers who had returned to China were forbidden to reenter the United States unless they had wives, children, parents, or property or debts in excess of $1,000 there. The act also nullified 20,000 return certificates that had already been granted to Chinese laborers in the country. In 1892, the exclusion laws were extended for another ten years under the Geary Act. Beginning the next year, all Chinese in the United States were required to register with the federal government to obtain certificates of residence (precursors to today’s Green Cards) that proved their legal right to be in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed again in 1902 and made permanent in 1904.”

“The U.S. presence in Hawaii began soon after British explorer James Cook discovered the islands in 1778. European and American settlers, missionaries, and traders flocked to the islands, and foreign advisors and weapons helped Kamehameha I unite the separate island governments into the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1810. By 1875, the United States was the dominant foreign power in the kingdom.”

“Annexation was fiercely debated, but both the pro- and anti-annexation forces also fixed their arguments on Asian immigrants, who in 1890 constituted 32 percent of the total Hawaiian population, Former U.S. minister to Hawaii John Stevens argued that the “American and Christian Caucasian people” needed to acquire the Hawaiian lands as soon as possible to prevent the islands “from being submerged and overrun by Asiatics.” When Hawaii was formally annexed to the United States on July 7, 1898, Chinese exclusion was automatically extended to the islands. The final treaty also prohibited the emigration of Chinese residents in Hawaii to any part of the continental U.S., a concession to labor organizations in the United States.”

“U.S. politicians argued, for example, that Filipinos lacked the capacity to compete with Chinese. The latter’s exclusion from the Philippines was therefore a policy that would benefit the Filipinos and assist them in their development under American protection. With the support of organized labor in the United States, Chinese exclusion became established policy in the Philippines in 1902.”

“Due to British relations with China, an all-out exclusion of Chinese immigrants was not feasible for Canada. Thus, instead of the United States’ explicit policy of exclusion, Canadian commissioners suggested a head tax policy that would permit entry to every Chinese, provided that he or she paid the landing fee. The federal government waited until construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway was mostly completed (with Chinese labor) and then yielded to the demands of British Columbians to restrict Chinese immigration in 1885 by imposing a $50 head tax on laborers. In 1900, Canada raised its head tax to $100. Three years later, the tax was raised again to $500. For some years, the Chinese head taxes were effective. But one unintended consequence was that the lower immigration rates turned Chinese laborers into a scarce and increasingly valuable commodity in British Columbia. Chinese immigrant wages doubled and, in some cases, tripled. By 1908–1909, the $500 head tax was no longer useful as a deterrent to Chinese immigration, although it proved to be an effective source of revenue for the Canadian government. From 1885 to 1923, Chinese immigrants paid $22.5 million to the Canadian government for the privilege of entering and leaving the country. No other group was required to pay these taxes.

In 1923, Canada transformed its regulation of Chinese immigration altogether. Closely modeled on U.S. Chinese exclusion laws, the 1923 Exclusion Act abolished the head tax system and instead prohibited all people of Chinese origin or descent from entering the country. Consular officials, children born in Canada, merchants, and students were the only exemptions. The act also required every person of Chinese origin in Canada, regardless of citizenship, to register with the Canadian government and obtain a certification of registration as in the United States. For the Chinese in Canada, the act was a major setback. July 1, 1923, the day that the law was passed, became known by Chinese Canadians as “Humiliation Day.””

“As the U.S. and Canada cracked down on Chinese immigration, Chinese immigrants headed to Mexico. By 1910 Chinese lived and worked in almost every state and territory in the country. They made up the second largest number of foreigners (around 24,000) residing in Mexico in 1926. The rise of the antichinistas (anti-Chinese ac-tivists) followed.

By the early twentieth century, Mexican newspapers were describing the Chinese as “savages,” “uncivilized,” and “lazy.” Chinese immigration itself was described in catastrophic terms: “onda amarilla,” “peste amarilla,” “invasión mongólica” (“yellow wave,” the “yellow plague,” the “Mongol invasion”). An organized anti-Chinese movement developed in the northern state of Sonora, where antichinistas focused on the unfair economic competition that Chinese immigrants allegedly posed to Mexicans. Although the Chinese population was never large, they dominated local commerce in groceries, dry goods, and general merchandise in border towns such as Nogales and Agua Prieta, where American companies were busy establishing mines and building railroads. Sonorans, who already felt disadvantaged by the large presence of U.S. capital in the region, greatly resented the Chinese-owned businesses.”

“Although leaders called for immigration restriction laws to limit or stop Chinese immigration to Mexico, violence was the most common response. There was an anti-Chinese riot in Mazatlán in 1886, and several unprovoked attacks on Chinese occurred in Mexico City that same year. Then came the massacre of Chinese in Torreón on May 5, 1911. The “two-day orgy of unbelievable brutality” resulted in the deaths of 303 Chinese (out of an estimated 600 to 700) and $850,000 worth of property damage to Chinese businesses and homes.”

“Most countries in Latin America had restricted Chinese immigration in one way or another, varying from total exclusion to various regulations that limited the number of Chinese immigrants allowed in each year. The campaign to restrict Chinese immigration begun in the United States ended up having far-reaching consequences for the regulation of immigration around the world. By the early twentieth century, a “restrictive international migration regime” was in place.”

Early Japanese Americans

“The first private Japanese emigration company was established in 1891, and soon other companies were competing to send Japanese laborers to the Hawaiian Islands, the United States, Australia, Fiji, the Philippines, Mexico, Peru, and Canada. Both emigration companies and labor recruiters targeted young men who could withstand hard labor. Most were from farming families who struggled to make ends meet as the Meiji government imposed higher and higher taxes to fund its modernization and industrialization programs (known as the Meiji Restoration) from 1868 to 1912. These programs were designed to protect Japan from encroaching European and American dominance in Asia, but the high taxes hit Japanese farmers, especially those in the southwestern agricultural prefectures of Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto, and Fukuoka, particularly hard. Farmers were required to pay fixed taxes every year regardless of the success of their crops or the market prices for their products. And during the 1880s, government economic policies depressed the price of rice and increased the financial burden on small farm owners even more. Three hundred thousand farmers were forced to sell their land when they could no longer pay the taxes. They joined a growing population of landless peasants. Even those who successfully held on to their farms struggled with plots that were often too small to support their families. A growing number of Japanese men chose emigration abroad instead of compulsory military service, and inflation, sharp increases in the price of rice, and a devastating earthquake in 1923 contributed to the ongoing interest in immigrating abroad. Okinawans, a minority group whose islands had been annexed by Japan in 1897, and whose homeland was and still is Japan’s poorest prefecture, made up another large group going to the United States. Between 1926 and 1941, 15 percent of all people leaving the country were from Okinawa, and at least one third of the Japanese population in Latin America came from the prefecture.”

“In the early 1900s, Japanese labor activism sparked a full-fledged revolt, culminating in the Japanese strike of 1909, one of the most massive and sustained strikes in the history of Hawaii. Strikers demanded higher wages, equal pay for equal work, and an end to the racially discriminatory wage system that paid Japanese laborers less than laborers of other nationalities. On the evening of May 9, 1909, several hundred Japanese laborers gathered at the Aiea Plantation on Oahu to organize. By morning time, they were on strike. Over the next few weeks, the strike spread from plantation to plantation. At its height, 7,000 Japanese participated in the “Great Strike of 1909.” Planters responded by evicting the strikebreakers and their families from the plantation. By the end of June, more than 5,000 strikers and their families were homeless and straggled into Honolulu. The evictions forced many strikebreakers back to the plantations, but the organized resistance of Japanese plantation laborers also forced the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to raise the wages of Japanese laborers and end the discriminatory wage scale. In 1920, Japanese plantation laborers in Hawaii joined with Filipinos to continue to push for better working conditions and higher pay.”

“Japanese did not remain laborers forever. As they began to consider permanent residency in the United States, many turned to agriculture. Issei leader and newspaper publisher Abiko Kyutaro played a key role in urging his fellow Japanese to abandon the dekasegi mindset and commit to staying in the United States. Farming, he suggested, was perfectly suited to the Japanese. Their timing could not have been better. Chinese immigrant laborers had helped to reclaim much of California’s Central Valley with their labor on irrigation projects. With a steady water supply, California’s fertile land could now be processed for intensive agriculture and fruit and vegetable production. An increased demand for fresh produce in the cities and the development of a distribution system that carried produce across the nation in refrigerator cars helped fuel an agricultural revolution in the state. Japanese contracted, shared, and leased farmland throughout the West. In 1900, there were thirty-seven Japanese farms in the United States with a combined acreage of 4,674 acres. By 1910, Japanese had 1,816 farms with a total acreage of 99,254. On the eve of World War II, they grew 95 percent of California’s fresh snap beans and peas, 67 percent of the state’s fresh tomatoes, and 44 percent of its onions.”

“In San Francisco, the anti-Japanese movement continued to grow, and violent attacks on Japanese residents increased. In the summer and fall of 1906, local police recorded nearly 300 attacks on San Francisco Japanese. In the spring of 1907, tensions erupted again. On the night of May 20, a mob of about twenty whites entered the Japanese-owned Horseshoe Restaurant at 1213 Folsom Street, drove out its customers, broke all the windows, and wrecked the interior. The mob then crossed the street and attacked a Japanese bathhouse. The next night, a white mob congregated in front of the Japanese-owned Lion Restaurant at 124 Eighth Street and began attacking Japanese homes, businesses, and restaurants throughout the city. The violence lasted for several nights. Japanese repeatedly called the police for help, but none came. Local and national officials dismissed the violence, but Japanese leaders continued to protest against the systemic harassment of Japanese in San Francisco. “Hardly a day goes by … that some threatening demonstration is not made by roughs and hoodlums against the Japanese,” complained the Japanese Association of San Francisco. As a result of Japanese immigrant and diplomatic protests, Secretary of State Elihu Root urged California officials to protect Japanese residents. President Roosevelt also stationed troops near San Francisco and gave them orders to quell the next riot should it occur. The violence in San Francisco would prove to be the least destructive of all of the 1907 riots, but it laid the groundwork for more violent outbreaks in Bellingham and Vancouver.”

“The Japanese-Korean Exclusion League formally changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League to better confront the new threat. On September 4, 1907, a mob of thirty to forty white men forced 200 South Asians out of the city to shouts of “Drive out the Hindus.” All South Asians were forced to leave the city over the next few days. Bellingham’s Asian immigration “problem” was apparently solved. But the issue of Asian exclusion was just coming to a head up north in Vancouver.

In the summer and fall of 1907, British Columbia experienced a sudden increase in Asian immigration. Government reports listed 11,440 Asians, including 8,125 Japanese, disembarking at Pacific Coast ports in Canada. Some of this immigration was a direct result of President Roosevelt’s 1907 executive order, which made it impossible for Japanese to go from Hawaii to the continental U.S. without a passport issued by the Japanese government. As a result, Japanese in Hawaii began to travel north to Canada. Newspapers reported that Japanese were “swarming in by shiploads from Japan and Honolulu” and that “feeling[s] of panic” were strong in the coastal cities. “White Canada Forever” became the favorite song of exclusionists, who often sang it on the streets of Vancouver.”

“The idea of an anti-Asian parade was soon suggested as a way to “bring the white people to a state of enthusiasm.” City Hall was packed to the doors with a mass of people. The president of the Asiatic Exclusion League of Vancouver chaired the meeting and welcomed the international gathering of anti-Asian leaders. W. A. Young, an American Federation of Labor leader from Seattle, deplored the “yellow blight.” J. E. Wilson, a visiting New Zealand labor leader, described to the crowds what the other colonies in the British Empire had done to exclude Chinese. But it was Arthur E. Fowler from Seattle who delivered the most rousing speech. He reportedly addressed the mob outside from a telegraph pole in the middle of the business district. “What will you do?” he asked, according to a reporter at the scene. “What did they do to the Hindus in Bellingham?” he called out. Then around nine o’clock, he proposed a march through Chinatown. “The mob was off like a pack of hounds,” the reporter described.

Soon the mob turned violent. Many Chinese and Japanese kept indoors. But when objects were hurled through the windows of their shops and homes, Japanese residents armed themselves with clubs and bottles, guns, or knives and paraded in front of their houses and places of business on Powell Street. Another group guarded the entrance to the Japanese quarter, while others hurled bottles, bricks, stones, and chunks of wood from the rooftops of their buildings. Japanese immigrant Akisaburo Sato was in his room in a boardinghouse on Powell Street when the mob descended. He described how “hundreds of white rioters poured down from the direction of Main Street, violently screaming, throwing stones and flaying about with clubs.” A stone broke a nearby window, and a piece of glass cut Sato’s face. “When I saw the damage incurred by all the other shops and businesses, I was really scared to death,” he recalled. By three the next morning, virtually every building occupied by Chinese was damaged. In the Japanese quarter, fifty-nine properties were wrecked and the Japanese-language school was on fire. Two thousand Chinese were driven from their homes. Many immigrants and rioters were wounded. The official Canadian investigations did not record any deaths, but Asian-language newspapers claimed that four rioters and one Chinese man were killed.

Pushed to act by the violent outbreaks, both the United States and Canada began to negotiate with Japan to restrict Japanese immigration. Because Japan agreed to these regulations voluntarily (rather than be subject to a humiliating Japanese exclusion bill), these policies were known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The negotiations were finalized within three days of each other. The U.S. agreement was signed on January 25, 1908; Canada’s on January 28, 1908. They were nearly identical. In the U.S. agreement, the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports to any laborers, skilled or unskilled, bound for the continental U.S., but passports would be issued to “laborers who have already been in America and to the parents, wives, and children of laborers already resident there.” What this meant was that Japanese immigrants already in the U.S. could re-enter the country if they left. They could also bring their families over if they wished. But any new Japanese immigrants seeking entry into the United States would find the door firmly closed against them.”

“It did not take long for the two countries to realize that the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreements were ineffective. The two policies barred the immigration of Japanese laborers, but family members of Japanese already in the United States and Canada could still apply for admission. From 1909 to 1920, almost 93,000 Japanese entered or reentered the United States. The largest number of new immigrants, 20,000, were picture brides. During that same period, 17,382 Japanese entered Canada, the majority being women as well.”

“Japanese success in agriculture sparked a great deal of resentment. The San Francisco Examiner bemoaned the spectacle of “thousands of acres of our richest and most productive farmlands” being under the control of “an unassimilable race.” Laws aimed at checking Japanese economic competition followed. In California, the 1913 Alien Land Law permitted “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” a legal category applicable only to Asian immi-grants, to lease land for only three years and barred them from further land purchases. Japanese immigrants deftly worked around this law by securing leases and land in their U.S.-born children’s names or in jointly owned corporations. Amendments to this law in 1919 and 1920 closed these loopholes. By 1923, Washington, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, and Idaho had all adopted similarly restrictive alien land laws as well.”

“The 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, thus reduced the total number of admissions to 165,000 and redesigned the quotas to further reduce the slots available to southern and eastern European immigrants (2 percent of the foreign-born population of each nationality already residing in the United States in 1890). No restrictions were based on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, but the act closed the door on any further Asian immigration by denying admission to all aliens who were “ineligible for citizenship” (i.e., those to whom naturalization was denied). This clause was specifically aimed at the Japanese. And it was effective. After decades of activism by anti-Japanese activists, the gates to the United States were finally barred to Japanese immigrants.

Other countries followed. In 1928, Canadas Prime Minister Mackenzie King informed the Japanese government that Canada would admit only 150 agricultural laborers, domestic servants, clergy, and women and children into the country per year. After some negotiation, Tokyo agreed to the limit and an end to the picture bride system. Japanese immigration to Canada soon slowed to a trickle.”

“The gates to North America were now closed to Japanese immigrants. But the struggle for Japanese exclusion in the Americas did not end; it merely shifted southward. From 1908 to the beginning of World War II, 190,000 Japanese immigrants entered Brazil, constituting 75 percent of all Japanese arrivals in Latin America before World War II. In 1934, there were 20,385 Japanese in Peru. As the Japanese population grew in Latin American countries, so did anti-Japanese sentiment and hostility. In 1934, Brazil put into effect an immigration quota system modeled after the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 that allowed in only 2 percent of the total number of nationals settled in Brazil during the past fifty years. Like the U.S. act, Brazil’s law clearly targeted Japanese immigrants. The quota set for 1935 allowed only 2,711 Japanese into the country, almost a tenth of the number of Japanese arrivals during the previous year.

By the 1930s, anti-Japanese sentiment in Peru was also on the rise and was greatly influenced by similar movements in Brazil and the United States. The Peruvian media paid close attention to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act in the United States. The newspaper La Prensa held up the “United States of North America” as an example of how to “impede successive yellow immigration.” The Peruvian government soon passed a series of anti-Japanese laws. The first established an immigration quota of 16,000 per nation, which was approximately two tenths of one percent of Peru’s total population. It also specifically barred the immigration of “racial groups,” like the Japanese. Other laws curbed the rights of Japanese immigrants already in the country, dictating that only 20 percent of employees in all businesses and professions could be foreigners, limiting the number of Japanese-owned businesses in certain industries, and making it difficult for foreign residents of Peru to return to Peru after a visit to their native land. A new constitution went further by requiring foreigners to renounce their dual citizenship and denying aliens the right to be naturalized altogether. Second-generation Peruvians were also stripped of their citizenship if they left Peru for their immigrant parents’ homelands to live, study, or undergo military training before they reached adulthood. One last law required all foreign newspapers in Lima that printed in type other than roman type to publish a parallel translation of the text in Spanish. In all of these cases, Japanese Peruvians were the clear targets.

On May 13, 1940, an anti-Japanese demonstration organized for that day developed into a full-scale riot during which almost all Japanese-owned shops in Lima were destroyed. By the time that Peruvian troops finally had the situation under control the next day, 620 households had lost $1.64 million in property damage. Scores of individuals were injured and ten Japanese had been killed.”

Korean Americans

“Japanese colonialism in Korea affected every aspect of Korean immigration. The Japanese-controlled government allowed Koreans to leave beginning in 1902 but then banned emigration in order to prevent Koreans from competing with Japanese laborers already in Hawaii and to keep an ample supply of Koreans at home to support Japanese expansionist projects. Koreans chafed under Japanese control, and the cause of Korean independence became central to almost everything that they did and how they thought of themselves. This extended to Korean immigrants in the United States as well. “We Have No Country to Return To. We are a conquered people,” an editorial in the San Francisco Korean language newspaper Sinhan Minbo (New Korea Newspaper) declared. “We must struggle in exile.””

“Chafing under a corrupt and debt-ridden Korean monarchy followed by Japanese colonial policies, Koreans suffered from heavy taxes and unemployment. Farmers were forced off their lands, and when two disastrous years brought a cholera epidemic, drought, flood, and locust plague in 1901 and 1902, many Koreans looked to leave their homeland.”

“The expansion of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, with its unfair economic policies and oppression, made many Korean immigrants reconsider their initial plans to return to Korea. Letters published in the New Korea newspaper from those who had returned warned them to stay in the United States. Korea under the Japanese was “like hell now,” one letter writer explained. Many immigrants heeded this advice. They began to send for wives through the picture bride system and prepared to make the United States their home. The Japanese government allowed small numbers of women to leave the country as a way of calming some of the passionate nationalist politics brewing in Korean communities abroad.”

“In California, Korean immigrants found work as farm laborers who, like other Asian immigrants, helped to turn California agriculture into a multimillion-dollar business in the twentieth century. They often worked together in cooperative Korean “gangs,” following the crops or working in light industry. The agricultural towns of Dinuba, Reedley, Sacramento, and Delano attracted nearly 83 percent of the Korean population in the United States. Many of them became tenant farmers and truck farmers and worked alongside Californias multiracial farm-laboring populations of Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Filipinos, whites, and African Americans.”

“Throughout her childhood, Mary would feel the sting of discrimination. She was barred from attending a white church and from playing with white classmates in Willows, California. She had to endure the derogatory remarks her history teacher made about “stinking Chinks and dirty Japs” in class. Koreans were also often barred from certain occupations and neighborhoods. Do-Yun Yoon remembered that a Korean could never rent in the “white town” in Delano, California, but only in the “Mexican town” or “black town.” Even the local movie theater was segregated. “The Americans would not let us sit anywhere in the public movie theater,” Yun explained. “They permitted us to sit in one corner with the Mexicans but not with the Americans.” They were routinely refused service in restaurants, public recreation facilities, and barbershops. As Asians, Koreans were also barred from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.”

South Asian Americans

“On April 6, 1899, San Francisco newspapers reported on four Sikh men who had just arrived on the steamship Nippon Maru. The quartet – described as a “picturesque group” —included some of the first South Asians to ever arrive in the city. Former British Army soldiers, they had been away from their native district of Punjab for twenty years. For much of that time, they had been in Hong Kong, where at least one of them was a sergeant with the British police. Bakkshield Singh, who spoke English fluently, told reporters that the men intended to “make their fortunes” in the United States and then return home. The San Francisco Chronicle gushed with praise for the dashing soldiers in the service of the British crown.

Less than ten years later, however, the same newspapers had nothing but condemnation for a different group of South Asians arriving to work in the lumber mills and on the farms and railroad lines up and down the Pacific Coast. Like other Asian immigrants, South Asians made up a fraction of the total number of foreigners coming to the United States at the time. Compared to groups like the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, South Asians were even smaller. A mere 8,055 were admitted into the United States from 1910 to 1932. Nevertheless, a virulent pattern of anti-Asian racism had been set. They arrived at a time when anxieties over Chinese and Japanese immigration were at a peak, and as headlines of a “Hindu Invasion” splashed across newspapers, all the public saw was another Asian immigrant threat. By 1917, South Asians were excluded from the United States.”

“After exclusionary laws in the United States and head taxes in Canada halted their lucrative business in Chinese immigration, company agents advertised cheap fares and flooded the Punjabi countryside with flyers describing “opportunities of fortune-making” in Canada and the United States. As one immigrant from Julundra explained, the circulars typically stated that “if men were strong, they could get two dollars a day.” Forty men went abroad from his village alone in just two years.”

“The family achieved a dream when they bought their first home in the city of Berkeley. But when they pulled up to their new neighborhood on moving day, they found that the neighbors had locked up the house to prevent them from moving in. “All of our luggage and everything was loaded on the trucks,” recounted Kala Bagai. “I told Mr. Bagai I don’t want to live in this neighborhood. I don’t want to live in this house, because they might hurt my children, and I don’t want it. He agreed. We paid for the house and they locked the doors? No.” The family moved back to San Francisco and lived above their store at 3159 Fillmore Street.

With so few South Asian women and children in the United States in the early twentieth century, the Bagais were a rare South Asian immigrant family in the country. Far more common were the multiethnic families of South Asians and Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and West Indians in the Northeast and South or Punjabi-Mexican families in southern California. In the Imperial Valley, along the Mexican border east of San Diego, Punjabis were among the newcomers who arrived after the massive Imperial Irrigation District project created hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile land. Barred from marrying white women by California’s antimiscegenation laws, many South Asian men began to seek out Mexican partners around World War I. Inder Singh, an Imperial Valley farmer, told an interviewer in 1924 that his Mexican wife not only provided companionship but also economic security in spite of the Alien Land Laws that prevented him and other Asian immigrants from owning land in the state. “Through her I am able to secure land for farming. Your land law can’t get rid of me now; I am going to stay.” By the 1930s, a vibrant Punjabi-Mexican community had been established in the county.”

“British subjects in name, South Asians in the United States expected to have the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as other British subjects. When the British government failed to protest the rampant discrimination that South Asians faced in North America, they realized that their equal status was merely a fiction. Increasingly, South Asians found the revolutionary message of Indian nationalists more and more appealing. They believed that if they could control their own country, they could also control their own destinies in North America.”

“For many South Asians, the Ghadar movement promised a way to achieve both independence in India and equal treatment in the United States and Canada. As Ghadar leader Gobind Behari Lal explained, “it was no use to talk about the Asiatic Exclusion Act, immigration, and citizenship.” Nationalists had to strike at the British because “they were responsible for the way Indians were being treated in America.””

“Racial tension and violence targeting South Asians escalated in the summer of 1907 in Bellingham, Washington, and built on the region’s established pattern of organized legal and extralegal violence directed toward Asians. Chinese miners had been driven out of Bellingham, Tacoma, and Seattle as early as 1885, and Japanese mill hands had been threatened with expulsion by whites in the early 1900s. By the summer of 1907, when South Asian workers came to Bellingham, white workers were ready. They demanded a “whites only” policy at the Whatcom Falls Mill Company.

When a mass firing of Asian workers in the mills did not materialize, a thousand union supporters marched down the main streets of Bellingham on Wednesday, September 4, shouting “Drive out the Hindus.” At eight in the evening, a mob of white men began pulling South Asians out of their residences and bunkhouses, dragging them off streetcars, and driving them out of town or to the city jail. By the end of the night, 200 South Asians were in jail. The next day, the rest of the South Asian community gathered up what they could find of their belongings and left Bellingham by boat or train for Vancouver, Seattle, or Oakland with the taunts of the gathered crowd ringing in their ears.”

“Since there was no direct steamship service between India and any Canadian port, the January 1908 Continuous Journey order effectively barred South Asians without exception. This law achieved exclusion of South Asians without explicitly discriminating against British Indian subjects.

With Canada closed, the United States became the primary North American destination for South Asian immigrants after 1908, and the numbers of South Asians entering the country grew dramatically. San Francisco quickly became the most important port of entry.”

“From 1911 to 1915, 55 percent of all South Asian applicants were denied admission. In comparison, immigrant inspectors on Angel Island rejected 9 percent of Chinese applicants during the same years.”

“Other South Asians who had become naturalized citizens were also unceremoniously denaturalized. By 1924, Vaishno Das Bagai was stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Without citizenship status, Bagai was subject to California’s Alien Land Laws. He was forced to sell his home, his San Francisco store, and other property. The final insult came when the U.S. government refused to grant him a U.S. passport to visit friends and relatives in India in 1928. They suggested that he reapply for a British passport, but having once renounced his British citizenship in the name of Indian nationalism, Bagai refused to reclassify himself as a British subject. Feeling trapped and betrayed, he committed suicide by gas poisoning in 1928.”

“When the 1946 Luce-Celler Act amended the Immigration Act of 1917 and allowed “natives of India” to apply for admission to the United States, Kala and her sons became naturalized U.S. citizens. India gained its independence from Great Britain the next year.”

Filipino Americans

“American companies and owners bought farmland to use for export crops, including sugar, and by the twentieth century the Philippines was exporting so many of its agricultural products and natural resources that it could no longer feed itself. Even basic necessities like rice and textiles had to be imported, and economic policies that kept the Philippines an unindustrialized export economy led to dislocation and inequalities. Small family farms, especially in the provinces of Ilocos Norte and Sur, Pangasinan, Tarlac, La Union, and Abra on the island of Luzon, became divided into unsustainable plots by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tenancy, landlessness, poverty, and migration followed.”

“Filipinos were the only foreign nationals allowed to enlist in the U.S. armed forces. They were restricted to joining only the U.S. Navy and were mostly relegated to demeaning “women’s work” as Navy stewards who prepared and served the officers’ meals and cared for their living spaces. Still, the incentive to join was high. With military service came good salaries, exemptions from immigration laws after 1935, and expedited naturalization after 1940. Thousands of Filipinos enlisted in the U.S. Navy and joined the navy’s “brown skinned servant force” as a career.”

“By the early twentieth century, the Philippines was identified as the next site in the United States’ ongoing search for Asian labor. Filipinos were attractive for a number of reasons. First, they could enter the United States easily because of their status as U.S. nationals. Second, like Koreans, they could be used to compete with the Japanese plantation workers in Hawaii who were leading successful labor movements for higher wages and better working conditions.

Soon, labor agents known as “drummers” were flocking to the Philippines. Traveling from town to town, they showed movies in the town plaza that promoted the great adventures and economic opportunities that awaited Filipino workers in Hawaii.”

“As the last group to arrive in Hawaii, they occupied the lowest position in the plantation hierarchy. As writer Milton Murayama ex-plained, the plantation was like a pyramid with the white plantation manager living at the top in the big house; the Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese foremen, living in decent homes just below. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean workers lived in wooden frame houses below them, and finally there was the run-down Filipino camp. The sewer system ran downhill too, with the result that the Filipino camp was the smelliest and most unsanitary. Over time, the tales of returning Hawaiianos were less about glory and more about hardship.”

“Since Filipinos were barred from living in most neighborhoods, “Little Manilas” made up of Filpino residents, families, and businesses sprang up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Stockton’s Little Manila was the largest in the country and was well known for its many Filipino businesses and vibrant community. By the 1920s, migrant farmworkers could return from weeks or months away following the crops to recuperate and reconnect in Stockton.”

“Anti-Filipino violence in California escalated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Filipino immigration was at an all-time high, the Filipino labor movement was growing in strength and number, and new white migrants entering the state as part of the great Dust Bowl migration from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas brought with them a regional culture where Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, participation in the Ku Klux Klan, and racial terror were common. On New Year’s Eve in 1926, white men went in search of Filipinos in Stockton’s hotels and pool halls, and by the end of the night, eight men had been stabbed and beaten. Over the next few years, Filipinos were expelled from the Yakima Valley in Washington, Filipino laborers socializing with white women were attacked in Dinuba, California, and mobs attacked Filipinos in Exeter, Modesto, Turlock, and Reedley. In December 1929, a mob of 400 white men attacked a Filipino dance hall in Watsonville after a local newspaper published a photograph of a Filipino man and white teenage girl embracing. Even though the couple was engaged and had the blessings of the girl’s family, the incident touched off many political pronouncements against the economic and moral threat that Filipino immigrants posed. Four days of rioting ensued after the attack on the dance hall, leaving many Filipinos beaten and one dead. In 1930, a group of white youths bombed the Stockton Filipino Federation of America building.”

“As Congress debated proposals to exclude Filipinos in 1930, representatives from the Philippines strategically used the congressional hearings to advance the cause of Philippine independence. If Filipino exclusion bills were successful in becoming law, the Philippine delegation pointed out, the United States would be the only imperial power to ban its own subjects from entering the mother country. Such blatant discrimination targeting Filipinos might jeopardize U.S. economic and political interests in the Pacific and would tarnish the U.S.’s reputation in the world more generally, they warned. At a time when the United States was on its way to becoming a major global power, such reasoning had an impact. Filipino exclusion without independence for the Philippines, the nationalist leaders continued, would be “unjust” and “un-American.” Pedro Gil, a leader in the Philippine House of Representatives, testified that if the U.S. Congress wanted to restrict Filipino immigration, it would first need to grant independence to the Philippines. By the end of the 1930 hearings, support for Filipino exclusion without independence was faltering. Exclusionists began to entertain proposals for a compromise.

The result was the Tydings-McDuffie Act (officially known as the Philippine Independence Act), which was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 24, 1934. It granted the Philippines commonwealth status and a promise of independence after ten years. It also changed the status of Filipinos from U.S. “nationals” to “aliens.” The Philippines were henceforth to be considered a “separate country” with an annual immigration quota of fifty. The bill then went to the Philippine Senate for approval. The exclusionists had won. But so had Filipino nationalists. On the other hand, prospective Filipino migrants had lost, including a group caught in legal limbo.”

Undocumented Asians

“The first immigrants to be excluded from the United States, Asians became the first undocumented immigrants.”

“Undocumented immigration was the logical if highly unintentional outcome of the exclusion laws. The efforts to exclude Asian immigrants from the United States contrasted too sharply with the demand for immigrant labor and immigrants’ intense need and desire to seek entry. Government laws restricted immigration, but gaps in enforcement provided the very openings (and high profitability) of undocumented immigration.

Because government statistics recorded only the numbers of immigrants caught while crossing the border, we will never know how many Asian immigrants entered the United States without documentation. Official government estimates identify 17,300 Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through the back doors of Canada and Mexico from 1882 to 1920. Other sources report that as many as 27,000 Chinese and Japanese immigrants entered without documentation between 1910 and 1920.”

“The first undocumented Asian immigrants were likely Chinese railroad workers who had been legally admitted into the United States but had traveled north to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in the United States in 1882, they found themselves stuck north of the border. Because they were not residing in the United States at the time of the passage of the act, they were ineligible for the laborers identification certificates that allowed laborers already residing in the United States to return to the country. They did what many others would do later: they simply crossed the largely unguarded 4,000-mile border between the United States and Canada and became undocumented immigrants. The huge expanse of unguarded borders made surreptitious entry into the United States a relatively easy affair in the late nineteenth century. Because steamships routinely traveled between Hong Kong and British Columbian ports, such as Victoria and Vancouver, the U.S.-Canadian border provided the first convenient back door into the United States. Canada’s Chinese head taxes (first established in 1885) did not prove to be a sufficient deterrent for immigrants motivated to enter the United States, and in the wake of the U.S. exclusion laws Chinese immigration to Canada actually increased.”

“Beginning in the 1890s, Chinese began to enter the United States from the U.S.-Mexican border as well. The start of regular steamship travel between China and Mexico in 1902 led to increased Chinese immigration to that country, and while many Chinese stayed and settled in Mexico, many others, perhaps a majority, eventually tried to enter the United States. The U.S. government estimated that 80 percent of Chinese arriving in Mexican seaports eventually reached the border with the help of Mexican guides or on their own. Chinese border crossings were an “open secret,” and the city of El Paso was especially known as a “hot-bed for the smuggling of Chinese.”

“Asian undocumented immigration in the U.S. borderlands also inspired frequent racial crossings: attempts by Asians to “pass” as members of other races in order to cross undetected. In 1904, the Buffalo Times reported that white “smugglers” routinely disguised Chinese as Native Americans. Dressed in “Indian garb” and carrying baskets of sassafras, they crossed the border from Canada to the United States without raising suspicions. Along the southern border, Chinese disguised themselves as Mexicans, cutting their queues, adopting Mexican clothes, and even learning to say a few words of Spanish, especially Yo soy mexicano. Along the Gulf Coast in the southern United States, Chinese were even known to disguise themselves as African Americans.”

“Over a year and a half, an estimated 20,000 Chinese were forcibly expelled from Sonora and other neighboring states, such as Sinaloa and Nayarit. Forced from their homes, suffering from heavy economic and property losses, and harassed at every point along their journey, the Chinese arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in a miserable state. Mexican officials reportedly inflicted one last indignity on departing Chinese by demanding a 50 peso exit fee. In September of 1931, the expulsion of all Chinese residents from Sonora had been accomplished, and Governor Calles announced with satisfaction that the “bitter twenty-year campaign” to terminate the “Chinese problem” had finally been completed.”

WWII

“Twenty-two thousand Japanese Canadians were similarly ordered to leave British Columbia for reasons of national security and were sent to what the Canadian government called “Interior Housing Centres” set up in ghost towns and on farms in the country’s interior. And over 2,100 Japanese Peruvians and other Japanese Latin Americans were arrested, detained, and taken to the United States to be incarcerated in camps as “enemy aliens.” Japanese Americans, Canadians, and Latin Americans were not individually charged with acts of treachery or subversion, but were instead sentenced as a group for incarceration during the war in the name of national and hemispheric security. Their only crime was their Japanese ancestry.”

“In the years leading up to the U.S.’s entry into the war, Japanese Americans came under increased government surveillance. The 1940 Alien Registration Act required all resident aliens over fourteen years of age to register annually with the federal government and provide their fingerprints. Both the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected information on Japanese communities and created lists of individuals suspected of potential subversive activities. The definition of “subversive activity” was broad and encompassed most Japanese community organizations and any contact – no matter how minimal – with the Japanese government. Immigrants who had led cultural or assistance organizations, Japanese language teachers, and members of the Buddhist clergy, for example, were all identified in three FBI master lists of enemy alien “suspects” to be removed and confined in case of war. By 1941, these lists were ready, and designs for camps for aliens were prepared.”

“Just as the U.S. and Canada were putting their wartime policies into action, Peruvian and U.S. authorities started to initiate a massive deportation and incarceration program that would bring approximately 1,800 Japanese Peruvians as enemy aliens to the United States from April of 1942 to April of 1945. Japanese Latin Americans from twelve other countries were also deported from their homes and incarcerated in the United States, but those from Peru made up 80 percent of all Japanese from Latin America. They were among the war’s unfortunate victims, “hapless pawns in a triangle of hate that involved the United States, Peru, and Japan during and after World War II,” in the words of historian C. Harvey Gardiner. Peruvian authorities cooperated eagerly, but it was the United States that masterminded, organized, and paid for the forcible deportation of Japanese Peruvians from their homes, their transportation to the United States on American vessels, and their incarceration on U.S. soil.”

“Altogether, twelve Latin American countries – Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Peru – deported Axis nationals to the United States. These included 2,118 Japanese from Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Peru. The vast majority, 84 percent, were from Peru, including Peruvian citizens by naturalization or birth. One thousand twenty-four Japanese Latin Americans had been arrested and deported by their governments.”

“The WRA provided housing, shelter, medical care, and education at no cost. Inmates could work in the camps, but their set wages of $12, $16, or $19 a month were far lower than what noninmates were receiving. Such wages were also not enough to meet even minimal needs, like shoes and clothing, or to pay for such things as mortgage payments on property owned outside the camp.

Nevertheless, employment in food operations, health and sanitation, education, and camp operations like the post office and camp store provided routine and some meaning to inmates during the long months and years of confinement. Japanese Americans even started thriving enterprises within the camps, such as a huge vegetable garden at Tule Lake, a dairy at Gila River, and a silk screen poster shop at Heart Mountain. Susumu Togasaki even started a successful tofu factory and an artificial flower making manufacturing outfit within his camp in Arizona.”

“Those Japanese American men who resisted the draft faced different realities. One center of draft resistance was at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming, where the Fair Play Committee was established by draft-age nisei men. They demanded that civil rights be restored to all nisei before they would comply with the military draft, and they also tried to test the legality of conscripting incarcerated Americans of Japanese descent. Mits Koshiyama, a member of the Fair Play Committee, spoke for many when he recalled, “I thought that Selective Service out of the camps was not right.” A Japanese American citizen, he had been put into camp, denied his constitutional rights, and was now being asked to join a segregated army unit to fight for the very democratic principles that were being denied to him. Altogether, 315 men from the War Relocation Authority camps resisted the draft. Their actions were vigorously criticized by many Japanese Americans, and members of the group were often vilified and ostracized.”

“Beginning in summer 1942, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) began to release incarcerees and encouraged them to resettle in areas of the United States other than the West Coast.””

“Between November 1945 and June 1946, more than 900 Japanese Peruvians were repatriated to Japan. Immersed in pro-Japanese propaganda and news sources during the war, a few of the repatriates were convinced that Japan had been victorious in the war and were crushed to later learn that Japan had indeed been devastated. With their property confiscated or lost and with both the Peruvian and U.S. governments refusing to allow Japanese Peruvians to either return to Peru or remain in the United States, most believed that they had no choice but to go to Japan.

The Peruvian government at first refused to acknowledge its role in the deportation and incarceration program, but ultimately did allow a total of seventy-nine Japanese Peruvian citizens and their families to return to Peru. The remainder were caught in a bind, and 364 Latin American detainees had no country to go back to. As a result, some Japanese Peruvians began to organize an effort to remain in the United States.”

“Racism in the United States was increasingly seen as damaging the United States’ war effort and its fight against the Axis powers. Decades-old Asian exclusion laws were abolished, and for these Asian Americans, World War II was a “good war” that opened up new opportunities to participate in the American economy, military, and society. Asian Americans took full advantage.”

“By the 1960s, some Asian Americans were being characterized as “model minorities” who overcame past obstacles to achieve the American Dream.”

“On December 22, 1941, both Time and Life magazines ran stories helpfully guiding readers on how to distinguish their new Chinese “friends” from the enemy “Japs.” Life’s story included photographs. The first featured a Chinese government official smiling humbly at the camera. The other featured a stern-looking General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Both portraits were covered with handwritten notes identifying defining features and racial rules.”

“The most significant symbol of Chinese Americans’ changing status in the United States and the strength of U.S.-China relations during the war was the 1943 goodwill tour by China’s first lady, Mayling Soong, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of wartime China’s nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. Madame Chiang started at the White House, where she was the honored guest of President Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. The next day, she became the first private citizen and only the second woman to address both houses of Congress. She eloquently linked the United States and China together in a common cause of freedom. Chiang charmed the assembled congressmen and senators, and when her speech ended in the Senate, the collective audience “rose and thundered” their applause. Over the next two months, she traveled around the country and spoke to thousands of people. Celebrated for her intellect, beauty, grace, and message of wartime cooperation, Chiang symbolized a new China, one that was a modern, capable, and valuable ally of the United States in the war against Japan. Her popularity in the U.S. also mirrored a new acceptance of Chinese Americans. A graduate of Wellesley College and featured with her husband as Time’s “Man and Wife of the Year” in 1938, Chiang fit the ideal of a modern woman at home in both China and the United States.”

“Seven hours after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines. On the Bataan Peninsula, U.S. and Filipino troops tried in vain to repel them over four long months. On April 9, Bataan fell to Japan, but the image of the “Fighting Filipinos” allied with U.S. forces had long-lasting repercussions.

Bataan came to symbolize interracial brotherhood and sacrifice in the name of freedom and democracy, and stories of the brave Filipino soldiers who fought side by side with U.S. forces helped transform images of Filipino Americans from backward “little brown brothers” to loyal and brave allies who shared a common cause with the United States. As First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt explained, the fighting in Bataan “has been an excellent example of what happens when two races respect each other. Men of different races and backgrounds have fought side by side and praised each other’s heroism and courage.”

Just as Chinese Americans received a boost from Madame Chiang Kaishek’s tour of the United States, Filipinos similarly benefited from the celebrated visit of Carlos P. Romulo, General Douglas MacArthur’s aide-de-camp. In April 1944, Romulo marked the second anniversary of the brutal Bataan Death March with an official visit to the Stockton Filipino community. His speech repeated the themes of interracial brotherhood now familiar to American and Filípino audiences. Connecting what happened in Bataan to what could happen in Stockton, Romulo urged white Americans to adopt the same acceptance of Filipino Americans in the United States. “Take them into your hearts as the 17 million Filipinos took into their hearts the 7,000 American soldiers who fought for you, for us, for freedom in Bataan,” he told the audience. “Don’t discriminate against them, please. Smile at them when you meet them in your street.”

The change in public attitude toward Filipinos was dramatic. Whereas before the United States entered the war there was a “flood” of race hatred directed at them, after-ward, writer Manuel Buaken remarked that “no longer on the streetcar do I feel myself in the presence of my enemies.””

“After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the situation changed. All Japanese aliens in the United States became enemy aliens, and the Treasury Department froze the financial assets of all Japanese nationals. In enacting these measures, the government failed to distinguish Koreans from Japanese. As a result, Koreans found themselves classified as enemy aliens and subject to many of the same restrictions imposed on alien Japanese. This classification rightly enraged Koreans. “Is there in this world a worse Jap hater than a Korean?” the editor of the Korean National Herald-Pacific Weekly newspaper asked. Violence and hate crimes also increased. Mary Paik Lee recalled that Koreans were afraid to go out at night. “Many were beaten even during the day. Their cars were wrecked, their tires were slashed… Many [perpetrators] just assumed that all Orientals were Japanese….It was a bad time for all of us.”

The consequences of these policies and crimes were devastating. Koreans in Hawaii and in the continental U.S. could not access their bank accounts. Businesses and livelihoods were in danger.”

“Forced to learn Japanese in Korean schools under Japanese colonialism, Koreans in the United States now used their valuable language skills to serve as Japanese-language teachers and translators and as secret agents and propaganda broadcasters in Japanese-occupied Asia.”

Adoptees

“They began to send money to sponsor a little girl named Cha Jung Hee, who was described by a relief agency as a parentless eight-year-old girl. As their attachment grew, the Borshays decided to adopt her. However, like most other children adopted in the 1960s under the Cold War humanitarian movement of “orphan adoption,” Cha Jung Hee was not without living parents, and her father found her at the agency before she could be sent to the United States for adoption.

The agency decided to go through with the adoption anyway and substituted Deann – whose Korean birth name is Kang Ok Jin – in Cha Jung Hee’s place. Like Cha Jung Hee, Kang Ok Jin was also not an orphan. Her birth family had placed her in the orphanage temporarily while they struggled to survive. Their intention was to bring her back home when their situation stabilized, but she was sent to the United States before this could happen. Eight-year-old Kang Ok Jin was thus taken from the orphanage, boarded a plane, landed in California, and became Deann Borshay. “I was given a history and identity that didn’t belong to me,” she explains. The Borshays told Deann what the orphanage had told them: that her mother had died during childbirth and that her father died during the Korean War. This information did not match Deann’s hazy memories of her parents and siblings still living in Korea. But she learned to dismiss them as mere dreams. Over time, even these dreams faded as her new identity as an all-American girl grew stronger in her new home under the care of her adopted family. As an adult, Borshay Liem confronted these memories and embarked on a journey to discover the truth of her identity. After a long search, she was able to reunite with her Korean mother, siblings, and large extended family and introduce her adopted parents to her birth family.”

Pioneers

“Born in Wuhan in 1935, Chang-Lin Tien was from a prosperous and politically active family. But when the communists took over in 1949, he and his family joined the exodus of anticommunist Chinese and sought refuge in Taiwan. Life was hard. Squeezed into one tiny room, Chang’s parents and their ten children slept in shifts.”

“As the United States sought to spread its anticommunist message in a positive, non-threatening, and nonimperialist light, successful Asian Americans who bridged both the U.S. and Asia provided powerful examples of the United States’ successful racial democracy. Thus, Korean American Olympic gold medalist Sammy Lee, Chinese American author Jade Snow Wong, and Chinese American artist Dong Kingman were sent on cultural diplomacy tours of the Asia-Pacific region to spread positive messages of goodwill during the 1950s.

Another Asian American Cold War ambassador was Congressman Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian American to serve in the U.S. Congress. A son of an illiterate but prosperous family in India, Saund had first arrived in the United States to attend graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley in 1920. He earned his PhD in mathematics four years later. While at Berkeley, Saund – already an ardent Indian nationalist – became involved in the Hindustani Association of America and was elected its national president. His fiery anti-British speeches caught the attention of British colonial officials, and his family warned him that it would not be safe for him to return to India.

Unable to become a U.S. citizen and barred from most professions because of his race, Saund became a foreman at a fruit cannery and then at a cotton farm in southern California. He eventually turned to farming, but like other Asian immigrants, he faced obstacles like the California Alien Land Law, which prohibited “aliens ineligible from citizenship” from owning land. These experiences led him to help form the India Association of America in 1942, which lobbied to end discrimination in U.S. immigration and naturalization laws.

After he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1949, Saund entered politics and was elected judge of the Westmorland judicial district court in 1953. In 1956, he decided to run for the U.S. Congress out of California’s 29th district, which then included Riverside and Imperial counties. Although an unknown political figure, Saund and his wife, Marian, a Czech American, and their children rang doorbells, registered voters, and visited precinct after precinct. He campaigned hardest to reach the many Mexican, African American, Japanese, and South Asian farmers in the Imperial Valley and even had serviceable “border Spanish.” His campaign message was one that celebrated the promise of the United States. “If elected to Congress,” he told voters, “the first thing I would do would be to fly to India and say, “Here I am, a living example of democracy in practice.” On election night, he repeated the same message to his crowd of supporters: “Look at me,” he said with heartfelt emotion. “I am a living proof of America’s democracy.””

“U.S. officials worried about anti-American sentiment in India and growing support for communism.

During his tour, Saund tried to ease U.S.-Indian tensions and bolster support for U.S.-style democracy. He effectively used his own example of overcoming racial prejudice and achieving the American Dream to praise the power of change in democracies like the United States. “If Americans were prejudiced against Indians, how did I get elected by free vote of American people in most conservátive California?” he pointedly asked his audiences. Saund did not deny the vicious racism that existed in the United States, especially toward Asian immigrants. “Prejudice thrives in all countries and climates,” he told his audiences. “But in a democracy things can change; people do change.””

“The significant gains of the civil rights movement – most notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in businesses, banned discriminatory practices in employment, and ended segregation in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination in voting – encouraged Americans to believe that racism had safely been taken care of and was now a relic of the past.Public support wavered for the systemic change and government programs that civil rights leaders and others insisted were necessary to counter enduring discrimination and to foster lasting equality. The Asian American model minority was held up as a counterexample and to delegitimize these claims.”

Post-1965 Immigration

“The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, was meant to be the first incremental step in changing the nation’s immigration policies, but in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform in the past fifty years, it remains the foundation of immigration policy today.”

“The 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act, for example, increased the flow of highly skilled “guest workers” from abroad with temporary visas known as H-1B visas, and U.S. companies, especially in the high- tech sector, have actively recruited high-skilled workers from Asia. Asian immigrants receive about three quarters of these visas; Indians alone received 56 percent of the 129,000 H-1B visas granted in 2011.

The last major change resulting from the 1965 Immigration Act was the establishment of a global cap on immigration and new restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time. As a result, the law ushered in a new era of undocumented immigration that has dominated immigration debates since the 1970s.”

“Chinese immigration increased dramatically from Taiwan and Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, when the Chinese army cracked down on pro-democracy activists. Hundreds were killed and more were wounded. Pro-democracy leaders were rounded up. Hong Kong residents who were already wary of the return of the colony to mainland China in 1997 viewed having foreign passports as a safeguard against communist rule. In the 1980s, surveys of Hong Kong residents found that 60 percent of its lawyers, 70 percent of its government doctors, and 40 percent of its civil engineers planned to leave the colony before 1997. Many paid tens of thousands of dollars to establish themselves in Canada, Australia, and the United States.”

“During the 1960s and 1970s, India’s economy could not keep pace with the number of college graduates it was producing. In 1974, there were 100,000 engineers out of work in India. At the same time, the U.S. was recruiting these types of highly skilled individuals under the technical and professional preferences of the 1965 Immigration Act.”

“In July of 2012, the Indian newspaper The Hindu published an exposé on the “sea of broken dreams” that Indian women in the United States faced. Many were highly educated professionals in their own right but had come with H-4 visas as spouses of husbands working in the expanding IT industry with temporary H-1B visas. Caught in a net of visa restrictions that prevented them from working, these career women who had once been able to support themselves and nurture their own careers found themselves isolated, depressed, and without purpose. Rashi Bhatnagar, an H-4 visa-holder with a master’s degree from India and years at a successful career, found only slammed doors when she relocated to the United States degree compared to the national rate of 28 percent.”

“Like Chinese Americans, Koreans are overrepresented at both ends of the economic scale. In general, they have higher median annual personal earnings than the U.S. population. But they also have higher poverty rates as well.”

“Another early Asian American activist was Philip Vera Cruz. A member of the first wave of Filipinos who came to the United States in the early twentieth century, Cruz spent thirty years working on farms and in canneries and restaurants in Minnesota and Washington. When he moved to California in the 1950s, he became involved in the Filipino labor movement and helped organize the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in a series of effective strikes and boycotts that crippled the grape industry in Delano in 1965. These actions led to the formation of the United Farm Workers (UFW), which joined Filipino farm laborers with other ethnic groups, including Mexicans. Vera Cruz served as the UFW’s vice president under Chicano Cesár Chávez until 1977. In his later years, he educated a new generation of activists with his messages of grassroots organizing, devotion to the rights of working people, commitment to democracy, and solidarity.”

War in Indochina

“The United States came to rely on a “Secret Army” of soldiers (so named because the existence of the army and its actions were kept from the American public) made up of the Hmong, an ethnic minority in Laos, for example.”

“During World War II, Japanese troops were stationed in and eventually occupied French Indochina by March of 1945. At the end of the war, France tried desperately to recolonize Vietnam. Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh had different ideas. Ho had spent the previous twenty years trying to bring independence to his country. Rebuffed by Western powers in his attempts to gain rights for the French Indochinese colonies in the early twentieth century, Ho turned to communism, and French and Viet Minh forces fought each other for almost a decade in the First Indochina War. After a devastating two-month siege in 1954, France gave up its Indochinese empire, and the 1954 Geneva Accords divided Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel. The North was led by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh government. The United States created a new government in South Vietnam led by anti-communist Roman Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem.”

“As U.S. troops were withdrawing from Vietnam, the war came increasingly to Cambodia and Laos, two countries that were officially neutral.”

“In Laos, a civil war between the communist Pathet Lao and the anticommunist Royal Lao government was dividing the country. Fearing that a communist takeover of Laos was imminent, the United States tried to influence Lao politics through military and humanitarian aid programs beginning in 1955. The hope was to prevent a communist victory in the upcoming 1958 elections. When the Pathet Lao won a majority of the seats in the coalition government, the U.S. government began to take action against it.

Over the next decade, the United States desired more active military intervention in Laos, but the 1962 Geneva Accords, which required that all foreign troops leave the country, hampered its ability. The Central Intelligence Agency thus set its sights on recruiting Hmong soldiers to take on covert actions on behalf of the United States.

An ethnic group with roots in southwestern China, the Hmong had been living in the mountainous regions of Laos since the early nineteenth century. A man named Vang Pao became central to U.S. efforts. As a young military officer in the Royal Lao Army, Vang had sided with the French against Vietnamese nationalists and was a self-described anticommunist and Lao nationalist. Committed to protecting northwestern Laos, where most Hmong lived, from communist domination, Vang was receptive to U.S. overtures.

In 1961, CIA agent James William (Bill) Lair contacted Vang to recruit Hmong soldiers to the U.S. effort. He proposed a deal in which the United States would arm and train special Hmong guerrilla units to attack North Vietnamese communists coming through Laos. In exchange, the Hmong would receive military and humanitarian aid. Because there was no written documentation of the meeting between Lair and Vang, we may never know what deal the two men struck exactly, but many Hmong believe Vang Pao’s explanation that the United States also promised a long-sought Hmong homeland or sanctuary in exchange for their service. Based out of the military base at Long Cheng and supplied by the CIA airline Air America, Hmong soldiers carried out espionage, sabotage, and propaganda missions. Because the United States paid the Hmong a fraction of what it paid its own military personnel, this was war on the cheap. And the Hmong did not disappoint. Vang Pao initially recruited 9,000 soldiers in 1961. By 1969, the secret army under his . command numbered 40,000 and has been called “America’s most lethal weapon.” By the late 1960s, the United States increased its reliance on the Hmong. The war involved the entire Hmong population. Hmong men faced high casualties, with some records estimating that 25 percent of enlisted Hmong were killed. By 1970, more Hmong soldiers were boys only twelve or thirteen years old. An estimated 50,000 civilians were also killed or wounded, a devastating statistic, considering that the entire Hmong population before the war was only 300,000.

In addition, Laos was engulfed in bombs. President Nixon ordered multiple bombings in Laos to support the Royal Lao government against the communist Pathet Lao and to disrupt the movement of North Vietnamese arms and personnel along the Laotian portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the South. Beginning in 1964 and continuing until 1973, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions, rendering the Plain of Jars “the most intensely bombarded place on the face of the planet.” In 1970, an estimated one in four Laotians (more than 600,000) had been displaced due to the war. Many had been displaced more than once, making Laos the country with the most displaced population in the world.

Although the war was directed by the U.S. embassy in Laos and the Central Intelligence Agency and was funded by congressional appropriations committees, the war remained out of America’s public eye for years. The . U.S. government maintained its position that the American presence in Laos was solely humanitarian.”

“The Hmong army in Laos was not the United States’s only secret in Southeast Asia. For fourteen months in 1969 and 1970, the United States launched bombing raids that dropped 108,823 tons of bombs on neutral Cambodia. Authorized by President Nixon but kept hidden from the American public, the bombings were targeted to destroy both the Ho Chi Minh Trail as well as the areas in Cambodia, where North Vietnamese troops retreated during firefights with U.S. forces. Although National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger claimed in 1973 that the bombings had taken place only in “unpopulated parts of Cambodia,” U.S. officials were aware of casualties from the start. Over time, more civilian deaths occurred in these bombings than military deaths. Estimates range from 50,000, which is almost equal to the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War, to 150,000. During this period of intense bombing, a protracted civil war raged within Cambodia between the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government and the communist Khmer Rouge led by Saloth Sar, who would later be known as Pol Pot. Scholars believe that the U.S. bombings —meant to thwart communist forces – were ironically an important factor in helping to increase support for the Khmer Rouge among rural Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge only had to point to the damage and devastation caused by U.S. bombs to recruit followers away from the U.S.-supported Nol government. The bombings also forced North Vietnamese troops to move deeper and deeper into Cambodia, where they provided military and political support to the Khmer Rouge. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh as victors. There they set up a new government called Democratic Kampuchea. Their reign over Cambodia was brief, only three years and eight months, from April 1975 to January 1979. But it would result in one of the greatest human tragedies in the modern age.”

“When the U.S. evacuation process – officially known as “Operation New Life” – kicked into high gear, U.S. airplanes evacuated around 7,500 people a day. After the runways of Tan Son Nhut Airport were destroyed by North Vietnamese forces, giant helicopters took over the task and evacuated more than 7,000 before Saigon fell on April 30. Another 73,000 escaped by sea on South Vietnamese navy vessels or on anything seaworthy they could secure. They found their way to the waiting U.S. naval vessels that then took them to the naval base in the Philippines. From there, officials directed them to other processing camps on Guam and Wake Island before sending them to reception centers in the United States. Later referred to as the “first wave” of Vietnamese refugees, these evacuees usually spent just a short time in the camps before being relocated. Largely from elite or middle-class backgrounds, they came with education, some English or French fluency, job skills, and previous contact with Americans. All of these factors would greatly help their transition to their new lives in the United States.

Around 4,600 Cambodians, mostly diplomats, high-level officials, and those who might face persecution in the new regime, were also admitted into the United States. Members of this first group of refugees were mostly educated, had professional backgrounds and work skills. They joined a small number of Cambodian students and professionals who were already in the United States, and together would form the core group of Cambodian community leaders who could assist those arriving in later years.

The fall of Saigon also had dire repercussions in Laos. The Pathet Lao slowly gained power in the country, and as they did so, they targeted the Hmong as former allies of the United States. Unlike what occurred in Saigon and Phnom Penh, there was no similar large-scale evacuation of Hmong. The CIA did airlift Vang Pao and his officers out of harm’s way, and Vang eventually resettled in California, but the few planes that were sent to do this could not evacuate all who wanted to leave. Panic and chaos followed as huge crowds showed up every day at Long Cheng in the hope of being evacuated. Mao Vang Lee, who had worked at the CIA-sponsored radio station at Long Cheng, waited at the base for three days to board one of the few planes. The scene is seared in her memory. “As soon as the airplane lands, the crowd was already packed underneath it before it came to a halt. They would fight, step on each other to get into the plane.” With a baby in tow, Mao explained that she and her husband decided that they just could not compete with the crowd. “Even though we feared for our lives … we decided to stay.”

Although 10,000 Hmong crowded onto the airbase at Long Cheng, only around 2,500 were evacuated by the United States in May 1975. When the last U.S. planes took off from the airbase, the crews dumped duffel bags of Lao money onto the tarmac as a diversion. After the last plane took off, described Yia Lee, who witnessed the event, “Everyone cried. In those moments, there was sense of hopelessness. No dreams for the future. You become like thin air.””

“Individuals and families from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos continued to seek refuge long after the evacuations ended. From 1975 to 1980, almost 433,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos arrived in the United States, peaking in 1980. By the early 1980s, an average of 50,000 refugees were admitted every year.”

“As part of the new Vietnamese government’s crackdown on “bourgeois trade,” armed soldiers and cadres descended upon the many Chinese-owned businesses that had dominated the rice milling and wholesale and retail trade in both North and South Vietnam for centuries. In 1978, 30,000 small businesses were raided and closed, and Chinese began to leave Vietnam in droves. One refugee later explained that “fleeing the country was the only way out.”

An international crisis heated up when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and ousted the China-backed Khmer Rouge regime. China retaliated by invading Vietnam in February 1979. Afraid of more reprisals now that the two countries were at war, a growing number of the remaining ethnic Chinese in Vietnam fled by boat. In the first few months of 1978, 20,000 landed in neighboring countries.

The flight had to be done under cover of darkness and with the utmost secrecy. Only a few items could be brought. One refugee recalled how her mother ingeniously sewed gold necklaces and jade jewelry inside the elastic waistbands of their pants, shirt collars, and luggage handles. Her cleverness allowed the family to retain their small savings. Traveling with their most precious possessions, these “boat people,” as they were known, took to the seas and often fell victim to pirates who preyed on them.”

“Some estimate that 30 to 50 percent lost their lives in their escape to places of first asylum like Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Hong Kong.”

“When they arrived in the United States after 1982, there were fewer programs available to assist in their adjustment, and federal funds had been reduced.

Over time, Vietnamese adjusted to their new lives in the United States. Although they were initially resettled all over the United States, many remigrated to be closer together. By the 1990s, the city of Westminster in Orange County, California, became home to the Vietnamese neighborhood of Little Saigon, and by 2000, one quarter of all Vietnamese Americans lived in the Los Angeles-Orange County-San Diego area.”

“On the day that the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, they began to put their revolutionary principles into action. Former military and government officials were executed. Markets, money, banks, and private property were abolished, as were Western medicine, schools, and Buddhism. Consequently, Buddhist monks were defrocked, while “class enemies” such as educated individuals, merchants, and landlords were killed. The 2 million residents of Phnom Penh were evacuated. Forced out of their homes and into the streets, tens of thousands died due to hunger, thirst, illness, and exposure to the elements. Kassie Neou described this march of death: “We stepped over the dead bodies. We heard the loudspeakers: ‘Move on. Move.” Under this regime, resistance was futile.

The Khmer Rouge restructured society and transformed the entire country into a giant forced labor camp. Peasants were granted full rights in the regime, while urbanites were treated as enemies of the revolution and had no rights. Ethnic minorities, including Chinese and Vietnamese who had lived in Cambodia for generations, were expelled. Fed only meals of thin rice gruel and forced to work long hours building dams and irrigation ditches and planting and harvesting crops with minimal or no tools, masses of Cambodians suffered from malnutrition, starvation, and illness.”

“The Khmer Rouge’s control over Cambodia ended when a dissident Khmer Rouge group fled to Vietnam for assistance and returned with Vietnamese troops. Pol Pot was driven from Phnom Penh the first week of January of 1979. In total, some 1.7 million people, about 21 percent of the country’s population, lost their lives during the three-and-a-half-year reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Those who were able to leave sought refuge in other countries. By 1979, more than half a million Cambodians were trying to enter Thailand, but by this time this first country of asylum for Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian refugees was experiencing a growing refugee crisis. Because Western countries like the United States prioritized the resettlement of former U.S. allies like the Vietnamese, Hmong, and Lao, they were less willing to accept Cambodians. As a result, the camps in Thailand became overcrowded, the Thai people grew weary of the number of refugees arriving in their country, and Cambodian refugees were sometimes treated with shocking violence.

Increased international attention about the crisis in Southeast Asia finally prompted the United States to admit Cambodians into the country.”

“In Laos, another exodus began. From May to December of 1975, some 45,000 fled the country. An estimated 200,000 “lowland Lao” – the dominant group in Laos – made it to Thailand between 1975 and 1986. They left to avoid being punished for their anticommunist political beliefs and forced into reeducation “seminars,” or because they were simply unable to support themselves in postwar Laos. Like the Hmong refugees, many Lao fled across the Mekong River to Thailand under fire from soldiers and at great risk to themselves. Over 10,000 Lao refugees arrived in Thailand in 1975. The next year, that number had almost doubled, and in 1978 almost 50,000 Lao fled to Thailand during the height of the exodus.”

“They joined 120,000 ethnic Lao refugees who were admitted into the United States from 1972 to 1992.”

“Hmong who were not lucky enough to be evacuated from Laos in 1975 faced months and years of struggle. After the Pathet Lao declared the formation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in December 1975, the new government made it clear that those who had fought against the communists, like the Hmong, would be punished. The official Pathet Lao newspaper announced that it was “necessary to extirpate, down to the root, the Hmong minority.”

At the former military base at Long Cheng and in other places, prisons were established to house all Hmong who were suspected of aiding General Vang Pao. Eventually, as many as 30,000 Hmong were either put in prison or placed under tight military security under the new government. They faced months and years of hard labor, starvation, and torture. Hmong remaining in the country also came under attack from poisonous chemicals, including one called “yellow rain” to describe the colored liquid sprayed from helicopters and planes. According to Her Ge, who lived with his family in the area where these chemicals were released, helicopters came every other day in 1980 and spread poisons. As he recounted to a journalist, “the planes drop three different colors: yellow that is like dry power and people get very drunk and paralyzed; yellow that is sticky and people get fever with vomiting with blood; and the blue color which is sticky and … gives people the fever, dizziness and vomiting.” The thirty-six-year-old, his wife, and their children were all struck by the toxins. His six-year-old son did not survive.

Hmong families faced harrowing decisions about whether to leave, who should go, and how they would escape. As Mai Vang Thao explained, “We stayed as long as we could, but when we could no longer survive safely we followed General Vang Pao to Thailand.” Trying to evade the communists, these escapees hid in the jungles for months and sometimes years before deciding to tackle the arduous trek to the Mekong and across to Thailand and the refugee camps. “We just kept running and hiding,” Thao recalled. Only half survived the journey. Ma Lee, her husband, and two young sons spent five years in the jungle hiding from Pathet Lao and Vietnamese forces. They survived by eating dirt and the pith from banana trees as they tried to stay one step ahead of their pursuers. One evening while Lee was sleeping, Vietnamese troops caught up with their group. “There were bullets flying everywhere. I mean, we could feel them going by our ears. There were so many bullets.” One of them found her six-year-old son, and he died in her arms.

Once families arrived at the banks of the Mekong, they faced more danger. Having lived most of their lives in the mountains, many had never learned how to swim. Yeng Xiong, her husband, and their three young children reached the river’s banks in 1980. They made string out of bamboo reeds. Yeng was tied to her husband, and her oldest child was tied to her. She put her two youngest children, including her eleven-month-old baby boy, inside her baby carrier and strapped it on her back. Then they entered the river. The family struggled in the strong current, went under water, and the baby carrier became untied. The baby fell out and began to float away. “[My husband] tried to swim to catch him but couldn’t,” Yeng tearfully recalled. When the family finally made it to shore, Yeng looked everywhere for her son. “The people … who didn’t make it, they all washed up on the bank. Only my baby wasn’t there.” Yeng and her husband were forced to abandon their search and went on to the refugee camp at Ban Vinai. They were eventually resettled in the United States after eight years and had three children in the refugee camp and five more in the United States. But more than thirty years after she crossed the Mekong River, the baby carrier that she used that fateful day remains a symbol of the great losses she suffered as part of her refugee journey. “We used this to carry our children to a better place in hopes of giving them a better life,” she explained. “But things don’t go the way you want them to. After my baby passed away, I never used that carrier again.””

“Over 102,000 people fled Laos for Thailand by 1980. Ninety-five percent of them were Hmong.”

Hmong Americans

“In 1982, only 20 percent of Hmong adults were employed in the Twin Cities area, and 85 percent of households were receiving some form of public assistance. Even those with jobs often had difficulty supporting their families on the low wages they earned. The trend continued into the next decade. The 1990 U.S. Census found that 65 percent of Hmong Americans were unemployed and more than 60 percent lived below the poverty line.”

“Some Hmong women were finding it easier to find work outside the home and to learn English as compared to Hmong men. With more economic power, they were demanding equality in their homes and communities.”

“Dawb and Kao Kalia Yang were just twelve and eleven years old when they started taking care of their two younger siblings after school and all night because their parents worked the nightshift in the factory. “We know it is illegal to leave children home at night in America, but we cannot do anything now. Help us make life possible in America,” their parents told them. “We did our best to help,” Kao Kalia remembers. “There was no time to learn how to take care of a baby; we learned by doing.””

“As the numbers of Hmong refugees coming to the United States grew, media portrayals often presented them in stereotypical and demeaning ways. Instead of characterizing them as war veterans who had earned political asylum, the Hmong were portrayed as primitive and backward peoples who lacked the abilities to survive in the modern world and assimilate into the United States.”

“Most Americans had little idea of who the Hmong were and why they were in the United States. It was easy for uninformed individuals to view the new arrivals as government freeloaders who were not assimilating into American society. Despite regulations that offered Southeast Asian refugees the same level of federal assistance as others in the same income bracket, many Americans complained that the newcomers received more financial assistance, priority for housing, and other benefits. “They’re the aliens, living off my tax dollar, that’s what fries me,” a St. Paul resident complained to the Saint Paul Dispatch in 1980. Hmong families in St. Paul public housing projects had Molotov cocktails thrown into their units or left in their mailboxes. Gunshots were fired into windows of refugee homes, injuring residents. Two Hmong brothers walking home in the middle of the night from their dishwashing jobs were beaten unconscious by two white attackers wielding clubs. Not reported to the police or covered in the newspapers were. the countless hate-filled interactions that many Hmong Americans experienced. Writer Kao Kalia Yang remembers that people often yelled at her and her family to “go home.” “Next to waves of hello, we received the middle finger.”

Such news reports of violence, discrimination, and resentment directed toward refugees reflected the compassion fatigue that began to set in during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The initial resettlement of refugees from Vietnam in 1975 led to what seemed to be a never-ending international refugee crisis. A Time magazine article headline baldly stated that the United States had “no more room for refugees” in May of 1982.

The U.S. government tried to keep pace with the growing exodus of peoples from Southeast Asia to address both “land” peoples who were mostly Hmong, Lao, and Cambodian, and Vietnamese “boat” peoples. A series of “parole” programs granted the U.S. attorney general ad hoc authority to allow into the United States any alien on an emergency basis with no real numerical limit or oversight from Congress. Eleven thousand were admitted in 1976. Another 15,000 were allowed into the country in 1977. From 1978 to 1980, around 268,000 refugees had been admitted into the United States.”

“Secondary migration has allowed the Hmong in the Twin Cities to reunite families, rebuild communities, establish mutual assistance organizations, gain some economic stability, and become involved in local and national politics. For many, family and clan remain central sources of strength in their new lives in Minnesota. Kao Kalia Yang remembers huge extended-family gatherings where the adults would talk about how to survive in the United States and exchange strategies for advancement. Uncles, aunts, and older cousins gathered together to share information about daily survival tactics.”

“Another political strategy involves mobilizing Hmong to exercise their voting rights and to elect Hmong American politicians to advocate on behalf of Hmong American issues. Some of this political activity first coalesced in the 1990s when welfare reform threatened to cut off aid to many elderly disabled veterans and their families. They and their advocates were quick to mobilize, and as a result Minnesota and thirteen other states developed a food assistance program for those – like the Hmong – who would no longer be covered under the federal government’s program.”

“When news that the United Nations-sponsored refugee camps in Thailand were beginning to close in 1992, Hmong American activists took to the streets to voice their concern that relatives and friends would be persecuted by the Lao government. They pressured President Bill Clinton’s administration to keep Thai refugee camps open or ease U.S. immigration rules. Between 1992 and 1994, more than 25,000 Hmong were resettled in the United States, and an additional 15,000 arrived in the country between 2004 and 2008.”

“Beginning in the 1970s, Hmong farmers began using vacant lots to grow vegetables that they could not find in local markets. In the 1990s, Hmong farmers in the Twin Cities helped revitalize the struggling farmer’s market in Minneapolis and were central to the emergence of a new market in St. Paul. Benefiting from the burgeoning interest in eating more local and organic produce, Hmong farmers have become important to this growing segment of the regional economy.”

““We’re not going to stand for racism anymore!” protesters declared in 1998 when Twin Cities radio host Tom Barnard made racist statements about Hmong culture following an infanticide committed by a thirteen-year-old Hmong girl in Wisconsin. Using the tragic event to ridicule Hmong customs and peoples, Barnard vehemently declared that the Hmong should “Assimilate or hit the goddamn road!” in his KQRS broadcast. Objectionable comments, jokes, and the use of an offensive “Asian” character who spoke in broken English continued to be mainstays of Barnard’s show over the next several days.

Hmong activists responded by forming Community Action Against Racism (CAAR), a multiracial coalition of whites, Latinos, and Asian and African Americans that staged protests and publicized the issues. After the radio station and its hosts refused to apologize, CAAR successfully organized an economic boycott of the station and urged corporations and businesses to pull their advertising contracts. By the fall of 1998, KQRS had issued an official apology and agreed to air public service announcements to raise awareness about Hmong history and pride. CAAR accepted that it had won a major victory, but signaled that it would be ready to mobilize community members and their allies around future incidents.”

“It is common for Hmong American boys, for example, to take on greater homemaking responsibilities, including such traditionally feminine duties as cooking, cleaning, and care of younger siblings, because their parents are busy working multiple jobs.”

Conclusion

“In the United States, the immigrant investor (EB-5) visa program grants lawful permanent residence to foreign nationals who invest $500,000 or $1 million in U.S. businesses and create or preserve at least ten American jobs. Created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the immigration investor program sparked little interest until recently; now Asian immigrant investors, particularly from China, have almost maxed out the annual cap of 10,000 visas given to investors and their immediate family members.”

“In 1986, the United States government abandoned its support of the Marcos government, in large part as a result of the activism of Filipinos in the United States.”

“In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan’s booming economy drew on Latin American Japanese to work as temporary laborers performing the “3K jobs” that most native-born Japanese rejected: kitanai/ dirty, kitsiu/ demanding, and kiken/ dangerous. In 1990, the Japanese government reformed its immigration laws to create a new “long-term resident” status (teijusha) for Japanese nationals and children and grandchildren of Japanese emigrants born abroad. The next year, 83,875 Brazilians of Japanese descent entered the country. By 1996 a culture of migration was firmly established among Japanese communities in many Latin American countries.”

“In recent years, Asian Americans in New York City plunged deeper into poverty and are now the poorest New Yorkers.”

“In the eight weeks that followed 9/11, more than a thousand incidents of racial violence were reported, including nineteen murders, attacks on places of worship, and personal intimidation and harassment.”

“Chinese American Wing F. Ong was the first Asian American to be elected to state office when he became a state representative in Arizona in 1946.”

“Beginning in the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were believed to be a particularly dangerous public health menace. Officials described San Francisco’s Chinatown, home to the largest Chinese American community in the country, as a “plague spot,” a “cesspool,” and a “laboratory of infection.” In 1900, when the bubonic plague was discovered in the city, all 25,000 Chinese residents were quarantined within the twelve-block neighborhood, while whites were allowed to leave.”