Asian Americans

Asian Americans. American economic, military, and missionary activities profoundly affected the pattern of Asian and Pacific islanders' emigration to the United States. U.S. imperial expansion in the Pacific, the Yankee clipper trade with China, the annexation of Hawai'i and the Philippines, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all helped determine which Asian groups came to America and their treatment once here. When Americans colonized the Hawaiian islands in the nineteenth century, they brought in Asian workers for their sugar plantations. American labor contractors, together with recruiters from South America, Australia, and Canada, created a diaspora of Asian laborers all around the Pacific basin.

Used on the West Coast as labor competition to drive down wages in railroad construction, mining, and agriculture, Chinese and then Japanese immigrant workers were portrayed by European Americans as a “yellow peril.” Asian workers were recruited in three successive waves—Chinese (1850–1882), Japanese (1890–1924), and Filipino (1900–1935)—as cheap laborers and then excluded or discriminated against as they came to be perceived as a threat. As West Coast nativists demonized “Orientals,” labor organizers created unions that excluded Asians. Anti‐Asian nativism and violence in the 1870s and 1890s drove Chinese Americans out of most industries and from small towns into large urban ghettos in Seattle and San Francisco.

Congress excluded Chinese immigrants in 1882—a ban that continued until 1943. West Coast citizens started a “Japanese and Korean Exclusion League” in 1905, and in 1906 San Francisco's school board segregated Asian children. When the board reversed this action under pressure from President Theodore Roosevelt, Japan voluntarily agreed to halt the emigration of Japanese laborers to America. California restricted Japanese Americans' rights to own or lease farmland, and the Immigration Act of 1924 barred Asian immigrants entirely. The Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, and the Cold War halted the Asian diaspora, but millions of Asian migrants remained in their adopted homelands.

Gender has played an important role in Asian American history. Asian manual laborers who came to the United States in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly male. The few women who did emigrate to America (less than 10 percent of the roughly 100,000 Chinese emigrants) were harassed through legislation and stereotyped as prostitutes or objects of white male sexual fantasies. Because of Japan's greater diplomatic power, Japanese American male laborers could send for brides from Japan. Male Chinese and Filipino laborers found it much more difficult to bring wives to America, and these immigrants lived in almost exclusively male social worlds. Confronting racist housing and job discrimination, most Asian Americans endured a difficult and marginal existence.

World War II proved the most dramatic example of America's hypocritical treatment of Asian Americans. The United States forcibly interned over 110,000 Japanese Americans, of whom two thirds were American citizens. Ostensibly motivated by security fears, this action underscored the continuing power of racism. In contrast, American propaganda heroicized America's wartime allies China and the Philippines, enhancing the standing of Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans. Despite discrimination, Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans volunteered in high numbers for military service. Troops of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up solely of Japanese Americans, many of whose families were interned, distinguished themselves for valor. After the war, Asian American veterans demanded that they be allowed to bring wives to the United States. The War Brides Act of 1947 allowed a small number of Asian American wives to enter the country. For veterans, the postwar period brought rising prosperity and civil rights gains. Reflecting U.S. Cold War foreign‐policy considerations, the 1952 McCarren‐Walter Immigration Act removed the 1924 ban on Asian immigration.

In late twentieth‐century America, native‐born Asian Americans combined with extensive new Asian immigration to create one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. A clause of the Immigration Act of 1965 encouraging the emigration of professionals proved pivotal, not only increasing Asian immigration, but changing the profile significantly from the earlier bachelor laborers. By the 1970s, many migrants from the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, and India were emigrating to America to fill jobs in the burgeoning economy. Often coming as family units, large numbers of highly educated and skilled immigrants proved a boon to the U.S. economy, especially in high‐tech industries. These professionals joined a growing number of second‐ and third‐generation Chinese and Japanese Americans in white‐collar jobs that had previously barred Asians. By the 1980s, the two most numerous Asian immigrant groups were South Koreans and Filipinos. Their paths to the United States paralleled that of migrants from Pacific islands with U.S. military bases, such as Samoa, Okinawa, and Guam. From 1980 to 1990, the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States grew by 80 percent, from 3.8 million to an estimated 6.9 million, comprising by 1990 just under 3 percent of the population.

Some post–World War II Asian immigrants were political refugees. For example, the U.S. government allowed Chinese students to stay in America after the Chinese communists came to power in 1949. After the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of refugees who had been identified with the American cause came to the United States from South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Although many of the Vietnamese were from the United States–supported Saigon government and military elite, they had difficulty finding work in anything except menial labor. Worse off were the Hmong, nomadic hill tribes recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the North Vietnamese. Products of a village culture and ill‐equipped for life in urban‐industrial America, the Hmong found their exile particularly difficult.

Equated with a mythical “Orient” and cast as foreign and exotic, Asian Americans have historically suffered from the perception that they were not fully American. Even late twentieth‐century positive representations of Asian Americans as a model minority—hard working, highly educated, and well paid—often attributed their success to supposedly “Confucian” values, further reinforcing their “otherness.” As the twentieth century ended, Asians and Pacific Islanders made up an important and diverse group of American citizens. Their experiences shaped by extravagant dreams that clashed with harsh realities, they continued to seek opportunities in a nation that too often failed to live up to its promise.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Asia; Immigration; Immigration Law; Incarceration of Japanese Americans; Missionary Movement; Nativist Movement.

Bibliography

Roger Daniels , Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850, 1988.
Gary Okihiro , Margins and Mainstreams: Asian Americans in American History and Culture, 1994.
Ronald Takaki , Strangers from a Different Shore, 1989.
Sucheng Chan , Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, 1991.
William O'Hare and and Judy Felt , Asian Americans: America's Fastest Growing Minority Group, Population Trends and Public Policy, 1991.
Alexander Saxton , The Indispensable Enemy, 2d ed., 1996.

Henry Yu