The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law made exceptions for merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major US law ever implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States, and therefore helped shape twentieth-century race-based immigration policy.
The Geary Act was a United States law that extended the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by adding onerous new requirements. It was written by California Representative Thomas J. Geary and was passed by Congress on May 5, 1892.
The Mexican Repatriation was the repatriation, deportation, and expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the United States during the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939. Estimates of how many were repatriated, deported, or expelled range from 300,000 to 2 million.
Asian immigration to the United States refers to immigration to the United States from part of the continent of Asia, which includes East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Asian-origin populations have historically been in the territory that would eventually become the United States since the 16th century. The first major wave of Asian immigration occurred in the late 19th century, primarily in Hawaii and the West Coast. Asian Americans experienced exclusion, and limitations to immigration, by the United States law between 1875 and 1965, and were largely prohibited from naturalization until the 1940s. Since the elimination of Asian exclusion laws and the reform of the immigration system in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, there has been a large increase in the number of immigrants to the United States from Asia.
Asian pride is a term that encourages celebration of Asian ethnicity and culture, with various interpretations and origins. In international relations, it can involve advancing Pan-Asianism and critiquing the West. In the United States, it has roots in counter culture, rejecting stereotypes and empowering Asian Americans. The term gained modern use through hip hop culture, promoting a positive stance on being Asian American. The phrase "Got Rice?" emerged as a symbol of cultural identity and pride, often tied to Asian Pride. It humorously references rice as a staple food in Asian cultures. The term was adopted in T-shirt campaigns and seen as a way for Asian Americans to define their identity and counter stereotypes.
Judith "Judy" Yung was a librarian, community activist, historian and professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in oral history, women's history, and Asian American history. She died on December 14, 2020, in San Francisco, where she had returned in 2018.
The history of immigration to the United States details the movement of people to the United States from the colonial era to the present day. Throughout U.S. history, the country experienced successive waves of immigration, particularly from Europe and later on from Asia and Latin America. Colonial-era immigrants often repaid the cost of transoceanic transportation by becoming indentured servants in which the new employer paid the ship's captain. In the late 19th century, immigration from China and Japan was restricted. In the 1920s, restrictive immigration quotas were imposed but political refugees had special status. Numerical restrictions ended in 1965. In recent years, the largest numbers of immigrants to the United States have come from Asia and Central America.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Dow v. United States, 226 F. 145, is a United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, case in which a Syrian immigrant, George Dow, appealed two lower court decisions denying his application for naturalization as a United States citizen. Following the lower court decisions in Ex Parte Dow (1914) and In re Dow (1914), Dow v. United States resulted in the Circuit Court's affirmation of the petitioner's right to naturalize based, in the words of Circuit Judge Charles Albert Woods, on "the generally received opinion. .. that the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria, [are] to be classed as white persons".
The Pacific Coast race riots were a series of riots which occurred in the United States and Canada in 1907. The violent riots resulted from growing anti-Asian sentiment among White populations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rioting occurred in San Francisco, Bellingham, and Vancouver. Anti-Asian rioters in Bellingham focused mainly on several-hundred Sikh workers recently immigrated from India. Chinese immigrants were attacked in Vancouver and Japanese workers were mainly targeted in San Francisco.
As of 2012, 21.4% of the population in San Francisco was of Chinese descent, and there were at least 150,000 Chinese American residents. The Chinese are the largest Asian American subgroup in San Francisco. San Francisco has the highest percentage of residents of Chinese descent of any major U.S. city, and the second largest Chinese American population, after New York City. The San Francisco Area is 7.9% Chinese American, with many residents in Oakland and Santa Clara County. San Francisco's Chinese community has ancestry mainly from Guangdong province, China and Hong Kong, although there is a sizable population of ethnic Chinese with ancestry from other parts of mainland China and Taiwan as well.
The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 is a 2010 book by Robert Chao Romero, published by the University of Arizona Press, about the history of Chinese immigration to Mexico. This is the first English-language monograph written about Chinese immigration to Mexico. Anju Reejhsinghani of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point described it as "a social history of the small but influential Chinese merchant and laboring community in northern Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century." Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota stated that because much of the existing literature on Asian immigration to North and South America discusses the United States, this book "fills an enormous historiographical gap."
Chinese Americans in the Pacific Northwest have been around since as early as the 1850s. Chinese Americans arrived in the Greater Seattle area in as early as 1851. Oregon had also seen an influx of Chinese Immigrants as early as 1851, because of mining opportunities. Idaho saw an influx of Chinese Immigrants in the late-19th century, and by 1870 saw a population of around 4,000 Chinese immigrants. The influx of Chinese immigrants in the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the Western United States led to retaliation by whites, leading to anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States. These sentiment then led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which expelled many Chinese Americans in the Pacific Northwest. Chinese exclusion is also driven by the failure of restriction. The United States had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to slow immigration, and mend Sinophobia in the west. However, the enforcement of the exclusion act was lackluster. The United States Department of Treasury had found itself with no money to enforce this law. Thus, nullifying the purpose of the exclusion act. Additionally, under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese people could migrate to the United States if they were return immigrants. Consequently, Chinese immigrants began claiming that they were return immigrants so that they could work in the United States. This also made the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 useless. This led the United States government to pass the Scott Act of 1888. This excluded all Chinese immigration because it was cheaper, and it appeased the racial tensions in the west.
Many Chinese Americans enlisted in the United States military or served in defense industries during World War II. It has been estimated that around 12,000 to 15,000 Chinese American men, representing up to 20 percent of the Chinese American male population, served during the Second World War. Although the majority of Chinese American servicemen fought in non-segregated units, all segregated units belonged to the 14th Air Service Group or the 987th Signal Company. Chinese American women also served, including two Women Airforce Service Pilots and countless other women in defense industries. Service in World War II played a large role in increasing social acceptance for Chinese Americans, and many Chinese American veterans were able to expedite their naturalization and bring their foreign-born wives and children to the United States.
Lucy E. Salyer is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire known for her work on the history of immigration law in the United States.
Donna Rae Gabaccia is an American historian who studies international migration, with an emphasis on cultural exchange, such as food and from a gendered perspective. From 2003 to 2005 she was the Andrew Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and from 2005 to 2012 she held the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair of Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. During the same period, she was the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. In 2013, her book, Foreign Relations: Global Perspectives on American Immigration won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Prize in 2013.
Sarah S. Richardson is an American philosopher and historian who is a professor at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects and Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome.
Scandinavians in Chicago: The Origins of White Privilege in Modern America is a 2019 non-fiction history book by Erika K. Jackson, published by University of Illinois Press.
The Making of Asian America: A History is a 2015 non-fiction book by Erika Lee, a history professor at Harvard University. At the time of publication, Lee was the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. The book concerns and investigates the history of several generations of Asian American immigrants and descendants, as well as the changing nature of Asian American life throughout several centuries. It was awarded an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Non-Fiction by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association in 2015.
Yee Won v. White, 256 U.S. 399 (1921), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. The court affirmed the prior Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Yee Won, a Chinese laundryman in San Francisco, was considered a laborer and not a merchant, thus denying his wife and children entry into the United States from China.
