Abstract
This chapter reviews major legislation that affected the levels and countries of origin of immigration from Asia. The history emphasizes continual tension between employers seeking a source of low-skilled workers and protectionist unions and xenophobic citizens seeking to restrict immigration from Asia. A consistent pattern emerges. Restricting immigration from one Asian developing country almost immediately increases immigration from another Asian country. Calls for legislation to restrict migration from the new labor source follow. This pattern repeats until the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 restricts immigration from the Philippines, effectively ending wide-scale immigration from Asia for 30 years. The Immigration Act of 1965 replaced the country-of-origin quotas with preference categories including relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and those with skills useful to the United States and refugees. These changes opened a new era of immigration from Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
We discuss only immigration and immigration policy that affected large movements of Asian men and women to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. For a more complete account of immigration from Asia see David M. Reimers Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People (2005).
- 2.
Betty Lee Sung, The Story of the Chinese in America (New York: Collier Books, 1967), 22–23.
- 3.
David M. Reimers, Other Americans (New York, New York University Press, 2005), 46–48
- 4.
See Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356.
- 5.
Liu, John M., “Race, Ethnicity, and the Sugar Plantation System: Asian Labor in Hawaii, 1850 to 1900.” In Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, by Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, 186–210. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 195.
- 6.
Eleanor C. Nordyke and Richard K.C. Lee, “The Chinese in Hawai‘i: A Historical and Demographic Perspective”, The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 23 (1989), 201.
- 7.
Stephanie S. Pincetl (10 March 2003). “Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development”. JHU Press. 23.
- 8.
Eleanor C. Nordyke and Richard K.C. Lee, (1989) 201.
- 9.
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.
- 10.
Masakazu Iwata, ‘The Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture’, Agricultural History 36.1 (Jan 1996), 25–37.
- 11.
David M. Reimers, 52–53.
- 12.
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little Brown, 1989), 192.
- 13.
David M. Reimers, 54.
- 14.
C.E. Neu, An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 1906–1909. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967).
- 15.
Chandrasekhar, S. “Indian Immigration in America.” Far Eastern Survey, vol. 13, no. 15, 1944, 138.
- 16.
Ibid, 138.
- 17.
Ibid, 141.
- 18.
Immigration Policy Center, “The Passage from India, Policy Brief.” 2000, 1.
- 19.
Boyd, Monica. “Oriental Immigration: The Experience of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Populations in the United States.” The International Migration Review 5, no. 1 (1971). 50–51.
- 20.
David M. Reimers, 2005, op cit., 62–69.
References
Sung, Betty Lee, The Story of the Chinese in America. New York: Collier Books, 1967.
Boyd, Monica. “Oriental Immigration: The Experience of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Populations in the United States.” The International Migration Review 5, no. 1 (1971).
Neu, Charles E. An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 1906–1909. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Chandrasekhar, S. “Indian Immigration in America.” Far Eastern Survey, vol. 13, no. 15, 1944.
Azuma, Eiichiro, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Nordyke, Eleanor C. and Richard K.C. Lee, “The Chinese in Hawai‘i: A Historical and Demographic Perspective”, The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 23 (1989).
Immigration Policy Center, “The Passage from India, Policy Brief.” 2000.
Cheng, Lucie and Edna Bonacich, Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, 186–210. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Liu, John M., “Race, Ethnicity, and the Sugar Plantation System: Asian Labor in Hawaii, 1850 to 1900,” in Cheng and Bonacich, Labor Migration under Capitalism. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.
Iwata, Masakazu, “The Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture”, Agricultural History 36.1 Jan, 1996.
Reimers, David M. 2005. Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People, NY: NYU Press.
Takaki, Ronald, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little Brown, 1989).
Pincetl, Stephanie S. (10 March 2003). Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development. JHU Press.
Yick Wo V. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356.
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Duleep, H., Regets, M.C., Sanders, S., Wunnava, P.V. (2020). A Brief Review of Immigration from Asia. In: Human Capital Investment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_2
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