Abstract
This chapter traces the history of United States immigration policies regarding peoples from Asia and the Pacific to consider race-based policy connections and contributions to trafficking, broadly understood. The modern racial notion of “Asian American” derives from this history, which inter-posed and counter-posed shifting associations of “Asian” against and within “American.” This racial notion informed views of Asian migrants as temporary, non-citizen laborers to justify restrictive immigration policies against them and exclude them from legal rights and protections as well as access to systems of care and protection; the racial notion leveraged their liminal and vulnerable status into conditions of racial precarity. Modern definitions of, and protections against, “trafficking” focus on “severe” trafficking, drawing on the 13th Amendment’s authority to enforce the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude. To address the broader range of trafficking’s exploitative and abusive practices, however, requires also expanding its conception, learning from historical examples, to consider policies that lead to and institutionalize practices that are at odds with the spirit, if not the letter, of the 13th Amendment, that is, those that harden social marginalization into formal precarity and insecurity.
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Notes
- 1.
Tatum’s seminal work on “otherness” defines seven core minority groups based on race or ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, and physical or mental ability. Tatum notes that “each of these categories has a form of oppression associated with it: racism, sexism, religious oppression, heterosexism, classism, ageism, and ableism, respectively. In each case, there is a group considered dominant (systematically advantaged by the society because of group membership) and a group considered subordinate or targeted (systematically disadvantaged)” (Tatum 2000).
- 2.
Not all women who were expatriated were White.
- 3.
The Bureau of Chinese Inspection was created in 1882 to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. The 1891 Immigration Act created the federal Office of Immigration, which subsequent legislation in 1895 promoted to the Bureau of Immigration.
- 4.
- 5.
The term, “Oriental,” has long historical roots in European language and thought that, on the one hand, employed the “Orient” as a synonym for the general geographic notion of the “East” while, on the other hand, also connected it to cultural associations of exoticism, difference (specifically Islam’s religious difference with Christianity), invasion, and degradation. With the emergence of European colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, these associations were redeployed to justify Western subjugation of the “Orient” (Said 1978).
- 6.
“The Japanese government agreed to stop granting passports to laborers who were trying to enter the United States unless such laborers were coming to occupy a formerly-acquired home, to join a parent; spouse; or child, or to assume active control of a previously-acquired farming enterprise” (Browne 1921).
- 7.
Madeline Hsu estimates 2/5ths of Chinese workers in the United States had family in China (Hsu 2000).
- 8.
The “Asia-Pacific Triangle” included all of Asia and the Pacific between the 60th meridians (east) and 125th meridian (west) of longitude and north of the 25th parallel of southern latitude.
- 9.
Asian Americans, for instance, are included among socially disadvantaged groups eligible for federal contracts under the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development program (13 CFR § 124.103; Sharpe 1997).
- 10.
On African immigrants, see Kassa 2012; Echeverria-Estrada and Batalova 2019; Partnership for a New American Research Fund 2018. On Asian poverty levels in New York City, 2013–17 (which uses adjusted data of the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey), see Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity 2019 and Asian American Federation 2018.
- 11.
“Redlining” refers to the color-coding system federal housing loan agencies developed to appraise the “mortgage security” of residential neighborhoods. Red was assigned to the lowest grade, most “hazardous” areas, often based on the presence and numbers of African Americans, racial minorities, and undesired immigrants. For an interactive historical map, see the University of Richmond’s “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining
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Cheng, J., Chang, K. (2021). Immigration, Precarity, and Human Trafficking: Histories and Legacies of Asian American Racial Exclusion in the United States. In: Chisolm-Straker, M., Chon, K. (eds) The Historical Roots of Human Trafficking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70675-3_10
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