Learn about Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigration in the past 150 years and how these groups were welcomed and excluded.
Transcript: Asians in America. A Brief History
Eric: But this is a famous picture of like two trains. There are no Chinese people in that picture and historians and scholars and thinkers believe that that was intentional.
Penny: ..to sort of say this is a great accomplishment, but then not actually depict all the people who are really part of that great accomplishment.
Will: Non-white immigrants in this era couldn't become citizens, only their children. And for a variety of Asian groups in different ways, it's important to connect American foreign policy with what's happening domestically.
Penny: Welcome, everybody, to this next podcast in our mini-series on Race in America. I have again with me today guests Eric Washington and Will Katerberg. And I'm Pennylyn Dykstra-Pruim. And we're here to discuss and explore a little bit some of the issues and some of our history related specifically to Asians and Asian-Americans and how some of these insights can help us understand this nuance, this piece of the race in America picture.
Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
I wanted to start out with asking what would be helpful to understand Asian Americans and how they were and were not welcomed or allowed into the United States to begin with. And I know that some of us may have heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act or be aware of perhaps different waves of Asian immigration in our maybe more recent history, perhaps related to the Vietnam War or other refugee situations. But I'm wondering if our historians, if Will and Eric can help us a little bit unpack sort of the history of this in the United States, perhaps starting, you know, like in the middle or the towards the end of the 19th century, because I know that's an important point in the history of Asian immigration into the United States.
Will: Large numbers of immigrants from China started coming to California in the eighteen fifties after the discovery of gold there. In California, almost from the start there were efforts to exclude Chinese people, and a variety of ways were tried by the California legislature, but they were generally ruled as unconstitutional. Chinese miners and Chinese people who came to work as laborers also were treated violently. One way to suppress them if it didn't work to use law was to use violence. The first national acts designed to limit or exclude Chinese people from the United States date to the 1870’s.
The most important of these was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended immigration from China for a decade. The United States renewed it in 1892 and then made it permanent in 1902. At roughly the same time, the United States also began trying to exclude immigrants from other parts of Asia, as well as from parts of Europe, where there were peoples that were less desirable as immigrants from the point of view of what we might think of as establishment Americans of British and Western European descent. And that included literacy laws, laws against polygamous immigrants, laws against unaccompanied, unaccompanied children and so on. And these laws, while they didn't specifically discriminate against Chinese or other Asians, could be enforced selectively.
Penny: So in the middle of the 19th century, we have sort of the first waves of Chinese immigrants coming related to the gold rush, but then also sort of in the 18th sixties, we have Chinese men in particular coming over to be workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, right?
Will: Yes, that's correct. Yep.
Penny: And so we actually had a lot of Asian or Chinese labor that was part of making that. We we were happy to have them as hardworking laborers to whom a relatively low wage could be paid to do this hard, back-breaking work. But then just after that, in 1882 is when we had that Chinese Exclusion Act.
Will: Yes.
Penny: And that was because there is sort of this there's like too many of them now here and we don't need them anymore. Or what was sort of the impetus for that Chinese Exclusion Act 1882?
Will: Well, the simple answer is racial animosity that the Chinese were considered as a race, as an immigrant group, unhealthy. They were associated with diseases, immoral. They were associated with gambling, with illegal drugs, with prostitution. It's also important to note that much of the opposition to Chinese laborers came from other working class laborers. So one of the reasons why Irish Americans and Irish immigrants were so hostile to Chinese immigrants is that they were competing for the same jobs. And the perspective of immigrant Irish laborers and native-born American laborers was that Chinese were being hired because they would work for a lower wage. And so some of the early opposition that promoted anti-Chinese legislation in California was from what was known as the working man's party, Irish immigrant dominated, but more generally working class political party in California that wanted to exclude Chinese because it argued that the Chinese were bringing down wages and that employers were exploiting this in order to cut the wages of workers generally. So the opposition to Chinese immigrants then is partly that working class frustration with lower paid Chinese people getting jobs that they wanted, combined with ethnic prejudices or racial prejudices.
Eric: This whole dynamic between Irish working class people and and Chinese working class people, especially connection to the Transcontinental Railroad, even the workforces were segregated. You (had) Chinese work gangs building uh laying down that track from the West. And … Irish work gangs. from the east going west, and they meet at Promontory Point, Utah. But this famous picture of like two trains meeting at that site. But all of the people in the picture all white.
Penny: I've seen that picture. Yeah.
Eric: There are no Chinese people in that picture. And historians and scholars and thinkers believe that that was intentional.
Penny: To sort of say this is a great accomplishment, but then not actually depict all the people who are really part of that great accomplishment.
Will: Yes.
Eric: All right.
Will: So when we think about the Chinese Exclusion Act, you ask why in 1882? Well, the prejudice had been there all along. By the eighteen eighties, it was more being perceived as a national problem because of what Eric mentioned: it's no longer Chinese coming simply to mined for gold, but becoming an increasing source of labor as wage laborers in mines and on the railroads. And the Chinese Exclusion Act is probably an example that suggests that they were one of the easier groups to limit because there were shared prejudices against them, not just by native born Americans, but by immigrant Europeans.
Penny: So another thing that I've read is that in the late 19th century, mid to late 19th century, and then with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, that that actually made Chinese in particular labeled aliens ineligible to citizenship. So that even if they, you know, they entered legally, they worked here for a while, they maybe, you know, had sort of settled here, they still weren't eligible for citizenship. And that is something too that I think distinguishes that Asian and the Chinese American experience. And I think this label of being ineligible or aliens eligible to citizenship is something that's sort of unique to the Chinese immigrants or the Asian-American experience, as opposed to some of the other groups that at different points were also discriminated against.
Will: And this goes back much earlier than with Chinese immigration. The original naturalization acts of the United States going back to the first administrations of the presidential administrations of the new nation, defined laws that said how people who immigrate to the United States would become citizens. And those laws indicate that only white people who come to the United States are eligible to become citizens. So Chinese immigrants themselves can’t become citizens. And same is true later of Japanese immigrants and other Asians. Only their children can and their children can because they're born in the United States. Non-white immigrants in this era couldn't become citizens, only their children.
Eric: In the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act. You have the administration administration is a country that is making people who are on the ground working, living. The administration is making them automatically a stroke of a pen undocumented or what people may call today illegal. So often the time in today's discourse, when folks talk about immigration and immigration reform and whether we use the term undocumented resident or a citizen or what have you versus illegal alien or illegal immigrant. But we (have) to realize that in speaking about this specific history, it was the administration that made a decision of the to discriminate against certain group. Therefore, making their presence in this country quote unquote illegal because we often look at people crossing the border illegally. Without papers, it is a case where the administration is saying you’re no longer welcome here. You're now ….
Penny: And these shifts happened in other cases, too, I remember reading that there was a period of time where the Japanese were seen more favorably, like they were particularly noble or good Asians to have. But then then some things happened and the beginning of the 20th century. Right. We had some anti-Japanese exclusion kind of happening right in the early nineteen hundreds. And then in 1924, the immigration act that halted Japanese immigration altogether. And then, of course, we know, at least some of us, I think I think most of us have heard about the Japanese internment camps that happened during World War Two. Is there an easy way to kind of wrap our heads around these shifts from being the more noble for the Japanese being, the more noble and desirable Asian immigrants to then actually being blocked from immigration and then being put in internment camps?
Will: I'm not sure if they were wanted so much. The Japanese were viewed as hard working and intelligent and moral, and so they didn't come with the same perceived negatives as Chinese immigrants. But from the start, I think the perception among white Americans was that the Japanese could never assimilate to American society like immigrants from Europe, white immigrants through intermarriage, that the racial distinctions would mean that non-Japanese or white people, they wouldn't marry Japanese immigrants. And so the Japanese immigrant population would never be truly assimilated. So the policy history is that in the 1890s, the United States signed an agreement with Japan allowing Japanese to immigrate to the United States. And in the United States have the same rights as U.S. citizens. They couldn't become U.S. citizens because they weren't white. Their children born here could. But in 1907, in the context of growing anti-Asian sentiment, often called yellow fever, at the time, the United States reached what was called a gentlemen's agreement with Japan. And that agreement entailed Japan restricting immigration to the United States. Those restrictions became formal in the 1920’s. The Immigration Act of 1924, confirmed Asian exclusion, as well as adding restrictive quotas on European immigration.
Penny: I feel like it's kind of a fear too of them gaining power. Right, whatever the “them” is.
Will: Yes. And for a variety of Asian groups in different ways, it's important to conduct American foreign policy with what's happening domestically. The United States sends a naval flotilla to Japan in the 1850s and forces Japan open to diplomacy and as Japanese immigrants are coming to the United States, the two countries are also competing for control of the Pacific region as growing military powers. And the whole story comes to sort of a culmination in World War Two when the United States and Japan are at war and the domestic population of Japanese Americans is now considered once again a foreign enemy. And the bulk of it on the West Coast is put in internment camps. A smaller percentage of Japanese Americans in Hawaii are put in internment camps. Interestingly, partly because the Navy opposed it and the Navy opposed it for practical reasons, because Japanese Americans in Hawaii were such an important part of the labor force.
And the expressions vary over time, the perceived Asian threat might change. So in the mid to late 19th and early 20th century, it's China or Chinese immigrants excuse me, in the late 19th and early 20th century, and especially during World War two it's Japanese immigrants who are the threat. An interesting example is Filipinos. So the United States goes to war with Spain in 1898, 99. And it's the end of the Spanish empire. And as a result, the United States now has control of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines. This is the same time period when the United States incorporates Hawaii as American territory. And so now with the Philippines as an American protectorate, functionally colony, Filipinos become American nationals. Nationals doesn't mean citizens, but they're recognized as having legal status in the United States. And so Filipinos can emigrate to the United States in significant numbers, go to Hawaii and to the American West Coast, and anti-Asian legislation doesn't apply to them into the 1930s. And in the 1930s, then because there's this growing anti-Filipino sentiment, it's the new unwanted growing Asian group, the United States actually negotiates with the Philippines. And the deal is Filipinos lose their national status. So now they can't freely come to the United States anymore. But the United States promises a road to increasing domestic independence for the Philippines as what it gets.
Eric: I've taught this this journal article published in the Journal of African-American History that was published in 2014. But it's it's about the experiences of African-American soldiers in the Philippines. They are fighting basically to suppress Filipino resistance to American colonial imperialism that way. And there's a case where an African-American soldier just leaves, he leaves the front. He leaves the army and sides with the Filipinos because he he stated that I have more in common with with the Filipinos in terms of their fight against American imperialism than that, I do staying with U.S. troops. And I think he hid himself real well, I think I think I think that the Army found and tried him. But it was interesting that this this man's African-American man, he wasn't alone, there were a few others who recognized that, you know, this this this this fight is is unfair and for me, justice demands that I leave, I desert the United States Army and actually take up with Filipinos who are resisting this.
Will: There are interesting stories like that where one group that's discriminated against sees commonality with a group that might not otherwise see that commonality. The Indian wars that had been taking place in the United States from the eighteen forties into the eighteen eighties. And so some of the same kind of sensibilities that Americans had in the way they viewed Indians and fought those wars against groups like the the Apache and Sioux and so on. They now carry those with them to the Philippines. And similarly, see the Filipinos as an indigenous group that needs to be conquered in ways similar to the way Native Americans needed to be conquered. So there's there's a lot of resonances between domestic and international perceptions of race and race relations.
Penny: I hope that this podcast has helped add some nuance to our understanding of Asian immigration by looking particularly at Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigration over the past 150 years. And we've had a chance to look a little bit at how those groups were at times allowed to immigrate, but also always had kind of an outsider status.
If you're interested in continuing to learn about Asians in America, I encourage you to listen to the podcast. “Asians in America, triangulation” for some interesting ways to think about the position that Asian-Americans have had in our country from the very first immigrants up and through the 20th and 21st century.
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