Background:

Historically, the United States has used immigration policies to preserve and maintain a white-majority population and society. As economic conditions, racial concerns, or international relations shifted, the United States has opened or closed its borders to non-white populations. For example, when Chinese labor was pivotal to U.S. expansion, they were welcomed. But when those workers chose to settle instead of returning to China, they were viewed as a threat by white people. The Chinese were excluded from immigration until the United States was compelled to promote more friendly relations with China during World War II when it was at war with Japan. These racial, political, and international factors continue to affect immigration policies today.

Essay:

From the early 1800s to 1965, Asian Americans’ rights to immigration and citizenship in the United States were severely limited by a series of discriminatory immigration laws. Fears about the influx of Chinese labor taking away jobs from white workers led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly banned Chinese immigrants from entering the country and prevented existing Chinese residents from becoming citizens. It was the first law in the United States to limit immigration based explicitly on ethnicity, and later expanded to exclude all Asians.

The Emergency Quota Act (Emergency Immigration Act of 1921) implemented a quota system based on nationality that overwhelmingly favored immigrants from Western Europe and barred immigrants from the vast majority of Asia and Africa. The Quota Act limited the annual number of immigrants admitted from any country to 3% of the total number of U.S. residents from that country based on the 1910 Census. Accordingly, the annual quota from Europe was 356,081, compared to 1,261 from Asia, and 122 from Africa.

When China became a key ally of the United States against Japan during World War II, Japan used the Chinese Exclusion Act as propaganda for China to break their alliance with the U.S. No longer able to justify the exclusion, the United States repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.

In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Nationality Act) attempted to reform immigration laws as critics believed they crippled U.S. international relations. While the Act removed past racial restrictions on citizenship by permitting naturalization, it retained discriminatory quotas that continued to favor western and northern European nations, which received 85% of the total spots. The stringent quota system and anti-immigration sentiment remained firmly unchanged for the next decade.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, spearheaded by the African American community and leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Subsequently, immigration laws based on national origin, such as the quota system that regarded immigrants from certain nations to be less desirable, came under serious review.

The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act) created a system that relied on “preferences” for immigrants who were highly skilled in fields that the Department of Labor deemed understaffed, or who had existing family relationships within the United States. Completely eliminating the use of quotas, this opened the doors to many Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants after decades of discriminatory and exclusionary immigration policies. The 1965 Immigration Act created a system of preferences that placed family reunification at the top (75%), followed by skilled employment (20%), and refugees (5%).

Legislators at the time believed that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was symbolic rather than consequential. Upon signing it, President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked, “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or power.” Though the bill was signed under the guise of progressivism, many legislators, including Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaiʻi, still had to placate xenophobic anxieties about Asian immigration and that those arriving would still remain majority European.

As immigration opened for family reunification and skilled workers, the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) population grew from 1.5 million in 1970 to 3.5 million in 1980, and doubled again to over 7 million by 1990. Part of the increase in the APIDA population can also be attributed to refugee resettlement: a series of wars were fought in Southeast Asia from 1946 to 1991, significantly impacting Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. By 1975, roughly 130,000 refugees fled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and resettled in the U.S., with about 1.2 million Southeast Asians fleeing to the United States by 2010. By the 21st century, 80 percent of immigrants to the United States were coming from Asia or Latin America, effectively transforming the demographics of American society.

While there are no longer racially exclusionary laws impacting an immigrant’s ability to immigrate or ability to naturalize, gaining citizenship is still difficult due to the length, cost, and stipulations of the process. Additionally, just as there were political motives behind past exclusionary immigration laws, the idea of opening up or easing pathways to citizenship is also a political issue. Some want to keep these barriers up to prevent, for example, undocumented immigrants, from obtaining citizenship. Just as immigration was controlled to exclude largely people of color from entering the U.S., barriers to citizenship for immigrants are tied to the motivation of keeping and maintaining the power of whiteness in the United States.