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Perpetual foreigner stereotyping is a form of systemic racism used against Asian Americans. They have historically been stereotyped as foreigners in the United States no matter their duration of time living here or whether they were American-born. The perpetual foreigner stereotype is maintained by institutions such as Hollywood, private and public sectors, to elected public officials. Throughout U.S. history, Asian Americans have been scapegoated as the cause of the country’s various problems and catastrophes including economic despair, wars, terrorism, and coronavirus pandemic.

Stereotyping is used to pit one race or group against another, pushing some to the bottom of the pecking order and allows certain groups to be taken advantage of. It also prevents people from uniting and advancing together. Perpetual foreigner stereotyping is a form of systemic racism used against Asian Americans, who have historically been stereotyped as foreigners in the United States no matter their duration living here or whether they were American-born. Asian Americans were placed into segregated schools, and were excluded from immigration and citizenship for over 60 years.

The perpetual foreigner stereotype is maintained by institutions including Hollywood, private and public sectors, to elected public officials. As far back as 1865 during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese workers were seen as inferior labor and placed into unskilled jobs, earning two-thirds what European workers did, and segregated into “section houses.”

Within the entertainment industry, the acting career of Anna May Wong was stymied by the Hays Code. Instead of Wong, the lead female role in The Good Earth (1937)—about Chinese farmers—went to Luise Rainer in yellowface. Mickey Rooney also in yellowface portrayed a Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). This practice of Asian roles going to white actors instead of qualified Asian actors would later evolve into whitewashing, as seen most recently with Tilda Swinton playing an Asian monk in Doctor Strange (2016), and Scarlett Johansson as the lead character—originally Japanese—in Ghost in the Shell (2017).

During World War II, Japanese Americans were seen as foreigners. Under the pretense of national security, almost the entire population (120,000) of Japanese Americans in the continental United States were incarcerated from 1942 to 1946, and lost their homes and businesses. Two-thirds of them were American-born citizens.

In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, became a scapegoat for the decline of the American auto industry in the 1980s. Chin was murdered by two unemployed white autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. In 1999, Joseph Ileto, a Filipino American, was murdered by an avowed white supremacist for being a person of color. Balbir Singh Sodhi, an Indian American, was the first among many murdered shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, because he looked like an Arab Muslim.

In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of U.S. government and other elected public officials referred to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.” This labeling then created an environment whereby violence and attacks against Asian Americans became more permissible. Thousands of innocent Asian Americans were scapegoated for being the cause of the coronavirus, and faced hate speech, hate incidents and hate crimes in the process.

Throughout all of these points in history, Asian Americans have organized in different ways to protest and fight back against these injustices.