The Good Immigrants

How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

Madeline Y. Hsu

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400866373
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness.The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act.Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

CHAPTER 1

Gateways and Gates in American Immigration History

UNDER CLEAR SKIES on July 3, 1986, in a ceremony broadcast around the world from Governor’s Island, President Ronald Reagan presided over the first of a four-day commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty with a one-time presentation of Medals of Liberty to twelve outstanding immigrants.¹ These highly select acclaimed Americans included no less than three individuals of Chinese ancestry—the architect I. M. Pei (Bei Yuming, b. 1917), the computer scientist and entrepreneur Wang An (1920–1990), and the astronaut Franklin R. Chang-Díaz (b. 1950).² From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the celebration of Chinese Americans as exemplary immigrants seems unsurprising given the pervasive image of Asians as model minorities whose educational and professional attainments surpass that of any other racial group, including whites.³ This is very recent history, however. Such an honor would have been inconceivable, and legally impossible, just a century before and as recently as World War II, when Asians categorized by race were barred from naturalized citizenship and subjected to highly limited rights of entry. The earliest American law concerning citizenship, the Nationality Act of 1790, had set aside Asians as racially ineligible, and the earliest enforced immigration laws (1875–1943) had targeted Chinese by race, who thereby became the first illegal immigrants against whom the legal and institutional foundations of American border controls were established. Under such circumstances, how did Pei, Wang, and Chang-Díaz, as Asians but particularly as Chinese, ascend so rapidly to become model American immigrants?

I. M. Pei’s life story surfs astride the shifting ideological, political, and legal tides that advanced the integration and visible successes of Chinese. Individual brilliance aside, Pei had excellent timing, for his arrival in the United States in 1935 at age seventeen coincided with the onset of major changes in the relationships between immigration priorities and practices, the politics of foreign relations, and views of domestic racial inequalities that transformed the positioning and possibilities available to Chinese. The immigration histories of Pei and his generation of fellow students, heretofore treated as exceptional to the mainstream of Asian American history, require our attention because they illuminate the many intersections between immigration history and international relations, underscoring that the evolution and institutionalization of American border controls emerged not just from domestic political agendas and racial ideologies but as manifestations of American ambitions and constraints abroad. The twentieth-century turn from restriction to selection gained momentum as the U.S. government—chiefly the executive branch and the Department of State but in conjunction with internationalists active in education, missionary work, and public policy—realized and co-opted the use of educational and cultural exchanges as means first to advance American foreign interests and eventually to develop national reserves of economically enhanced human resources. Immigration policies and practices shifted from a set of defensive measures protecting America from unwanted immigrants seen as posing dangers to the state to a set of selective processes recruiting immigrants seen as enhancing the national economy.

Figure 1.1. Ronald Reagan awarding Medals of Liberty, July 3, 1986. A dozen exemplary immigrant Americans were honored at this one-time ceremony to celebrate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. I. M. Pei is third from the left, next to Franklin Chang-Díaz and Wang An. Courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library.

Pei entered the United States as a student, which, along with merchants, diplomats, and tourists, was one of the few exempt classes of Chinese permitted legal admission, although only for temporary residence. A banker’s son, he came to study architecture first at the University of Pennsylvania but then transferred to MIT and continued to Harvard University for graduate study. As did other Chinese students, and even some American-born Chinese facing discrimination in the United States, Pei anticipated working in China, where professional careers were more readily available to ethnic Chinese. The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), the outbreak of the Cold War (1948), and the hardening of political divides with the Korean War (1950–1952) shattered these plans and transformed him from a relatively privileged professional-in-training with a secure future in his homeland to a stateless refugee with uncertain prospects for either residence or employment. Unlike most Chinese in America, stigmatized as working class, ghettoized, and inassimilable, however, Pei had abundant talents, bicultural adeptness, and top-notch educational credentials that brought opportunities knocking at his door. On graduating in 1940, he received the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the AIA Gold Medal and continued his studies at Harvard with leading architects such as Walter Gropius, garnering special attention and teaching assignments. Pei was not alone in receiving support and succor from Americans. In 1948, alerted to the plight of thousands of elite Chinese students and technical trainees rendered homeless in the United States by the tragic turn of events, Congress made legal and financial provisions to provide sanctuary that included payments for tuition and living costs, stays of deportation, and legal employment. In the mid-1950s the Department of State came to accept the permanence of China’s communist government and sought ways for the “stranded students” to gain permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the United States, a strategic move in light of the intensifying Cold War competition in the arms and space race.⁴ In 1954 China’s assistant foreign minister, Wang Bingnan (1908–1988), had issued an open invitation for overseas Chinese scientists and technicians to return and help rebuild their homeland, a move that prompted the State Department to make U.S. citizenship available to selected resident Chinese refugees of good standing and demonstrated usefulness, such as Pei and Wang, who were otherwise unable to regularize their status because of restrictive immigration laws.

They and others in their cohort of student-refugees, such as the Nobel Prize–winning physicists Li Zhengdao (T. D. Lee, b. 1926) and Yang Zhenning (C. N. Yang, b. 1922), are also early examples of the phenomenon later criticized in the 1960s as “brain drain,” the dynamic of educated elites departing their developing homelands to work in advanced economies, chiefly that of the United States, seeking better professional opportunities and working conditions, resources conducive to intellectual development, and political stability. In the face of Chinese with such outstanding capacities, and in the context of the mounting Cold War refugee crisis and intensifying competition for highly valued knowledge workers, changing the priorities and practice of U.S. immigration controls to privilege individual merit rather than race and national origin presented compelling imperatives.⁵ The product of these shifting considerations, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, facilitated the transformation of Asian Americans into model minority groups by prioritizing employment and educational criteria over race and national origin in potential immigrants. The Good Immigrants traces the longer history of such selective processes to the exemption for students articulated in the 1882 law restricting Chinese entry by race, a differentiation that laid the ideological and legal foundations for the role of Chinese students and refugees in enabling this dramatic turn in American immigration strategies, racial ideologies, and foreign relations, as immigration controls turned from emphasizing restriction to selection, with the aim of enhancing America’s international political and economic agendas.⁶

Considering immigration as both a restrictive and a selective process makes several major interventions. At a basic level it integrates students and intellectuals into standardized narratives of excluded, largely working-class Asian immigrants, thereby providing the connections between the dominant, early twentieth-century trope of Asians as a yellow peril to the late twentieth-century positioning of them as model minorities.⁷ Furthermore, it alleviates the scholarly neglect of the Cold War era by tracing how the international alliances and enmities of World War II and the Cold War improved acceptance for certain kinds of Asian immigrants and conditions for their permanent resettlement in ways that foreshadow the transformations more usually associated with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Although some monographs have addressed social and cultural history dimensions of race and foreign relations during the Cold War, none so far has addressed how international politics and fiscal considerations contributed to significant shifts in immigration laws, practices, and ideologies that in turn transformed the demographics, attributes, and trajectories of Asian American communities and U.S. immigration policies more broadly.⁸

The Good Immigrants contributes to discussions concerning the relationships among foreign policy, the naturalization of neoliberal principles, American immigration laws, and domestic ideologies of racial difference and inequality. Celebratory narratives emphasizing the successes of Asian “model minorities” have obscured how selection processes serve economic purposes by screening immigrants for educational attainment and economic potential, thereby eliding domestic limits on access to opportunities and systems enabling upward mobility and success for those without such advantages. Cold War politics laid the groundwork for transformations associated with the Civil Rights era in repositioning Asians, here particularly Chinese, as capable of, and even ideally suited to, participating in American democracy and capitalism. Attributed with exemplary economic, social, and political traits, educated and readily employable Chinese, and other Asians, gained preferential access to “front-gate” immigration as permanent residents eligible for citizenship, in the framing of Aristide Zolberg. In contrast, “back-door” immigrants such as refugees and unsanctioned migrant laborers face greater, sometimes insurmountable, barriers to naturalization.⁹ To these I would add the “side door” through which migrants such as students, paroled refugees, and now H-1B workers legally enter through less scrutinized temporary statuses yet routinely gain permanent status leading to citizenship. Between 1948 and 1965, such side doors enabled thousands of Chinese screened for educational and employment credentials to resettle in numbers far exceeding quota allocations as part of campaigns for general immigration reform. The H-1B visa side-door system, which primarily admits Asian workers in the high-tech sector, exemplifies twenty-first-century priorities in immigration selection that demonstrate how this metamorphosis has become naturalized, thereby rendering invisible how our systems of border controls continue to designate certain racial and ethnic groups for success while severely penalizing others.

Legacies of Exclusion

Asian Americans have featured most prominently in U.S. history in the Gold Rush period, as workers on the transcontinental railroad, and as the innocent victims of incarceration during World War II. After the shocking attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were categorically treated as “enemy aliens” who were liable to engage in sabotage or espionage if allowed to remain within one hundred miles of the West Coast. “Military necessity” justified removing about 120,000 Japanese Americans, a majority of whom were American-born citizens, from their homes to isolated, hastily erected, “relocation camps” in the interior. Although no evidence of espionage or treason ever came to light, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of such mass civil rights violations in cases such as Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944), decisions that were not vacated until the 1980s.¹⁰ That the executive branch enacted such mass incarceration against targets defined by race as bound to enemy national origins, a move sanctioned by the highest reaches of the judicial branch, illustrates the pernicious prejudice with which ethnic Asians have been viewed as essentially foreign, inassimilable, and therefore probable threats to national security if allowed to enter and remain in the United States.

The impossibility of Asians becoming U.S. citizens was established early in America’s history. As noted earlier, Asians had been excluded from citizenship when the Nationality Act of 1790 confined naturalization rights to “free white persons,” a category that then referred to white, male property-owners. The groups eligible for citizenship expanded with the inclusion of Mexicans through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and African Americans with the Civil War (1861–1865) but Asians not fully until 1952.¹¹ Asians thus existed for most of American history as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a legal category underpinning discriminatory legislation such as the alien land laws that prevailed in many western states during the first half of the twentieth century and used to ban their entry altogether with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924.¹² The move to restrict the admission and residence of racially incompatible Asians had begun much earlier with Chinese, who were the first to arrive in noticeable numbers during the Gold Rush. These numbers only grew as economic development in the western states enticed workers with abundant job opportunities in trade, agriculture, fishing, service industries, manufacturing, mining, and railroad construction. Although Chinese constituted but 0.2 percent of the national population during the 1870s, some 70 percent of this number lived and worked in California, which spearheaded efforts to impose limits on their entry as early as the 1850s. During the 1870s the most severe economic contractions yet experienced by the United States, anxieties regarding the economic and racial legacies of recently abolished slavery, the restoration of southern Democrats to Congress after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and California’s influence as a swing state in razor-close presidential elections¹³ propelled the anti-Chinese movement into a heated national campaign. Presidential candidates of both parties in 1876 and 1880 featured platforms that declared the racial incompatibility and inferiority of Chinese—as marked by their status as unfree, heathen, coolie laborers; the undermining of white, working-class family men through unfair economic competition; and the sheer numbers of Chinese poised to take over the West Coast if allowed to enter unchecked. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, seemed to grant scientific authority to such beliefs in intrinsic racial inequalities and incompatibilities and the imperative to segregate different “species” of men otherwise bound to erupt into evolutionary competition and violence.¹⁴ Such arguments justified the transformation of America from a nation founded by free immigrants to a “gatekeeping nation” that began shutting its doors by targeting Chinese.¹⁵

Congress first passed what came to be popularly known as the Chinese Exclusion Law in 1882 under the title “An Act to Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to Chinese” (47th Congress, Sess. I, Chap. 126; 22 Stat. 58). This law restricted Chinese entry by enacting the terms of the Angell Treaty of 1880 in which China had acknowledged America’s sovereign powers “to regulate, limit, or suspend” the entry of laborers with the stipulation that certain exempt classes, including students, merchants, merchant family members, teachers, tourists, and diplomats were “permitted to come and go of their own free will and accord.”¹⁶ In practice the United States interpreted the law much more severely than the Chinese government had expected, a source of tension for decades to come, so that all Chinese not of the exempt classes were presumed to be laborers and therefore barred from entry. The 1882 law also affirmed the ineligibility of Chinese for naturalized citizenship and set the United States onto the path of securing its borders—evolving from a nation of free immigration to one preoccupied by excluding unwanted migrants as expressed through restrictive laws with an expanding array of targets and a growing bureaucracy for enforcement. This institutionalization of American nativism ran against the determined dexterity of Chinese in continuing to pursue the greater economic opportunities in the United States by defying the thickening jungle of laws and enforcement strategies of surveillance, interrogation, confinement, and deportation by challenging their constitutionality in court, sneaking across land borders, assuming fraudulent statuses and identities, and multitudinous other manipulations and evasions of American laws and bureaucratic practices. These contestations laid the foundations for the legal, ideological, judicial, and institutional implementation of America’s border control regime in all its twenty-first-century contradictions, abuses, and ineffectiveness. From enforcement of Chinese exclusion developed legal and procedural strategies such as the sovereign and plenary powers of the U.S. government to enact immigration laws, the executive branch’s sole authority over border controls, an explicitly funded and designated immigration bureaucracy, standardized profiling, practices of documentation and authorization, early versions of green cards, deportation of illegally resident aliens, the limited rights of such aliens to access American courts, and the caste-like inability of unsanctioned immigrants to gain legal status.¹⁷

From Chinese, immigration restrictions extended to paupers, those with diseases, and illiterate people in 1891; to Japanese in 1908 through the diplomatically negotiated Gentlemen’s Agreement; to a legislated “barred zone” in 1917 reaching from Palestine to Southeast Asia; and capping overall numbers by imposing a quantitatively discriminatory quota ...