Asian Americans and American Immigration and Naturalization Policy

(By Yvonne Walter)

The question is no longer, “How do people become Americans?”

but rather “How has America become its people?”

Since its beginnings, the United States has been heralded as a nation of immigrants, a safe haven for those who have to leave their homes, be the reasons hunger, political or religious persecution, and the desire for land or the possibility of finding work. The self-perception as a country of immigration has been carved in stone at the foot of the symbol of the immigrant nation, the Statue of Liberty.

The welcoming of new immigrants, however, has been a selective process and it is no coincidence that the Statue of Liberty, erected in New York, has been welcoming European immigrants to the American shores. In the West, the detention center at Angel Island, in view of the former maximum security prison at Alcatrez, was used for decades to interrogate Chinese immigrants before they were allowed to enter the United States, and in the Southwest, a barbed wire fence was built to control Mexican and South American immigration in the last decades of the twentieth century. Two hundred years earlier, Africans were involuntary brought to Southern shores to endure a life of hardship and forced labor for themselves and their descendents under slavery

The immigration policy of Asian in the United States is the result of race-conscious immigration and naturalization policies practiced by the government of the U.S. Although the concept of race was never officially ascribed to policies and laws regarding the immigration of Asians, the repeated patterns of exclusion, denial of citizenship and unequal laws applied successively to immigrants from different Asian Countries have made it obvious that their racial difference from the white mainstream was the reason for this legislation. Immigration, in the case of Asians, has been racialized.

For my analysis of race-biased legislation against Asian Americans and their consequences I will concentrate on two areas of legislation of the American legal system regarding Asian immigrants: naturalization laws and immigration policy. Naturalization is the process that leads to the acquisition of citizenship. This process starts upon the petition of the immigrant after a certain waiting period. The requirements and tests that lead to a successful completion of the naturalization process are also mandated by law but are not the object of analysis here.

I will base my argument on Chinese immigrants, who were the first Asians to come to the United States in large numbers, as an example for Asian immigration. Starting in 1850, Chinese immigration lasted unregulated for only 30 years and never made up more than 5% of the entire immigration for any given year during this period. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the members of immigrants were proportionally small compared to the negative public attention these immigrants received, particularly at the West Coast, nor to the harsh response of lawmakers. No other immigrant group had to endure a similar number of exclusion laws and consistent denial of citizenship. The reasons for this discriminatory treatment of immigrants from the Pacific rim are grounded in racist beliefs of white European supremacy and the stereotypes of Asians as homogeneous masses of people who look different and would create a danger to American social and labor life, the so-called “yellow peril” image.

The first immigration of Asians dates back to the 18^th century but images and stereotypes of people from this continent are even older and were well established in the United States when the first wave of Asian immigrants reached American shores. These images were deeply ingrained in the European and, later, American imagination through military or other unequal encounters with Asians ranging from the conquests of the Greeks in India, the mythic and sensual tales of Marco Polo’s China, and the “yellow invasion” of Europe by the Mongolians in the 14^th century to the colonizing attempts of Great Britain and France in East and Southeast Asia and the forced opening of Japanese harbors by the American Commodore Perry in 1853. As said argues in Orientalism, in all these encounters Asians were perceived as weaker, darker, more sensual, homogeneous, in a word, racially different from Europeans. The construction of Asians as the racially Other, inferior to the majority of Americans who were and are white has had an impact on the policies regarding Asian immigration. Therefore, orientalism, the construction of Asians as culturally and racially different, from the white, Anglo-Saxon norm has additional component in the United States: Asians and Asian Americans are perceived as foreigners, forever aliens who are unable to completely assimilate into the American mainstream.

The first laws concerning immigration in the United States that were passed reflect the racist thinking of those days. During the colonial period, immigration was not regulated. On the contrary, certain incentives* were used to attract new settlers to people a virgin land. Land, work, and immediate citizenship were offered to interested Western Europeans and at the same time, black slaves were brought to the Eastern shores. In 1790, America had become exceedingly diverse in its ethnic and racial background. Congress took control of immigration and naturalization proceedings by passing “An uniform standard for Naturalization” which allowed only white men to become American citizens, although this law was changed several times, the racist exclusion of non-white persons remained in place until African Americans acquired citizenship after the Civil War and the naturalization laws were changed to include persons of African nativity and descent in 1870. Chinese Americans, however, and subsequently all immigrants from the Asian continent were still considered aliens, ineligible for citizenship.