Over the past few weeks, we've touched on immigration in our discussions of the demographic and economic changes in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. I know I've responded to a fair amount of annotations by looking ahead to the material we'll cover in this module and in Module 12--namely, how racial ideology and eugenic "science" was linked to immigration policy.
In this module, we'll get into more details about immigration policies and the experiences of immigrants at this moment in time. This module contains a lot of legal and policy history, so take your time as you move through it.
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
What restrictions did US officials place on immigration and naturalization and how were these restrictions enforced on a day-to-day basis?
How did definitions of whiteness impact the ability of immigrants to secure American citizenship in the early twentieth century?
How did scientific definitions of race impact who was eligible to enter the United States and who was eligible to become a citizen?
Let's get started.
Part I: Asian Immigration and Exclusion Laws
In Part I, we’ll revisit the Chinese Exclusion Act and examine subsequent pieces of legislation, court cases, and diplomatic agreements which structured legal immigration from Asian nations to the United States in the early twentieth century. Additionally, we’ll explore illegal immigration from Asia and look further at anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States at this time.
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
We first examined the Chinese Exclusion Act in Module 3. As a reminder: This act suspended the arrival of Chinese laborers to the US. Exceptions were made for Chinese merchants, students, diplomats, and tourists. It was renewed in 1892, with more stipulations. All Chinese people were required to carry registration cards, like the one below. Chinese immigrants were the first people in the US to be required to carry passports with photographic identification. [1]
The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act stopped the immigration of Chinese laborers on paper. In reality, the situation was more complicated. Chinese immigrants worked around the exclusion laws in order to enter the US.
An estimated 17,300 Chinese immigrants entered the US through Canada and Mexico from 1882 to 1920. During this period, borders between Canada, the US, and Mexico were largely unguarded and porous. We’ll discuss the creation of the Border Patrol in Module 12. Chinese immigrants integrated themselves into existing trade and smuggling networks that thrived in border towns on both the Canadian and Mexican borders. [2]
Chinese immigrants would try to “pass” as members of other groups that regularly crossed the borders—Mexicans or Native Americans. During the early 1900s, Chinese immigrants were increasingly viewed as “illegal.” The agents who policed the border were mainly looking for illegal Chinese migrants. Newspapers in the Southwest reported on “Chinese wetbacks.” [3]
Besides illegal border crossing, other Chinese immigrants entered the US by claiming “derivative citizenship.” From 1910 to 1940, over 178,000 Chinese men and women were admitted into the country as new immigrants, returning residents, and US citizens. [4]
In 1906, a major earthquake and fire in San Francisco destroyed the San Francisco Hall of Records. Many Chinese immigrants took advantage of this, claiming that they had actually been born in the US and their parents had taken them back to China at a young age. Because all birth records had been destroyed, there was no way of verifying their claims.
The reason why they claimed access to citizenship dated back to an earlier Supreme Court case. In 1873, Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to parents who ran a mercantile in Chinatown. In 1895, Wong visited China, and upon his return, was denied admittance to the US by an immigration official who did not believe that he was an American citizen and asserted he was excludable under Chinese Exclusion Act.
Wong was placed under the custody of a US marshal and detained aboard the steamship he'd arrived on. He filed a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that he was being unlawfully confined on the ship and the the had a right to enter the US as a native-born citizen, under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark. The court affirmed that regardless of race, all persons born in the US were, in fact, native-born citizens of the US and entitled to all of the rights that citizenship offered. But, the Justices also affirmed the right of Congress to set racial restrictions on immigration.
Since all records had been destroyed, there was no way to authenticate the claims of those Chinese immigrants who claimed they were born in the US, like Wong Kim Ark. Others tried to falsely claim membership in one of the classes exempt from exclusion laws, such as merchants. Customs and immigration officials started to exclude Chinese people entering without documentation.
However, many immigrants turned to the courts to overturn those decisions. The courts were inclined to accept oral testimony. Between 1891 and 1905, the US District and Circuit Courts in San Francisco heard over 2,500 cases brought by Chinese petitioners, and ruled favorably in over 60% of them. The courts then created a paper trail establishing native-born citizenship where there had been none. [5]
Paper Sons and Paper Daughters
Posing as the child of an exempt-class immigrant was another way that Chinese immigrants entered the country. They became known as “paper sons” or “paper daughters.” A Chinese immigrant entering the country for the first time could claim more children than he actually had and then sell those “slots” to prospective migrants. Papers usually cost $100 per year of age of the applicant.
Immigration authorities would interrogate immigrants on their family history and details of their life in their villages in China. These interrogations were designed to uncover fraud in the testimonies. Immigrants came up with an elaborate system to create a record of facts that could be coached, memorized, and recited in order to convince officials that they were the person that their papers claimed them to be.
Questions from immigration officials became more and more elaborate and specific: How many steps lead up to your house? How many rows of houses in your village? If there were any discrepancies discovered, the immigration inspectors could conclude that the claimed relationship did not exist. While waiting to be interrogated, immigrants were detained at Angel Island in San Francisco. [6]
Poems like the one pictured above were carved on the walls at the Angel Island Detention Center by detained immigrants. The poems were discovered in the 1970s. Read more about the poems and see more images here.
Poll #1:
In your opinion, which of the following experiences of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century had the largest impact on the history of American immigration policy? Illegal border crossings? Or authorities' increased interrogation of "paper sons" and "paper daughters"?
Respond in the poll below, or answer the poll here.
Asiatic Exclusion League
After Chinese exclusion became law, Japanese laborers began to migrate to the United States, often via sugar plantations in Hawai’i, since Hawai’i was annexed in 1898.
Economic competition with white farmworkers soon erupted. Many whites resented the success of some Japanese farmers. Some were able to move up from positions of menial farm laborers to owning their own farms and employing others.
The Asiatic Exclusion League lobbied the government and published articles calling for the exclusion of Japanese immigrants. In addition, in San Francisco, Japanese students were ordered to attend segregated schools, which angered the Japanese government. The following quotes emphasize the perceived threat to white businesses from Japanese immigrants:
“The Jap spends some of his money, but he does not spend it at a white man’s store. There is absolutely no business for the white merchant and the 800 Japs in this town bring nothing at all into the avenue of trade.” - Asiatic Exclusion League, 1908
“A Mr. Kawakami, writing in the “Independent” some time since, stated that his countrymen owned and farmed some 98,000 acres of the best land in California.” - Asiatic Exclusion League, 1908 [7]
By the early 20th century, Japan had becoming an imperial world power. They had won the Russo-Japanese War and were in possession of Korea. Restricting immigration outright would have been bad for the geo-political relationship between the US and Japan, and presumably, would have hurt US access to Japanese markets.
Between 1907-1908, President Teddy Roosevelt negotiated an agreement with Japan known as the Gentleman’s Agreement.
Japan agreed to refrain from issuing travel documents to laborers coming to the US. Japanese wives and children were permitted to join their husbands and fathers within the US. Additionally, according to the agreement, Japanese children in San Francisco were allowed to attend integrated schools.
1917 Immigration Act
Federal immigration law changed in 1917. The 1917 Immigration Act included an official “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In conjunction with the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Gentleman’s Agreement, this effectively shut off all immigration from all of Asia, with the exception of the Philippines (then a territory of the US). The “Asiatic Barred Zone” exclusion applied to persons of Asian descent who were also born elsewhere. The law was passed primarily to stop the immigration from Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but especially India (you'll read more about this act in the JSTOR Daily article assigned for this module and in Module 12).
Part II: Eugenics, Race, and Immigration Restriction
In addition to racial discrimination, those who favored restricting immigration in the early twentieth century were also concerned about who might “damage” the social order in the US by adding to the problems of inequality and vice already present in the industrialized and urbanized nation.
In Part II, we’ll examine how restrictive immigration policies coincided with the rise of the eugenics movement in the United States. In the early twentieth century, eugenicists adopted scientific methods to “improve” the human population by “breeding out” certain undesirable characteristics.
The 1917 Immigration Act did not just restrict immigration from Asia. In addition, it specified a long list of “undesirables” in categories other than race.
The act restricted immigration of:
“…idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons affiliated with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists; anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States, or of all forms of law; prostitutes.”
The act targeted those with physical and mental disabilities (or perceived disabilities), those who would supposedly not be able to support themselves, and anarchists. In the context of radical labor organizing and World War I, this stipulation against people “opposed to organized government” is not surprising.
A note about some of the language in this act: Words like "feeble-minded" and "idiot" were coined in the early twentieth century by psychologists and psychiatrists. The definition of "feeble-minded" was someone who was deemed capable of making a living, but incapable of managing themselves or competing with others. An "idiot" was someone with an intellectual disability who was unable to protect themselves from physical dangers. You might also see the word "moron" used in the same circles, which was defined as someone with a "mental age" in adulthood of 7-10. Intellectual disabilities were understood to be "hereditary" traits in the early 20th century.
I want to acknowledge that today, we would consider these terms very offensive. I hope that the context below will help to make sense of why.
In addition to restricting people who fell into these specific categories, the act also instituted a literacy test. In order to monitor literacy, immigration inspectors were furnished with slips containing 30-40 words printed in some of the various languages and dialects of immigrants which they asked immigrants to read and explain.
For example, upon her arrival at Ellis Island in 1923, Ms. Friedman, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant from Poland, was asked to read and explain a sentence printed in Yiddish. Translated to English, the sentence read, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." Ms. Friedman could read the words, but was unable to explain what they meant. She was denied admission. [8]
Why a literacy test? The Immigration Restriction League argued in 1911 that, “Statistics show that, in general, those unable to read are undesirable for other reasons. The more ignorant the alien, the less likely he is to observe sanitary regulations or to live in a hygienic manner.”
Literacy was a convenient benchmark for whether or not an immigrant would be able to assimilate. It was also used as a mark of “inborn mental or intellectual health,” supposedly pointing to the immigrant’s intelligence in some way. One restrictionist group argued that immigrants who cannot read and write English “do not possess an intelligent understanding of the fundamental ideas of human liberty.” [9]
Eugenics in the Early Twentieth Century
Why were these so-called “undesirable” people excluded? Eugenicists believed that intelligence and morality were hereditary traits that could be passed down from parents to children. Lack of intelligence and morality could damage the social institutions holding the US together.
These viewpoints were backed by charts, graphs, and testing, and were viewed as legitimate, sound science.
From the Immigration Restriction League, 1910:
“In 1908, the foreign-born population of 13.6 per cent furnished 15.6 per cent of the criminals, 20.8 per cent of the paupers, and 29.5 per cent of the insane. Between 1904 and 1908, the aliens in these institutions increased 34%. The League feels that facts like these show that the present laws governing the admission of aliens are inadequate to protect our social and political standards and institutions from deterioration.”
Ellis Island immigration officials began administering IQ tests to immigrants arriving in 1912. Only those who arrived in steerage (the lower class) were subject to examination. IQ tests were also administered to men who were drafted into the army, and the lowest scores corresponded with those whose racial backgrounds were “least desirable” — Blacks scored lowest, Eastern and Southern Europeans only slightly higher.
Intelligence tests administered at Ellis Island supposedly found: “83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, 87 percent of the Russians were feebleminded. Sixty percent of the Jews were morons.” [10]
Early intelligence tests were also administered to draftees into World War I. Those results were compiled and analyzed in a 1923 report called A Study of American Intelligence by a psychology professor at Princeton named Carl Brigham. His writings heavily influenced the eugenics movement, and the study was used to justify the most restrictive immigration act in American history in 1924 (more on that below). He also went on to design the SAT test for the College Board.
In the table below from Brigham's study, you can see that the largest percentage of low grades on the intelligence tests belonged to Black draftees. The highest grades belonged to draftees from England.
Word Cloud #1:
Take a minute to look at the graph above. The lowest scores were those marked D-E, and the highest A-B. What do you notice/wonder about the "data" collected in this graph? Respond in the word cloud below, or access it here.
“Feeble-mindedness” was an excludable offense in previous immigration acts. However, prior to 1917, officials had three years from the date of entry to deport “feeble-minded” individuals. After 1917, officials had five years to do so.
This was because eugenicists argued that “feeble-mindedness” would not manifest itself until the realities of urban life had sunk in. One of the ways it could manifest was through “pauperism.” (In other words, being poor was evidence of "feeble-mindedness.")
Eugenicists also saw a direct link between mental deficiencies and anarchists and other radicals. This was because they often came from the same demographic groups of Southern and Eastern Europeans.
Poll #2:
Those who favored restricting immigration feared the negative influence of certain groups on the American population. In your opinion, which would have seemed more dangerous to restrictionists? Illiteracy? or anarchism or other radical political viewpoints?
Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Medical Examinations and Quarantines
In addition to IQ tests, immigrants were required to undergo medical examinations to determine whether or not they carried any infectious or contagious diseases.
Depending on which point of entry immigrants used, their experience could be different. For example, due to several cases of typhus found along the US-Mexico border, immigrants entering through El Paso were forced to strip naked, have their clothing chemically scoured (which took 30 minutes), have their scalp examined for lice and deloused if necessary, then receive a shower of soap, kerosene, and water.
They were then vaccinated against smallpox, and evaluated by an immigration official who determined if they met any of the categories that would prohibit their entry into the US. In 1916, this process resulted in the deaths of twenty Mexicans who were given a bath in kerosene. Someone lit a match too close to the area, in order to light a cigarette, and they caught fire and were burned alive. [11]
At Ellis Island, immigrants also underwent complete medical inspections. However, they were only required to strip if they were suspected of carrying disease. At El Paso, all immigrants were required to strip and shower, reflecting the assumption that Mexicans were more likely to carry disease. The forced nudity and shower practices continued long after the end of the typhus panic.
Sterilizations
Eugenicists were concerned with the degrees of certain types of “blood” in different immigrant groups. “Nordic” blood was found in those from Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. Those with the least amounts of “Nordic” blood were the Mediterraneans (Greeks, Italians, Turkish, Romanians, and Portuguese) or “Alpines” (Russians and Polish).
In 1920, Harry Laughlin, the author of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, was called to testify before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, and became an “official expert” on issues of eugenics. His “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” laid out different classes of people who should be compulsorily sterilized to prevent their inferior “stock” from reproducing.
Included in Laughlin’s list were:
feeble-minded
insane
criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward)
epileptic
inebriate
diseased
blind
deaf
dependent (including ne’er-do-wells, tramps, and paupers)
He claimed that these categories were based on “inferior family stocks” rather than nationalities. However, he also noted that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were overrepresented in schools for delinquents, and a large portion of the "insane" were Italians, Russians, and Austrian Jews. He also advocated for examinations for immigrants in their hometowns to ensure they would pass mental and moral tests before arriving and a national registry for aliens.
Laughlin’s law became the blueprint for Nazi Germany’s Hereditary Health Law, under which two million people were sterilized during the Third Reich.
His law was not implemented in the US. But, several states did have their own sterilization laws, including California, which enacted its law in 1909. The law remained on the books for 70 years. [12]
The 1917 amendment to California’s law specified that the act pertained to those “afflicted with mental disease which may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants, the various degrees of feeblemindedness, those suffering from perversion or marked departures from normal mentality or from disease of a syphilitic nature.” Sterilization was made a precondition for release from institutions like centers for juvenile delinquency or mental institutions.
By 1921, California accounted for 2,248 sterilizations, over 80 percent of all cases nationwide.
[Pause]
This history is especially hard to digest in this particular moment. Just in this past month, a whistleblower reported that sterilizations were being performed on immigrant women at a detention center in Georgia. Take a break if you need it.
Poll #3:
In your opinion, which policy associated with eugenic ideology made the most significant impact on immigrants’ lives? IQ Testing? Literacy tests? Medical examinations? or sterilizations? (You can select multiple options for this one. Explain your choices in the comments/annotations.) Access the poll below, or check it out here.
1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act)
The 1917 Immigration Act was supported by eugenicists and restrictionists, but they found that it did not do enough to restrict those with so-called “undesirable” traits from entering the United States, especially immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
In the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, a system of quotas was put into place that set numerical limits on how many people could enter from each country.
The law used the 1910 census as the base. Three percent of each country’s population that was in the US at the time of the 1910 census was allowed to enter in 1921. With this formulation, close to 60% of the approximately 360,000 immigrants allowed entry into the US each year were from Northern and Western Europe.
However, according to restrictionists, the 1921 act did not do enough to limit undesirable immigration. In the 1924 Immigration Act, a different quota system was introduced, which was held in place until the middle of the twentieth century.
Instead of using numbers from the 1910 census and a 3% quota, the 1924 act used the 1890 census, and a 2% quota.
Why the 1890 Census?
After 1890, there was a shift in European immigration—most came not from Northern and Western Europe, but from Southern and Eastern Europe.The 1890 census formulas reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the nation to 155,000 per year.
After 1927, visas would be allocated in proportion to the national origins of the entire population in 1920. The quotas based on national origins took into account not only the number of foreign-born people from each nation, but the national origins from the entire US population.
This gave 16% of the total visas to Southern and Eastern European immigrants, and 84% of the visas to immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. Additionally, the law excluded from immigration all persons “ineligible for citizenship,” a euphemism for immigrants from Asia.
No numerical restrictions were placed on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, most specifically Mexico. (We'll examine why in Module 12.)
This table demonstrates the disparate quotas of Northern/Western European nations and Southern and Southern/Eastern European nations. The results are striking if you compare the quotas for Great Britain and Italy or Russia.
The new immigration law differentiated Europeans according to nationality and ranked them in a hierarchy of desirability.
How would one even begin to quantify or evaluate the national origins of the entire US population? The Quota Board relied on Census and immigration records, which did not differentiate the parental nativity of native-born Americans until 1890. In addition, many of the boundaries of Europe changed after World War I, requiring the Quota Board to allocate quotas for countries that existed in 1920.
The law also excluded nonwhite people residing in the US in 1920 from its population calculations. It did not include an inspection of the national origins of “immigrants from the Western Hemisphere or their descendants, aliens ineligible for citizenship or their descendants, the descendants of slave immigrants, or the descendants of American aborigines.”
Certain American citizens’ “national origins” were not included in the quota calculations, because those citizens were nonwhite.
On a practical level, this meant that there would be larger quotas for European immigrants and smaller ones for other countries. For example, in 1920, African Americans constituted 9 percent of the populatio. If they had been counted and their “national origins” in Africa considered, 9 percent of the quota would have gone to west African nations, resulting in 13,500 fewer slots for Europe. [13]
Thus, the law divided Europe and divided Europe from the non-European world. The quota system distinguished “colored races” from “white” persons from “white” countries.
In a table of the US Population published in 1924, the column “country of birth” listed 53 countries, from Australia to Yugoslavia, and five “colored races” (black, mulatto, Chinese, Japanese, Indian). Thus, white Americans and immigrants from Europe had “national origins,” but “colored races” just had race.
How did the Quota Board quantify national origins of the immigrants who were deemed to have national origins?
Because there had been intermarriage between nationalities since the country was settled, the Board employed a methodology that was an analysis of the population in terms of numerical equivalents rather than actual people.
In this quote from Joseph Hill, one of the experts who developed this system, we can see how convoluted it became: “So when the law speaks of the number of inhabitants having a particular national origin, the inhabitant must be looked upon as a unit of measure rather than a distinct person. That is to say, if we have, for example, four people each of whom had three English grandparents and one German grandparent, we have the equivalent of three English inhabitants and one German inhabitant.” [14]
The Quota Board viewed nationalities as fixed, immutable entities that could be calculated using fractions. But does a person with one English grandparent and three German grandparents really think of themselves as three-quarters German and one-quarter English? Or do they become something new, impacted by the cultural interchange among family members and the communities in which they live? What do you all think? Add your thoughts to the comments/annotations.
Part III: Naturalization Laws (Part I)
In Part III, we’ll turn to the laws and policies which governed who was allowed to become an American citizen. We’ll pick up this discussion again in Module 12.
1790 Naturalization Act
The earliest naturalization law in the US was the 1790 Naturalization Act. The act specified that:
Any immigrant who sought to be naturalized in the US must have been:
a free white person
of good character
who had lived in the US for 2 years
and pledged loyalty to the Constitution
At the time the act was written, African Americans were not considered citizens. After the passage of the 14th Amendment, the Naturalization Act was revised to reflect the new racial specifications for citizenship in the US: one had to be white or Black in order to naturalize.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
Mexicans occupied an ambiguous status within naturalization law. This was the result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was signed after the Mexican American War. The treaty ceded a large portion of Northern Mexico to the US, making up what is now all or parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The law also guaranteed citizenship rights for all Mexicans living in the ceded territory, making them eligible for US citizenship.
However, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did not specify whether Mexicans should be classified as “white.” The citizenship provision was put to the test in the courts in 1897.
Ricardo Rodríguez, a Mexican man who had lived in Texas for more than a decade, sought to become naturalized. He took his case to court, and faced a lot of opposition from those who claimed only whites or Blacks could naturalize.
The judge sided with Rodríguez, and although he did not proclaim that Rodríguez was white, he did claim that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had conferred the rights of citizenship upon Mexicans, and therefore Rodríguez, and, by extension, all Mexicans, had the right to obtain US citizenship.
This case is particularly significant if we look at the ways in which race was linked to citizenship—and most particularly, the ways in which citizenship was linked to whiteness.
Were Mexicans considered white by immigration officials who were required to state an applicant’s “color” on their naturalization forms? Sometimes they were, because they could claim whiteness due to their Spanish heritage, other times they were viewed as more “Indian” than white, due to their indigenous heritage, which was neither Black nor white. (In the documents from the Timoteo Andrade case assigned for this module, you'll have the chance to see how this played out in naturalization courts.)
If a Mexican person looked more “Indian” than “white,” their application was more likely to be denied. Mexicans continued to occupy an ambiguous racial status, even within their own communities, throughout the twentieth century. We’ll pick up with more analysis of the Andrade case in Module 12.
Poll #4:
In your opinion, which of the following reveals more about American racial ideologies? Immigration laws (who can come into the country) or naturalization laws (who can become a citizen)? Answer below, or access the poll here.
Conclusion
Immigrants were restricted and policed based on assumptions that equated them with disease, criminality, and mental “unfitness.” These characterizations were often racialized.
Whiteness was required in order to access full citizenship in the United States.
In the early 20th century, scientific definitions of race and nation intersected with popular understandings of whiteness to limit who had access to American citizenship.
Citations
[1] Anna Pegler-Gordon, "Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of US Immigration Policy," American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 2006): 51-77.
[2] Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 151.
[3] Lee, At America's Gates, 172.
[4] Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 204-205.
[5] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 205.
[6] Judy Yung and Erika Lee, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.
[7] Quoted in Lon Kurashige and Alice Yang Murray, Major Problems in Asian American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003),110-111.
[8] Bill Ong Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 51.
[9] For more primary sources from the Immigration Restriction League and other groups, see this collection from Harvard University.
[10] Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 281.
[11] Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930,” Hispanic American Review 79 no. 1 (1999), 53.
[12] Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 82-110.
[13] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 33.
[14] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 33.
In your opinion, which of the following reveals more about American racial ideologies?
Even though it is hard to accomplish both in the USA, I think that the US makes it harder for people to get in the country. Once your in America, you can still live a normal life without a citizenship.
With many different views on race, and identity in this time period. The Flow of migrants and those seeking to become Americans are of a hot topic. With "research" to support the racial differences of humans, this pushed the need and support for eugenics and other means of keeping the country on the tracks to keep it's European white identity. This agenda pushing the need to filter out different migrants and even imposing life-changing actions upon them. Such as Sterilization, denial of visas, and other forms of keeping the undesirables out. While sterilization was at the highest point of the life-changing moment for migrants. As the grounds for such actions were often left to those who want to keep suc…
In your opinion, which of the following experiences of Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century had the largest impact on the history of American immigration policy? Illegal border crossings? Or authorities' increased interrogation of "paper sons" and "paper daughters"?
I believe the illegal border crossings had the biggest impact on American immigration policy the American government went even further to put in place many government organizations to strictly enforce border laws and policies.
In your opinion, which of the following reveals more about American racial ideologies? Immigration laws (who can come into the country) or naturalization laws (who can become a citizen)?
I believe Naturalization laws revealed more about the American racial ideologies. Naturalization law in 1790 was used to set rules granting the united states citizenship. Black people weren't able to get citizenship until after the 14th amendment was passed. Non-white people received a different treatment and they struggled to gain citizenship that was not easy to get.
In your opinion, which of the following reveals more about American racial ideologies?
I think the Naturalization laws (who can become a citizen) reveal more about American racial ideologies. Because they only accept any immigrant that is a free white person which reflected great discrimination.