Notes

20th Century Immigration Policy
•Immigration Act of 1917: added a literacy test and denied entry to people coming from the “Asiatic Barred Zone” (India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Polynesia, parts of Russia)
•Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924: exclusion of all Asians except Filipinos, and most of SE Europe
•In 1934, Filipinos also excluded and along with Mexicans, were targeted for deportation
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Brief Timeline

•Chinese Exclusion Act extended in 1904

•Asiatic Barred Zone created in 1917
•Senate passed a bill to exclude all members of the “African or black race,” but defeated in House after intensive lobbying by NAACP.

•National Origin Act passed in 1924, barring immigration to all who were not in western or northern Europe

•Chinese Exclusion Act repealed in 1943

•Racial restrictions on immigration repealed in 1965

Citizenship



How do you become a citizen of the
United States?

What is the purpose of citizenship?
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Citizenship and Race
1790 Naturalization limited to “white persons”

(1) Racial prerequisite to citizenship ended

In the interim, immigrants needed to argue their racial identity to become citizens of the U.S. : between 1878-1952, 52“prerequisite cases” reported
How did courts justify
decisions about race?

Courts justified decisions by:

1.referring to common or popular beliefs about race

2.referring to “scientific evidence”


First Pre-requisite Case
In re: Ah Yup (1878), federal district court in CA
denied citizenship to Chinese applicant because:
1.“the words “white person” in this country, at least, have undoubtedly acquired a well settled meaning in common popular speech… as well as in common parlance.”



First Pre-requisite Case
In re: Ah Yup (1878), federal district court in CA
denied citizenship to Chinese applicant because:

2. “In speaking of the various classifications of races… the common classification is that of Blumenbach, who makes five. 1. The Caucasian, or white race, to which belong the greater part of European nations and those of Western Asia; 2. The Mongolian, or yellow race, occupying Tartary, China, Japan, etc.; The Ethiopian or Negro (black) race, occupying all of Africa, except the north; 4. The American, or red race, containing the Indians of North and South America; and 5. The Malay, or Brown race, occupying the islands of the Indian Archipelago…”

First Pre-requisite Case
In re: Ah Yup (1878), federal district court in CA
denied citizenship to Chinese applicant because:

2. “ [N]o one includes the white, or Caucasian, with the Mongolian or yellow race.”
First Pre-requisite Case
In Ah Yup’s case, courts used both rationales:
1. According to common sense or popular ideas about race, Ah Yup was not white.

2. According to science, Ah Yup was Mongolian yellow so he could not be Caucasian/white.



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First Pre-requisite Case
•This case is unusual for relying on both types of rationales; later cases usually rely on one or the other.

•Both rationales rely on an assumption that there are natural physical differences that divide humans into different races.

Ozawa vs. United States (1922)
“In name I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.”
•Japanese American, born in Japan but lived in the U.S. for 20 years


•Said that he was of Japanese descent but that his skin color made him “white”


Ozawa vs. United States (1922)
•What did the Supreme Court say?

•There is a lot of variation in every race
•Skin color does not correlate with racial identity
•Science defined Ozawa as a Mongolian  he could not be white

Court decided:
•White person == Caucasian race
•Japanese people could not be white because they were not Caucasian

PETITION DENIED


United States v. Thind (1923)
•Thind was born in India and “high caste Hindu, of full Indian blood”
•Served in the U.S. Army
•He argued that he was racially Caucasian because he was descended from Aryans who had conquered the indigenous people of India
•Science agreed that Asian Indians were Caucasian
•Thind argued that since he is Caucasian, he is white.
[in Ozawa, White person == Caucasian race]


United States v. Thind (1923)
•What did the Supreme Court say?

•OK, he is Caucasian, willing to admit a technical link between Europeans and South Asians
•Science can not be trusted to define Whiteness
•“the understanding of the common man” became the rationale

PETITION DENIED

Denaturalization campaign, at least 65 people between 1923 and 1927
Pre-requisite Case Logics
Why did these cases depend on convincing the courts that the petitioner was White (when post-1870, Black people were also eligible for citizenship?)

AND, given that many groups, including the Chinese, were characterized as black?
Pre-requisite Case Logics
1.1870 act referred to people of “African nativity or African descent” not “black” people
2.Legal definition of black was more established
3.Social stigma and racial discrimination led whiteness to be seen as more valuable


Challenging Citizenship


What is the difference between legal citizenship and social citizenship?

The Limits of Citizenship

Japanese internment

Japanese Internment

•1922, Ozawa citizenship case (he lost)

•1924, Japanese barred from entering the US



Japanese Internment


Anxiety about Japanese immigrant communities had already been building: WHY?


Japanese Internment
1941: 127,000 Japanese Americans in US
•Over 112,000 lived in Oregon, Washington, California (93,000 in CA)

12/7/1941: Pearl Harbor (US naval base in Hawai’i) is surprise attacked by the Japanese  U.S. entering World War II






Japanese Internment & the Munson Report
Munson Report, issued by State Department
(Fall 1941)

How loyal is the Japanese community to the U.S.?
-a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty

Media

Time Magazine, December 1941
“How to tell your friends from the Japs.”

Life Magazine, December 1941
“How to tell the Japs from the Chinese.”

What are the differences here? Are they racial or cultural, or both?
Japanese Internment & the Munson Report
1942: Evacuation order: 110,000 people put into concentration camps; about 2/3 were U.S. citizens

Internment continued from
12/19/1942– 11/2/1945

Last camp closed in 1946
Connections to Today

Japanese communities came out to support South Asian, Arab, Muslim communities during post-9/11 detentions and deportations

Turban Primer

A turn: Myth of the Model Minority
•Post-WW II, difficult to keep national policies based on theories of white supremacy (after fighting Nazi Germany)

•1965, removal of racial restrictions on immigration



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Social and Political Context
July 1964
Civil Rights Act is signed into law.

March 1965
Daniel P. Moynihan (Secretary of Labor) issued a “Report on the Black Family”– states that black poverty comes from a “tangle of pathology”

June 1965
President Johnson extends civil rights into the economic sphere stating that black poverty is due to white racism and the government is responsible to change this

August 11-17, 1965 Watts Rebellion, LA

A turn: Myth of the Model Minority
1966
New York Times story about the success of the Japanese community
*same year Stokely Carmichael made the phrase “Black Power” popular



Cultural traits vs. biological traits

Cultural traits lead to success but only as continued outsiders


Model Minority Waves
•1970s, post-Petersen article
•Cultural difference/foreignness & unchangeable (despite Jap-Am community being almost exclusively U.S. born)
•Internment experience used to show how the community was able to come back from hardship

•1980s, conservatism (roll back of affirmative action, civil rights, etc.)
•Who needs aid from the government?