Asian exclusion connotes a uniformity of immigration regulation that conflates the piecemeal process by which limits on Asian migration actually emerged in white settler societies and some Central and South American nations.Footnote 1 As early as 1862, the US Congress began by banning the importation of “coolies,” then prostitutes in 1875, before severely limiting legal entries by Chinese, defined by race to a few exempt classes in 1882. Japanese restriction resulted from a 1908 negotiated agreement whereby the Japanese government limited emigration by laborers. In 1917, Congress banned immigration from a “barred zone” that covered most of Middle, South, and Southeast Asia but not the Philippines, a US colony, or Japan and Korea. Not until the 1924 Immigration Act were all Asians, except for Filipinos, uniformly excluded as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Even after Filipinos came under restriction with the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, they received an annual entry quota of fifty.
The dismantling of “Asian exclusion” was similarly fragmented and influenced by foreign relations considerations, as described in Jane H. Hong's broadly researched and insightful monograph, Opening the Gates to Asia. Chinese, Indian, Filipino, and Japanese American community advocates campaigned largely separately for immigration and citizenship rights, and sometimes at cross-purposes with representatives from their homelands who prioritized gaining international status by receiving immigration rights matching those of the United States’ most favored European allies. Asian American activists, in contrast, sought immigration reforms to substantively improve their lives in the United States—particularly immigration rights for women to unite or form families—while international lobbyists were content with symbolic gestures that barely changed conditions. Moreover, repeal bills had to be framed narrowly to pass through a Congress that remained committed to sharply limiting Asian immigration through the 1960s. When the Indian revolutionary and scholar Taraknath Das, with whom Hong begins her narrative, urged an end to all Asian exclusion laws, he seriously undermined the campaign for the repeal of only Chinese exclusion.
As the United States’ chief World War II ally in Asia, China was positioned to be the first to leverage the repeal of Chinese exclusion but accepted terms that dismayed community activists such as Albert Lee, who had long campaigned for immigration of wives of noncitizen Chinese American men. The 1943 repeal brought a presidential acknowledgment of exclusion as a “historic mistake” and naturalization rights, but it allotted a token fifty entries per year, determined through the existing “national origins quota” system. This compromise set the pattern for future repeals in which the US government removed the stigma of outright exclusion that advanced its diplomatic agendas while still blocking Asian immigration almost entirely.
Independence campaigns characterized US negotiations with Indian and Filipino representatives. For the former, the United States first sought Britain's sanction to deal with its soon-to-be former colony, then laid the foundations for future diplomatic relations through conciliatory gestures anticipating India's eventual autonomy. For the latter, however, the United States already wielded significant influence and reneged on promises that Filipino soldiers would receive US military veterans status while conferring narrow immigration and citizenship rights. These two repeal movements operated separately yet became conjoined in the 1946 Luce-Celler Act. These are the two most transnational of Hong's chapters in drawing on archives of the Indian and Filipino independence movements.
Japanese Americans were the last to receive repeal, but they wielded the greatest influence in Washington, D.C., of any of these ethnic communities through the efforts of lobbyist Mike Masaoka. Masaoka spearheaded the rapid reintegration of Japanese Americans through the martial patriotism of the 442nd Infantry Regiment and civic compliance with incarceration. These displays of hyperpatriotism, combined with Masaoka's political access, gained Japanese Americans citizenship rights and an immigration quota of 185 in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Masaoka acknowledged the token nature of these measures while prioritizing the symbolic acceptance that they conveyed for the former “enemy aliens.” Not until 1965 would overt racial and national preferences in immigration laws end.
Hong presents the many complexities impeding enactment of immigration policy, including attempts and agendas that failed and the abortive character of laws that passed. Her comparative lens reveals the divided character of Asian American activism before the civil rights era and the considerable influence of long-distance nationalism over ethnic communities that have been for most of their histories predominantly foreign born. Because immigration laws are enacted by Congress in Washington, D.C., access to national leaders is necessary to influence policy. Local communities are handicapped while representatives of foreign governments have guaranteed access through the US Department of State. Not until Asian Americans held congressional or cabinet seats, positions more reliably attained after Hawaii gained statehood in 1959, could they more directly influence immigration laws to advance their own agendas.
A key flaw of this book is its lack of a chapter about Korean migration, even though the comparison is intriguing, with independence claimed in 1945 by activists such as Syngman Rhee, who spent decades campaigning in the United States, followed by the crisis of the Korean War. This monograph will nonetheless speak to scholars concerned with migration, international relations, and immigration policy studies.
