“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
In the modern era the notion of the tired and the poor arriving upon our shores sends talking heads frothing at the mouth. Yet African Americans are still often pitted against various immigrant groups. People note the social stigma and discrimination felt by European immigrants at the turn of the last century. They point out the legal discrimination endured by Asians, over the course of many decades, and point to their current success and assimilation. They look to recent successes by immigrants from Nigeria, Somalia, and other parts of Africa, ignoring that immigration law has changed to the extent that for the most part people have to be able to afford to buy their way here, and they ask, “What’s up with African Americans?”
The 1798 Naturalization Act came as increasing numbers of non-English immigrants were arriving on America’s shores. This disturbed the Federalists, led by President Adams, as non-English ethnic groups had been the core supporters of the Democratic-Republicans in the 1796 election. According to this oft cited quote from an unnamed Federalist Congressman there was no need to “invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all the world, to come here with a basic view to distract our tranquility.”
The Federalists decided to use the law to slow the flow of immigrants in series of acts that: extended from five years to fourteen years the term of residency required to become a naturalized citizen; authorized the president to deport foreigners deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” during peacetime; and allowed the president to arrest, imprison, and deport any foreigner subject to an enemy nation.
Though the Naturalization Act was quickly seen as the terrible law it was anti-immigration thought tinged with racist xenophobia continued and continues to plague American politics. Though the ire against the Irish continues to be exaggerated in white-supremacist’s lore Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Arabs, and so on faced varying degrees of discrimination, hostility, assertions of inferiority, exploitation, and even violence in the US over the next couple of centuries.
The racist pseudo-science of the 19th and early 20th centuries divided Europeans into various races by nationality or perceived nationality, and often created a hierarchy among those groups. Irish, Italians, European Jews, Poles, etc. were considered white but different. Outsiders. Though they were white they would suffer prejudice and bigotry for generation before becoming more socially accepted part of the dominant ruling caste in the United States in the mid twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Americans of African, Asian, and Mexican* descent faced various degrees of legal and government enforced exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage, and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
Where there were large populations of Chinese people there was strong anti-Chinese sentiment from whites. To the extent that from 1871 to 1885, Chinese-American children were denied access to any public schools in San Francisco at all in direct conflict with the 14th Amendment. On a national level this bigotry presented itself in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act formed a ten-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. Labor was so loosely defined it was essentially a ban on immigration from China.
If a Chinese person already here left during this time, they had to gain re-entry certificates. During this era courts, state and federal, barred from the Chinese the ability to gain naturalized citizenship. In the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. The Exclusion was extended in the Geary Act in 1892 which added even more restrictions to Chinese people living in the US. It was made permanent in 1902. Then came the Immigration act of 1924 which excluded immigration from Asia.**
For the opening of American hearts and minds to our Asian population we have to thank the Nazis. It was the 1940s and the nation was gearing up for global war. Again. In comparison to the Nazi’s purist and genocidal racial politics American leaders started to worry about how our own policies of virulent racial discrimination would be perceived. This was made even more awkward by the fact that China was our ally in the war. This prompted Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion.
In the 1950s an obsession over the delinquency of our youth exploded into our national consciousness. Taking note leaders in various Chinatowns began to peddle tales about the obedience of their children. Wrapped in Confucian ethics and Chinese traditional family values Chinese children, they claimed, always listened to their elders and never got into trouble. Meanwhile, Japanese Americans, unlike African Americans, were perceived to have quietly recovered from the internment concentration camps. Scattering across the country doggedly and, more importantly, quietly assimilating. Japanese Americans weren’t marching in the streets; they weren’t protesting. A bad thing “happened to them”, they moved on, and they were doing okay.
Over time anti-Asian prejudice would soften leading to a series of acts from 1943 to 1990 that would gradually ease restrictions on Chinese and other Asian immigrants to and in the US. It helps that Asian Americans were then, as they are still, a comparatively small part of the population. Most Americans would never physically encounter anyone of Asian descent in life and rarely in media. This made Asian American’s upward mobility feel less threatening. Certainly less so than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans. Basically, America’s model minority started to excel in response to the nation being less racist against them.
This easing of immigration restrictions on Asians happened at the same time as a general tightening ln immigration overall. First generation Asian Americans who are the parents of people my age and younger are more likely to have immigrated to the US for, or with, higher education. The result, according to a 2018 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the U.S. Census Bureau, is that Asian Americans have the highest rates of upward mobility of racial groups in the country.
The thing is, this is only true for the children of those first-generation immigrants. This can be obscured by the fact that though Asian Americans*** are the country’s fastest growing ethnic group, the growth is through immigration. Asian-Americans are more highly educated than any other racial group in the U.S. but the least likely among all races to become higher level managers and executives. It seems that, even from the good ones, America will only tolerate so much and a certain type of success.
Asian Americans and other immigrant minorities whom America has legislated against still have an advantage that African Americans did not. When we read about the path of immigrants to the US (and other countries) we see the same story over and over again. In groups and as individuals, foreigners arrive on the shores of a new country that will one day be home with the entire foundation of who they were and are intact. The first thing they do is seek out others like themselves. People who speak their language and know their culture. People who can serve as guides and bridges to the new world in which they find themselves.
This is how we get Little Italys, Korea Towns, Little Odessas, and Chinatowns. Even expat communities follow this pattern. Some people will stay in these isolated enclaves for generations. There are still Irish sections of Boston, Polish sections of Milwaukee. Cajun Country. Others will stay just long enough to get acclimated, to conquer the language and familiarize themselves with cultural expectations, before moving on. For most it’s somewhere in-between.
African Americans, however, are not immigrants.****
Sources
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lum-family-desegregation_n_581a4320e4b0c43e6c1db6f5
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/29/the-real-reason-americans-stopped-spitting-on-asian-americans-and-started-praising-them/?utm_term=.ea0d1253b6cd
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-Chinese-Americans-won-right-to-attend-SF-11107543.php
https://www.theroot.com/when-the-irish-weren-t-white-1793358754
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/?utm_term=.67175ea231b1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/29/the-real-reason-americans-stopped-spitting-on-asian-americans-and-started-praising-them/?utm_term=.7264c2b1cc6a
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-Chinese-Americans-won-right-to-attend-SF-11107543.php?psid=cmq75
https://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-the-model-minority-ends-with-second-generation-asian-americans/90337
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States#Mexican_Americans
https://www.usbr.gov/history/borhist.html
*From 1850 to 1920 and again from 1940-40 the federal government did not distinguish between whites and Mexican American people on the Census. This did not protect them from discrimination and illustrates the fluidity of the concept of race as an American social construct.
**Except for the Japanese whose government had voluntarily limited Japanese immigration to the United State. And Filipinos as, as a US colony, citizens of the Philippines were U.S. nationals. (China was not mentioned in the 1924 Act as they were already denied immigration visas under the Chinese Exclusion Act.)
***Asian Americans have been here centuries but theirs continues to be a story deeply colored by immigration.
The phrase Asian American was created in 1968, shortly after the signing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which changed immigration quotas for non-European countries. It was self-chosen to recognize the commonalities of the Asian American experience and for the purpose of expressing the idea Asian Americans had/have to work together to fight for social justice and equality. Today, with an even more diverse Asian American population, recognizing each ethnicity on its own terms is as important as acknowledging commonalities, in the struggle for advancement. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/after-50-years-asian-american-advocates-say-term-more-essential-n875601
**** Native Americans are also not immigrants. Indigenous people have been the victims of attempts and successful genocide by the American government that has attempted to deny their humanity. The government has actively attempted to destroy their languages and cultures. A glimpse of that savagery can be read about here. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shocking-savagery-of-americas-early-history-22739301/