Immigration in U.S. History (2 volume set)

Immigration in U.S. History MAGILL’S C H O I C E Immigration in U.S. History Volume 1 Accent discrimination — Indent...

Author: Carl L. Bankston (Editor) | Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo (Editor)

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Immigration in U.S. History

MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Immigration in U.S. History Volume 1 Accent discrimination — Indentured servitude Edited by

Carl L. Bankston III Tulane University

Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo Tulane University Project Editor

R. Kent Rasmussen

Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover image: The NARA photograph on the outside cover of these volumes shows an unidentified group of European immigrants at Ellis Island in 1908. The original black-and-white photograph was tinted by R. Kent Rasmussen. Every effort was made to use authentic colors, but the actual colors of hair and clothes may have differed. Frontispiece: Italian immigrants approaching Ellis Island on a ferry in 1905. (Library of Congress)

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Some essays originally appeared in (in descending order of numbers): Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (1999), Encyclopedia of Family Life (1999), Great Events from History: North American Series (1997), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Great Events: 1900-2001 (2002), Women’s Issues (1997), Magill’s Legal Guide (1999), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2001), Identities and Issues in Literature (1997), Criminal Justice (2006), American Justice (1996), The Bill of Rights (2002), and Survey of Social Science: Sociology Series (1994). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Immigration in U.S. history / edited by Carl L. Bankston, III, Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-266-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-266-8 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-267-7 (v. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-267-6 (v. 1 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. I. Bankston, Carl L. (Carl Leon), 1952 - II. Hidalgo, Danielle Antoinette. III. Title. IV. Series. JV6450.I565 2006 304.8′7303—dc22 2005033560 First Printing

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Contents Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Accent discrimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 African immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Alien and Sedition Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Alien land laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Amerasians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 American Jewish Committee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Anglo-conformity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Arab American intergroup relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Arab American stereotypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Arab immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Asian American education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Asian American Legal Defense Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Asian American literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Asian American stereotypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Asian American women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Asian Indian immigrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Assimilation theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Au pairs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Bilingual education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Bilingual Education Act of 1968. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Border Patrol, U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Bracero program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 British as dominant group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Burlingame Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Cable Act . . . . . . California gold rush Celtic Irish. . . . . . Censuses, U.S. . . . . Chicano movement . Chinatowns . . . . .

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113 115 119 120 125 130


Chinese American Citizens Alliance . . . . . . . Chinese detentions in New York . . . . . . . . . Chinese Exclusion Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chinese exclusion cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chinese immigrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush. Chinese immigrants and family customs . . . . Chinese Six Companies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clotilde slave ship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coast Guard, U.S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coolies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cuban immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cuban immigrants and African Americans . . . Cuban refugee policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural pluralism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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133 138 140 144 146 151 155 160 164 168 172 174 176 180 184 188

Demographics of immigration . Deportation . . . . . . . . . . . Discrimination . . . . . . . . . Dominican immigrants . . . . .

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190 195 201 207

Eastern European Jewish immigrants . . . . English-only and official English movements Ethnic enclaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Euro-Americans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . European immigrant literature . . . . . . . European immigrants, 1790-1892 . . . . . . European immigrants, 1892-1943 . . . . . .

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212 214 219 222 224 235 240

Family businesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . Farmworkers’ union . . . . . . . . . . . Federal riot of 1799 . . . . . . . . . . . . Filipino immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . Filipino immigrants and family customs. Florida illegal-immigrant suit . . . . . .

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246 251 257 258 264 267

Garment industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Generational acculturation. . . . . . . . . . Gentlemen’s Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s German immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . González rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Green cards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gypsy immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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270 273 276 281 284 290 293 295

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Contents

Haitian boat people. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haitian immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hansen effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants . . Head money cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy. History of U.S. immigration . . . . . . . . . . Hmong immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Homeland Security Department . . . . . . . . Hull-House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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297 300 303 304 309 310 316 324 327 332

Illegal aliens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigrant advantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Act of 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Act of 1921 . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Act of 1924 . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Act of 1943 . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Act of 1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 . . . Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 . . . Immigration and Naturalization Service . . . Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha Immigration “crisis”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration law. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 Indentured servitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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334 338 339 343 349 353 356 358 362 366 371 372 376 383 387

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Complete List of Contents Volume 1 Celtic Irish, 119 Censuses, U.S., 120 Chicano movement, 125 Chinatowns, 130 Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133 Chinese detentions in New York, 138 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Chinese immigrants, 146 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Chinese immigrants and family customs, 155 Chinese Six Companies, 160 Citizenship, 164 Clotilde slave ship, 168 Coast Guard, U.S., 172 Coolies, 174 Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Cultural pluralism, 188

Accent discrimination, 1 African immigrants, 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Alien and Sedition Acts, 15 Alien land laws, 19 Amerasians, 22 American Jewish Committee, 26 Anglo-conformity, 27 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Arab American intergroup relations, 33 Arab American stereotypes, 38 Arab immigrants, 41 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Asian American education, 52 Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 56 Asian American literature, 57 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Asian American women, 63 Asian Indian immigrants, 67 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76 Assimilation theories, 79 Au pairs, 84

Demographics of immigration, 190 Deportation, 195 Discrimination, 201 Dominican immigrants, 207

Bilingual education, 85 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 British as dominant group, 107 Burlingame Treaty, 109

Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 English-only and official English movements, 214 Ethnic enclaves, 219 Euro-Americans, 222

Cable Act, 113 California gold rush, 115 ix


Head money cases, 309 Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy, 310 History of U.S. immigration, 316 Hmong immigrants, 324 Homeland Security Department, 327 Hull-House, 332

European immigrant literature, 224 European immigrants, 1790-1892, 235 European immigrants, 1892-1943, 240 Family businesses, 246 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Federal riot of 1799, 257 Filipino immigrants, 258 Filipino immigrants and family customs, 264 Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267

Illegal aliens, 334 Immigrant advantage, 338 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Immigration Act of 1990, 356 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371 Immigration “crisis,” 372 Immigration law, 376 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 383 Indentured servitude, 387

Garment industry, 270 Generational acculturation, 273 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s, 281 German immigrants, 284 González rescue, 290 Green cards, 293 Gypsy immigrants, 295 Haitian boat people, 297 Haitian immigrants, 300 Hansen effect, 303 Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants, 304

Volume 2 Jamaican immigrants, 415 Jamestown colony, 419 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese immigrants, 431 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438

Indigenous superordination, 391 Iranian immigrants, 392 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish immigrants and African Americans, 400 Irish immigrants and discrimination, 402 Irish stereotypes, 403 Israeli immigrants, 405 Italian immigrants, 409 x

Complete List of Contents

Operation Wetback, 572 Ozawa v. United States, 576

Jewish immigrants, 443 Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Justice and immigration, 458

Page law, 579 Palmer raids, 584 Picture brides, 589 Plyler v. Doe, 590 Polish immigrants, 594 Proposition 187, 598 Proposition 227, 600 Push and pull factors, 604

Know-Nothing Party, 465 Korean immigrants, 466 Korean immigrants and African Americans, 469 Korean immigrants and family customs, 473 Ku Klux Klan, 477

Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606 Refugee fatigue, 612 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 614 Refugees and racial/ethnic relations, 618 Russian immigrants, 622

Latinos, 481 Latinos and employment, 488 Latinos and family customs, 494 Lau v. Nichols, 499 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503 Literature, 507 Little Havana, 512 Little Italies, 514 Little Tokyos, 516

Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626 Santería, 629 Scandinavian immigrants, 630 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 635 Sephardic Jews, 636 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 Settlement house movement, 643 Sikh immigrants, 647 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653

Machine politics, 518 Mail-order brides, 521 Mariel boatlift, 524 Melting pot, 529 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Middle Eastern immigrant families, 538 Migrant superordination, 542 Migration, 542 Model minorities, 549 Mongrelization, 554 Muslims, 555

Taiwanese immigrants, 655 Thai garment worker enslavement, 657 Tibetan immigrants, 659 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 661 Twice migrants, 664 Undocumented workers, 665 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 667

Nativism, 558 Naturalization, 562 Naturalization Act of 1790, 569 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571

Vietnamese immigrants, 670 Visas, 676 xi


War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 West Indian immigrants, 689 White ethnics, 693 Women immigrants, 694 Wong Kim Ark case, 699

Appendices Bibliography, 715 Time Line of U.S. Immigration History, 723 Indexes Category Index, 737 Index of Court Cases, 747 Index of Laws and Treaties, 749 Index of Personages, 753 Subject Index, 759

Xenophobia, 702 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 Zadvydas v. Davis, 711

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Publisher’s Note In 1958, while campaigning in Congress for passage of amendments to the Refugee Relief Act, Senator John F. Kennedy published a little book titled A Nation of Immigrants. His immediate purpose was to call attention to the enormous contributions made to the United States by immigrants and thereby rally public support behind liberalization of the nation’s immigration laws— a task in which he succeeded. At the same time, his book helped to fix in the public mind the fact that the United States was, and always had been, a nation of immigrants. During Kennedy’s run for the presidency in 1960, much was made of his Irish ancestry and the fact that the great-grandson of humble Irish immigrants could be elected president of the United States. In 2003, more than a generation later, the public reacted with equal wonderment when Arnold Schwarzenegger—a first-generation Austrian immigrant—was elected governor of California. Schwarzenegger was not the first immigrant to be elected governor of an American state, but his elevation to that office seemed all the more remarkable because California, the nation’s largest state by population, would rank as the world’s seventh-largest economy, were it an independent nation. Indeed, its economy would dwarf that of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian homeland. Of the 281,421,056 residents of the nation counted by the U.S. Census in 2000, nearly 99 percent traced their ancestry to immigrants who arrived in North America within the previous four centuries. Moreover, even Native Americans—who make up the remainder—can trace their ancestry to immigrants who came thousands of years earlier. The United States is, indeed, a nation of immigrants. Of the many themes that dominate U.S. history, immigration is one of the most constant and most pervasive. Since the first European and African immigrants began arriving in North America during the early seventeenth century, immigrants have steadily poured into what is now the United States. During the early twenty-first century, that flow has continued unabated—the major difference being that most immigrants now come from Latin America—especially Mexico and Central America—and Asia. Meanwhile, immigration remains as controversial a public issue as it has ever been. Because the United States is a nation of immigrants, it is obvious that most of the contributions to the building of the country have been made by immigrants and their descendants. Nevertheless, immigration has long been a subject of debate—and now more than ever, as Americans are increasingly feeling their security threatened by the constant flow of foreigners into the country. Subject Matter The two volumes of Immigration in U.S. History examine the many issues surrounding immigration—from the earliest settlement of xiii


British North America in the seventeenth century through the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of the twenty-first century. The set’s 193 essays explore immigration from a wide variety of perspectives, such as border control and law enforcement (20+ articles), court cases (9), demographics (47), discrimination (29), economic and labor issues (25), events (32), family issues (22), government and politics (13), illegal immigration (17), language and education (15), laws and treaties (25), literature (3), nativism and racism (24), refugees (22), religion (21), sociological theories (14), and stereotypes (10). (Note that some essays are counted under more than one category here and below.) Immigration in U.S. History places special emphasis on the many ethnic communities that have provided American immigrants. For example, readers will find 17 articles treating African Americans; 56 articles about Asian immigrants, including articles specifically on Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Pacific islander, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan, and Vietnamese immigrants; 25 articles on Latino and West Indian immigrants, including articles specifically on Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, and Mexicans; 10 articles on Middle Eastern immigrants, including articles specifically on Arabs, Iranians, and Israelis; 37 articles on European immigrants, including articles on German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, and Scandinavian immigrants. Most of these articles are accompanied by graphs summarizing immigration statistics into the twenty-first century. Immigration in U.S. History answers such questions as • When did members of individual ethnic groups come to the United States? • From what parts of the world have most immigrants come? • Where have different immigrant groups settled in the United States? • What contributions have immigrants made to the United States? • How long has illegal immigration been a problem? • How have U.S. immigration laws changed over time? • How has U.S. immigration policy been influenced by events in other parts of the world? • Which groups have been victims of discriminatory immigration laws? • What is a “model minority”? • What are “push and pull” factors? • What are “mail-order brides” and “picture brides”? • What is a green card? • What do immigration lawyers do? • How did Chinatowns get started? • Why have there been conflicts among different immigrant groups? xiv

Publisher’s Note

• What has been the Supreme Court’s role in American immigration law? • Which immigrants were the first victims of segregation laws? • What are the origins of ethnic stereotypes? • How have immigrants organized to protect their rights and interests? • What role have immigrants played in U.S. labor history? • Did all African immigrants to North America come as slaves? • What has been the impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. immigration policy and border control? • What was the “yellow peril”? • What was the bracero program? • What was American nativism? • What was the role of immigrants in the political “machines” of big cities? • Who are the “boat people”? • How have bilingual education programs affected immigrants? • What is “generational acculturation”? • Is there a specifically immigrant literature? • What state and federal agencies are responsible for enforcing immigration laws? Using This Set Each of the alphabetically arranged articles in Immigration in U.S. History opens with the type of ready-reference top matter for which Salem Press’s reference works are well known. The first entry following most titles is a brief passage that defines or identifies the article’s subject. Articles on such subjects as events, court cases, organizations, and laws have additional entries that provide dates and places, as relevant. The next item in every article is a brief italicized statement summarizing its subject’s significance. Readers can thus see the most essential information about every topic at a glance. Boldface subheads help guide readers through longer articles, and all articles are followed by up-to-date Further Reading notes. Additional bibliographical help can be found in the general bibliography at the end of volume 2. Immigration provides a rich subject for illustration, and these volumes contain more than 150 photographs. Many of the photographs offer poignant images of immigrants arriving in the New World. Many articles are also illustrated with statistical tables and graphs that provide immigration figures up to the year 2003. Some graphs include boxed notes on historical events designed to help readers understand why immigration rates have risen and fallen. The Time Line at the end of volume 2 should also help readers to put events in a broader historical perspective. Immigration in U.S. History offers several features to help readers find the information they need. The first and most obvious feature is the alphabetical xv


arrangement of the essays, whose titles are worded to make finding topics as straightforward as possible. Readers may either go directly to the articles they seek or look for them in the complete list of contents that can found at the front of each volume. Readers who cannot find what they need in the article titles will find substantial additional help in the set’s detailed indexes of court cases, laws and treaties, personages, and general subjects at the end of volume 2. Volume 2 also has a Categorized List of Topics that should help readers who are uncertain under what headings they should look. Finally, every article is followed by a list of cross-references to other articles on closely related subjects. Readers are encouraged to follow the paths that these crossreferences provide. Acknowledgments All but two of the 193 articles in this set are taken from 13 different Salem Publications: Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (121 articles), Encyclopedia of Family Life (13), Great Events from History: North American Series (12), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (8) Great Events: 19002001 (8), Women’s Issues (6), Magill’s Legal Guide (6), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (4), Identities and Issues in Literature (4), Criminal Justice (3), American Justice (3), The Bill of Rights (2), and Survey of Social Science: Sociology Series (1). These articles and their Further Reading notes have all been updated, as necessary. Two articles are entirely new (“African immigrants” and “September 11 terrorist attacks”). The editors of Salem Press would again like to thank the scholars who contributed the essays for making this reference work possible. We also especially wish to thank the project’s editors, Professor Carl L. Bankston III and Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo of Tulane University’s Department of Sociology.

xvi

Contributors Nobuko Adachi Illinois State University

Arthur Blaser Chapman University

McCrea Adams Independent Scholar

Steve D. Boilard Independent Scholar

Carl Allsup University of Wisconsin at Platteville

Aubrey W. Bonnett State University of New York, Old Westbury

James A. Baer Northern Virginia Community College

Denise Paquette Boots University of South Florida at Tampa

Barbara Bair Independent Scholar

Anthony D. Branch Golden Gate University


Michael Broadway Independent Scholar

Rosann Bar Caldwell College

Mary Louise Buley-Meissner University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee

Graciela Bardallo-Vivero Berkeley College

Michael H. Burchett Limestone College

Alvin K. Benson Utah Valley State College

William H. Burnside Lenoir-Rhyne College

Milton Berman University of Rochester

Edmund J. Campion University of Tennessee

Tej K. Bhatia Syracuse University

Brenda E. Reinertsen Caranicas Fort Berthold Community College

Warren M. Billings Louisiana State University at New Orleans

José A. Carmona Daytona Beach Community College Peter E. Carr Caribbean Historical and Genealogical Journal

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College xvii


Jack Carter University of New Orleans

Christopher H. Efird Independent Scholar

Balance Chow San Jose State University

Sharon Elise California State University at San Marcos

John G. Clark University of Kansas

James V. Fenelon John Carroll University

Lawrence I. Clark Independent Scholar

Celestino Fernández University of Arizona

Richard H. Collin Louisiana State University at New Orleans

John W. Fiero University of Southwestern Louisiana

Stephen Cresswell West Virginia Wesleyan College

R. M. Frumkin Center for Democratic Values

Norma Crews Independent Scholar

C. George Fry Lutheran College of Health Professions

Edward R. Crowther Adams State College

Gloria Fulton Humboldt State University

Rochelle L. Dalla University of Nebraska

John C. Gardner Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge

Richard V. Damms Mississippi State University

Louis Gesualdi St. John’s University

Mary Yu Danico California State Polytechnic University at Pomona

K. Fred Gillum Colby College

Judith Boyce DeMark Northern Michigan University

Robert F. Gorman Southwest Texas State University

Ashley W. Doane, Jr. University of Hartford

Lewis L. Gould University of Texas at Austin

Joyce Duncan East Tennessee State University

Christopher Guillebeau University of Memphis

xviii

Contributors

Michael Haas University of Hawaii at Manoa

Robert Jacobs Central Washington University

Peter J. Haas Vanderbilt University

Duncan R. Jamieson Ashland University

Marian Wynne Haber Texas Wesleyan University

Kristine Kleptach Jamieson Ashland University

Irwin Halfond McKendree College

Kathleen Odell Korgen William Patterson University

Susan E. Hamilton Independent Scholar

Melvin Kulbicki York College of Pennsylvania

Sheldon Hanft Appalachina State University

M. Bahati Kuumba Buffalo State College

Keith Harper Mississippi College

P. R. Lannert Independent Scholar

Peter B. Heller Manhattan College

Douglas Edward LaPrade University of Texas—Pan American

Arthur W. Helweg Western Michigan University

Gregory A. Levitt University of New Orleans

Diane Andrews Henningfeld Adrian College

Thomas Tandy Lewis Anoka-Ramsey Community College

Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo Tulane University

Paul Madden Hardin-Simmons University

Keith Orlando Hilton University of the Pacific

Paul D. Mageli Independent Scholar

Ronald W. Howard Mississippi College

Martin J. Manning United States Department of State

John Quinn Imholte University of Minnesota at Morris

Cecilia G. Manrique University of Wisconsin at La Crosse

W. Turrentine Jackson University of California at Davis

Carl Henry Marcoux University of California at Riverside xix


R. Kent Rasmussen Independent Scholar

Chogollah Maroufi California State University at Los Angeles

William L. Reinshagen Independent Scholar

Rubén O. Martinez University of Colorado

Martha E. Rhynes Independent Scholar

Hisako Matsuo Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Silke Roth University of Connecticut

Daniel J. Meissner University of Wisconsin at Madison

Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr. Towson University

Randall L. Milstein Lansing Community College

Irene Struthers Rush Independent Scholar

Christina J. Moose Independent Scholar

Wendy Sacket Independent Scholar

Amy J. Orr Linfield College

Michael A. Scaperlanda University of Oklahoma

Maria A. Pacino Azusa Pacific University

Helmut J. Schmeller Fort Hays State University

Gowri Parameswaran Southwest Missouri State University

Kathleen Schongar The May School

Pedro R. Payne University of California at Riverside

Stephen Schwartz Buffalo State College Larry Schweikart University of Dayton

David Peck California State University at Long Beach Louis G. Perez Independent Scholar

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

Wayne J. Pitts University of Memphis

Donald C. Simmons, Jr. Mississippi Humanities Council

Marjorie J. Podolsky Penn State University at Erie

Celia Stall-Meadows Northeastern State University xx

Contributors

James Stanlaw Illinois State University

Thomas J. Edward Walker Pennsylvania College of Technology

Francis C. Staskon Independent Scholar

Annita Marie Ward Salem-Teikyo University

Susan A. Stussy Neosho County Community College

Major L. Wilson Memphis State University

Robert D. Talbott University of Northern Iowa

Richard L. Wilson University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Nancy Conn Terjesen Kent State University

Gene Redding Wynne, Jr. Tri-County Technical College

Leslie V. Tischauser Prairie State College

George Yancey University of Wisconsin at Whitewater

Frank Towers Clarion University

Philip Q. Yang California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo

Paul B. Trescott Southern Illinois University

Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes Indiana University

Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr. Spelman College

Clifton K. Yearley State University of New York, Buffalo

Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Eastern Michigan University

Paul J. Zbiek King’s College

Theodore M. Vestal Oklahoma State University

xxi



MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Immigration in U.S. History Volume 2 Indigenous superordination — Zadvydas v. Davis Appendices Indexes Edited by


Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo Tulane University Project Editor

R. Kent Rasmussen Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Cover image: The NARA photograph on the outside cover of these volumes shows an unidentified group of European immigrants at Ellis Island in 1908. The original black-and-white photograph was tinted by R. Kent Rasmussen. Every effort was made to use authentic colors, but the actual colors of hair and clothes may have differed. Frontispiece: From 1892 through 1954, Ellis Island served as the primary reception center for immigrants reaching the United States from across the Atlantic Ocean. The ornate reception hall is now maintained as a public museum that visitors may tour on their way to the nearby Statue of Liberty. (Library of Congress)

Copyright © 2006, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997) Some essays originally appeared in (in descending order of numbers): Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (1999), Encyclopedia of Family Life (1999), Great Events from History: North American Series (1997), Great Events from History II: Human Rights (1992), Great Events: 1900-2001 (2002), Women’s Issues (1997), Magill’s Legal Guide (1999), Encyclopedia of the U.S. Supreme Court (2001), Identities and Issues in Literature (1997), Criminal Justice (2006), American Justice (1996), The Bill of Rights (2002), and Survey of Social Science: Sociology Series (1994). New material has been added. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Immigration in U.S. history / edited by Carl L. Bankston, III, Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-266-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-266-8 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58765-268-4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58765-268-4 (v. 2 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. United States—Emigration and immigration—History. I. Bankston, Carl L. (Carl Leon), 1952 - II. Hidalgo, Danielle Antoinette. III. Title. IV. Series. JV6450.I565 2006 304.8′7303—dc22 2005033560 First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii Indigenous superordination . . . . . . . Iranian immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish immigrants and African Americans Irish immigrants and discrimination . . Irish stereotypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Israeli immigrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . Italian immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . .

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391 392 395 400 402 403 405 409

Jamaican immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . Jamestown colony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Japanese American Citizens League . . . . Japanese American internment . . . . . . Japanese immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . Japanese Peruvians . . . . . . . . . . . . . Japanese segregation in California schools Jewish immigrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jewish settlement of New York . . . . . . . Jews and Arab Americans . . . . . . . . . . Justice and immigration . . . . . . . . . .

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415 419 424 427 431 437 438 443 449 454 458

Know-Nothing Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . Korean immigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Korean immigrants and African Americans . Korean immigrants and family customs . . . Ku Klux Klan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Latinos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Latinos and employment . . . . . . . . . . Latinos and family customs. . . . . . . . . Lau v. Nichols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . League of United Latin American Citizens Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Havana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Italies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Little Tokyos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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481 488 494 499 503 507 512 514 516

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Machine politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518 Mail-order brides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 xxix


Mariel boatlift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melting pot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund Mexican deportations during the Depression. . . . . . Middle Eastern immigrant families . . . . . . . . . . . Migrant superordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Model minorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mongrelization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Muslims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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524 529 531 533 538 542 542 549 554 555

Nativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naturalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naturalization Act of 1790 . . . . . . . . . . . Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service

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Operation Wetback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572 Ozawa v. United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 576 Page law . . . . . . . Palmer raids . . . . . Picture brides . . . . Plyler v. Doe. . . . . . Polish immigrants. . Proposition 187 . . . Proposition 227 . . . Push and pull factors

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579 584 589 590 594 598 600 604

Racial and ethnic demographic trends Refugee fatigue . . . . . . . . . . . . . Refugee Relief Act of 1953 . . . . . . . Refugees and racial/ethnic relations . Russian immigrants . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sacco and Vanzetti trial . . . . Santería . . . . . . . . . . . . Scandinavian immigrants. . . Scotch-Irish immigrants . . . Sephardic Jews . . . . . . . . September 11 terrorist attacks Settlement house movement . Sikh immigrants. . . . . . . . Southeast Asian immigrants . Soviet Jewish immigrants . . .

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Contents

Taiwanese immigrants . . . . . . . Thai garment worker enslavement. Tibetan immigrants . . . . . . . . . Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire . Twice migrants . . . . . . . . . . .

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Undocumented workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 665 Universal Negro Improvement Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667 Vietnamese immigrants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 670 Visas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 War brides . . . . . . . . War Brides Act . . . . . West Indian immigrants White ethnics . . . . . . Women immigrants . . . Wong Kim Ark case . . .

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Xenophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702 “Yellow peril” campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707 Zadvydas v. Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Appendices Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 715 Time Line of U.S. Immigration History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723 Indexes Category Index . . . . . . . Index of Court Cases . . . . Index of Laws and Treaties . Index of Personages . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . .

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Complete List of Contents Volume 1 Accent discrimination, 1 African immigrants, 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Alien and Sedition Acts, 15 Alien land laws, 19 Amerasians, 22 American Jewish Committee, 26 Anglo-conformity, 27 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Arab American intergroup relations, 33 Arab American stereotypes, 38 Arab immigrants, 41 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Asian American education, 52 Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 56 Asian American literature, 57 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Asian American women, 63 Asian Indian immigrants, 67 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76 Assimilation theories, 79 Au pairs, 84 Bilingual education, 85 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 British as dominant group, 107 Burlingame Treaty, 109 Cable Act, 113 California gold rush, 115

Celtic Irish, 119 Censuses, U.S., 120 Chicano movement, 125 Chinatowns, 130 Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133 Chinese detentions in New York, 138 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Chinese immigrants, 146 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Chinese immigrants and family customs, 155 Chinese Six Companies, 160 Citizenship, 164 Clotilde slave ship, 168 Coast Guard, U.S., 172 Coolies, 174 Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Cultural pluralism, 188 Demographics of immigration, 190 Deportation, 195 Discrimination, 201 Dominican immigrants, 207 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 English-only and official English movements, 214 Ethnic enclaves, 219 Euro-Americans, 222 xxxiii


European immigrant literature, 224 European immigrants, 1790-1892, 235 European immigrants, 1892-1943, 240 Family businesses, 246 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Federal riot of 1799, 257 Filipino immigrants, 258 Filipino immigrants and family customs, 264 Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267 Garment industry, 270 Generational acculturation, 273 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s, 281 German immigrants, 284 González rescue, 290 Green cards, 293 Gypsy immigrants, 295 Haitian boat people, 297 Haitian immigrants, 300 Hansen effect, 303 Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants, 304

Head money cases, 309 Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy, 310 History of U.S. immigration, 316 Hmong immigrants, 324 Homeland Security Department, 327 Hull-House, 332 Illegal aliens, 334 Immigrant advantage, 338 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Immigration Act of 1990, 356 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371 Immigration “crisis,” 372 Immigration law, 376 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 383 Indentured servitude, 387

Volume 2 Indigenous superordination, 391 Iranian immigrants, 392 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish immigrants and African Americans, 400 Irish immigrants and discrimination, 402 Irish stereotypes, 403 Israeli immigrants, 405 Italian immigrants, 409

Jamaican immigrants, 415 Jamestown colony, 419 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese immigrants, 431 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 xxxiv

Complete List of Contents

Operation Wetback, 572 Ozawa v. United States, 576

Jewish immigrants, 443 Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Justice and immigration, 458

Page law, 579 Palmer raids, 584 Picture brides, 589 Plyler v. Doe, 590 Polish immigrants, 594 Proposition 187, 598 Proposition 227, 600 Push and pull factors, 604

Know-Nothing Party, 465 Korean immigrants, 466 Korean immigrants and African Americans, 469 Korean immigrants and family customs, 473 Ku Klux Klan, 477

Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606 Refugee fatigue, 612 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 614 Refugees and racial/ethnic relations, 618 Russian immigrants, 622

Latinos, 481 Latinos and employment, 488 Latinos and family customs, 494 Lau v. Nichols, 499 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503 Literature, 507 Little Havana, 512 Little Italies, 514 Little Tokyos, 516

Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626 Santería, 629 Scandinavian immigrants, 630 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 635 Sephardic Jews, 636 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 Settlement house movement, 643 Sikh immigrants, 647 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653

Machine politics, 518 Mail-order brides, 521 Mariel boatlift, 524 Melting pot, 529 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Middle Eastern immigrant families, 538 Migrant superordination, 542 Migration, 542 Model minorities, 549 Mongrelization, 554 Muslims, 555

Taiwanese immigrants, 655 Thai garment worker enslavement, 657 Tibetan immigrants, 659 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 661 Twice migrants, 664 Undocumented workers, 665 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 667

Nativism, 558 Naturalization, 562 Naturalization Act of 1790, 569 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571

Vietnamese immigrants, 670 Visas, 676 xxxv


War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 West Indian immigrants, 689 White ethnics, 693 Women immigrants, 694 Wong Kim Ark case, 699 Xenophobia, 702 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707

Appendices Bibliography, 715 Time Line of U.S. Immigration History, 723 Indexes Category Index, 737 Index of Court Cases, 747 Index of Laws and Treaties, 749 Index of Personages, 753 Subject Index, 759

Zadvydas v. Davis, 711

xxxvi


Accent discrimination

Accent discrimination Definition: Employment discrimination based on the manner in which employees or prospective employees speak English Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Education; Language; Sociological theories Significance: Under U.S. law, employers can discriminate against applicants for employment whom they believe to have accents that might impede their normal business activities. Immigrants, whose primary language is not English, therefore, may have to shed their accents to qualify for jobs that involve speaking with the general public. A standard American English accent is commonly heard in schools and spoken on radio and television, but there are regional variations, especially in Hawaii, New England, and the southern states. Immigrants who learn English tend to speak the new language in accordance with the pronunciation and intonation patterns of their native tongues, which means that those unfamiliar with their accents may not understand them completely and may ask these immigrants to repeat what they are saying. At issue, therefore, is whether an employer can reject someone with an unfamiliar accent without discriminating against that person on the basis of ethnic group membership. The Nature of Accents Vocal muscles develop so early in life that it is difficult for an adult native speaker of one language to learn a second language without carrying forward the accents of the primary language. In the United States, composed as it is of immigrants and their descendants, English is spoken with many accents. Some schools teach adult immigrants to speak without a noticeable accent, but these classes are expensive and not always accessible to newcomers, whose time is usually preoccupied with material adjustments to life in a new country. The United States does not have an official standard of speech, although the informal standard is the American English accent spoken by newscasters at the national level. Accent is the result of speech patterns that differ from region to region or country to country. For example, Cuban speakers of Spanish speak more quickly than do Mexican speakers of Spanish. Variations also exist within countries. Because one characteristic of an ethnic group in the United States is the manner in which its members pronounce English, ethnic group membership is often identified by or associated with accent. It is this connection that makes accent a key issue of racial and ethnic relations. Antidiscrimination Legislation and Litigation In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress banned discrimination on the basis of a person’s color, eth1

Accent discrimination

nicity, or race in education, employment, government services, public accommodations, public facilities, and voting. The law regarding employment discrimination prohibits not only obvious discrimination, such as signs that say “Blacks Need Not Apply,” but also the use of neutral-sounding job qualifications that systematically place minorities or women at a disadvantage unless these qualifications are vital for the performance of the job. To refuse to hire a member of a minority group on the pretext that the person’s accent is too strong, therefore, might violate the law unless the lack of a noticeable accent can be demonstrated to be necessary for the performance of the job. In Carino v. University of Oklahoma Board of Regents (1984), the federal appeals court ruled that Donaciano Carino, a dental laboratory supervisor, could not be terminated from his position because of his Filipino accent as his job did not involve communication with the general public. In 1982, Manuel Fragante, a Filipino with a noticeable accent, applied for the position of applications intake clerk in the motor vehicle licensing division of the city and county of Honolulu. The hiring officer turned him down, claiming that Fragante’s accent would make communication difficult; Fragante’s lawyer argued that his client’s accent was fully understandable and therefore was a mere pretext for a Japanese supervisor to discriminate against a Filipino. In Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu (1987), the federal district court in Honolulu upheld the right of the employer to refuse to hire someone with a “heavy accent,” ruling that Fragante’s accent was not an immutable part of his Filipino ethnic group membership. The court of appeals upheld the ruling in 1989, and the Supreme Court refused to review the case in 1990. In 1985-1986, James Kahakua and George Kitazaki applied for the position of weather-service broadcaster. Although they were native speakers of English, they spoke “pidgin” English, a decided accent local to Hawaii. The position involved broadcasting marine weather reports to ships at sea, and most of the vessels in the area were based in California, so the National Weather Service felt justified in refusing to hire the two men because their accents might prevent a clear transmission of information. Kahakua and Kitazaki sued the weather service for discrimination but lost. Impact on Public Policy In the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress did not explicitly forbid discrimination on the basis of accent. For the present, clarity in speech is recognized as a bona fide occupational qualification for jobs involving considerable oral communication with the general public. The standards for determining whether an accent is unclear tend to be subjective, so the issue may be resolved by use of the Test of Spoken English, a standardized test administered nationwide by the Educational Testing Service. Michael Haas Further Reading Laughlin McDonald’s Rights of Racial Minorities: The Basic ACLU Guide to Racial Minority Rights (2d ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois 2

African immigrants

University Press, 1993) is one of the publications sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union that describes the laws governing employment discrimination. A more focused study is Rosini Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an analysis of the legal issues, see Mari J. Matsuda’s “Voices of America: Accent, Antidiscrimination Law, and a Jurisprudence for the Last Reconstruction,” in Yale Law Journal (100, 1991), and Beatrice Bich-Dao Nguyen’s “Accent Discrimination and the Test of Spoken English: A Call for an Objective Assessment of the Comprehensibility of Nonnative Speakers,” in California Law Review (81, October, 1993). Other sources that touch on the subject of accent discrimination include Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities, and Schools: Intersections and Tensions (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2005), by Jim Anderson and others; Charmian Kenner’s Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems (Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004); Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), edited by Terry A. Osborn; and Terrence G. Wiley’s Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States (2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005). See also Anglo-conformity; Bilingual education; Discrimination; Englishonly and official English movements; Proposition 227.

African immigrants Identification: Voluntary and involuntary immigrants to North America from Africa Immigration issues: African Americans; Civil rights and liberties; Slavery; West Indian immigrants Significance: Africans began immigrating voluntarily to the United States in significant numbers only in the late twentieth century; however, involuntary African immigration to North America began during the early period of European settlement. Through slavery, members of this group made up one of the largest sources of migration to North America throughout early American history. Movement from Africa to the territory of the United States decreased sharply after the importation of slaves became illegal in the United States in 1808 and virtually ceased with the Civil War and the complete abolition of slavery during the 1860’s. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration from Europe increased greatly. As a result, African Americans became a smaller 3

African immigrants

proportion of the American population than they had been in earlier years. Nevertheless, throughout U.S. history, African Americans have constituted one of the nation’s largest population groups. Involuntary African Immigration The first people of African descent came to America with Spanish explorers during the early sixteenth century. During the late fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established trading posts in West Africa and had begun buying slaves from African leaders and selling these people to other Europeans. Spanish demand for workers in the New World in activities such as sugarcane cultivation and mining led to the development of the Atlantic slave trade during the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Over the course of the sixteenth century, many European nations became active in West Africa and began to take part in the slave trade. The Dutch became the main carriers of slaves to North America in the earliest part of this period. In early 1619, a Dutch ship brought the first African slaves to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The settlers exchanged goods and provisions for these slaves. The earliest Africans in Virginia were not clearly distinguished in status and treatment from European indentured servants, and the Africans were often able to earn their freedom. According to slavery scholar

Imaginative depiction of the interior of a slave ship painted by Bernarda Bryson Shahn during the 1930’s. (Library of Congress)

4

African immigrants

Ira Berlin, free people made up nearly 30 percent of the black population of Virginia’s Northampton County by 1668. Dutch involvement in the slave trade meant that many people of African ancestry arrived in the Dutch colony of New Netherland from about the 1620’s onward. As in Virginia, however, the condition of these first slaves was generally better than that of slaves who arrived during later historical periods. These early slaves were allowed to own property, marry, and establish families. When the English took possession of New Netherland in 1664, the colony’s capital, New Amsterdam—renamed New York—contained about 300 slaves. These people constituted roughly one-fifth of New Amsterdam’s entire population. In the southern part of North America, African slaves began arriving in significant numbers somewhat later than in the northern part. The French Compagnie des Indes brought people of African ancestry to the port city of New Orleans, at the base of the Mississippi River, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As in New Amsterdam, slaves could generally own property and engage in economic activities of their own. The free black population also grew steadily, and the free black population of Louisiana became the largest in North America, continuing to exist even until the American Civil War. Expansion of the Slave Trade The eighteenth century saw great increases in the numbers of African origin people arriving in North America. These changes were results of the growth of the plantation economy. The growth of the plantation system began in the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland at the end of the seventeenth century, fueled by the cash crop tobacco. Big planters found African slaves a better source of labor for working this crop than indentured servants or hired hands. About 2,000 African slaves arrived in Virginia during the 1680’s, and more than 4,000 during the 1690’s. During the first decade of the eighteenth century, this figure increased again to almost 8,000 slaves newly imported to Virginia. North American slaves came from all parts of West Africa, speaking different languages, so that it became difficult for them to maintain a common language or cultural identity. Achieving freedom became an increasingly rare occurrence. Treatment of slaves became harsher, and the lines separating black people, who were almost all slaves, from white people, who were all legally free, became sharper and deeper. From Virginia and Maryland the plantation system spread to the ricegrowing regions of South Carolina and then Georgia during the first part of the eighteenth century. Before 1710, Africans had come to these regions at a rate of 300 or under per year. During the 1720’s, however, this rate went up to about 2,000 new African arrivals each year, and the numbers continued to increase dramatically throughout the rest of the century. Louisiana maintained the largest free population of people of African descent throughout the period of slavery. However, the cultivation of sugarcane 5

African immigrants

promoted the expansion of the plantation system in the southwestern part of the state. After the vast expanse of territories along the Mississippi River was joined to the United States in 1803, plantation-style slavery and the demand for slaves increased throughout many southern lands. With the growing importation of slaves during the eighteenth century, American shippers began to enter the trade along with the Europeans. Rhode Island became the most important center for shipping slaves, even though that colony never had a significant population of slave workers of its own. By the time the United States had adopted its Constitution in 1789, ships from Rhode Island had carried more than 100,000 Africans to the Americas. End of the Legal Slave Trade The Constitution of the United States implicitly recognized slavery—although it did not mention the word—but it also made provisions for the end of the slave trade. Although many of the founders of the U.S. were slave owners, the leaders of the new nation generally believed that the practice would gradually come to an end. Thus, the Constitution abolished the importation of slaves after the year 1808. In 1807, the British government had adopted a prohibition on the slave trade throughout its empire. Thus, laws in the early nineteenth century placed a brake on involuntary migration from Africa to North America. Despite the ending of the slave trade, slavery itself did not begin to wind down after the foundation of the United States. A boom in the cotton trade, promoted by the invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, made plantation slavery increasingly profitable. This not only encouraged slave owners to keep and trade in slaves born in the United States, it also contributed to the smuggling of slaves into the nation. It is difficult to estimate how many Africans were brought to the United States illegally between the prohibition of the importation of slaves in 1808 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. By some calculations, as many as 50,000 Africans may have entered the United States during that period. Official U.S. Census records show only 551 U.S. residents who had been born in Africa in 1850 and only 526 in 1860. However, it seems reasonable to assume that the illegality of the importation of slaves resulted in a great official undercounting of African origin people born after 1808. In addition, the 1870 census showed 2,657 people in the United States who had been born in Africa, and it is safe to assume that this did not reflect a great wave of arrivals from Africa during the Civil War and the early years of Reconstruction. Most of the people of African descent who immigrated, voluntarily or involuntarily, to the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century were from other parts of the Americas, particularly the Caribbean. Reflecting this, U.S. Census figures showed that, in contrast to the small numbers of African-born black people, there were more than 4,000 officially reported foreign born blacks in total in 1850, more than 7,000 foreign-born blacks in 1860, and more than 9,600 in 1870. Again, the big jump in numbers in the first census after the Civil War is probably a reflection of underreport6

African immigrants

ing of slave immigrants before the war. From the beginnings of the transAtlantic slave trade until the American Civil War, an estimated 11.5 million people reached the shores of the Americas on slave ships from West Africa. Between 600,000 and 700,000 of these people probably reached the territories that became parts of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century. The greatest numbers of those imported directly to U.S. lands came from the West African regions of Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast. By 1860, this involuntary immigration had provided the basis for an African A rare example of an early African immigrant whose name is now well known is Phillis WheatAmerican population of nearly 4.5 ley, who was brought to Boston from the Senegal million people. region of West Africa by a slave ship in 1761. Opposition to slavery provided While working as a servant for the family of John the basis for a small amount of emi- Wheatley, she was encouraged to develop her gration of African Americans to Af- literary skills and became a published poet. (Lirica. The American Colonization So- brary of Congress) ciety sought to end slavery in the United States by freeing slaves and sending them back to Africa. The society helped to establish the colony of Liberia in 1822 and, over the following decade, sent 2,638 people to live there. The End of the Era of Slavery The Civil War brought an end to the legal institution of slavery in the United States. With the end of slavery came a long period of negligible immigration of people of African descent into the United States. Even with the illegal importation of slaves in the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the growth in the black population of the United States was a result of American births, rather than of immigration. From 1810 to 1860, the African American population of the United States grew from a reported 1,377,808 to 4,441,830. However, since immigration expanded other parts of the American population even more, the African American share of the total population decreased from 19 percent in 1810 to 14 percent in 1860. After the end of slavery, direct African immigration to the United States was almost nonexistent, and there was little immigration of African origin people from the Caribbean and other areas. Between 1891 and 1900, only about 350 people are known to have entered the United States from Africa. Moreover, many of these late nineteenth century immigrants were theology 7

African immigrants

students who were sponsored by Christian missionaries and were expected to return to their home countries after completing their studies in the United States. Meanwhile, after 1880, however, a great wave of immigrants began to reach the United States from Europe. Seeking economic opportunities in the industrializing economy of the United States, these new immigrants produced a great expansion of the size of the nation’s population, and the African American share of the total shrank accordingly. By the time this great wave of European immigration had ended in the 1920’s, the African American portion of the population had dropped 10 percent of the total. The American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 brought some new immigrants from that Caribbean nation. Haiti was one of the main sources of the increase in the foreign-born black population of the United States from 40,339 people in 1910 to 98,620 in 1930. However, until the middle of the twentieth century, immigrants of African descent, from Haiti and all other places of origin, accounted for less than 1 percent of all new immigrants in the United States. Modern African Origin Immigration Trends During the 1920’s, the United States adopted an immigration policy based on the national origins quota system. This meant that immigrants were allowed to enter the United States in numbers proportional to their homelands’ representations in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Under this system, overall immigration decreased, and immigration of nonwhite people was particularly discouraged. In 1965, however, the United States again revised its immigration policy and removed most of its nationally and racially discriminatory policies. The years following 1965 saw a steady increase in the numbers of African immigrants and immigrants of African descent from other parts of the world. The U.S. Census of 1960 showed 35,355 immigrants from Africa living in the United States. Only ten years later, this figure had more than doubled—to 80,143. By 2000, Census figures showed a total of 881,300 African-born immigrants, 512,630 of whom were classified as “black.” Black immigrants from all parts of the world numbered only 125,322 people in the 1960 census. By 1970, all black immigrants had also more than doubled, reaching 253,458. The 2000 census showed that the United States had well over two million black immigrants, making up nearly 8 percent of the nation’s total immigrant population. The largest number of immigrants arriving from Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came from Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. In 2003 alone, nearly 8,000 Nigerians immigrated to the United States, accounting for about one-sixth of all African immigrants to the United States during that year. The Nigerian immigrants to the U.S. in that and previous years were generally highly educated and settled in large cities. Ethiopia, in Northeast Africa, was the second-largest source of African immigration to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many of these 8

African immigrants

immigrants came to the United States during the 1980’s and 1990’s, when political and civil unrest made Ethiopia one of Africa’s largest refugeeproducing nations. Other African nations sending significant numbers of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century included Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, and Liberia. Political upheavals in Somalia and Sudan added to the flow of immigrants from Northeast Africa. From 1990 through 2003, nearly 115,000 refugees entered the United States from Africa, most of them from Northeast Africa. Other Sources of Black Immigrants Although African migration to the United States increased after 1965, the largest number of immigrants of African descent came from Latin America. In 2000, U.S. Census estimates showed that just under 513,000 black immigrants in the United States had been born in Africa. By contrast, over 1.5 million black immigrants had been born in Latin America. The Caribbean was the single-largest region of origin for these foreign born residents, with more than 1.25 million black immigrants from the Caribbean living in the United States in 2000. These people represented well over half of all the nation’s immigrant population of African descent. Afro-Caribbean immigrants have come from both English- and Frenchspeaking island nations. The English-speakers have come mostly from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as from smaller nations, such as Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The French-speakers have come primarily from Haiti, with smaller numbers from Guadeloupe and Martinique. Haiti was the single largest contributor of immigrants of African descent in the United States, and by the 1990’s large Haitian communities had developed in New York, Miami, Boston, and other urban centers. Haitian immigration to the United States became a heated political issue during the late 1980’s and 1990’s, when large numbers of Haitian boat people began reaching the United States. The U.S. government classified the Haitians as economic immigrants, rather than political refugees, and generally followed a practice of refusing them political asylum. Immigrants of African origin have complicated the debate over affirmative action in the United States. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that universities and other institutions could use race as a consideration in admissions decisions in order to promote the compelling national interest of diversity in schools and in the nation’s leadership. Courts and institutions frequently assumed that the experiences of native-born African Americans were an important part of this diversity. Although the Supreme Court explicitly denied that affirmative action could be used to compensate the descendants of slaves, many supporters of affirmative action in the American public believed that making up for centuries of exclusion was also an important goal of affirmative action. However, foreign-born black Americans represented 9

African immigrants

some of the highest achievers in the African American population, so that affirmative action policies in university and professional school admissions disproportionately benefited new immigrants and their children. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and others during the mid-nineteenth century. Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Up-to-date and authoritative history of slavery in the United States. Provides an examination of the factors shaping the growth of the African American population during the years of slavery. Coniff, Michael L., and Thomas J. Davis. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Survey of the distribution of Africans throughout the Western Hemisphere. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of immigrants from more than twenty nations, including modern Ghana and Haiti. Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Revisionist demographic study of the slave trade that went back to primary sources for data on the numbers of Africans transported to the New World and found that the actual numbers were radically less than those that had long been cited in historical literature. McKinnon, Jesse. The Black Population: 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001. The U.S. Census Bureau is the main source of demographic information on the United States, and McKinnon’s book is the best place to begin an examination of the African American population. This short publication can be found in most libraries that contain census materials. It is also freely available online at the bureau’s Web site. Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001. Survey of African American slavery during the colonial era of the United States. Reitz, Jeffrey G., eds. Host Societies and the Reception of Immigrants. La Jolla, Calif.: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2003. Collection of articles on interactions between immi10

Afro-Caribbean immigrants

grants and other members of their new societies in countries around the world, including the United States and Canada. Emphasis is on large urban societies. Includes chapters on African Americans and immigrants in New York City. Spear, John R. The American Slave Trade: An Account of Its Origins, Growth and Suppression. Williamstown, Mass.: Corner House, 1978. Well-researched and thoroughly documented book about the slave trade in general. Stepick, Alex, et al. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Study of competition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups—Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. Zéphir, Flore. The Haitian Americans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Excellent overview of the Haitian experience in the United States. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Clotilde slave ship; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Indentured servitude; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Jamaican immigrants; Korean immigrants and African Americans; Racial and ethnic demographic trends; Santería; Universal Negro Improvement Association; West Indian immigrants.

Afro-Caribbean immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America of African descent from the Caribbean islands Immigration issues: African Americans; Cuban immigrants; Demographics; Slavery; West Indian immigrants Significance: African slaves imported to the Caribbean islands developed a unique Creole culture, rich in African heritage but infused with European notions of white supremacy that encouraged internal racism among AfroCaribbeans, who began immigrating to the United States even before the American Revolution. The Caribbean islands were the birthplace of African slavery in the New World; between 1518 and 1860, millions of Africans were imported to the islands to work the extensive sugar plantations operated by European colonials. Around 43 percent of Africans transported to the Western Hemisphere were sold as slaves in the Caribbean; less than 5 percent of these Africans were imported to the United States and Canada. Africans greatly outnumbered whites and native peoples on most Caribbean islands and therefore were able to forge their own cultural identities. 11


Workers on a Puerto Rican sugarcane plantation around 1900. (Library of Congress)

These Creole cultures, which varied from island to island, combined Old World African folkways and elements of European and native language, religion, and customs to create a common framework from which to unite the diverse tribes of transplanted Africans. The harshness of Caribbean plantation life and the resultant high death rate among Caribbean slaves necessitated a constant flow of human cargo from Africa, ensuring the continued presence of strong African elements in island Creole cultures. Nevertheless, the influence of dominant European colonial societies continued to permeate the social, spiritual, and economic lives of Afro-Caribbeans long after slavery ended during the 1860’s. Modern Afro-Caribbeans The demoralizing effect of centuries of bondage and cultural alienation left Afro-Caribbean cultures susceptible to the influence of colonial value systems and social norms once the institution of slavery collapsed. Free Afro-Caribbean communities became structured along rigid lines of socioeconomic caste, based primarily upon the skin color and 12


reputed ancestry of individuals and families. Many Afro-Caribbeans began to deny or downplay their African roots and to claim European colonial heritage and ancestry. Under this system, light-skinned Afro-Caribbeans of modest economic means were placed above their darker counterparts, and darkskinned individuals who attained wealth often gained entry into the whiter upper castes. The system of “shading” that defined social hierarchy in Afro-Caribbean societies often affected these societies’ perceptions of fellow Caribbeans. For example, residents of the Dominican Republic, although clearly of mixed European and African descent, traditionally identified themselves as “Spanish” while invariably classifying neighboring Haitians as “black.” Economic and social discrimination against Haitian immigrants to the Dominican Republic is exemplary of the internal racism that accompanied massive internal and interisland migration in the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century. Rural (and often darker-skinned) Afro-Caribbeans migrating to urban areas and immigrants from poorer (and more Africanized) countries were often consigned to the most squalid living conditions and the least desirable employment. In the aftermath of World War II, a new black political consciousness, influenced by labor and Civil Rights movements in the United States, began to emerge in the Caribbean in opposition to the old colonial social order. By this time, many Afro-Caribbeans had been exposed to strains of racial and economic protest from the United States, most notably in the teachings of black separatist Marcus Garvey, who inspired the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. By the postwar era, Afro-Caribbean workers and intellectuals had joined forces with Garveyites to form labor unions; by the 1960’s, many of these unions had been transformed into black-dominated political parties, winning significant elections in British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Afro-Caribbeans in the United States Afro-Caribbean migration to North America predates the American Revolution. Slave trading between Caribbean and mainland colonies brought substantial numbers of AfroCaribbeans to North American port cities and exerted a palpable Caribbean influence upon slave and free black cultures; free Afro-Caribbean immigrants to North America attained notoriety in the black communities of New Orleans and other port cities. The bulk of Afro-Caribbean immigration to the United States took place in the twentieth century, with more than five million people of African descent migrating from the Caribbean to the United States between 1945 and 1990. Among these immigrants were many thousands of “boat people” from Cuba and Haiti, who fled their native countries in search of political asylum or economic opportunity. Thousands more arrived by more conventional means, blending into the large Caribbean American communities in eastern urban areas. Although many established permanent residence in the United States, it is estimated that around 80 percent of Caribbean immigrants to the United 13


States in the latter half of the twentieth century were seasonal workers who returned to their home countries. Afro-Caribbean immigrants have exerted a profound influence on the cities and labor force of the United States, posing challenges to its social structure, educational system, and notions of assimilation and diversity. Homegrown racial prejudices have formed the crux of many of these challenges; many light-skinned Afro-Caribbeans, regarded as whites in their home countries, experienced racial discrimination for the first time in their lives upon migration to the United States. Immigrants from relatively homogenous Caribbean societies often encountered ethnic groups with whom they had had little or no previous contact, such as Mexican, Asian, and African American, sparking occasional cultural clashes and social tensions. Groups of AfroCaribbean immigrants have occasionally clashed with each other, as did Cuban Americans and Haitian Americans in Miami during the 1980’s. Despite occasional difficulties, various groups of Afro-Caribbeans established thriving communities in major metropolitan areas of the eastern and southern United States after World War II—most notably the Cuban American enclaves of Miami and the “Nuyorican” community of Puerto Ricans in New York City. These communities have contributed greatly to the cultural and political framework of eastern urban areas and the United States as a whole. Michael H. Burchett Further Reading Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), by Mary C. Waters, and Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), by Milton Vickerman, both examine the West Indian immigrant experience in the United States. Peter Winn, in Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), provides ample information on Afro-Caribbean migration to the United States and its effect on American society. In Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis compare and contrast the development of Afro-Caribbean and African American societies. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price discuss continuity between African and Afro-Caribbean cultures in The Birth of African-American Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). For a discussion of the political and cultural impact of Afro-Caribbean literature, see Patrick Taylor’s The Narrative of Liberation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). Other useful sources include Aubrey W. Bonnett’s Institutional Adaptation of West Indian Immigrants to America (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), Philip Kasinitz’s Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), Ransford W. Palmer’s Pilgrims from the Sun: West Indian Migration to America (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), Irma Watkins-Owens’s Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem 14

Alien and Sedition Acts

Community, 1900-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), and Robert Carr’s Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Barbados, Cuba, and Haiti. A useful study of the employment of Afro-Caribbean immigrants is Melonie P. Heron’s The Occupational Attainment of Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, Canada, and England (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2001). Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, is a collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes chapters on Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans, Haitians, and other West Indians. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), by Alex Stepick et al., examines competition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups— Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. See also Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Dominican immigrants; Haitian immigrants; Jamaican immigrants; Latinos; Santería; Universal Negro Improvement Association; West Indian immigrants.

Alien and Sedition Acts The Law: Four federal laws that ostensibly were passed to aid in avoiding war with France Date: Became law June-July, 1798 Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Government and politics; Laws and treaties Significance: The Alien and Sedition laws, three of which directly affected immigrants, led to further debate regarding the function of the Bill of Rights during wartime, the role of the federal government in legislating for the states, and the process of judicial review. News of the XYZ affair, which almost brought the United States and France to war, descended upon the American people and their representatives in Congress like a thunderbolt. It galvanized the government into action on the high seas; it helped unite Americans against the French, just as the initial news of British seizures had united them against Great Britain; it seriously weakened the infant Republican Party, which was associated with Franco15


philism; and it firmly entrenched the Federalists in power. Even President John Adams, for a time, seemed to relish the thought of leading the United States against its newest antagonist, but Adams regained his sense of moderation in time to prevent a catastrophe. The same cannot be said of certain elements of the Federalist Party, which exploited the explosive situation to strike out at their political opponents. Political Rivalries The Federalist Party, or at least its old guard, deeply resented gains made by the Republican opposition. Many of the Federalist leaders resented the very existence of the other political party. The High Federalists were by no means committed to a two-party system and rejected the idea of a loyal opposition. With the Republican tide at low ebb, these Federalists intended to strike a killing blow at two sources of Republican strength: the immigrant vote and the manipulation of public opinion through the use (and abuse) of the press. In selecting these targets, the Federalists demonstrated an acute awareness of the impact of the press on the growth of political parties, and they intended to use their political power to muzzle the Republican press, while leaving the Federalist press intact. Furthermore, Federalists expressed a deep xenophobia, and they viewed people of foreign birth as threats to the fabric of ordered liberty that they believed the Federalists had built and must preserve. Many Federalists had a long history of antiforeign sentiment. With the United States on the verge of war with France, the Federalists were apprehensive over the loyalty of thousands of French West Indian refugees who had flocked to the United States in an effort to escape the ferment of the French Revolution and its accompanying “Terror.” The Federalists were further concerned by the fact that the refugees who became U.S. citizens generally aligned themselves with the Republican Party. Much the same was true of the Irish, who supported anyone who opposed the English. Such conditions threatened the continued hold of the Federalists on political power in the national government. To deal with such potential subversives, foreign and domestic, the Federalist-controlled Congress passed a series of four acts, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Content of the Acts Three of the acts dealt specifically with aliens or immigrants. The Sedition Act declared speech or writing with the intent to defame the president or Congress to be a misdemeanor. The Alien Act permitted the president to deport allegedly dangerous aliens during times of peace. Neither act was enforced, however. The Naturalization Act struck at the immigrant vote. Previously, aliens could become naturalized citizens after residing for five years in the United States. The new act raised the probationary period to fourteen years. The Sedition Act was by far the most notorious. It imposed heavy fines and imprisonment as punishment on all those found guilty of writing, publishing, 16


or speaking against the federal government. By allowing a defendant to prove the truth of statements as a defense, the Sedition Act was a definite improvement over the English laws of sedition libel. The fact remains, however, that its intent was the repression of political opposition and the annoying Republican press, and the Sedition Act seemed plainly to ignore the First Amendment. Under the law, suits were initiated against the editors of eight major opposition presses. The principal target was the Philadelphia Aurora, whose editor, William Duane, was prosecuted under the act. Congressman Matthew Lyon John Adams, the second president of the United of Vermont received a jail sentence States. (Library of Congress) of four months and was fined one thousand dollars for disparaging remarks he had made about President Adams. Some of these suits gave a comic air to the gross abuse of power. One gentleman was fined one hundred dollars for wishing out loud that the wadding of a salute cannon would strike President Adams in his backside. Republican opposition to these laws was immediate. Vice President Thomas Jefferson, himself a Republican, believed that the Alien and Sedition Acts were designed to be used against such leading Republicans as the Swiss-born congressman from Pennsylvania, Albert Gallatin. Republicans were convinced that the Sedition Act was designed to destroy them as an organized political party. The act had passed the House strictly along sectional-party lines. The vote was forty-four to forty-one, with only two affirmative votes coming from south of the Potomac River, where the Republicans were strongest. Ineffectiveness of the Laws From the Federalist point of view, the acts were completely unsuccessful in suppressing the opposition. They were resented by many, and it soon became obvious even to those who first supported the new laws that they were as unnecessary as they were ineffective. The handful of “subversives” prosecuted under the Sedition Act hardly compensated for the fact that its existence gave the Republicans another campaign issue. Jefferson through the Kentucky legislature, and Madison through the Virginia legislature, penned immediate responses to the Alien and Sedition Acts. These remonstrances, known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves, aroused little enthusiasm at the time but did point out not only some of the basic principles of the Republican Party but also some striking differences between two streams of thought within the party. 17


Both resolutions maintained that the Constitution was a compact between sovereign states that granted to the federal government certain narrowly defined powers, while retaining all other enumerated powers. If the states created the Constitution, they had the power to decide when the federal government had overstepped its proper bounds. Jefferson, in the Kentucky Resolves, went much further than Madison in assigning to the states the power to nullify a federal law—to declare it inoperable and void within the boundaries of a state. South Carolina was to do so in 1832, when it nullified the Tariff of 1828. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolves had no immediate effect, but they had spelled out the theoretical position that those advocating states’ rights could, and ultimately did, take. The Alien and Sedition Acts took their place among a growing list of grievances against the Federalist Party. The Alien Act expired in 1800 and the Sedition Act in the following year. The Naturalization Act was repealed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1802. The only tangible effect of these measures was to contribute to the defeat of Federalism in 1800. However, the mood that led to their passage was to return in later days. John G. Clark Edward R. Crowther Further Reading Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Chapter 15 of this gracefully written document captures the motives and mentalities of the principals responsible for the acts. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. The Alien and Sedition Acts are examined in their broader legal context in this work. McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jefferson’s America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Contains an excellent discussion of the competing theories of society and government bantered about by Federalists and Republicans. Miller, John C. Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. A thorough and judicious narrative of the passage of and response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Places the Alien and Sedition Acts in the context of paranoid politics during the 1790’s. Smith, James Morton. Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966. Contains the best discussion of the congressional debates over the passage of these laws. See also 18

Federal riot of 1799; Nativism; Palmer raids.

Alien land laws

Alien land laws Definition: State laws restricting the right of Asian immigrants to own land Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Japanese immigrants; Laws and treaties Significance: These state measures deprived Japanese Americans of their property rights. Immigration from Japan to the United States increased significantly during the final decade of the nineteenth century, with most of the Asian immigrants settling in the Pacific states. As the number of Japanese laborers arriving in California increased substantially, however, a strong anti-Japanese sentiment developed: Their success threatened and antagonized the emerging labor unions. The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed in 1905, and a campaign to bar Japanese immigration was launched. Negotiations begun in 1906 between the United States and Japan resulted in the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, which limited immigration from Japan to nonlaborers and to families who were joining previously settled laborers. In 1907, an immigration bill was amended to prevent Japanese laborers from entering the United States via Hawaii, Mexico, and Canada. The First Proposals The California legislature’s attempts to pass alien land bills began in 1907 when it appropriated funds to investigate Japanese agricultural involvement. The California State Labor Commission’s report, which was favorable to the Japanese, resulted in a reprimand for the commissioner. In 1910, twenty-seven anti-Japanese proposals were introduced in the legislature. Enactment of the proposed anti-Japanese legislation was prevented that year by influence from the White House and, in 1911, by President William Howard Taft’s direct intervention. On April 4, 1913, a California bill that would prohibit Japanese and other foreigners ineligible for citizenship from holding or leasing land in California prompted the Japanese ambassador, Viscount Chinda, to make an informal protest to the Department of State. The proposed bill in California was modeled on an 1897 federal law barring ownership of land by aliens ineligible for citizenship. The federal law, however, contained a proviso that it would not be applicable where treaty obligations conferred the right to own and hold land. The California bill included a clause prohibiting the leasing of land to Japanese, but the Japanese contended that this right had been conferred previously by the Treaty of 1894 and reenacted in the Treaty of 1911. In Washington, D.C., the introduction of the 1913 California Alien Land bill was viewed seriously. The prevailing opinion was that its effect could be more sweeping than the problems of 1908 and could lead once again to talk 19

Alien land laws

of war. When Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and Ambassador Chinda exchanged mutual assurances of continuing friendship between the United States and Japan on April 4, the Department of State expressed confidence that the matter would be resolved amicably. The following day, Bryan met with the California congressional delegation, which emphasized the necessity of the proposed legislation. Members of the delegation described how, in many parts of California, more than half the farms were operated by Japanese, and neither U.S. nor Chinese workers could compete with Japanese labor. They asserted that despite the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, “coolie laborers” were arriving continuously. The feeling in California was so strong, they reported, that people who leased land to the Japanese were ostracized by their neighbors. Members of the delegation intimated that violent protests against the increase in Japanese competition were imminent. In Japan, the Tokyo press vehemently opposed the legislation. The Japanese government filed a formal protest on April 7. President Woodrow Wilson’s position was to remain outside the conflict because he believed that the proposed legislation lay within the rights of a sovereign state. The final draft of the new law was adopted by the California Senate on April 12. Ambassador Chinda presented his government’s formal protest against the bill to the Department of State. Because of agitation in Tokyo, where the bill was denounced by the press and where demonstrators were calling for war, the California legislature, despite overwhelming margins in both houses, delayed further action until May 20, when the Alien Land Law, known also as the Webb-Henley bill, was signed into law by Governor Hiram Warren Johnson. The statute barred all aliens ineligible for citizenship, or corporations with more than 50 percent ineligible alien ownership, from the legal right to own agricultural land in California, and it limited land-leasing contracts in the state to three years’ duration.

U.S . secretary of state William Jennings Bryan around 1907. (Library of Congress)

20

Further Restrictions To prevent the Japanese from circumventing the law, a more restrictive alien land bill was introduced in the California legislature in 1920 to forbid the issei (first generation Japanese Americans) from buying land in the name of their U.S.-born children, the nisei. It also prohibited the transfer of land to noncitizens by sale or lease and established criminal pen-

Alien land laws

alties for aliens caught attempting to bypass the 1913 law. In a statewide ballot, California voters passed the 1920 Alien Land Law by a three-to-one margin. A number of cases to test the constitutionality of the new law were instigated by the Japanese. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the issei in four of these cases. Further restrictions also were passed in a 1923 amendment, which, together with the 1924 Immigration Act, effectively denied further immigration and determined the status of Japanese immigrants in the United States. The alien land laws in California were not repealed until 1956. During 1917, an alien land law was enacted in Arizona. In 1921, Washington, Texas, and Louisiana followed suit, as did New Mexico in 1922, and Oregon, Idaho, and Montana in 1923. Other states followed: Kansas in 1925; Missouri in 1939; Utah, Arkansas, and Nebraska in 1943; and Minnesota in 1945. Susan E. Hamilton Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and European Americans in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Chuman, Frank F. The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans. Del Mar, Calif.: Publisher’s Inc., 1976. Includes good coverage of the alien land laws. Curry, Charles F. Alien Land Laws and Alien Rights. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921. A contemporary account of the alien land laws. Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: Free Press, 1988. Includes discussion of the laborcontracting system and the exclusion movement. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 18821943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s. McGovney, Dudley. “The Anti-Japanese Land Laws of California and Ten Other States.” California Law Review 35 (1947): 7-54. A detailed discussion of alien land laws in relation to state, federal, and English common law up the time of publication. Nomura, Gail M. “Washington’s Asian/Pacific American Communities.” In Peoples of Washington: Perspectives on Cultural Diversity, edited by Sid White and S. E. Solberg. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989. Provides specifics of Washington and Texas land laws. Takaki, Ronald, ed. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Provides insight into the origin of anti-Asian sentiment and its connection to legislation such as the alien land laws. 21

Amerasians

See also Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Discrimination; Japanese American internment; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; Ozawa v. United States; Page law; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Amerasians Definition: Term coined by the American novelist Pearl S. Buck to describe children of U.S. servicemen and women born and raised in East Asia Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Families and marriage; Japanese immigrants; Refugees Significance: With U.S. participation in wars and occupations in Asia, American servicemen have fathered children with women in several Asian countries, posing the issue of immigration rights for both Amerasian children and their Asian mothers. The Pearl Buck Foundation, set up in 1964 to help Amerasian children, continued its work after Buck’s death in 1973. The existence of Amerasian children has posed knotty questions for judges and policy makers in the areas of immigration and citizenship law. The issues involved are not merely political. Amerasians were sometimes raised out of wedlock, sometimes adopted, and sometimes raised by both natural parents. Studying Amerasian children and youth in both East Asia and the United States permits sociologists and psychologists to assess the relative weights of different handicaps—their status as members of minorities, their foreign-language background, and their fatherlessness—impeding their progress toward healthy and productive adulthood. Historical Background After Japan’s defeat in World War II, U.S. servicemen occupied Japan. Within six years about 24,000 Amerasian children were born to Japanese women. After Japan regained sovereignty in 1952, several U.S. air bases remained on Japan’s home islands, and Okinawa remained under U.S. occupation. Mixed marriages and the births of Amerasian babies continued into the first years of the twenty-first century, when the United States still stationed tens of thousands of troops in Asia. The U.S. occupation of South Korea during the late 1940’s was followed by the Korean War. After the armistice in 1953, some U.S. soldiers remained. Hence, some South Korean women bore Amerasian babies into the early 1980’s. Amerasian children were also born to women from Taiwan, which was protected by the U.S. Navy against the People’s Republic of China after 1950. 22

Amerasians

After the French left Vietnam in 1954 and Vietnam was split into communist North Vietnam and anticommunist South Vietnam, the United States decided to defend the latter. About 30,000 Amerasian children were born to South Vietnamese women during U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. During this time some Amerasians were also born to women in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, which served as bases for U.S. air raids into Vietnam. When North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam in April, 1975, normal economic and diplomatic relations with the United States ceased, not to be restored Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth (1931), The until the mid-1990’s. Hence, no Dragon Seed (1942), and other novels set in China. Amerasian babies were born in In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to Vietnam after 1976. receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Library of In the Philippines, Amerasian Congress) children were born soon after the United States acquired the islands in 1898. Although independence was granted in 1946, Amerasian births continued until 1992, when Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base were closed. By 1992 about 50,000 Amerasians lived in the Philippines. In 1993, Filipino prostitutes sued the U.S. government for financial aid in raising their Amerasian children. In November, 1997, Lorelyn Penero Miller, the Filipino daughter of a U.S. serviceman born out of wedlock, challenged the U.S. citizenship law in the U.S. Supreme Court. Family, Citizenship, and Immigration Unlike France, which offered citizenship rights to its colonial Eurasians, the U.S. government recognized Amerasians as citizens only if they were born within the bonds of marriage. Amerasians born out of wedlock could be recognized as U.S. citizens only if specific American men recognized them as their children and provided documentary proof of fatherhood. Out-of-wedlock births resulted from institutional obstacles to marriage as well as from individual irresponsibility. Until 1967 several American states prohibited white-Asian and black-Asian marriages. In 1945 U.S. immigration law still prohibited the entry of Japanese. Although the U.S. Congress twice gave Japanese war brides the opportunity to immigrate to the United States, many couples could not meet the deadlines. From the passage of the 23

Amerasians

McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which permitted all Asian spouses of U.S. servicemen to immigrate to the United States, until 1965, roughly half of all Korean and Japanese immigrants to the United States were servicemen’s wives. Until 1992 many Filipino immigrants were the wives of servicemen. Despite the time-consuming requirement of approval by superior officers, which sometimes came through only after soldiers had been transferred back to the United States, more than 6,000 marriages between South Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen occurred between 1965 and 1972. Most Japanese and Korean Amerasians entering the United States were either preteen children of intact interracial families or preteen orphans adopted by American couples. Aside from twenty college-age Korean Amerasians sponsored yearly by Gonzaga University after 1980, relatively few Amerasian teenagers or young adults from Korea or Japan have ever immigrated to the United States. Vietnamese Amerasians, by contrast, did not immigrate to the United States in large numbers until they were already late adolescents and young adults. Only a few Vietnamese Amerasian children, including many of the 2,000 orphans airlifted out of South Vietnam in April, 1975, left South Vietnam before the communist triumph. Although a 1982 U.S. law stipulated that Amerasians born between 1950 and 1982 from Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Korea (but not Japan) had priority in immigrating to the United States, it did little for Vietnamese Amerasians. Relatives were not allowed to accompany their children, and the United States had no diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Although well-publicized reunions between preteen Amerasian children and their fathers did occur in the United States in October, 1982, children claimed by their American fathers after 1975 were only a tiny percentage of all Vietnamese Amerasians. From 1982 to 1988 about 4,500 Vietnamese Amerasians and 7,000 accompanying relatives entered the United States as refugees. The Amerasian Homecoming Act (1987) speeded up the exodus by permitting all Vietnamese Amerasians born between January 1, 1962, and January 1, 1977, to immigrate without proving that they had a specific American father and by permitting them to bring their mothers and siblings along. After 1991 Amerasians’ spouses and children could come as well. By 1994 about 20,000 Vietnamese Amerasians and 60,000 relatives had settled in the United States. Adjustments in Asia and the United States Because Amerasians usually had some of the physical features of their white or African American fathers, those raised in East Asian countries were usually discriminated against by their countries’ racial majorities. However, being half white was socially acceptable in the Philippines. In Japan, Amerasians raised on U.S. military bases by intact two-parent families were shielded somewhat from prejudice. Most Amerasians raised in East Asia, however, grew up without fathers, in societies where fatherlessness was stigmatized. Their mothers sometimes abandoned them to the care of relatives or orphanages or even to the streets, while 24

Amerasians

stepfathers mistreated them. In their mothers’ countries, Amerasians had difficulty in receiving an education, finding jobs, and marrying spouses. In post1975 Vietnam they received on average no more than one to two years of schooling. Fatherlessness was not confined to Amerasians reared in Asia; some Amerasians born in the United States, or taken there by their natural parents at an early age, saw their childhood disrupted by parental divorce. Of all Amerasians in the United States, those adopted by American couples at an early age and those whose natural parents’ marriages remained intact throughout their childhood probably had an easier transition to adulthood than others. Thus, Vietnamese Amerasians airlifted to the United States as small children for adoption in 1975 and those reunited as preteen children with their natural fathers in 1982 faced fewer problems than post-1987 teenage and young adult Vietnamese Amerasian immigrants. The latter were usually accompanied by only one parent or by no parent at all and had to struggle to learn English while seeking to hold down a job. Amerasian adolescents’ search for an acceptable ethnic identity followed a different course in the United States than in East Asia. In the United States, Amerasians who were half white usually suffered less from majority prejudice than in East Asia, while half-black Amerasians suffered no more from majority prejudice than African Americans in general. The latter, however, were not always accepted by African Americans. Vietnamese Amerasians rejected in Vietnam were often also rejected by the Vietnamese refugee community in the United States. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Bass, Thomas A. Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home. New York: Soho Press, 1996. Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Conn, Peter J. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Field, Norma. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century’s End. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. McBee, Susanna. “The Amerasians: Tragic Legacy of Our Far East Wars.” U.S. News and World Report 96 (May 7, 1984). Spickard, Paul R. “Madam Butterfly Revisited.” In Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. “From Dust to Gold: The Vietnamese Amerasian Experience.” In Racially Mixed People in America, edited by Maria P. P. Root. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. Westbrook, Peter. Harnessing Anger: The Way of an American Fencer. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997. Williams, Teresa. “Prism Lives: Identity of Binational Amerasians.” In Racially 25

American Jewish Committee

Mixed People in America, edited by Maria P. P. Root. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. Yarborough, Trin. Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005. See also Asian American education; Japanese immigrants; Mail-order brides; Southeast Asian immigrants; Vietnamese immigrants; War brides; War Brides Act; Women immigrants.

American Jewish Committee Identification: Jewish rights and advocacy organization Date: Founded in 1906 Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Jewish immigrants; Religion Significance: The American Jewish Committee is one of the oldest Jewish rights organizations. The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 by a group of prominent American Jews in response to a series of anti-Jewish riots (pogroms) in Russia. It was to be a defense and advocacy group dedicated to the prevention of any “infraction of the civil and religious rights of Jews, in any part of the world.” During and after World War I, its efforts were concentrated on aiding refugees and combating anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States. During the late 1990’s, the committee’s work consisted mostly of analysis, advocacy, and legal action relating to issues such as immigration, civil rights, church-state relations, and social justice. In addition, it sponsors research in such areas as Jewish family life, intermarriage, and Jewish education, and the significance of Judaism in an age of modernity. Local chapters are encouraged to participate in legislative advocacy activities and involvement as amici curiae in litigation at the local and state levels. On the international scene, the committee has articulated a special commitment to Israel’s security and to the support of democratic movements across the globe on the theory that the fate of Jews is inextricably bound to the fate of democracy. Peter J. Haas Further Reading Cohen, Naomi Werner. Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984. 26

Anglo-conformity

Gerber, David, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. See also Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Anglo-conformity Definition: Tendency of immigrants to North America to lose much of their native cultural heritage and conform substantially to an Anglo-Protestant core culture Immigration issues: Language; Nativism and racism; Sociological theories

Editor of an Italian-language newspaper published in New York correcting proofs in 1943. Foreignlanguage newspapers sprang up in virtually every major urban center to serve immigrant communities and made it easier for immigrants to avoid adapting to the dominant Anglo culture. (Library of Congress)

27

Anglo-conformity

Significance: Anglo-conformity has a homogenizing effect that tends to obliterate non-Anglo cultures. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-conformity was practiced by immigrant groups who came from eastern and southern Europe—such as Poles, Italians, and Greeks. Although some members of those groups have maintained some of the distinctive elements of their native cultures, many others have become completely assimilated into the dominant American society. As late as the early twenty-first century, many immigrant racial groups of non-European origin, such as Asian Americans and Hispanics, were still experiencing Anglo-conformity. For example, California’s Proposition 227, which limits the time elementary school students can spend in bilingual education, passed with a large amount of Mexican American political support in 1998. Since its passage, immigrants from Mexico, and their children, have faced strong social pressure to concentrate on English, the language of the dominant culture, at the expense of their own Spanish language. Anglo-conformity may also be experienced by nonimmigrant racial minorities since they are generally expected to follow European American styles of dress and speech patterns when operating in the dominant American society. George Yancey Further Reading Deveaux, Monique. Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Kramer, Eric Mark, ed. The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority.” Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Wiley, Terrence G. Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. See also Accent discrimination; Assimilation theories; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; British as dominant group; Euro-Americans; Immigration Act of 1924; Nativism; White ethnics.

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Anti-Irish Riots of 1844

Anti-Irish Riots of 1844 The Event: Nativist uprising against immigrant Irish-Catholic workers Date: May 6-July 5, 1844 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Immigration issues: Discrimination; European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Nativism and racism; Religion Significance: This anti-Irish riot reflected nativist prejudice against immigrants and afterward moved Irish immigrants to band together more to protect themselves. Rapid population growth, industrialization, and cultural conflict characterized urban America during the 1840’s and helped produce bloody anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia’s industrial suburbs of Kensington and Southwark in the summer of 1844. Already the second largest U.S. city in 1840, Philadelphia’s population grew by more than one-third during the 1840’s, from twenty-five thousand people to thirty-six thousand. Irish immigrants, hard-pressed by the Great Famine that had ruined the potato crops in their homeland, stimulated this growth, and they made up 10 percent of Philadelphia’s population in 1844. Prior to commuter railroads and automobiles, most people lived near their workplace, and cities were densely populated. Low-income newcomers such as the Irish resided in cheap, substandard housing and symbolized the ill effects of disorderly urban growth to longtime Philadelphians. The Irish Immigrants Lacking in job skills and capital, Irish immigrants filled the bottom rungs in the emerging industrial order’s occupational ladder. As its population grew, Philadelphia expanded its involvement in largescale manufacturing. By 1840, half of Philadelphia’s sixteen thousand working adults labored in manufacturing, and 89 percent of the workers in Kensington toiled in industrial trades. American-born whites predominated in such well-paying craft occupations as ship carpenter and ironmaker, leaving lowpaying jobs requiring less skill, such as weaving, for Irish newcomers. Perceiving immigrants and African Americans as competitors for jobs and housing, many white American workers used violence to drive them from trades and neighborhoods. During the 1830’s, Philadelphia, like other major cities, hosted a strong working-class trade union and political movement. At its height, the General Trades Union of Philadelphia City and County (GTU) included more than ten thousand workers representing more than fifty different trades. Collective action in an 1835 general strike advocating a ten-hour workday succeeded in winning shorter hours and wage hikes in numerous workplaces. GTU activists voted against conservative Whigs who opposed strikes and Irish 29


Catholic immigrants. The Panic of 1837 brought on a national economic depression and weakened the GTU and undermined the solidarity of its culturally and occupationally diverse constituency. During the 1840’s, native-born Protestant skilled workers fought for a dwindling supply of jobs and received little help from the financially weakened GTU. Evangelical Protestants from all social classes joined moral reform campaigns for temperance and strict observance of the Sabbath. Temperance and Sabbatarianism symbolized American-born white workers’ efforts to survive hard times through personal discipline. Workers made up the majority of temperance societies in industrial suburbs such as Kensington and Southwark. Moral reforms often attacked immigrant cultural institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church and Sunday tavern visits. Economic contraction and moral reform eroded the GTU’s bonds of working-class solidarity, which might have prevented ethnic conflict in 1844. Nativist Forces The American Republican Party, dedicated to eliminating the influence of Catholic immigrants in public life, best exploited the anxieties of native-born workers. The party flourished briefly in eastern cities during the mid-1840’s, drawing support from Americanborn workers and middle-class professionals such as Philadelphia’s Lewis Levin, a struggling lawyer and aspiring politician from South Carolina. In the spring of 1844, American Republicans campaigned against Catholic voters’ attempts to protect their children from Protestant religious instruction in the public schools. Protestant-dominated Philadelphia schools used the King James version of the Bible as a classroom textbook. Objecting that the King James version was not authoritative, Catholics preferred the Douay Bible, which included annotations written by the Vatican. Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop, Francis Kenrick, wanted public schools Title page of a Douay Bible—which was at the heart to allow Catholic students to bring of the 1844 riots—features an illustration of St. Pat- their Bibles to class or be exrick’s Cathedral in New York City. (Library of Con- empted from Protestant religious instruction. American Republicans gress) 30


accused Philadelphia Catholics of plotting to remove the Bible from the schools entirely and to have priests take over classrooms. In April, 1844, American Republicans staged rallies across the city to whip up support for their nativist program. Violence between the Irish and nativists broke out when nativists gathered near Irish neighborhoods. American Republicans scheduled a mass meeting for May 6 in Kensington’s third ward, a neighborhood composed mainly of Irish weavers. On May 6, rain drove hundreds of nativists who traveled to the third ward rally to seek cover at the Nanny Goat Market, a covered lot of market stalls. Approximately thirty Irish waited at the market, and one yelled, “Keep the damned natives out of the market house; it don’t belong to them. This ground is ours!” Samuel Kramer, editor of the pro-American Republican Native American newspaper (named for Anglo-American nativists, not American Indians), tried to finish his speech against the Catholic proposals for the Douay Bible, but Irish hecklers drowned him out. A shoving match escalated into fistfights and gunfire as nativists and Irish battled for control of the market house. Police arrived at dusk and temporarily restored order. Four men died, three of them nativists, and many more were wounded in the fighting. Nativist Revenge The next day, nativists massed in Kensington for revenge. The Native American ran the headline: “Let Every Man Come Prepared to Defend Himself!” A parade of nativists marched through Kensington under a U.S. flag and a banner declaring, “This is the flag that was trampled underfoot by Irish Papists.” Nativist mobs rampaged through Kensington for two more days, burning homes and invading two Catholic churches, where rioters defaced religious objects and looted valuables. Although Sheriff Morton McMichael tried to calm public disorder, police were too few in number to stop the violence. Needing reinforcements, McMichael called on General George Cadwalader, commander of the First Brigade of Pennsylvania state militia, stationed in Philadelphia. On May 10, state troops brought peace to the city and kept it under martial law for a week. Tension prevailed in June, amid criticism of city officials and militia commanders for failing to prevent violence. American Republicans still had public support, and Catholics worried about more violence. Catholics feared that nativists would use July 4 patriotic celebrations as a pretext to riot. Parishioners at St. Philip’s Catholic Church in Southwark, just south of Philadelphia, hoarded weapons inside the church in order to defend it. Hearing of the arms cache, on July 5, Levin led thousands of nativists, including volunteer militia with cannons, to St. Philip’s to demand the weapons. Stung by earlier criticism, Cadwalader’s militia promptly seized the church and ordered nativists away. When the mob refused to move, Cadwalader opened fire and a pitched battle involving cannon and rifle fire ensued for a day and a half. The militia, helped by city police, prevailed in the fighting that left two rioters dead and dozens of state troops and civilians wounded. 31


The American Republican Party campaigned on the riots, attacking reigning politicians as the allies of Irish Catholics and making martyrs of the nativists killed in the riots. In October, Levin and another American Republican won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, and nativists captured several county offices, mostly on the strength of votes from working-class Kensington and Southwark. The American Republicans faded during the late 1840’s, but nativists returned during the 1850’s under the aegis of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party. The riots forced Irish Philadelphians to band together as an ethnic group. The most prominent Irish opponent of the mobs was Hugh Clark, a master weaver and ward politician worth more than thirty thousand dollars in 1850. Clark had stridently opposed striking Irish journeymen weavers prior to 1844. Master weavers, some of them Irishmen like Clark, cut journeymen’s wages in the wake of the Kensington riot, confident that few non-Irish workers would protest the cuts. Bishop Kenrick urged conciliation and softened his public position on the Bible controversy. American Republican anger at police and militia actions temporarily stalled police reform, but during the 1850’s, Philadelphia and other cities established professional police departments to prevent more riots like those of 1844. Frank Towers Further Reading Davis, Susan G. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Examines public celebrations that frequently turned violent, such as the parade that became a riot in Kensington. Feldberg, Michael. The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. The most comprehensive account of the riots. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Study of nativistic stereotypes of the Irish that fed the riot. Lannie, Vincent P., and Bernard C. Diethorn. “For the Honor and Glory of God: The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844.” History of Education Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Spring, 1968): 44-106. Examines the Bible controversy in Philadelphia schools. Laurie, Bruce. Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Provides background on workers and unions. Montgomery, David. “The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844.” Journal of Social History 5, no. 4 (Summer, 1972): 411-446. Analyzes the conflict in terms of social class. 32

Arab American intergroup relations

Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Broad survey of Irish immigration history. Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Analyzes the riots in the context of other disturbances and police reform. See also British as dominant group; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 1790-1892; Federal riot of 1799; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; Know-Nothing Party; Nativism; Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Arab American intergroup relations Definition: Relationships among immigrants from different Arab countries Immigration issues: Demographics; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion; Stereotypes Significance: Although Arab immigrants share the same language and many of them share the same religion, Islam, they are far from being a homogeneous group. At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than one million people of Arab origin were estimated to live in North America: more than 870,000 in the United States and more than 188,000 in Canada. Although figures for specific Arab national origin are not available for either country, they are available for the state of Michigan, which has a large population of Arab Americans. During the 1990’s, more than 77,000 persons of Arab ancestry were living in Michigan. More than half of those people were of Lebanese background. In 1990, Michigan was also home to 7,656 Syrians, 6,668 Iraqis, 2,695 Palestinians, 1,785 Egyptians, 1,441 Jordanians, 14,842 unspecified Arab Americans, and 2,310 other Arabs. In addition to these Arab Americans, the 1990 U.S. Census reported the presence of 14,724 Assyrians (Chaldeans). Apparently in Michigan and other parts of the United States, most Assyrians do not, contrary to the opinion of most scholars, consider themselves Arabs. Arab Americans come to the United States and Canada from the twentyone countries of the Arab League. In addition to the countries in the Michigan breakdown, these nations are Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Kuwait, Libya, 33


Leading Metropolitan Hometowns of Arab Americans Rank Metropolitan Area 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Detroit, Mich. New York, N.Y. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif. Washington, D.C.-Md.-Va. Chicago, Ill. Boston, Mass. Anaheim-Santa Ana, Calif. Bergen-Passaic, N.J. Houston, Tex. Cleveland, Ohio San Diego, Calif. Pittsburgh, Pa. San Francisco, Calif. Miami-Hialeah, Fla. Philadelphia, Pa. Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif. Nassau-Suffolk, N.Y. Oakland, Calif. Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minn.-Wis. Phoenix, Ariz.

Population 61,065 58,347 56,345 28,148 26,770 22,391 15,662 15,580 15,389 14,005 13,055 12,141 11,973 11,344 10,345 10,291 8,837 8,668 8,155 7,719

Percentage of all Arab Americans 7.0 6.7 6.5 3.2 3.1 2.6 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.6 1.5 1.4 1.4 1.3 1.2 1.2 1.0 1.0 0.9 0.9

Source: Data are from U.S . Bureau of the Census, Census of Population, 1990. Washington, D.C ., U.S . Government Printing Office, 1991.

Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Although the numbers of immigrants from most of these countries are too small for them to be separately counted, these subgroups have a significant effect on intergroup and intragroup relations. One Arab American group, the Arab Jewish Americans, part of the Sephardic Jewish population and believed to be sizable, is not counted by any official sources. They trace their ancestry predominantly to Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. It is estimated that there are some 85,000 Arab Jews in the United States. Demographics During the 1990’s, about 48 percent of Arab Americans lived in twenty metropolitan areas. The largest populations were in the Detroit, Michigan (61,065), New York City (58,347), and Los Angeles-Long Beach (56,345) areas. In eight out of ten of the metropolitan areas with the highest Arab American populations during that period, the median household income for Arab Americans exceeded that of the overall population. For 34


example, in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, the median income for Arab Americans was 130 percent of that of the general population. Overall, Arab Americans tend to be better educated than the average American. They earn graduate degrees at a rate twice that of the general population. As might be expected given the level of educational achievement, in 1990, 80 percent of Arab Americans were employed versus 60 percent of all Americans. Most Arab immigrants to the United States seek permanent status. One exception has been Yemeni temporary male workers, who often want to earn large sums of money to take back to their families in Yemen. Some Arab Americans of higher educational and occupational status look down on these Yemenis because they are less educated and poorer and have adopted the dress and lifestyles of young working-class American men. This violation of traditional manners is irritating to non-Yemeni Arab Americans, especially those striving for acceptance by American society. They fear that non-Arab Americans with ambivalent attitudes toward Arab Americans and who hold negative stereotypes of Arabs fostered by their unfavorable portrayal in the mass media will think less of them because of the behavior of some of the young Yemeni men. Arab Americans’ fears are intensified by hate crimes against them, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nine days after those attacks, the attorney general of California reported that his office was investi-

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gating seventy separate incidents of possible hate crimes against Muslims in his state alone. Arab American Women Unlike their sisters in most Arab countries, Arab American women have become strong and courageous feminists. Carol Haddad, of Lebanese and Syrian heritage, founded the Feminist Arab Network (FAN) in 1983. Its membership comprised about one hundred women, about one-third immigrants and the rest born in the United States. FAN organized panels, wrote articles for progressive feminist newspapers, magazines, and journals, and spoke to numerous groups about what Arab American women wanted for themselves, non-Arab American women, and women throughout the world. Although FAN did not last for more than a few years, it nevertheless brought together activist Arab American women and Jewish, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women to further feminist and progressive causes. In 1994, the South End Press published an anthology by Arab American and Canadian feminists entitled Food for Our Grandmothers. Thanks to FAN’s efforts, women have served as chairs and presidents of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). The Multicultural Immersion Program The Arab American community is a diverse and successful one. Because of the turmoil in the Middle East, however, and the negative portrayal of Arabs in the mass media, Arab Americans have often felt the sting of prejudice and discrimination and the tragedy of violence and murder. At the 1984 Democratic National Convention, African American Jesse Jackson expressed empathy for the plight of Arab Americans, saying that “Arab Americans, too, know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection. They must not continue to be made pariahs.” During the Middle East turmoil in 1989, Arab American businesses in Chicago’s black neighborhoods were frequently boycotted by African Americans. The boycotts were motivated by the anti-Arab defamation with which the mass media showered the nation and the failure of Americans to distinguish between Arab Americans and overseas Arabs. All over the United States, Arab Americans became the targets of violence, property destruction, and even murder. In 1996, to combat anti-Arab sentiment in Detroit, a social service agency called New Detroit launched the Multicultural Immersion Program. Directed by Sonia Plata, it consists of yearlong programs that bring together people from the major ethnic, religious, and racial groups in the metropolitan area to learn about one another through seminars presented by designated leaders from each of five major groups: African Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos/Chicanos, and Native Americans. The key organizations that lend support to the groups are the Charles Wright African American Museum, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS), American Citizens for Justice (an Asian American group), Casa de Unidad, and the American Indian Health and Family Services agency. 36


Milestones in Arab Immigration History Year

Event

1870’s

First Arab immigrants arrive in the United States.

1883

Kahlil Gibran, noted Lebanese immigrant and author, is born (dies 1931).

1892

First Arab American newspaper, Kawkab Amerika, is published.

1898

Maronites found newspaper called Al Hoda (the enlightener).

1948

The formation of the state of Israel creates a large Palestinian diaspora.

1961

Institute of Palestine Studies creates Maronite seminary (Our Lady of Lebanon) in Washington, D.C.

1967

Israeli victory in Six-Day War provides stimulus to Arab organizations to present their case to the American public.

1967

Professionals form Association of Arab American University Graduates.

1968

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinates Senator Robert Kennedy.

1972

Lobbying group National Association of Arab Americans is founded.

Mid-1970’s Lebanese civil war divides Arab Americans. 1978

Lisa Najeeb Halaby marries King Hussein of Jordan and assumes the name Queen Noor.

1982

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), a civil rights activist group, is organized.

1985

West Coast ADC leader Alex Odeh is assassinated.

1989

Council of Lebanese American Organizations, umbrella organization lobbying for Lebanese freedom and sovereignty, is founded.

1991

Educational outreach group, Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services, is created.

2001

Terrorist attacks on the United States raise American distrust of Arabs.

The first of the seven sessions in the annual program is an orientation, which is followed by five sessions that consist of seminars presented by members of each of the five major groups. Each group selects ten to fifteen of its leaders and members to organize and present an all-day, eight-hour program to members of the other four groups. These seminars feature lectures, discus37

Arab American stereotypes

sions, presentation of audiovisual materials, dissemination of literature, and other creative efforts to foster communication, mutual understanding, and friendship among the program participants. The seventh session is a summing up of the program and graduation ceremonies. The program is underwritten by the Ameritech Corporation. Participants have access to Web sites that deal with multicultural issues. The Multicultural Immersion Program has become a model for all American communities intent on fostering positive relations among minority groups and intergroup peace based on justice, mutual respect, and understanding. In 1997, the program had seventy graduates. R. M. Frumkin Further Reading A comprehensive overview of Arab American background can be found in Gregory Orfalea’s The Arab Americans: A Quest for Their History and Culture (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005). Clear pictures of Arab Americans and their struggles for an American identity are presented in The Development of Arab-American Identity, edited by Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004). The former work deals with Arab images and stereotypes created by the mass media, antiArab racism and violence, including the murder of two Yemeni immigrant workers, and many other relevant topics. Arab American women are discussed in Evelyn Shakir’s Bint Arab (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997). Barbara Aswad edited Arab-Speaking Communities in American Cities (New York: Center for Migration Studies of New York, 1974). Her book deals with Chaldeans, Arab Christians and Muslims, Lebanese and Syrian Arab Americans, and other significant topics related to Arab Americans. For additional titles, see Joan Nordquist’s Arab and Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern Origin: Social and Political Aspects—A Bibliography (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Reference and Research Services, 2003). See also Arab American stereotypes; Arab immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Muslims.

Arab American stereotypes Definition: North American perceptions and misperceptions about Arab immigrants Immigration issues: Discrimination; Middle Eastern immigrants; Stereotypes; Women 38


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Significance: American stereotypes of Arab immigrants are mostly negative and often confuse Arabs with other Middle Eastern peoples. Social scientists have not studied stereotypes of Arab Americans in as much detail as those of some other ethnic groups, probably because of the relatively small number of Arab Americans in the United States. Arab American stereotypes are revealed mostly through an examination of media coverage of events such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 1970’s civil war in Lebanon, and acts of terrorism involving Arabs—particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—and the depictions of Arabic-speaking people in American films and books. Although many stereotypes are of Arabs, not Arab Americans, the characteristics that are found in them are often attributed to Arab Americans. The Arab stereotype is predominantly a negative image, revolving around a number of overgeneralizations and falsehoods. Arabs have been portrayed in the media as oil millionaires buying up the United States, white slavers, and uncivilized rulers of kingdoms. Palestinians have been depicted as terrorists and called derogatory names such as camel jockeys, ragheads, and sandsuckers. Common misconceptions include the belief that Iranians are Arabs and that all Arabs are Muslims. 39


Before 1930, Hollywood studios frequently portrayed Arabs as members of the French Foreign Legion or royalty, Egyptians, and sheiks. Films from 1961 through 1970 depicted Arabs as royalty, murderers, sheiks, slaves, and slaveowners and often featured harems. Many of the roles incorporated elements designed to show the foreignness of the Arab culture and its supposed lack of civilization in comparison with mainstream American culture. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, acts of terrorism and conflicts in the Middle East caused Hollywood and the media to add violence and barbarism to the Arab stereotype. Arabs, particularly Arab men, were seen as anti-American, greedy, oilrich, uncivilized foreigners who were abductors of Western women and, as Muslims, oppressors of women in general. In the media and in film, Islam has been equated with violence, terrorism, and suppression of women. In order to counter the negative stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination experienced by Arab Americans, numerous scholars have published papers on the topic, and several organizations such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates, the Institute of Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee have been created to address these topics. One of the concerns about the negative stereotypes in the media is that they are not countered by positive portrayals. In particular, Arab American children are hardly present on television, and the Islamic religion is rarely depicted favorably. Francis C. Staskon Further Reading Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, ed. Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Elaasar, Aladdin. Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America. Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2004. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004. Nordquist, Joan. Arab and Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern Origin: Social and Political Aspects—A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Reference and Research Services, 2003. Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A Quest for Their History and Culture. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005. See also Arab American intergroup relations; Arab immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Muslims.

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Arab immigrants

Arab immigrants Identification: Immigrants from Arabic-speaking nations of the Middle East Immigration issues: Demographics; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion Significance: Arab Americans are an emerging group of U.S. citizens with an interest in the Middle East. The rise of Israel and Zionism have helped this group coalesce; however, Arab Americans have faced serious conflict with the influential American Jewish community. Arab Americans are U.S. citizens who have roots in Arabic-speaking countries. Because Arab Americans are internally divided by religion and country of origin, reliable statistics on this group are difficult to obtain. Moreover, given the strong commitment of the United States to Israel, many individuals are reluctant to identify themselves as Arab Americans. Between one million and three million Americans are of Arabic or part-Arabic descent, but estimates vary greatly because of poor statistics. Arab Americans are difficult to describe as a group because they often downplay or deny their ethnic origins in order to gain greater acceptance in an American mainstream that tends to stereotype them as “camel drivers” or probable terrorists and often compares their homelands unfavorably with the state of Israel. Arab Americans are generally included in the white category in U.S. Bureau of Census records, although on occasion some individuals may be classified as “other Asian.” In key urban areas such as Detroit, Michigan, Arab American shopkeepers and entrepreneurs have experienced clashes with the African American community. Definition and Overview Arab Americans are all non-Jewish individuals claiming ancestral roots in Arabic-speaking countries from Morocco to Syria and Saudi Arabia or Yemen with minor exceptions such as Chaldean- and Kurdish-speaking individuals. Americans unfamiliar with the Middle East often assume that all Muslims native to the region are Arabs. Therefore, Turkish and Iranian (Persian) Americans, who are Muslims but not ethnically Arabs, are often mistakenly believed to be Arab Americans. Arab Americans are far more likely to be Christian than are natives of their home countries, although a majority of Arab immigrants since the 1960’s have been Muslim. During the late 1990’s, the Arab American community was believed to be about half Christian and about half Muslim, with Christians being more acculturated and accepted in the United States. Arab American Christians often are indistinguishable from other Americans by the second generation, although Arab American Muslims form a more distinct group. Middle Eastern problems such as the Lebanese civil war during the 1970’s 41

Arab immigrants

have pitted Arab American Christians against Arab American Muslims. However, since the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, Arab Americans have begun to organize to confront hostile stereotypes in the press and discriminatory practices that often imperil their civil rights and employment opportunities. Arab American activists risk potentially serious conflict with the more established American Jewish community when they call on the U.S. government for an “even-handed” (that is, less pro-Israel) Middle East policy. However, both Arab Americans and American Jews may be able to serve as constructive bridges between the United States and the Middle East and help them return to the generally good relations enjoyed before 1948. Early History Early Arab American immigrants came to the United States between 1870 and World War I. Most Arabic-speaking individuals who immigrated to the United States during this period were subjects of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and immigration authorities often incorrectly called them Turks. Immigrants described as “other Asian” were in many cases Arabic-speaking. Arab immigrants during this period were predominantly Orthodox or Eastern Catholic (Uniate) Christians. They often identified themselves by their religious loyalties or local origins, and very few of these pioneers stressed their Arab identity. Most came from the area that later became Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and they frequently called themselves Syrian. Some immigrants were urban artisans and skilled laborers, but most were peasants, less than half of whom were literate in their native Arabic. Arab immigrants quickly became peddlers, and many participated very successfully in the free enterprise system. A minority among the Arab immigrant population turned to factory labor, but peddling allowed greater possibility for financial success and more opportunities to learn English and become acculturated. Some Arab American individuals established small businesses in cities and towns. Arab American communities grew in urban centers such as Boston, New York, and Detroit, and hard work produced success for many Arab Americans. Early immigrants did not bring clergy with them from the Middle East. Therefore, Arab American community leaders worked to secure clergy to serve their compatriots. Most Arab immigrant clergy were marginally educated and prone to sectarian and ethnic factionalism. However, Maronite, Melkite, and Orthodox Christian churches were organized in New York toward the end of the nineteenth century. Arab American newspapers thrived between 1892, when the first Arabic newspaper was established in New York, and the 1920’s. By the late 1920’s, the number of Arabic readers was in decline because immigration had been limited by the Immigration Act of 1924, and the children of earlier immigrants spoke only English. The children of both Christian and Muslim immigrants frequently married outside their ethnic groups, and many lost their Arab identity. 42

Arab immigrants

From the mid-1920’s to World War II, immigration declined. After the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the United States accepted significant although disputed numbers of Arab immigrants from all parts of the Arabic-speaking world. Most have been Muslims, and many have been educated professionals who originally entered the United States as students. New Arab groups, especially Egyptian Copts and Yemenites, have become important in the changing American cultural mosaic. Arab American Organizations Since the mid-1960’s, an era emphasizing multiculturalism and the rediscovery of ethnic roots, Arab Americans have sought to foster pride in their Middle Eastern heritage. Significant Arab American organizations include the Association of Arab American University Graduates (formed in 1967), the National Association of Arab Americans (1972), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1982), Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services (1991), the Council of Lebanese American Organizations (1989), the El Bireh Palestine Society of the USA (1981), and the Institute for Palestine Studies (1961). Because the Arab American community includes many well-educated professionals, the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) has been very active since its founding in 1967. This tax-exempt educational and cultural organization promotes understanding between the American and Arab worlds through an annual convention, a strong publication program, speakers, and support of human rights in the Middle East and else-

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Arab immigrants

where. In its early years, the AAUG attracted post-1948 immigrants while the National Association of Arab Americans gained more U.S.-born individuals. By the 1990’s, this distinction had largely disappeared. The program of the twenty-ninth annual convention during October, 1996, in Anaheim, California, illustrates the diversity of concerns of Arab Americans. Both Democratic and Republican speakers were present. The cultural and legal status of the Arab American community as well as its demographic makeup provided the focus for several sessions. The group also scheduled sessions on Palestinian issues and their connection to Arab Americans, the status of Arab American women, and studies of Arab American urban communities in the United States. The National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) lobbies Congress concerning issues of concern to Arab Americans. A February, 1996, statement by Khalil E. Jahshan, president of the NAAA, illustrates the group’s public profile. Jahshan addressed the Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request that the ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to Lebanon be lifted for both humanitarian and business reasons. In his statement, Jahshan spoke with pride of the work of Lebanese Americans in Congress and praised Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan and Representative Nick Joe Rahall of West Virginia for their support. The ban was lifted during the following year. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) confronts the civil rights issues facing the Arab American community. It has never had universal Arab American support because the head of the Maronite Catholic Church forbade its members from joining when the group did not support the Phalangist cause in the Lebanese civil war. However, since its founding by former South Dakota senator James Abourezk, a Lebanese American, the group has made significant progress on issues of concern to the Arab American community. To protect the civil rights of Arab Americans, the ADC’s department of legal services aids individuals who have experienced defamation and discrimination based on their Arab ethnicity. ADC wants the federal Office of Management and Budget to add a separate racial designation for Arab Americans to the record-keeping efforts of governmental agencies because it believes that Arab Americans are racially targeted and that anti-Arab hate crime is hard to document because it is difficult to separate relevant data regarding Arab Americans from data concerning other groups. In an attempt to combat negative portrayals of Arabs in the media, the ADC media and publications department publishes a bimonthly newsletter, ADC Times, as well as special reports and “action alerts” on issues of concern. In addition, the organization’s department of educational programs sponsors the ADC Research Institute, which encourages public school teachers to provide a balanced portrayal of Arab history and culture. Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services (AWAIR), founded in 1991, provides educational outreach at both the elementary and second44

Arab immigrants

ary school levels. To improve public understanding of the Arab world, this group conducts teacher training and provides a summer institute for teachers. To celebrate National History Day, this group donates an Arab and Islamic History Award. Book-length publications offer recommended curricula targeting both the elementary and the secondary school student. The Council of Lebanese American Organizations (CLAO), an umbrella organization, lobbies for freedom and sovereignty for Lebanon and the withdrawal of all foreign troops, both Israeli and Syrian. It provides the monthly report Adonis as well as a monthly newsletter Lebanon File. In addition, this Lebanese American organization offers the annual Cadmus Award. The El Bireh Palestine Society of the USA (EBPSUSA), founded in 1981, attempts to unite former residents of El Bireh now residing in the United States. It wishes to preserve traditional Arab culture and values in a new American environment and to facilitate contact among members. It offers educational and children’s services. By focusing on remembered ties to a locality, this group strengthens the local allegiances of its members. The Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), founded in 1961, is a research-oriented, nonprofit, independent organization formed to study the Arab-Israeli conflict and status of the Palestinians. The bestknown publication of IPS is the Journal of Palestine Studies: A Quarterly on Palestinian Affairs and the Arab Israeli Conflict. IPS also has an extensive list of publications in Arabic, English, and French. Despite the existence of these organizations, Arab Americans have continued to experience significant civil rights problems in education, employment, immigration law, and public accommodations. Moreover, whenever crises develop in the Middle East or terrorist acts such as the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 or the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, the Arab American community braces for significant hostility from the American population. At the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, members of the news media and others immediately speculated that Arab terrorists were the murderers but were later proved wrong. Hate Crimes and Targeting Issues The ADC uses the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) definition of a hate crime: a criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, ethnic/ national origin group, or sexual orientation group.

The situation after the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building was much graver than any that had occurred before. The fact that the perpetrators of the attacks were Arabs was almost immediately known, and incidents of hate crimes against Arab and Muslim Americans increased dramatically. During the first days following the attacks, incidents were reported from all over the United 45

Arab immigrants

States. Incidents included many violent attacks on mosques and Arab American community centers and assaults on people assumed to be from the Middle East—including many Asian Indians who were neither Middle Easterners nor Muslims. Among the hundreds of incidents reported shortly after September 11, a Middle Eastern store clerk in Alabama was beaten. In Anchorage, Alaska, vandals did several hundred thousand dollars in damage to a print shop owned by an Arab American. In Chicago, a firebomb was thrown at an Arab American community center, and windows were broken in an Arab Americanowned convenience store. In Indiana, a man wearing a ski mask fired an assault rifle at a Denton gas station at which an American citizen from Yemen was working. Another Indiana man rammed his car into Evansville’s Islamic Center. In California alone, more than seventy incidents of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim crimes were reported within the first ten days after the attacks. These incidents ranged from the painting of racist graffiti on schools and other locations and the stoning of several mosques to the burning down of a church with a predominantly Arab American congregation and violent assaults on individual persons. Perhaps more serious than these hate crime incidents is evidence of governmental targeting of individuals perceived to be Arab American or Muslim. Although the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) denies targeting Arab Americans or including Arab descent as part of its terrorist profile, Arab American individuals repeatedly face detention and interrogation at airports, an experience not shared by members of many other groups. Arab Americans are often deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under unusual legal provisions that allow the use of secret and unreliable evidence not subject to challenge. In a November 8, 1995, decision of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, eight Palestinians won a significant civil rights victory over INS efforts to deport them for their alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The court held that aliens had the same freedom-of-expression rights as United States citizens. Despite this success, Palestinian immigrants who protest Israeli actions such as the 1982 invasion of Lebanon remain vulnerable to deportation threats. Media Bias The Progressive Magazine documents anti-Arab media bias in an August, 1996, article entitled “Up Against the Wall,” detailing brutal U.S. Customs treatment of Arab women at the San Francisco airport. It also notes that both U.S. News and World Report and The New Republic incorrectly stated that the Prophet Muhammad advocated breaking treaties and broke the Treaty of Hudaybiah in 628. Only the first magazine retracted its error. Many Arab Americans see media bias against the Arab world and their poor treatment at the hands of U.S. government agencies as intertwined issues. Prominent Arab Americans From assassin to peacemaker, from author to queen, Arab Americans have achieved prominence in many fields. One of 46

Arab immigrants

the best-known Arab Americans is Lebanese-born artist and author Kahlil Gibran, who made a difficult cultural transition between a mountain village in late Ottoman Lebanon and turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston. Although he was active in many cultural fields, Gibran is best remembered today as the author of The Prophet (1923). Another well-known Arab American is Queen Noor of Jordan, the widow of King Hussein. She was born Lisa Najeeb Halaby in 1951, in the United States, to an Arab American family with Syrian roots. She received her B.A. in architecture and urban planning in 1974 as part of Princeton University’s first coeducational class. When she married King Hussein on June 15, 1978, she converted from Christianity to Islam. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. She has patronized many educational and cultural organizations in Jordan, and she has consistently exhibited an interest in work that enhances the welfare of women and children. Given her unique crosscultural perspective, Queen Noor has attempted to serve as a bridge between American and Arab cultures. She supported the establishment of the Jordanian society in Washington in 1980 to promote better understanding and closer relationships between the United States and Jordan. Two Arab Americans who have made their mark in politics are Spencer Abraham and George Mitchell. A conservative Republican, Abraham was elected to the U.S. Senate from Michigan in 1994. The Lebanese American Abraham received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University in 1974 and his J.D. from Harvard in 1979. After teaching at the Thomas J. Cooley School of Law from 1981 to 1983, he became Michigan Republican chair in 1983. He served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle from 1990 to 1991 and was cochair of the Republican National Committee from 1991 to 1993. He failed in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 2001, but president George W. Bush made him secretary of energy in 2001. Although he does not stress his Arab ancestry outside Detroit’s Arab community, Abraham has a strong interest in the Middle East. He values his family’s immigrant past and has worked hard to fight severe restrictions on new immigration. Mitchell, a Lebanese American born in Waterville, Maine, served as U.S. senator from Maine and Democratic majority leader during the 1980’s. As a diplomat in Northern Ireland during the administration of Bill Clinton, he helped negotiate a peace agreement between Roman Catholics and Protestants in 1998. Perhaps the most infamous Arab American is Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, born in Jersusalem on March 19, 1944. He became a resident of the United States in 1957 but remained an outsider who resented American economic and political aid to Israel. Angry over his family’s losses in the War of 1948 and U.S. policy supporting Israel, Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, the day that Kennedy won the Democratic presidential primary in California. In addition to killing Kennedy, Sirhan assaulted five other people. After receiving a death sentence, Sirhan had his sentence commuted to life in prison. His assassination of Kennedy may have changed the course of 47

Arab immigrants

U.S. political history because Kennedy appeared to have a realistic chance of receiving the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. At the time, the press described Sirhan as a Jordanian because the term “Palestinian” had not yet come into use. Arab American Churches The Antiochian Orthodox Church is based in Syria, although it is now increasingly active in the United States. Metropolitan Philip heads the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, headquartered in Englewood, New Jersey. Unlike most Arab Orthodox churches, the Antiochians do not focus solely on their own ethnic communities and Middle Eastern concerns. A notable example of Arab acculturation to life in the United States, this Arab-based church has sought and received the membership of many non-Arab Americans, including a significant number of former Episcopalians unhappy with what they perceive as liberal trends in belief and practice in the Episcopal Church. The Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate-Archdiocese of North America, an Egyptian-based group, owes allegiance to H. H. Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt. The North American bishop is H. G. Bishop Surial, who resides in New Jersey, home to a Coptic seminary. The Egyptian Copts practice a form of Eastern Orthodoxy that dates from antiquity. They are generally considered the descendants of the ancient Egyptians because Egypt was Coptic Christian before it became Muslim. Maronite Catholics are an Eastern Rite church that has been in full communion with Rome since the sixteenth century. Lebanese immigrants have brought the Maronite Church to the United States from its native Lebanon. The Maronites are notable for their married clergy. Maronite parishes exist in Austin, Texas; Detroit; New York City; Washington, D.C.; and other U.S. cities. Our Lady of Lebanon Seminary in Washington, D.C., established in 1961, is the only Maronite Catholic seminary outside Lebanon. Priests from twentyfour American Maronite Catholic churches participated in the foundation of the seminary. During the Lebanese civil war in the 1970’s, the Maronites in the United States and the Middle East allied with Israel. This caused severe conflict with other Arab American groups, especially those strongly supporting the Palestinian struggle for statehood. Susan A. Stussy Further Reading A comprehensive overview of Arab American background can be found in Gregory Orfalea’s The Arab Americans: A Quest for Their History and Culture (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005). The Arab American Directory (2d ed. Alexandria, Va.: Arab Media House, 1997) provides a comprehensive view of the Arab American community in Washington, D.C. “Up Against the Wall” in the August, 1996, issue of The Progressive illustrates media bias against Arabs and Muslims. Michael W. Suleiman’s “Arab Americans: A Community Profile,” in Islam in North America: A Sourcebook, ed48

Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants

ited by Michael A. Koszegi and J. Gordon Melton (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), surveys the nineteenth and twentieth century Arab American experience. “Ninth Circuit: Aliens Have First Amendment Rights,” in The National Law Journal (November 27, 1995), describes the Palestinian Los Angeles Eight’s fight against the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Jean Gibran and Kahlil Gibran’s Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World (New York: Interlink Books, 1991) shows how an immigrant from an isolated and impoverished village in Lebanon became an important cultural figure in turn-of-thetwentieth-century Boston. Issues of Arab American identity and challenges to their rights in post-September 11, 2001, America are discussed in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004) and Aladdin Elaasar’s Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America (Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2004). For studies of major Arab communities in two states, see Janice Marschner’s California’s Arab Americans: A Prequel to California, An International Community Understanding Our Diversity (Sacramento, Calif.: Coleman Ranch Press, 2003) and Rosina J. Hassoun’s Arab Americans in Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003). Arab American literature is the subject of Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004), edited by Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa. For additional titles, see Joan Nordquist’s Arab and Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern Origin: Social and Political Aspects—A Bibliography (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Reference and Research Services, 2003). See also Arab American intergroup relations; Arab American stereotypes; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Muslims.

Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants Identification: Jewish immigrants to North America from Germany and central and eastern Europe Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Religion Significance: These earliest Jewish immigrants to the United States have formed the predominant part of the nation’s Jewish American population. 49


During the second half of the seventeenth century, German and Ashkenazic Jews from the central and eastern European countries of Germany (Holy Roman Empire), Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to North America by a variety of routes. Ashkenazic Jews are Jews from eastern Europe who spoke Yiddish and lived in separate enclaves, or ghettos, mainly in modern-day Russia and the Baltic countries outside Germany. Some came to America after the Dutch lost control of Brazil in 1654, and others came directly to New Amsterdam before it was added to the British Empire by the duke of York, after whom it was renamed New York City. New York City was the first Immigrants reading sacred texts on the Jewish new year to allow Jews to build a house of worship and purchase land in 1907 in New York City. (Library of Congress) for a cemetery. Although individual Jews and Jewish families can be found in the early colonial records of all of the thirteen original colonies, Charleston, South Carolina, was home to the largest Jewish community. Mediterranean Jews were predominant, although all of the colonial American Jewish congregations had large percentages of Ashkenazic and German Jews who came to the British North American colonies with the aide of London and Caribbean merchants. After the American Revolution, immigration increased slowly, and by the 1830 U.S. Census, the Jewish population had reached nearly 3,000, predominantly Ashkenazic and German Jews. The European Enlightenment, the passage of laws preventing Jews from entering professions and leaving their ghettos, and new taxes, combined with the unsuccessful revolution in Poland and throughout central and eastern Europe in 1836, brought a dramatic increase in emigration by German-speaking Jews throughout the 1840’s and 1850’s. By the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, there were 150,000 Jewish Americans, more than 90 percent of whom were Ashkenazic and German Jews. During this era, large numbers of trained rabbis came to the United States, and denominational divisions followed. In 1834, German Jews seeking to anglicize the liturgical service founded Charleston’s Society of Reformed Is50


raelites. Isaac Leeser, the promoter of the Jewish Sunday School movement, anticipated the Conservative Jewish movement that emerged later in the century. This era also saw the publication of several Jewish periodicals, including one by Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, which became a springboard for the creation of the first Jewish seminary and the establishment of the reformed Union of American Hebrew Congregations. From the middle of the nineteenth century to its final decade, the influence of German Jews in business and in Jewish social, cultural, and religious life reached its apex. The German Jewish community began to seek recognition of its expanding economic success, creating a separation between the German Jews and the later-arriving Ashkenazic Jews from Russia, which led to more sectarian and social divisions within the Jewish religious and secular communities. As new immigration expanded the number of American Jews beyond the four million mark, American “popularism” and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan during World War I led to the passage of a series of immigration acts, the last of which (Immigration Act of 1924) changed the base year for computing national immigration quotas from 1920 to 1890 and had the greatest impact on Jewish immigration. The decrease in new immigration meant that the German and Ashkenazic Jewish groups would continue to be the dominant group in the Jewish American population. Jewish Americans numbered nearly six million during World War II, and in the second half of the twentieth century, their numbers did not increase. Sheldon Hanft Further Reading Cohen, Naomi Werner. Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984. Scholarly study of the reaction of this group to legal equality and citizenship. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Sterba, Christopher M. The Melting Pot Goes to War: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in America’s Great Crusade, 1917-1919. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1999. See also American Jewish Committee; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

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Asian American education

Asian American education Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Education; Japanese immigrants Significance: Asian Americans have gained a reputation for high educational achievement. To some extent, this reputation reflects actual performance, and this performance has been part of the debate about why ethnic and racial groups vary in educational achievement. The educational achievements of Asian Americans have attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention. Popular interest in Asian American educational performance often involves comparing this group with members of other minority groups, heightening the perception of Asian Americans as members of a so-called model minority, a stereotype that often makes Asian Americans uncomfortable. Scholars interested in immigrants, minority groups, and influences on education have studied the educational performance of various Asian American groups in order to obtain insight into how immigrant membership and minority group membership may be related to achievement in school. Levels of Achievement Although it is difficult to discuss the educational performance of such a diverse group, Asian Americans do seem to show overall levels of achievement that are quite high. Moreover, they begin to distinguish themselves educationally at fairly early ages. In an analysis of 1980 U.S. Census data presented in their book Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States (1993), Herbert Barringer, Robert W. Gardner, and Michael J. Levin noted that Asian Americans showed high rates of preschool attendance. This was particularly true for Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Asian Indians. The 1990 U.S. Census showed this pattern continuing. About 24 percent of all Asian American children under six years of age were enrolled in school, compared with 21 percent of white children. Among Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Thai American children, rates of early school attendance were particularly high, with 27 percent of Chinese, 31 percent of Taiwanese, 31 percent of Japanese, and 30 percent of Thai children under six years of age enrolled in school. School enrollment, however, is not the same thing as school performance. However, data from the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study show that as early as the eighth grade, Asian American children display higher levels of educational aspiration than other American children. According to these data, 43 percent of Asian American children reported that they aspired to education beyond a bachelor’s degree, while only 25 percent of white eighth-graders wanted to pursue postgraduate education. 52


Asian American children are more likely than other American students to reach high school and stay in high school. Less than 6 percent of Asian Americans age sixteen to nineteen were high school dropouts in 1990, compared with nearly 7 percent of white Americans and 16 percent of African Americans. There were substantial variations among Asian groups; however, only the three most economically underprivileged Southeast Asian refugee groups (Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian Americans) showed dropout rates that were higher than those of white Americans, and all of the Asian American groups had dropout rates that were lower than those of African Americans. College entrance examinations are among the most commonly used indicators of high school performance. Although breakdowns by particular Asian groups are not available, the scores of Asian Americans in general were as high as the scores of any other racial group or higher. On the American College Test (ACT), for example, the average Asian American score was 21.7, equal to the average score for whites and higher than the average score for African Americans (17.1). The average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score for Asian Americans, 1056, was higher than that for members of any other racial or ethnic group, including white Americans (1052). Asian Americans tended to score much higher than white Americans on the math part of the test (560 for Asians, compared with 536 for whites) and substantially lower on the verbal part of the test (496 for Asians, compared with 526 for whites). This suggests that Asian American scores would have been even higher had many of them not been hampered by relatively weaker English proficiency.

Students of a Chinese school in New York City around 1910. (Library of Congress)

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Asian Americans were more likely than either white Americans or African Americans to be enrolled in college in 1990. Although 29 percent of whites and 23 percent of African Americans age eighteen to twenty-five were attending college in that year, 46 percent of Asian Americans in this age category were enrolled in higher education. Once again, there were substantial variations among Asian American groups, but only the Hmong and the Laotian Americans, two of the most recent and most economically underprivileged Asian American groups, showed lower rates of college enrollment than the majority white population. Theories of Asian Educational Achievement According to researchers Stanley Sue and Sumie Okazaki, in their 1990 article “Asian American Educational Achievement,” published in the American Psychologist, theorists have usually attributed Asian American school achievement either to innate, genetic characteristics of Asians or to cultural characteristics. Genetic explanations address the problem by citing the performance of Asians on intelligence quotient (IQ) tests and other measures of ability as evidence of higher levels of innate intellectual ability among Asians. Psychologist Richard Lynn has argued that Asian scores on aptitude tests and IQ tests provide evidence for a genetic explanation of Asian academic achievement. Cultural explanations of Asian American scholastic success have received wider acceptance than genetic explanations. From this point of view, Asian American families pass on cultural values that stress hard work and educational excellence. Looking at Vietnamese American children, Nathan Caplan, Marcella H. Choy, and John K. Whitmore maintained that Vietnamese families passed on cultural values to their children that enabled the children to do well in school. One difficulty with applying this explanation to Asian Americans in general is that the different Asian groups come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. To address the difficulties raised by both the genetic and cultural explanations, Sue and Okazaki put forward the theory of “relative functionalism” in their 1990 article. According to this theory, Asian success is to be explained by blocked mobility: As a result of barriers to upward mobility by other means, such as social networks, Asians tend to focus on education. Although blocked mobility may influence the life choices of Asians, it would not account for trends in other groups that also experience blocked mobility but do not show the levels of academic performance characteristic of Asians. Sociologists Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III have argued that Asian American educational success may, to some extent, be a consequence of the types of social relations found in Asian American communities. They have claimed that tightly knit ethnic communities, such as Chinatowns or Southern California’s Little Saigon, can promote the upward mobility of young people by subjecting them to the expectations of all community members and by providing them with encouragement and support from all community members. This explanation, though, does not tell us why Asian Americans 54


who do not live in ethnic communities may sometimes be high achievers in school. The precise causes of Asian American educational achievement, then, remain a matter of debate. In all likelihood, some combination of existing theories may account for the scholastic performance of this group, with some theories applying more to some specific groups than to others. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading James R. Flynn’s Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991) provides an overview of Asian American academic achievement and provides a useful introduction for those interested in this subject. In Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), Vivian S. Louie focuses on the academic achievements of Chinese Americans. My Trouble Is English: Asian Students and the American Dream (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook, 1995) offers insight into the importance of education as a means of upward mobility for Asian American students and into the challenges faced by many of these students. Stacey J. Lee’s Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996) investigates the motivations and problems of Asian American students. The educational achievements of children of refugees from Southeast Asia are described in Children of the Boat People (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1991). In Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (New York: Russell Sage, 1998), Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III examine the experiences of Vietnamese children in American schools and compare Vietnamese American students with students of other Asian and non-Asian ethnicities. For broader studies of Asian American youth, see Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2004), edited by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou; Stacey J. Lee’s Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth (New York: Teachers College Press, 2005); and H. Mark Lai’s Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004). For broader perspective on immigrant education, see Educating New Americans: Immigrant Lives and Learning (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1999), by Donald F. Hones and Cher Shou Cha; Overlooked and Underserved: Immigrant Students in U.S. Secondary Schools (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2000), by Jorge Ruiz de Velasco and Michael Fix; and Immigrants, Schooling, and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), edited by Hans Vermeulen and Joel Perlmann. The latter volume is a collection of papers from a 1996 conference on culture and worldwide immigration that was held in Amsterdam. See also Amerasians; Asian American literature; Assimilation theories; Bilingual education; Model minorities. 55

Asian American Legal Defense Fund

Asian American Legal Defense Fund Identification: Asian American rights advocacy organization Date: Founded in 1974 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants Significance: The Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDF) organization formed to defend and promote the legal rights of Asian Americans through litigation, legal advocacy, community education, leadership development, and free legal assistance for low-income and immigrant Asian Americans. The Asian American Legal Defense Fund is headquartered in New York City, and the executive director in 1998 was Margaret Fung, an Asian American lawyer. The AALDF was organized to help relieve the effects of racial prejudice and social discrimination experienced by Asian and Pacific Americans. Many individuals from the diverse Asian American population have attained middle-class status, and a select few have entered upper-level management within major United States corporations. However, in wages and career advancement, Asian Americans generally lag behind their white counterparts. The AALDF addresses these and other grievances by educating Asian American communities, particularly in the election process of the United States. Furthermore, to encourage voter participation, the AALDF has fostered the use of bilingual ballots and voter material in the United States. Asian Americans cast a significant number of votes in key electoral states such as California and major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Alvin K. Benson Further Reading Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. See also Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

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Asian American literature

Asian American literature Definition: Fiction, essays, and other works written by Americans of Asian ancestry Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Japanese immigrants; Literature Significance: Asian American literature is usually based on themes that touch on the authors’ cultural heritages. These works, which first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, have enabled Asian Americans to identify with their own cultural heritage and have helped others to better understand their culture and experiences. The first published Asian American writers were two sisters, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton) and Onoto Watanna (Winifred Eaton), the daughters of British planter Edward Eaton and his Chinese wife, Lotus Blossom. Critics have accused Sui Sin Far of presenting stereotypical descriptions of the Chinese and of Chinatown, but in fact, through her collection of short stories Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), she portrayed the discrimination and psychic pain that Chinese immigrants endured. In novels such as Heart of Hyacinth (1904), Onoto Watanna wrote of love affairs between Asian women and white men in which her Asian women protagonists always accepted the superiority of their Western lovers. She chose a Japanese-sounding name for her pen name because at the time, although the American public discriminated against the Japanese, they viewed them more favorably than the Chinese, stereotyping them as harder working and more intelligent. Before World War II, several Asian American writers described their experiences growing up in the United States. One book, Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937), offers a humorous look at the life of a young Korean American and pokes fun at white people’s prejudices. After World War II, several Japanese Americans published books about the internment camps and other wartime experiences. In The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida (1972), nisei (second-generation Japanese American) Jim Yoshida, who was in Japan when World War II broke out, relates how he was forced to serve in the Imperial Army and had to sue to regain U.S. citizenship after the war. In No-No Boy (1957), John Okada, another nisei, writes about the hysteria that he experienced in wartime America, and in the award-winning book Obasan (1981), Joy Kogawa describes her life in a Canadian World War II internment camp. The 1960’s and 1970’s During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Civil Rights and women’s movements inspired many minority groups to become active politically and to become more aware of their heritage. This heightened activity 57


and awareness resulted in the publication of more works by Asian Americans, which helped others to understand and respect them. In 1972, the first anthology of Asian American literature, Asian-American Authors, edited by Kai-Yu Hsu and Helen Palubinskas, was published. This anthology includes works from only three Asian American groups—Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino—and gives priority to writers born in America, such as Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong. However, other anthologies soon followed, broadening the spectrum of Asian American writers to include Americans of Korean, Southeast Asian, and Indian ancestry and immigrants such as Chitra Divakaruni. In 1972, The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first play by an Asian American, Frank Chin, to receive critical acclaim in New York. Asian American literature received widespread recognition with the publication in 1976 of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Kingston uses ancient Chinese stories to develop her best-selling novel around the character of Fa Mulan, a woman warrior. This work, like many others by Asian American writers, incorporates elements of traditional Asian mythology and culture. It also illustrates the effect that the Civil Rights and women’s movements have had on literature produced by members of minority groups. Common Themes During the 1970’s and 1980’s, various demographic trends, such as increased immigration from Asia and Mexico, helped the United States become much more multicultural, and more Asian American writers felt encouraged to explore Asian themes. Although Asia is a large con-

Frank Chin, the author of The Chickencoop Chinaman, the first play by an Asian American to be produced. (Corky Lee)

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tinent with many languages, cultures, and religions, certain themes and elements appear to be common in Asian American literature. These include the balance between dark and light and between masculine and feminine; conflicts between ancient heritage, familial obligations, and contemporary (often Western) lifestyles; and the effects of immigration. After Kingston’s work became popular, there was widespread appreciation for novelists, poets, dramatists, and essayists of Asian ancestry. Many Asian American women have written of the cultural conflicts that women experience when they move Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club. (Robert from traditional Asian cultures to the Foothorap) more liberal American culture. Velina Hasu Houston explores this theme in a 1985 trilogy, Asa ga Kimashita, American Dream, and Tea, whose main characters are Japanese war brides who have to cross traditional boundaries in order to survive in their new environment. In Arranged Marriages (1995), Indian-born poet Divakaruni presents images of the adjustment problems that many women from traditional Indian backgrounds have in American society. Asian American writers also have explored familial obligations and tensions. In “Seventeen Syllables” (1994), Hisaye Yamamoto explores the tensions created within Japanese American families when traditional cultural expectations clash with contemporary lifestyles. In Clay Walls (1986), a novel by Korean American Kim Ronyoung, the issue of obligation to family is explored as the wife and mother ruins her eyes doing embroidery work to support her family after her husband loses all their money gambling. Some Asian American writers based their stories on the immigrant experience, as did Wakako Yamauchi in her novel And the Soul Shall Dance (1977) and Fred Ho in the play Chinaman’s Chance (1987). In Honey Bucket (1979), Filipino American Mel Escueta explores the issue of identity, attempting to deal with the guilt he felt after killing Asians during the Vietnam War. Frank Chin uses stereotypes in the humorous novel Donald Duk (1991), as does David Henry Hwang in his Tony Award-winning play M Butterfly (1988). Perhaps after Kingston, who made the American public aware of Asian American literature, Chinese American Amy Tan is the writer who has done the most to popularize the genre. Tan rose to public attention with the publication of her novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989. She won both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times book award that year. Tan turned her novel into a screenplay for the 1993 film The Joy Luck Club. She has objected to hav59

Asian American stereotypes

ing her work described as Asian American literature because she believes that the themes in her work, which include male-female relationships and family obligations, are universal. Nevertheless, Tan’s themes arise from an experience that may be termed Asian American: the balance between male and female; clashes between traditional cultures and contemporary lifestyles; struggles with familial obligations; and identity and spirituality issues. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading King-kok Cheung edited An Interpretive Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling edited Reading the Literature of Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). Judith Caesar explored Asian American themes in “Patriarchy, Imperialism, and Knowledge in The Kitchen God’s Wife ” in North Dakota Quarterly (62, no. 4, 19941995). Asian American literature is discussed in Sucheng Chann’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991). For a discussion of the treatment of immigration in seventeen novels written for children, see Ruth McKoy Lowery’s Immigrants in Children’s Literature (New York: P. Lang, 2000). Broader issues of Asian American identity are covered in Migration and Identity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005), edited by Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, and Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2004), edited by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou. The sixvolume Asian American Encyclopedia (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), edited by Franklin Ng, covers all aspects of the Asian American experience, with many articles on individual writers and related topics. See also Asian American education; Asian American stereotypes; Asian Indian immigrants; Asian Indian immigrants and family customs; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Japanese immigrants; Literature; Southeast Asian immigrants.

Asian American stereotypes Definition: North American perceptions and misperceptions about Asian immigrants and Asian Americans Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Japanese immigrants; Nativism and racism; Stereotypes 60


Significance: The hard work and thriftiness that have contributed to the success of Asian Americans have, at times, caused members of other ethnic and racial groups to feel threatened. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Asian immigrants and their offspring were often called threats to American society and were viewed by white Americans as a group that could not be assimilated. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, millions of Americans of Asian ancestry lived in the United States; however, some of the old negative stereotypes and attitudes about them persisted. Many fourth-generation Asian Americans were identified as Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and so on) rather than as “American.” The Chinese, who first immigrated to the United States during the midnineteenth century, were willing to work for low wages, which got them jobs but also made them the objects of white workers’ jealousy and anger. On the West Coast, where many of the immigrants had settled, many white workers blamed Chinese immigrants for their economic woes. They called the Chinese laborers “coolies,” a derogatory term, and claimed that they were of inferior character and could not be assimilated into American culture. This general climate of blame coupled with the desire of white nativists to limit immigration, and many discriminatory laws (such as the 1862 California law, An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition from Chinese Coolie Labor) were passed against the Chinese immigrants. Many of these laws were later employed against immigrants from other Asian countries. As the Chinese immigrants moved beyond California, white workers in area after area spoke out against them, claiming that their willingness to work for meager wages would ruin all Americans’ standard of living. In 1885, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a white mob drove Chinese workers out of town and burned their homes, killing twenty-eight Chinese immigrants in the process. Transfer of Prejudice Although the Chinese were excluded from immigration by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, other Asians—Japanese, Koreans, and Indians—did arrive in the United States. From 1900 to 1910, about 100,000 Japanese arrived on the West Coast. These immigrants tended to be better educated than the earlier Chinese immigrants had been. Nevertheless, white Americans on the West Coast, particularly in California, expressed alarm at their arrival, again claiming that the Japanese could never be assimilated into American society. The press and politicians claimed that a Japanese invasion was taking place and began to speak of the “yellow peril,” which they said posed a threat to the American way of life and might result in the United States being taken over by the Japanese. In 1924, Congress passed an immigration act that barred nearly all immigration from Asia. Only Filipinos were allowed to immigrate because as citizens of the Philippines, they could become U.S. citizens. However, during the late 1920’s and during the Depression of the 1930’s, trade unions wanted Fili61


pino immigration banned, claiming the Filipino laborers’ willingness to work cheaply was undercutting the American standard of living. Filipinos were called a “mongrel stream” that could not be assimilated. Union members urged the government to ship Filipinos back to the Philippines. Asians During and After World War II By the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, two generations of Japanese Americans were living in the United States and Canada: the issei, the original immigrants, and their children, the nisei. Some Japanese American families had been in North America for more than fifty years. Nevertheless, both the Canadian and the United States governments assumed that these Japanese Americans would not be loyal to them and placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps until the end of World War II. Immigrants who came to the United States under the quota system, established by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 were often professionals, tending to be more affluent than earlier immigrants and far less likely to live in ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns or Koreatowns. This new group of professional immigrants and their offspring gave the United States a new Asian American stereotype—the smart achiever. In 1965, the quota system was abolished, allowing much more immigration from Asia. During the mid-1970’s, large numbers of people from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam entered as refugees from the conflict in Southeast Asia. Many of these people, particularly the Hmong from Laos, were uneducated. Political leaders began to object to the entrance of refugees, claiming that their education and skill levels made it difficult for them to assimilate because they could not learn to read and write in English. It was also claimed that they took jobs away from Americans. Such stereotyping contributed to the English-only movement and passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Stereotypes and Resentment In the last decade of the twentieth century, household incomes for Asian American families and educational levels for Asian American adults were generally higher than those of the general American population. New resentments and stereotypes emerged. In the cities, this resentment was often directed toward shop owners and landlords of Asian ancestry. These shop owners were often stereotyped as mercenary and racist, particularly by some African Americans, such as the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, who likened the affluent Asian Americans to the Jewish landlords and shop owners of the mid-twentieth century. This resentment was portrayed in Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing (1989), which foreshadowed some of the violence directed toward shop owners of Korean ancestry during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Although people of Asian and Pacific islander heritage represented about 4 percent of the U.S. population in 1999, they made up 8 to 10 percent of enrollment in Ivy League institutions. Students of Asian heritage made up 62

Asian American women

35 to 40 percent of the student bodies at some universities in the University of California system, although the percentage of African American and Latino students fell from the early 1990’s. This situation created resentment against Asian Americans and placed pressure on young Asian Americans to conform to the stereotype of Asian Americans as superior students. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading The subject of stereotyping is discussed in Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2004), edited by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou. William L. Tung’s The Chinese in America, 18201973 (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Press, 1974) gives a detailed record and chronology of Chinese Americans’ experiences from 1820 to 1973. Other useful books include The Japanese Americans, The Korean Americans, The Chinese Americans, The Filipino Americans, and The Indo-Chinese Americans, all part of the Peoples of North America series, edited by Nancy Toff (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as senior consulting editor to the series. The six-volume Asian American Encyclopedia (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), edited by Franklin Ng, covers all aspects of Asian American history and life. See also Arab American stereotypes; Asian American literature; Asian American women; Asian Indian immigrants and family customs; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Irish stereotypes; Japanese immigrants; Southeast Asian immigrants.

Asian American women Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Demographics; Families and marriage; Japanese immigrants; Women Significance: During the 1990’s, Asian American women belonged to the fastest-growing group of minorities in the United States and Canada. According to 1999 projections by the U.S. Census, the total number of Asian Americans and Pacific islanders in the United States more than doubled from the 1980 census figure of 3.4 million. Despite this rapid population growth, Asians in the United States, as in Canada, accounted for less than 5 percent of the population. Demographics There is growing awareness that Asian Americans come from many different backgrounds, not simply Chinese and Japanese ones. Al63


though the 1990 census reported twenty-eight different Asian American groups, the focus of much of the literature has been on the eight largest or more recently controversial and influential groups: Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong. Approximately 66 percent of Asian Americans in the United States live in five states: California, New York, Hawaii, Texas, and Illinois. They also have a tendency to congregate and concentrate in a few cities: Chicago, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. In general, Asian American men had higher rates of graduation from a high school or higher institution than women in 1990, 82 percent versus 74 percent. Among the various groups of women, however, disparities exist in terms of completion rates. A high school or higher educational level had been obtained by 86 percent of Japanese American women but only 19 percent of Hmong American women. Asian American women had a higher labor force participation rate than all women. In 1990, 60 percent of Asian American women were in the labor force, compared with 57 percent of all women in the United States. The diversity in origins and cultural backgrounds of Asian Americans has made it difficult to speak of an Asian American culture that ties all these groups together. Nevertheless, common themes can be found in the experiences of women who must struggle constantly with the social burden not only of their race but also of their gender and their class. Reasons for Coming to America Historically, it is difficult to speak of Asian American immigrant women, because there were relatively few of them. Restrictions on Chinese and Japanese men bringing their wives to American shores led to the phenomenon of bachelor men and picture brides. In addition to legal restrictions, cultural deterrents kept Asian women from venturing abroad: “Respectable” women did not travel far from home; the only women to do so were maids and prostitutes. Those Asian women who were able to immigrate labored under hard physical conditions and were often callously treated. In many cases, however, leaving their home country was these women’s only alternative to poverty, war, and persecution. Some of the most recent arrivals to the United States—Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—came as refugees of wars in their homelands. Still other Asian women came in search of adventure and the excitement of living in a new country, especially those from more affluent families and those who were well educated. Yet, no matter what their original status in their native countries, Asian American women have often encountered a hostile society in the West. Even those who have been living in the United States or Canada for many years or decades have not been spared this hostility. Moreover, Asian American women born in the West are not guaranteed fair treatment. Many immigrant Asian women are faced with financial hardships, violence, and social ostracism, forcing them to learn survival skills in order to adapt to life in a new 64


country. Some have adjusted quite well to the new environment, while others have not. Issues of Concern Asian American women have to some degree helped perpetuate the myth of Asian Americans as a model minority since, as wives and mothers, they socialize their families—using a cultural emphasis on education, hard work, and thrift—to excel in earnings, education, and occupational status. Such goals often set Asian Americans apart from other ethnic groups and can lead to jealousy, resentment, and discrimination. Despite the hard work and self-sacrifice of many Asian American women, however, disparity often exists between striving and achievement. Many newer immigrants must contend with a lack of communication because of poor English-speaking skills. Asian American women have acquired a reputation for being conscientious and industrious but docile, compliant, and uncomplaining as well. The necessity of a paycheck relegates some to work as hotel room cleaners, waitresses, cooks, shop clerks, and electronics assemblyline workers. Some postpone learning English and as a result may never leave their entry-level jobs. In general, Asian American women with college educations are concentrated in limited, less prestigious rungs of the professional-managerial class. Professionally, Japanese women typically become elementary or secondary school teachers and Filipinas become nurses. In 1980, Asian American women with four or more years of college were most likely to find jobs in administrative support or clerical occupations, such as cashiers, file clerks, office machine operators, and typists. They are overrepresented in these jobs, many of which not only have low prestige, low mobility, and low public contact but also offer little or no decision-making authority. Executive managerial status is limited to such occupations as auditors and accountants. Asian American women are least represented in the more prestigious professions: physicians, judges, dentists, law professors, and lawyers. Thus, Asian American women in general are poorly represented in higher-level management and leadership positions and experience the “glass ceiling,” which often prevents women and minorities from rising above a certain job level. The fact that Asian American women do not reap the income and other benefits one might expect given their high levels of educational achievement raises questions about the reasons for such inequality. To what extent is this situation attributable to self-imposed limitations related to cultural modesty, the absence of certain social and interpersonal skills required for upper-managerial positions, institutional factors beyond their control, or outright discrimination? The number of Asian American women turning to mainstream politics, running for office, or working in politics is increasing. The Civil Rights and antiwar movements motivated many younger Asian American women to become politically active over issues of discrimination because of race, sex, or place of origin. During the 1960’s, the first wave of Asian American feminism focused on empowering these women economically, socially, and politically. 65


The second wave of activism during the 1980’s focused on working with specific women’s groups as support networks for women of color. Some Asian American women became involved in assisting the homeless and the poor (many of whom are elderly immigrants), nuclear disarmament efforts, and the international issues of freedom in the Philippines and Korea and the sex trade in Asia. Many conflicts still need to be resolved. Some tension exists in the Asian American community between new arrivals and long-term residents or citizens, between native-born and foreign-born members, and between the professional and working classes. New arrivals still look to Asia for reference, while the U.S.-born tend to view the world from an American perspective. The established working class views the new arrivals as competitors for the same scarce resources. The established professionals look askance at those with limited English proficiency and their culturally ill-at-ease immigrant counterparts. Professionals dissociate themselves from the residents of ethnic ghettos in Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and Japantowns. Working-class Asian Americans view the professionals’ tendency to speak for the community with suspicion. The chasm between traditional Asian familial values and mainstream values has brought conflict for Asian American women. In order to be effective, they must be aggressive, but such an approach is contrary to traditional Asian feminine values of passivity and subordination. They must be highly visible and public, contrary to the values of modesty and moderation. Thus, the Asian American woman pressured to conform to traditional female roles must overcome a number of barriers in the attempt to adjust to the American environment. Cecilia G. Manrique Further Reading George Anthony Peffer’s If They Don’t Bring Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) focuses on one major aspect of the experience of female Asian immigrants. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, is a collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes chapters on Filipino and Vietnamese immigrants. Additional sources of information about Asian Americans include Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s The State of Asian America (Boston: South End Press, 1994), Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels’s Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), Tricia Knoll’s Becoming Americans: Asian Sojourners, Immigrants, and Refugees in the Western United States (Portland: Coast to Coast Books, 1982), Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), and William Wei’s The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American 66

Asian Indian immigrants

Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989) is a collection of writings by Asian women edited by the Asian Women United of California. The six-volume Asian American Encyclopedia (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), edited by Franklin Ng, covers all aspects of Asian American society. See also Amerasians; Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Filipino immigrants; Garment industry; Japanese immigrants; Mail-order brides; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Page law; Picture brides; Southeast Asian immigrants; Thai garment worker enslavement; War brides; Women immigrants.

Asian Indian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the South Asian nation of India Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics Significance: The more than one million people of Asian Indian origin or descent living in the United States have contributed significantly to their adopted nation. The Asian Indian community contains a large proportion of well-educated, affluent, highly motivated people. Emigration out of South Asia has been a dominant behavioral pattern since the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1700 b.c.e.). The impact of merchants and Buddhist missionaries from India is evident today in Central and East Asia, where Indian mythology, dance, and theater have had lasting effects. Movement from western India to Africa dates back to the second century c.e. Small-scale movement changed to mass emigration as Indians provided cheap labor for British colonies, many becoming indentured servants. The result was a diaspora of nine million Indians scattered throughout the British Empire but concentrated in places with labor-intensive economies, especially plantation systems, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, and East Africa. Widescale migration to the United States, Australia, and Canada developed during the 1960’s, largely because changes in immigration regulations removed existing racial barriers. The oil-rich Middle East has become a focus for South Asian immigration since 1970. Coming to America Initially, Asian Indians came to the United States as sea captains and traders during the 1790’s, actively pursuing trade between India and North America. A very few came as indentured laborers. By 1900, 67


Sikh immigrants posing for a group portrait in 1910. (California State Library)

the United States was home to about two thousand Indians, including about five hundred merchants, several dozen religious teachers, and some medical professionals. Six thousand Indians entered the United States through the West Coast between 1907 and 1917, but another three thousand were barred entry. Many of these immigrants came from Canada, where they had faced hostilities, only to meet with the same sort of treatment in the United States. Most immigrants from India during this period originated from Punjab and were adherents of the Sikh faith. As Indian immigration increased, anti-Asian violence on the West Coast began to target Indians. Discriminatory laws were passed, prohibiting them from owning land and being eligible for U.S. citizenship. In fact, the Immigration Act of 1917 is sometimes referred to as the Indian Exclusion Act. The hostile environment, along with the Great Depression of the 1930’s, resulted in several thousand immigrants returning to India. Therefore, in 1940, only 2,405 Asian Indians were living in the United States, mostly around Yuba City, California. After World War II, new legislation gave Asian Indians the rights to become citizens and own land and established a quota of 100 immigrants per year, allowing for family reunification. Between 1948 and 1965, 6,474 Asian Indians entered the United States as immigrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the national origins clause in U.S. immigration legislation and gave preference to highly educated and skilled individuals. India 68


had a ready pool of such talent, and the mass movement from India to the United States began. Sixty-seven percent of the foreign-born Asian Indians in the United States have advanced degrees, as opposed to only 25 percent of the American-born. In addition, Asian Indians are highly represented in managerial positions and as sales/technical/clerical workers and have low representation in the service, blue-collar categories. The post-1965 immigrants fall into three categories: initial immigrants, second-wave immigrants, and sponsored immigrants. The initial immigrants, who came soon after restrictions were lifted in 1965, are mainly very highly educated men—doctors, scientists, and academics—who migrated for better educational and professional opportunities. By the 1990’s, most of these immigrants, now middle-aged, were earning more than $100,000 annually. Their wives typically had little more than a high school education and did not work outside the home, and their children were in their late teens or early twenties. This first wave of immigrants were concerned about retirement and their children. The second-wave immigrants, who came during the 1970’s, were also highly educated professionals. However, these professionals tended to be couples, both of whom worked. Their children were mostly collegebound teenagers, and one of their main concerns was getting their children through college. The third group of immigrants were those individuals sponsored by established family members. They generally were less well educated and more likely to be running motels, small grocery stores, gas stations, and other ventures. Their concerns were to establish themselves in a successful business. Profile The Asian Indian population in the United States—which consisted of about 7,000 people in 1970—grew to about one million by the late 1990’s, making them the fourth-largest immigrant group. This group reached 815,447 in 1990, a 111 percent rise since 1980, when they numbered 387,000. The percentage of foreign-born was up from 70 percent in 1980 to 75 percent in 1990. The community is, on the average, getting younger; the median age dropped from thirty years in 1980 to twenty-eight years in 1990. However, over the same period, the size of the elderly population increased. The gender balance has become more equitable as well: In 1966, women made up 34 percent of the population; in 1993, they accounted for 53 percent. During the mid-1990’s, the mean family income of Asian Indians reached $59,777, the highest of any Asian group. During the 1980’s, the trend to sponsor relatives was very strong, thus lowering the overall education and income levels of the community. By 1990, the number of individuals at the poverty level had doubled, but they still represented about the same percentage of the whole population of Asian Indians. The post-1965 immigrants flocked to the major metropolitan areas, where their skills were most marketable. By the mid-1990’s, 70 percent of the Asian Indian population lived in eight major industrial-urban states: California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. How69


ever, the Asian Indians in the United States generally do not live in concentrated areas but are dispersed throughout the city. The vast majority speak English and are familiar with American ways, so they do not need to rely on their compatriots for help. In addition, because many of them are professionals, they are affluent enough to live where they choose. The educational attainment of the Asian Indian population is very high: 73 percent of those age twenty-five or older have at least a high school education. A 1984 study showed that Asian Indians had a mean high school gradepoint average of 3.8 on a scale of 4. Therefore, they form sizable proportions of the student bodies at the elite colleges in the United States. In 1998, they held more than five thousand faculty positions in American colleges and universities. The Asian Indian population uses lobbying and campaign contributions to promote its special interests, which range from revisions of immigration policy to efforts to prevent or minimize Pakistan’s military buildup. One of the best-known areas of South Asian entrepreneurial behavior is the hotel and motel business. Hindus from the Gujarat region in India, most with the surname of Patel, began arriving in California during the late 1940’s.

Indian grocery store in Marysville, California. (California State Library)

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They bought dilapidated hotels and motels in deteriorating neighborhoods and, with cheap family labor, turned the businesses into profitable enterprises. During the mid-1980’s, the newsstand business in New York City was dominated by Indian and Pakistani immigrants who controlled 70 percent of the kiosks. However, ten years later, the Indians and Pakistanis were being replaced by immigrants from the Middle East. South Asians have also been prominently involved in laundries, gift shops, and the garment industry. During the early 1990’s, 40 percent of the gas stations in New York City were owned by Punjabi Sikh immigrants. Impact of Emigration on India India has benefited tremendously from emigration to the United States. Remittances, sent by immigrants to remaining family, have made areas such as Gujarat and Punjab relatively prosperous. Large amounts of capital from abroad have been invested in high technology, and new ideas from the United States and elsewhere are also evident. By the mid-1990’s, many Asian Indians had returned from abroad to set up industries or work for international companies establishing a presence in India. The bicultural knowledge and skills of these returnees have contributed to Hyderabad’s becoming the Silicon Valley of India. However, the impact is not limited to Hyderabad; it can be seen in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi as well as Punjab’s prosperous agricultural Doab region. Arthur W. Helweg Further Reading Arthur W. Helweg and Usha M. Helweg’s An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) is a comprehensive study of the Asian Indian community in the United States. Jagat K. Motwani’s America and India in a “Give and Take” Relationship: Socio-psychology of Asian Indian Immigrants (New York: Center for Asian, African and Caribbean Studies, 2003) is a broad sociological study of Asian Indians to the United States. Hugh Tinker’s A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1974) and Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1820-1959 (Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1976) chronicle South Asian migration. Bruce La Brack’s The Sikhs of Northern California 1904-1974 (New York: AMS Press, 1988) sets forth the development of the Sikh community in California. The six-volume Asian American Encyclopedia (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995), edited by Franklin Ng, offers entries on a wide variety of topics relating to Asian immigrants. Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of immigrants from many nations, including Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. See also Asian American stereotypes; Asian Indian immigrants and family customs; Coolies; Sikh immigrants. 71

Asian Indian immigrants and family customs

Asian Indian immigrants and family customs Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Families and marriage; Religion Significance: Immigrants to the United States from the South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have had to struggle to maintain their cultural identities while striving to integrate successfully into mainstream American culture. According to U.S. Census figures, slightly fewer than one million persons immigrated to the United States from India (including what is now called Pakistan) between 1820 and 2003. During the first three years of the twenty-first century, Indians continued to enter the United States at the rate of about 60,000 immigrants per year. The 1990 U.S. Census counted 1.4 million Asian Indians and a half million Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in the United States. Even though the United States has far fewer immigrants from the Indian subcontinent than from several other Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the former became the fastest-growing immigrant group during the 1990’s. The Indians and Pakistanis who have migrated to the United States and Canada since the 1960’s represent a highly professional and educated class. Some 62 percent of them have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. South Asians are concentrated primarily in several large urban centers, such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago, although sizable numbers also live in smaller cities. Evidence has suggested that permanent communities of South Asians have established themselves in several big cities. Family Size The size of the average East Indian and Pakistani family in the United States is small: 3.2 people per household. Families are usually nuclear, with parents and children living by themselves. However, groups of close relatives may live in the same area and maintain frequent contact with one another. Parents of Indian couples living in the United States quite commonly visit their children for several months, but they face relative isolation because they lack social contacts with persons with similar backgrounds. Within families from the Indian subcontinent, husbands have remained the authority figures even in homes where wives have professional careers. Wives must often contend with the pressures of the “second shift” and their husbands’ continuing demands for special privileges. Divorce has continued to be rare among all groups of South Asians. Only 4.5 percent of East Indian and Pakistani households lack husbands and only 1.3 percent are headed by 72


unmarried couples. While these immigrants have a higher per-capita income than other Americans, they consume less than those in the same income brackets. They put a great premium on savings and investment. East Indian food consumption has been highly resistant to change. Most Indian Hindus avoid beef and pork, while Pakistanis avoid pork and alcoholic beverages. In households with children, American style meals have become more frequent, but traditional Indian meals predominate. Community Relations India is a culturally diverse country with sixteen major languages and several main religions. First-generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent maintain the traditional values and rituals handed down to them as a way of preserving their identity. Most of them participate in organizations with others from their places of origin who speak the same language, practice the same religion, and eat the same foods. Visiting friends and entertaining guests from similar backgrounds are major leisure-time activities among Indians and Pakistanis. Preparing lavish feasts for guests is a common traditional practice, and anything less is considered bad manners. Among those who practice Islam, regular Sunday schools exist in which children are taught to read the Qur$3n and how to pray. Among Hindus, religious practice is less rigid and the major Hindu festivals are conducted in temples, usually presided over by priests.

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Children South Asian children, both boys and girls, are usually indulged for the first five years of their lives. The age of five marks a transition in their lives; by then, they are expected to adhere to socially appropriate standards of behavior and to advance academically. The transition is more abrupt for boys than for girls. Indian and Pakistani immigrants’ attitudes toward raising children have remained traditional. Rigidly defined sex roles are taught and reinforced by adults. Girls are expected to become proficient at housework, take care of younger siblings, and be sensitive to social cues, while boys are expected to be strong and academically successful. Families from the Indian subcontinent have not emphasized athletic competence as much as other American families. Such attitudes have often been a source of conflict for young boys, whose parents have often not been willing to spend time or money in developing their children’s athletic capacities to match those of their school peers. Indian and Pakistani adolescents are expected by their families to excel in the sciences and enter science careers (preferably high-status and highpaying ones). Since mainstream American society places great emphasis on education, there is no conflict in this area. Yet, South Asian immigrants have not viewed education as the free, individualistic enterprise that the host society considers it. Children’s educational achievements are regarded as contributing to families’ social prestige. Dating and Marriage Children of South Asian immigrants, especially when they reach adolescence, face immense conflicts between parental values and peer pressure to conform to American customs, conflicts that have been especially pronounced in dating and marriage. Dating is usually forbidden, and arranged marriages are the preferred norm in most families. Girls are expected to remain virgins until they are married, and chastity is highly valued among Indian and Pakistani families when choosing brides for their sons. Parents consider sexual contact before marriage to be immoral and corrupt. There have been several reported cases in which lovers have eloped, married secretly, or even committed suicide, because their relationships were unacceptable to their parents. Most men and women from the Indian subcontinent prefer to return to their homelands for arranged marriages. Relatives back home establish ties with several prospective partners and their families. Eventually, immigrant sons and daughters go to South Asia for short visits in order to select from among the chosen candidates and marry. Muslim parents usually tolerate interfaith marriages for boys, since offspring are expected to follow the father’s faith. Daughters’ choices are more limited, because children of daughters could lose their Islamic affiliation. Religion and Religious Holidays When South Asians arrive in the United States and Canada, their religious attitudes become more lenient. Most Hindus fervently participate in religious activities, worshiping at home 74


or at temples. Families with children practice their religions more often than families without children as a way of maintaining their children’s sense of traditional consciousness. Hindu and Muslim families celebrate most of their religious holidays as a way of keeping the heritage alive for their children. At such times, families renew social bonds and meet to discuss issues pertinent to their communities. East Indian children learn forms of classical (Indian) music and dance, and religious functions are a medium to display children’s talents and skills. Hindu and Muslim schools have been opened in all areas with significant South Asian populations. Such schools are open on weekends and in the evenings to teach children basic religious practices. A principal Hindu holiday is the Diwali, or the festival of lights, which celebrates the day Krishna, one of the principal gods in the Indian pantheon, killed the demon Kamsa. In India, streets and homes are usually lit up with oil lamps a month before the holiday. The night before the festival, firecrackers are lit and effigies of the demon Kamsa are burnt on street corners, while people sing praises to Krishna. The festivities continue the next day with more firecrackers, while friends and families exchange sweets and feast together. Muslims’ main holidays are Ramadan and aftar (breaking the fast at sunset). Prayers are held every evening followed by taravih (recital of Qur$3nic verses). Devout Muslims begin fasting a month before Ramadan. Adults and children refrain from eating or drinking water from sunrise to sunset. Special prayers are offered at Eid-ul-Fitr (marking the end of the month of Ramadan) and Eid-ul-Adha (commemoration of the pilgrimage to Mecca). After prayers, families often gather together for feasts. Gowri Parameswaran Further Reading Abraham, Margaret. Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence Among South Asian Immigrants in the United States. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Khandelwal, Madhulika S. Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Kurian, George, and Ram Srivastava. Overseas Indians. New Delhi, India: Viking Press, 1993. Lee, Jennifer, and Min Zhou, eds. Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity. New York: Routledge, 2004. Motwani, Jagat K. America and India in a “Give and Take” Relationship: Sociopsychology of Asian Indian Immigrants. New York: Center for Asian, African and Caribbean Studies, 2003. Saran, Parmatma. The Asian Indian Experience in the USA. New Delhi, India: Vikas Publishing House, 1985. 75

Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance

Vaidyanathan, Prabha, and Josephine Naidu. Asian Indians in Western Countries: Cultural Identity and the Arranged Marriage. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1991. See also Asian American education; Asian American literature; Asian Indian immigrants; Coolies; Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha; Sikh immigrants.

Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance Identification: Asian American/Pacific islander advocacy organization Date: Founded on May 1, 1992 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Civil rights and liberties; Labor Significance: The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance formed to address the needs of a growing Asian and Pacific islander community in the United States. On May 1, 1992, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) held its founding convention in Washington, D.C. That gathering drew five hundred Asian, American, and Pacific island unionists and laborers from around the United States, including garment factory workers from New York City, hotel and restaurant workers from Honolulu, longshore laborers from Seattle, nurses from San Francisco, and supermarket workers from Los Angeles. The establishment of APALA was the culmination of several decades of Asian American unionization activity. Unionizing Since the mid-1970’s, Asian American labor activists in California had worked to strengthen unionization attempts by holding organizational meetings in the larger Asian American communities within San Francisco and Los Angeles. Through the efforts of such neighborhood-based organizations as the Alliance of Asian Pacific Labor (AAPL), stronger ties between labor and the community were forged, and Asian union staff members were united more closely with rank-and-file labor leaders. Those too-localized efforts of the Alliance of Asian Pacific Labor, however, failed to organize significant numbers of Asian American workers. In order to begin unionizing on the national level, AAPL administrators, led by Art Takei, solicited organizational aid from the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a key U.S. labor collective. 76


Upon the invitation of the AFL-CIO executive board, AAPL vice president Kent Wong attended the 1989 national AFL-CIO convention in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the establishment of a national labor organization for Americans of Asian and Pacific island descent. In addressing Wong’s request, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland acknowledged the local accomplishments of the AAPL in California and recognized the organizing potential of the growing Asian American workforce. In 1991, Kirkland appointed a national Asian Pacific American labor committee. This group of thirty-seven Asian and American labor activists met for more than a year to create the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. In planning for the 1992 convention, the Asian Pacific American labor committee released a nationwide invitation for Asian, American, and Pacific island unionists, labor activists, and workers to gather in Washington, D.C., to take on the responsibility for bridging the gap between the national labor movement and the Asian Pacific American community. APALA Is Born The response to that invitation exceeded the committee’s expectations. At the May 1, 1992, convention, more than five hundred delegates participated in adopting an Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance constitution and in setting up a governmental structure with a national headquarters in Washington, D.C., and local chapters throughout the United States. Organized in this manner, APALA could receive recognition and control from a national administration guided by the AFL-CIO, while still using its powerful techniques of community organization at the local level. During the convention, APALA organizers and delegates recognized and honored Asian Pacific American labor pioneers whose achievements they believed had melded national and local unionization efforts successfully. Among them was Philip Vera Cruz, the eighty-seven-year-old former vice president of the United Farm Workers Union. Vera Cruz had worked since the 1930’s to create local unions for farmworkers in the southwestern United States, and continuously lobbied for national support of farmworkers’ unionization. With an eye toward the future, APALA drafted a Commitment to Organizing, to Civil Rights, and to Economic Justice, which called for empowerment of all Asian and Pacific American workers through unionization on a national level; it also called for the provision of national support for individual, local unionization efforts. APALA also promoted the formation of AFLCIO legislation that would create jobs, ensure national health insurance, reform labor law, and channel financial resources toward education and job training for Asian and Pacific island immigrants. Toward that end, the group called for a revision of U.S. governmental policies toward immigration. APALA’s commitment document supported immigration legislation that would promote family unification and provide improved immigrant access to health, education, and social services. Finally, the document promoted national government action to prevent workplace discrimination against immigrant laborers; vigorous prosecution for perpetra77


tors of racially motivated crimes was strongly supported. To solidify their commitment, APALA delegates passed several resolutions, which they forwarded to the AFL-CIO leadership. These documents decried the exploitative employment practices and civil rights violations alleged against several United States companies. Convention delegates also participated in workshops that focused on individual roles in facilitating multicultural harmony and solidarity, enhancing Asian American participation in unions, and advancing a national agenda to support more broadly based civil rights legislation and improved immigration policies and procedures. From these APALA convention workshops, two national campaigns were launched. The first involved working with the AFLCIO Organizing Institute to recruit a new generation of Asian Pacific American organizers, both at the national and local levels. The second campaign involved building a civil and immigration rights agenda for Asian Pacific American workers, based upon APALA’s commitment document and its convention resolutions. Through the legislative statement of its goals and in lobbying for their substantive societal implementation, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance was the first Asian American labor organization to achieve both national and local success. Although by the time of the 1992 APALA convention Asian Americans had been engaged in various forms of unionization activity for more than 150 years, establishment of APALA within the ranks of the AFLCIO provided it with more powerful organizational techniques. The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance was able to solidly unite Asian Pacific workers, simultaneously integrating them into the larger U.S. labor movement. Thomas J. Edward Walker Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes Further Reading Aguilar-San Juan, Karin, ed. The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Explores the connection between race, identity, and empowerment within the workplace and the community. Covers Euro-American, African American, and Asian American cultures. Chang, Edward, and Eui-Young Yu, eds. Multiethnic Coalition Building in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: California State University Press, 1995. Suggests ways to build multicultural harmony within the community and the workplace. Discusses labor union organization among African Americans, Chicanos, and Asian Americans in California. Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. General reference source on Asian immigrants to the United States. Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Analyzes the positive impact of Asian Pacific immigration 78

Assimilation theories

upon the formation of industries on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest between 1870 and 1942. Omatsu, Glenn, and Edna Bonacich. “Asian Pacific American Workers: Contemporary Issues in the Labor Movement.” Amerasia Journal 8, no. 1 (1992). Discusses the advance in status that Asian American workers have achieved in recent decades; summarizes the political, economic, and social issues that still impede their progress. Rosier, Sharolyn. “Solidarity Starts Cycle for APALA.” AFL-CIO News 37, no. 10 (May 11, 1992): 11. Summarizes the AFL-CIO conference report on the establishment of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Survey of the history and economic and social conditions of Asian immigrants to the United States, both before and after the federal immigration reforms of 1965. Wong, Kent. “Building Unions in Asian Pacific Communities,” Amerasia Journal 18, no. 3 (1992): 149-154. Assesses the difficulties of Asian American unionization and gives suggestions for overcoming those problems. See also Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Asian American women; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Garment industry; Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants.

Assimilation theories Definition: Theories about the processes by which individuals or groups take on the culture of the dominant society, including language, values, and behavior, as well as the processes by which groups are incorporated into the dominant society Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Families and marriage; Language; Sociological theories Significance: Two major models of assimilation are the melting pot theory and Anglo-conformity. Assimilationist theories suggest that the outcome of race and ethnic relations in society is assimilation: the ultimately harmonious blending of differing ethnic groups into one homogeneous society. A key question that emerges among assimilationist theorists concerns the basis of that homogeneity. The melting pot theory holds that distinct groups will each contribute to the building of a new culture and society that is a melting pot of all their differing values and behaviors, and the Anglo-conformity theory holds that (in North 79


America) the varying groups will all adopt the values and behaviors of the dominant, Anglo-Saxon group. Anglo-conformity According to Milton Gordon in his book Assimilation in American Life (1964), assimilation involves both acculturation and structural assimilation, wherein groups are fully incorporated into, and indistinguishable from, the larger society. Cultural assimilation, or acculturation, however, can proceed in either a melting pot pattern or an Anglo-conformity pattern. Gordon, who attributes the Anglo-conformity thesis to Stewart Cole, states that this pattern requires that immigrants completely abandon their cultural heritage in favor of Anglo-Saxon culture. According to Gordon, those who propose Anglo-conformity as a practical ideal of assimilation view the maintenance of the English language, institutions, and culture as desirable. Such views, in his estimation, are related to nativist programs that promote the inclusion of those immigrants who are most like the English as well as to programs that promote the acceptance of any immigrants willing to acculturate on the basis of Anglo-conformity. According to Gordon, those espousing the Anglo-conformity ideal cannot be automatically labeled racist although, as he puts it, all racists in the United States can be called Anglo-conformists. Furthermore, Anglo-conformists tend to assume that English ways and institutions are better than others. Even those who do not support that view argue that these ways and institutions, regardless of their relative merit, do predominate in existing American society. Therefore, newcomers must adapt to what is already in place. Angloconformists also assume that once immigrants have acculturated based on Anglo-conformity, they will be found acceptable and will no longer be the targets of prejudice and discrimination. Melting Pot Although the Anglo-conformity ideal has been the prevalent form of assimilation proposed, the melting pot ideal has also been an important and influential aspect of assimilationist thought. Particularly during the early twentieth century, those who viewed American society as a new experiment in which diverse peoples came together to forge a new culture saw Americans as a new “race” of people. In this view, the United States was a giant melting pot that received all immigrants, melting them—and their cultures— down into one homogeneous and unique group. The melting pot theory of assimilationist theory was implied by sociologist Robert Ezra Park’s theory of the race relations cycle, suggested during the 1920’s. In that theory, Park presented the idea that assimilation involves both cultural and biological processes. In other words, Park conceived of assimilation as accomplished both by the “interpenetration” of distinct cultures, in which each group takes on some of the other’s culture, and by amalgamation, or biological mixing through intermarriage and reproduction. Gordon criticizes melting pot idealists for failing to discuss whether all groups can contribute equally to the final mixture. Furthermore, since 80


Patriotic poster published during World War I promoting the idea of cultural assimilation. (Library of Congress)

Anglo-Saxons arrived chronologically before other immigrants, they were able to establish the social order into which newer immigrants are expected to “melt.” Because of this difference in group influence on the American character and society, Gordon claims that the melting pot ideal masks the fact that nonAnglo-Saxons are the ones expected to change. Furthermore, although some differences, such as nationality, can be melted down among whites, other differences, such as race and religion, are either not willingly given up or cannot be melted away. African Americans and other people of color, according to Gordon, are prevented from melting down by racial discrimination.

Other Theories and Criticisms In their 1963 book Beyond the Melting Pot, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan review the melting pot theory in the light of continuing ethnic diversity and conflict in New York City. Glazer and Moynihan believed that ethnic groups could join society if they were willing to change, to acculturate. Unlike Gordon, Glazer and Moynihan do not view prejudice as the major obstacle to assimilation. They view internal group weaknesses as the major obstacle; they also cite the lack of a single American identity for immigrants to adopt. Glazer and Moynihan think that ethnic groups develop a new ethnic identity, thus remaining distinct— neither melted down nor conforming to the Anglo model. In his 1981 book, The Ethnic Myth, Stephen Steinberg states that the early rise of nativism in the United States implies that Anglo-conformity dominated assimilationist views. Nativism is a term used for manifestations of the desire to maintain the given ethnic character of society or particular social institutions. Generally, nativists see themselves as the real Americans and are xenophobic, or fearful and hateful of foreigners. Anglo-Saxon settlers wished to preserve their cultural legacy in the face of massive immigration that labor 81


shortages forced them to tolerate. Perhaps one of the greatest instruments for Anglo-conformity has been the centralized system of public education that was developed in the United States. Immigrants were and are taught English language skills, as well as citizenship, and are thus Americanized. According to Gordon, other forms of Anglo-conformity assimilation include political movements by nativists to exclude “foreigners” from social institutions, favoring immigration only by people similar in background and culture to Anglo-Saxons, and basing social inclusion on the adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture by immigrants. Park, who supported the melting pot theory, held that the melting pot would emerge through amalgamation—accomplished through intermarriage across lines of ethnicity. Intermarriage then becomes an important measure of the extent to which groups are merging into one homogeneous group. Studies of intermarriage reveal that ethnic groups, in particular, are marrying across group lines, though not always across religious or racial lines. For example, intermarriage has increased substantially between Jews and non-Jews, although in-marriage is still strong for Italian Americans and Irish Americans. Intermarriage still tends to be culturally prohibited across racial lines, reflecting important differences between race and ethnicity that melting pot theorists tended to downplay in their analyses. Assimilationist theorists generally have not distinguished race from ethnicity. They have not ignored the significant differences between the levels of assimilation of white ethnic groups and groups of other races; they explain them either as a product of the greater prejudice held against people who look different or as a product of the failure of nonwhite minorities to conform to and embrace the dominant culture. Assimilationist theorists view prejudice as the product of the differences that minority group members present to the dominant society. As group members acculturate, these differences diminish, and the people are accepted by the dominant society. They then no longer experience discrimination. Sharon Elise Further Reading Baghramian, Maria, and Attracta Ingram, eds. Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity. New York: Routledge, 2000. Collection of scholarly discussions of issues relating to assimilation and pluralism. Barone, Michael. The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001. Reconsideration of the melting pot theory in the context of early twenty-first century America. Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration, including assimilation. 82


Cook, Terrence E. Separation, Assimilation, or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Sociological study of the dynamics of power relationships among different ethnic groups. Feagin, Joe R., and Clairece Booher Feagin. Racial and Ethnic Relations. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993. Introductory text in the sociology of race relations that examines sociological theories against the background of extensive case history of both white ethnic groups and ethnic groups of other races. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are race, government policy, sociological theories, naturalization, and undocumented workers. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970. Controversial book that presents studies of African Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Italians, and Irish Americans in New York to re-examine the melting pot thesis. Gordon, Milton. Assimilation in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Presents the author’s theory of assimilation, with chapters devoted to the Anglo-conformity model and the melting pot model. Houle, Michelle E., ed. Immigration. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Greenhaven Press/Thomson/Gale, 2004. Collection of speeches on U.S. immigration policies by such historical figures as Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. Includes a section on assimilation. Kramer, Eric Mark, ed. The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority.” Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Collection of essays on a wide variety of topics relating to cultural assimilation and the notion of “model minorities,” with particular attention to immigrant communities in Japan and the United States. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Survey of the cultural adjustments through which new immigrants to the United States must go. Vermeulen, Hans, and Joel Perlmann, eds. Immigrants, Schooling, and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Collected papers from a 1996 conference on culture and worldwide immigration that was held in Amsterdam. See also British as dominant group; Cultural pluralism; Ethnic enclaves; European immigrant literature; Generational acculturation; History of U.S. immigration; Melting pot; Migrant superordination; Model minorities.

83

Au pairs

Au pairs Definition: Immigrants—usually young Europeans—who do domestic work for families in exchange for room and board and opportunities to learn English Immigration issues: Illegal immigration; Labor; Women Significance: Au pairs help satisfy working parents’ need to find care for their children at a reasonable cost, while making it easier for young foreigners to come to the United States. During the late twentieth century, many American families with parents who worked outside their homes felt a pressing need for household help. For the wealthy, such services were often provided by children’s nurses or nannies; however, a less costly alternative was au pairs, usually young foreign visitors who were treated as family members. Au pairs performed light domestic duties, including child care, cleaning, cooking, and laundering, in exchange for room and board, weekly stipends, and opportunities to learn the language of the families with whom they stayed. Prior to 1986 it was a fairly common practice to hire illegal immigrants as au pairs, but the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 increased the penalties that could be imposed on employers of such workers. Au pairs have continued to play an important role in the growth and development of children under their care and in helping to foster and maintain family unity, while giving young foreigners opportunities to come to North America. Alvin K. Benson Further Reading Bloodgood, Chandra. Becoming an Au Pair: Working as a Live-in Nanny. Port Orchard, Wash.: Windstorm Creative, 2005. Miller, Cindy F., and Wendy J. Slossburg. Au Pair American Style. Bethesda, Md.: National Press, 1986. See also

84

Indentured servitude; Mail-order brides; Women immigrants.

Bilingual education

Bilingual education Definition: Education systems that involve the use of minority and majority languages for teaching schoolchildren whose primary language is not English Immigration issues: Education; Language Significance: Bilingual education, which combines language learning with teaching culture in meeting the educational goals of different minority groups, has become a controversial and highly politicized subject that is closely tied to immigration issues. Bilingual education in the United States has had a turbulent history. On June 2, 1998, voters in California ended the thirty-year-old tradition of bilingual education in California public schools by passing Proposition 227, which gives immigrant children only one year to learn English before they enroll in regular classes. The passage of this initiative and the courts’ response to the new law (which almost immediately became subject to court litigation) were seen as a critical test of the U.S. commitment to bilingual education; California, after all, represented the largest school system in the nation with the largest student population enrolled in bilingual classes. If California eliminated bilingual education, many other school systems in other states were hoping either to impose severe restrictions on bilingual instruction or to eliminate it totally by passing an English-only policy. In contrast, the Coral Way School in Miami, which became the first successful bilingual school in the United States in 1963, continued to offer a strong commitment to bilingual education. Although support was eroding in other parts of the United States, Miami support for bilingualism was gaining strength. These examples best represent the roller-coaster history of bilingual education. Over the years, bilingual education has experienced a series of ups and downs as various immigrant groups have arrived in the United States. One of bilingual education’s most significant moments was the passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968. The act promoted bilingualism as a way to address the educational needs of children whose primary language is not English. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols that a school district was required to provide bilingual education. Subsequent court decisions further highlighted the need for solid bilingual education programs as a means of providing equal access to education. However, many schools did not comply with this ruling. Bilingual education underwent a series of setbacks during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. By 1990, the tide was turning in favor of the English-only campaigns. The passing of Proposition 227 in California was intended to deliver the most severe blow yet to bilingual education in the United States. 85

Bilingual education

Maintenance vs. Transitional Bilingualism The main problem that bilingual education attempts to address is how to respond to the need of minority children to learn the majority language, English. According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than five million children in public schools have limited English proficiency (LEP). If these children cannot understand what the teacher is saying, they obviously cannot learn academic subjects such as math, science, and reading. If their study of academic subjects is postponed until they are proficient in English, their progress in these subjects is seriously hampered. If the “sink-or-swim” approach is used and children are taught entirely in English, their performance in academic subjects will deteriorate. Bilingual education solves this problem by teaching academic subjects to LEP children in their native languages while teaching them English. Furthermore, studies show that improving cognitive skills in native languages further facilitates the learning of academic subjects. However, studies such as those by Jim Cummins show that at least four to six years of instruction in native languages (called Late-Exit to English) are needed before optimal results are registered both on proficiency in English and on other subjects in terms of achieving or exceeding national norms. Most bilingual programs in the United States can best be characterized as transitional bilingual programs because they encourage the maintenance of

Classroom made up primarily of European immigrants in a Boston school in 1909. The question of how best to teach English to immigrant children is an old one, but attempts at bilingual education have generally been made more often in schools in which a single second language predominates than in schools whose pupils speak many different languages. (Library of Congress)

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Bilingual education

the native language as a transition toward the learning of English. This process is called subtractive bilingualism. In the first stage, students are monolingual, learning only in their native language. Then students enter a stage of transitional bilingualism, in which they are functional in both their native language and English. Finally, they become monolingual in English. Maintenance programs are additive bilingual programs that maintain the students’ native language as they learn English. At the beginning, students are monolingual, speaking only their native language, then they begin to become bilingual, adding English to their native language. In the end, the students become fully functional in English yet maintain their native language. Proponents of additive bilingual programs claim that maintenance of the student’s native language is critical for the child’s linguistic and cognitive growth, school performance, psychological security, ethnic and cultural identity, self-esteem, and many other positive personality and intellectual characteristics. The supporters of transitional bilingual programs claim that these programs avoid unnecessary linguistic duality and confusion, which sometimes cause children to be unable to function well in either language; improve students’ performance in school; and minimize social, ethnic, and political divisions. The latter view derives support from long-term bilingual programs that have been found to lack effectiveness. For example, in 1997, only 6.7 percent of LEP children moved into regular classes in California as compared with 15 percent in 1982. Other states exhibit the same trend, pointing to the low success rate of long-term bilingual programs aimed at maintaining both languages. Advocates of maintenance bilingual programs attribute these low success rates to factors that are not intrinsic to bilingual education, such as a lack of funding, trained teachers, and federal/state commitment to bilingual education; poorly structured classrooms (grouping large numbers of students with diverse and unrelated native languages); and not enough adequate pedagogical material. According to Jim Lyons, executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education, a large number of bilingual programs are “not worthy of the name.” Programs such as the Eastman school model (pioneered by Steven Krashen and Cummins), which is widely used in Los Angeles schools, have shown themselves to be effective. The model is notable for its effective use of the results of basic research in recent theories of language acquisition and its long-term bilingual and bicultural basis. Alternatives to Bilingual Education Alternatives to bilingual programs generally take the shape of programs to teach children English. Instead of simply placing LEP children in ordinary classes, children are placed in English as a second language (ESL) or English language development (ELD) programs. The ELD approach follows a strategy that encourages students to first comprehend and then speak English. The lessons are delivered in a low-anxiety, small-group, and language-conducive environment. Students’ errors are tolerated, and the focus is on the acquisition of interactive 87

Bilingual education

Milestones in Bilingual Education Period/Year

88

Event

Impact

1694-mid Vernacular nineteenth education schools century

German-, French-, and Spanish-speaking schools in the East and South are common in spite of periodical attempts to replace German/Spanish with English.

1828

U.S.-Cherokee Treaty

Treaty recognizes language rights of the Cherokee tribe.

1848

Treaty of Guadalupe Language rights of the new SpanishHidalgo speaking citizens of the United States are “guaranteed”—but rarely respected.

1868

Indian Peace Commission

1889

American Protective Declares that English should be the sole Association proposal language of instruction in all public and private schools.

1898

Spanish-American War

English becomes the medium of instruction in the new colonies, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.

1917

World War II— Cox’s bill

This bill, the product of anti-German sentiment, bans German from Ohio’s elementary schools.

1930’s

Decline of nonEnglish languages

Bilingual education is wiped out, except in parochial schools in rural areas of the Midwest.

1964

Civil Rights Act

Language provision of this act becomes the legal basis for bilingual education.

1968

Bilingual Education This act addresses the needs of students Act with limited English skills, promoting bilingualism and encouraging ways to help speed up children’s transition to English.

1974

Lau v. Nichols decision

Establishes the principle that children have a right to instruction in a language that they can understand.

1998

Proposition 227

California voters pass Proposition 227, which gives immigrant children only one year to learn English before entering regular classes. Other school systems in other states watch this development with interest.

Group concludes: “Their [native Indian] barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted.”

Bilingual education

communicative skills. The teacher provides what is termed “comprehensible input” (expressions in English that make sense to children) by means of roleplaying, modeling, and pictures. After about six to twelve months of ELD instruction, a shift is made to “sheltered English” instruction, which includes simplified language with common vocabulary, frequent paraphrasing, clarification, comprehension checks, and the use of simple sentence structures to teach context-rich subjects such as art and music. Researchers Keith A. Baker and Adriana A. de Kanter suggest the structured immersion program modeled after the St. Lambert French immersion program in Quebec as an alternative to bilingual education programs. However, the success of the Canadian program is attributed to community and parent support; the fact that language-majority students (English speakers) were immersed into a minority language (French); and that the program goals included additive bilingualism. Similarly structured immersion programs failed in the United States because they involved language-minority children, neglected their native language, and were based on subtractive bilingualism. As political battles are being waged all over the United States concerning bilingual education, the nation’s schools are still being overwhelmed by never-ending waves of LEP children. However, the question of how best to teach these children English remains unanswered. Tej K. Bhatia Further Reading Up-to-date studies of issues relating to bilingualism include Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), edited by Terry A. Osborn; Charmian Kenner’s Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems (Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004); and Terrence G. Wiley’s Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States (2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005). James Crawford’s Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice (Trenton, N.J.: Crane, 1989) and Kenji Hakuta’s Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism (New York: Basic Books, 1986) are two classic studies on the various facets (historical, political, and educational) of bilingual education. For the latest trends in bilingual education, see Duane E. Campbell’s Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996). James Cummins’s Empowering Language Minority Students (Sacramento: California Association for Bilingual Education, 1989) deals with educational and other issues pertaining to minorities at risk. A detailed state-of-the-art treatment of language acquisition is presented in two volumes, Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (1996) and Handbook of Child Language Acquisition (1998), edited by William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia (San Diego: Academic Press). These two volumes contain several chapters dealing with the phenomenon of bilingualism, bilingual language acquisition, and bilingual education. 89

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See also Anglo-conformity; Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Cultural pluralism; English-only and official English movements; Generational acculturation; Lau v. Nichols; Proposition 227.

Bilingual Education Act of 1968 The Law: Federal legislation that authorized federal assistance to schoolchildren of limited English-speaking ability Date: 1968 Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Cuban immigrants; Education; Language; Laws and treaties Significance: In creating the Bilingual Education Act, Congress attempted to bend the will of the many to meet the needs of the few and provide a chance for the children of all people to share in the American Dream. Although hailed as the world’s melting pot, for most of its history the United States has been a nation of one language and culture. This conformist ethic maintained that as immigrants came to the United States they should give up their native customs and languages and assimilate as quickly as possible into the Anglo-American mainstream. Underlying this drive toward conformity was the unwritten rule in both Anglo and immigrant communities that to succeed, immigrants must bend to American culture instead of expecting American culture to bend to them. Although ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves did exist and in some areas even flourished, the mainstream of American society was one of English-derived Anglo tradition. Bilingual Education: Theory vs. Reality It was believed by many educators that the best way to prepare the children of immigrant parents for life in American culture was to immerse them in the English language and customs as quickly as possible. In this process of immersion, it was thought that the children who could learn would; those who could not were obviously of inferior mental abilities and therefore were not capable of obtaining the American Dream. This philosophy, besides confirming the prevailing notion of Anglo-American superiority, also fit well with the notion of social Darwinism popular during the late nineteenth century. The reality for most immigrant children during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that they were much more likely to sink than swim. In 1908, 13 percent of immigrant children enrolled in New York City 90


schools at age twelve were likely to go on to high school, as opposed to 32 percent of the native-born. This trend was mirrored across the country, as nonEnglish-speaking immigrant children, not understanding the language of instruction, fell further and further behind their native-born classmates. While English dominance remained the rule across most of the United States in the years preceding World War I, certain areas of the country were forced by circumstance to provide limited native-language instruction. These areas included parts of Louisiana, where French was the language of the majority of the population, and the Northeast and Midwest, where there were substantial German American populations. These areas, as well as several Native American reservations, provided instruction in the language of the nonEnglish-speaking population. With the advent of World War I, an intense wave of nationalism swept the country. It reinforced the negative reaction of many Americans to the large wave of immigration that had begun during the 1890’s. Among the first casualties of this increase in “nativism” were programs for instructing schoolchildren in any language other than English. State Legislation By 1925, thirty-seven states had passed laws requiring instruction in English, regardless of what was the dominant culture of the region. This trend continued into the 1950’s. By the end of that decade, however, there were growing indications that more and more students with limited English proficiency were falling through the cracks of the educational system and thereby becoming trapped in language-induced poverty and despair. For those children who attempted to stay in school, the outcome was often little better than if they had dropped out. During this period, the preferred method of dealing with those who spoke little or no English was to tag them as mentally retarded or learning impaired. Once so characterized, these children were placed in remedial instruction programs, where they were constantly reminded of how different they were from their native, Englishspeaking classmates. For those who managed to avoid being tagged as retarded, the most likely educational track was vocational, foreclosing access to higher-paying professional occupations. Demographics began to force a change in the attitudes of many public officials by the early 1960’s. As immigrant populations began to flood into the schools of the South, districts were forced to consider alternative means of instruction. The first to do so was Coral Way, Florida. After the Cuban revolution of 1959, waves of Cuban refugees entered South Florida. Responding to the demand for quality bilingual instruction, the Coral Way school district implemented the first state-supported program to instruct students in their native language, thereby easing their transition to English. Since there was no U.S. precedent for the school district to draw upon, it turned to the American schools in Ecuador and Guatemala, which sought to develop fluency in both languages. The bilingual program was implemented for the first three grades of Coral Way schools and provided all students, Anglo and Cuban, instruction in both Spanish and English. Given the 91


middle- to upper-class background of much of the early Cuban immigrant population, there was no need for a compensatory component to the program to care for general language or learning deficiencies. With the success of the Coral Way project, the precedent for state and local government involvement in language assistance was set. The Federal Government Becomes Involved By the mid-1960’s, there were indications that the federal government was ready to become involved as well. As the national government began to investigate poverty and discrimination, several pieces of legislation were enacted that paved the way for the eventual adoption of the Bilingual Education Act. Of these, the two most important were the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically Title VI barring discrimination in education, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which established the precedent for federal involvement in aid to impoverished and educationally deprived students. In 1968, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would be the vehicle by which Congress funded bilingual education. By the time the Ninetieth Congress opened in 1967, bilingual education had become a popular topic. More than thirty-five bills on the subject were introduced during the session, as many members of Congress became aware of the injustice of forcing immigrant children to struggle to learn lessons in what was to them a foreign language. Of these bills, Senate Bill 428, introduced by Ralph W. Yarborough, was typical. It proposed amending the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to create a new section, Title VII, providing bilingual education for those students speaking Spanish at birth or whose parents had originated in either Mexico or Puerto Rico. The Yarborough bill thus was not universal in scope but rather a concession to the Hispanic community—by far the nation’s largest non-English-speaking minority and a group that was increasingly vocal. Mexican Americans were of growing importance in Yarborough’s home state of Texas. Yarborough’s approach was immediately attacked by both the White House and members of Congress. President Lyndon B. Johnson had portrayed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as the hallmark of his war on poverty and saw no need to modify it. Commissioner of Education Harold Howe II formalized this position when he proposed that instead of creating a new Title VII, additional monies could be appropriated under the existing Title I of the act. This section earmarked funds for language programs in economically impoverished areas, although it did not require schools to use languages other than English in order to receive funding. In Congress, numerous members rose in opposition to the bill’s limitation of bilingual education to one ethnic group, no matter how potentially powerful that group might be. It was argued that targeting one group for aid would unconstitutionally deny equal protection to myriad other ethnic groups and language minorities scattered across the country. Representative James H. Scheuer of New York proposed a compromise 92


that would provide funding for bilingual education to school districts with substantial non-Englishspeaking populations residing in economically disadvantaged areas. To receive funding, districts would be required to provide instruction in a student’s native tongue until the child could demonstrate competence in English. Although Senator Yarborough resisted the expansion of the act’s scope, he relented when the White House gave its grudging approval. With this political hurdle cleared, President Johnson signed the amendments adding Title VII to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on January 2, 1968. Although no money was appro- President Lyndon B . Johnson saw no need to amend priated for 1968, $7.5 million was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of appropriated for 1969, enough to 1965 but nevertheless eventually signed the Bilinfund bilingual education for some gual Education Act. (Lyndon B . Johnson Library/ twenty-seven thousand students. Yoichi R. Okamoto) Accompanying the political battle over the number of language groups to be served was a deeper philosophical struggle concerning the goals of bilingual education. Congress knew that it had to do something, but the “how” of bilingual education was unclear. The Bilingual Education Act created a framework for federal aid to schools with students of limited English ability but said little about whether the goal of the program should be a rapid transition to instruction in English or a slower approach allowing the maintenance of the child’s native language and customs. The act’s only significant stipulation was that to obtain federal aid a district had to use native languages in instruction. This lack of clarity contributed to the creation of an ideological conflict that lasted into the twenty-first century and brought the overall impact and effectiveness of bilingual education into question. Impact of Event The federal government’s commitment to bilingual education grew into the hundreds of millions of dollars by the mid-1970’s. Reauthorizations in 1972 and 1974 broadened the scope of the legislation and provided additional programs. These efforts were aided by both the federal courts and the Office of Civil Rights (then a part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare). 93


L AU V. NICHOLS and Anglo Backlash In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols that school districts with a substantial number of non-Englishspeaking students must take steps to overcome language difficulties. This provided the Office of Civil Rights with the backing needed to force recalcitrant school districts to initiate bilingual education plans. These Lau plans greatly expanded the number of native-language instructional programs available across the country. They also set standards for when students qualified for inclusion in a program and when they could be allowed (or forced) to exit. During this period, test scores repeatedly showed that students exiting from well-designed and well-implemented programs consistently performed at or above grade level and thus were on a par with their native Englishspeaking classmates. By the 1980’s, the ambiguities in the goals of bilingual education had begun to engender resentment in parts of the Anglo population. Some believed that the aim of bilingual education was not to speed immigrants into the mainstream but rather to maintain their culture through state-sponsored ethnic programs. Fueling this attack were several studies showing that some bilingual programs were allowing students to remain in bilingual classes longer than the three-year maximum and were not teaching them sufficient English to function in mainstream classrooms. With the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, the federal government began to retreat from aggressively promoting native-language instruction and instead encouraged districts to choose their own methods to develop capability in English. Federal Reauthorization The 1984 reauthorization for the first time saw federal monies available for methods of instruction that did not utilize a student’s native tongue but rather allowed for English immersion or submersion. Although this funding was limited in 1984, it was expanded in 1988. This change was amplified by a major retreat on the part of the Office of Civil Rights in its enforcement of Lau remedies. Under the Reagan administration, a school district was one-ninth as likely to be reviewed by the Office of Civil Rights as under the administrations of either Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter. This change in government philosophy, while not signaling the end of bilingual education, did have a significant impact. By the mid-1980’s, several studies, including an influential one by the General Accounting Office, had shown that while there were problems in the implementation of some programs, the philosophy of instruction in students’ native languages during the transition to English not only worked but allowed students to obtain grade-level standing much more quickly than English-only programs. Correspondingly, as the English-dominant approach became the program of choice for many districts, the performance of limitedEnglish students once again declined. As with any attempt to expand the rights of the few, the Bilingual Education Act was politically charged and buffeted by ideological storms. What was indisputable, however, was that the leap of faith that Congress undertook in 1968 was aimed at the future—a future in 94


which the dominant Anglo-American culture would be forced to adapt to an increasingly diverse population. Christopher H. Efird Further Reading August, Diane, and Eugene E. Garcia. Minority Education in the United States: Research, Policy, and Practice. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C Thomas, 1988. A fairly analytical work, this book provides a thorough discussion of the theoretical groundings of bilingual education as well as federal and state attempts to implement these programs. Well-indexed and referenced. Includes a particularly well-written chapter on specific types of bilingual education programs. Crawford, James. Bilingual Education: History, Politics, Theory, and Practice. Trenton, N.J.: Crane Publishing, 1989. Written from a lay perspective, this book presents a good summary of the competing educational and political philosophies that characterize the debate over bilingual education. Although somewhat unsophisticated, the book touches on all aspects of bilingual education: political, practical, and philosophical. Grant, Joseph H., and Ross Goldsmith. Bilingual Education and Federal Law: An Overview. Austin, Tex.: Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education, 1979. As its name implies, this book summarizes and comments on the various federal laws pertaining to bilingual education. A particular strength is the author’s excellent weaving together of the often conflicting priorities of the Congress, the president, and the courts to show how bilingual education has been affected. Kenner, Charmian. Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems. Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004. Study of the technical aspects of bilingual education. Leibowitz, Arnold H. The Bilingual Education Act: A Legislative Analysis. Rosslyn, Va.: InterAmerica Research Associates, National Clearing House for Bilingual Education, 1980. Provides a compact history both of the original 1968 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that created the Title VII bilingual provisions and of the 1974 reauthorization. The discussions of the statutory provisions of each are thorough, but there is little discussion of impacts. Osborn, Terry A., ed. Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Consideration of bilingualism in the context of the role of multiculturalism and education. Porter, Rosalie Pedalino. Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education. New York: Basic Books, 1990. A fascinating presentation of the arguments opposed to bilingual education. Using both theoretical discussions and historical examples drawn from twenty years of bilingual practice, the author builds the argument that bilingual education has failed both the students it is supposed to help and the society that is paying for it. 95

Border Patrol, U.S.

Sandoval-Martinez, Steven. How Much Bilingual Education? Educational vs. Legislative Considerations. Los Alamitos, Calif.: National Center for Bilingual Research, 1984. A very short work, this paper is nevertheless useful for its discussion of the implications of legislative standards on bilingual program exit criteria. In looking at these criteria, the author demonstrates how standardized exit requirements are incongruent with the educational needs of most students. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. “Multilingualism and the Education of Minority Students.” In Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle, edited by T. SkutnabbKangas and J. Cummins. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1988. In keeping with the theme of the book, this chapter looks beyond the minority education problems in the United States and takes a more global perspective. The author investigates the impact that a multilingual population has on a society and the demands this imposes on the educational system to integrate language minorities into the mainstream. Stein, Colman Brez, Jr. Sink or Swim: The Politics of Bilingual Education. New York: Praeger, 1986. Provides a good history of bilingual education policy from its modern inception in Coral Way, Florida, through the 1984 reauthorization. Contains a substantial discussion of state initiatives and how they worked to support or undermine federal programs. Wiley, Terrence G. Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. Comprehensive study of language and literacy in American education. See also Bilingual education; English-only and official English movements; Lau v. Nichols; Proposition 227.

Border Patrol, U.S. Identification: Units of the federal agency that oversee the coastal and land boundaries of the United States Date: Established in May, 1924 Place: Washington, D.C. Immigration issues: Border control; Illegal immigration; Latino immigrants; Law enforcement; Mexican immigrants Significance: Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol to prevent undocumented immigrants from Latin America and Canada from entering the United States. As a federal law-enforcement body under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security since 2003, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency is responsible for controlling the entry of both people and substances into the United States. 96

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The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is one of the busiest law-enforcement agencies in the United States. On March 1, 2003, the Department of Homeland Security unified border personnel working in the immigration, customs, agriculture, and border patrol divisions under one agency. Formerly known as the U.S. Border Patrol under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the border patrol was originally founded in 1924 after Congress passed strict limitations on legal immigration. With only several hundred mounted agents on horseback, there were challenges in patrolling all the areas between inspection stations in the United States. Over the next eighty years, the border patrols evolved into a technologically advanced and increasingly sophisticated workforce with nearly ten thousand uniformed agents. Twenty-First Century Missions During the early twenty-first century, the CBP still maintained its primary mission to prevent the illegal entry of goods and immigrants into the United States. This duty, undertaken in cooperation with numerous other local and state law-enforcement agencies across the United States, resulted in approximately twelve million arrests between 1994 and 2004. This monumental task requires scrutiny from the land, air, and sea of more than 6,000 miles of international boundaries with Canada and Mexico and another 2,000 miles of coastal waters. Agents from twentyone sectors across the United States work in all weather conditions and terrains, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Before 1924, a force of fewer than forty mounted inspectors rode the borders looking for Chinese migrants attempting to enter the country in violation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Mexican workers proved so valuable to the economy of the American Southwest that little effort was made to prevent them from crossing the Rio Grande to work for cotton and sugar beet growers and as agricultural laborers. A literacy test passed in 1917 during World War I made it more difficult for farmhands to enter the United States, but the test could be avoided easily by sneaking into the country at night. Enforcement was lax because of protests from growers and farmers who depended on a cheap labor supply for their economic livelihood. Dealing with Illegal Immigration During the early 1920’s, illegal immigration from Mexico far exceeded the average of fifty thousand legitimate immigrants per year. In 1921, Congress adopted a restrictive immigration policy based on a national quota system. Supporters argued for including the peoples of the Western Hemisphere in the limitations but did not succeed because of opposition from the State Department and agricultural interests in Texas, Arizona, and California. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes told Congress that limiting Latin American immigration would harm attempts to improve diplomatic relations with that part of the world, while farmers and growers claimed that a steady supply of migrants from south of the border was necessary to keep them in business. For these reasons, both the Senate and the House agreed to put no restrictions on New World peoples. 97

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When Congress passed a law in 1924 establishing a national origins system for immigrants, it again excluded people from the Western Hemisphere. A proposal to include Latin Americans and Canadians under this more restrictive policy failed by large margins in the House and Senate. Hughes once again testified in opposition to the amendment and repeated his statement that the foreign policy of the United States demanded favorable treatment of migrants from Western nations. A new element entered this debate in Congress, however, as several congresspeople, led by Representative John Box of Texas, emphasized what they perceived as the racial and cultural inferiority of the Mexican population.

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The discussion in Congress focused on Mexicans because they made up the largest portion of immigrants from the New World. Almost 100,000 had crossed the border legally in 1924. Thousands more had entered illegally to escape paying the eighteen-dollar visa fee required of all immigrants under the new law. The flow of Central and South Americans coming into the country numbered fewer than five thousand that year and was not perceived as a threat. Opponents of Immigration Advocates of ending the flows of both legal and illegal immigration argued that Mexicans were taking away American jobs and working for starvation wages. The American Federation of Labor, under its new president, William Green, and the American Legion were major proponents of this viewpoint. “Scientific racists,” who believed that white America was disappearing, argued about the dangers of “colored blood” polluting America and contaminating its way of life. Most Mexicans had Indian blood in them. According to racial theorists of the time, Indians were inferior to Nordic types in intelligence and physical ability. The 1924 law was aimed at keeping the inferior races of southern and eastern Europe out of the country. It made no sense, therefore, to allow free access to inferiors from other parts of the world. These arguments had been successful in winning approval of the 1921 quota system, whereby each nationality group in the United States was limited in immigration each year to 3 percent of its total number in the United States according to the 1910 census. The 1924 law reduced the total to 2 percent of the population according to the census base of 1890. Congress decided to remove Latin America and Canada from these restrictions principally because of the belief that cheap Mexican labor was necessary to keep American farmers prosperous. Labor unions had frequently challenged that view. During the 1921-1922 depression in the United States, they began a campaign to include Latin Americans under the quota system. They had a strong ally in Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, a former union president. He ordered all unemployed Mexicans to leave the United States in 1922. Resentment and violence mounted because of the economic hard times, and in some Texas towns starving Mexicans were physically expelled. When the short depression ended and job opportunities opened, agricultural interests petitioned Congress to reopen the borders. Mexican labor was too valuable to the economy to exclude completely, because Mexicans did the jobs Americans simply would not do, and for wages Americans would not accept. The Spanish-speaking aliens would not become permanent residents, Congress was reassured, and they offered no political threat since the poll tax still in effect in Texas and other southern states prevented them from voting. The sugar beet growers and cotton farmers tried to appease the labor unions by arguing that the aliens were unskilled laborers and therefore were not a threat to American workers. The same reasoning kept Canadians from inclusion in the new immigra99

Border Patrol, U.S.

tion system. These immigrants were mostly from French-speaking Quebec and worked in New England textile mills for very low wages. Most of the congressional debate centered on Mexicans, and there was little discussion of immigration from the north. Congress’s major fear seemed to be that large numbers of “peons” from south of the border were entering the United States illegally and that they posed a threat to American values and customs because they were Roman Catholics and spoke a foreign language. Something had to be done to stop that flood, but the economic interests of southwestern farmers would also have to be protected. If, for foreign policy and economic reasons, Latin Americans could not be in the quota system, the reasoning went, perhaps the borders of the United States could be secured from illegal immigration by tighter controls. Smuggling of impoverished workers from south of the border was a major problem, and no agency of the American government existed to control it. Birth of the Border Patrol Concern over the flow of laborers from the south led to the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol on May 8, 1924. Congressman Claude Hudspeth of Texas, who owned a large farm in East Texas but who was not dependent on Mexican labor, proposed its creation and got Congress to provide $1 million for this new branch of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization in the Department of Labor. The Border Patrol had 450 officers, whose main job was to ride the Mexican border on horseback seeking out smugglers and the hiding places of illegal aliens. Opposition to the Border Patrol proved to be considerable. Ranchers and farmers protested and interfered with the arrests of their laborers. Patrol officers were told to expel any alien who could not prove that he or she had paid the visa fee. The growers bitterly assailed the increasingly difficult requirements for legal immigration. The 1924 law mandated not only a ten-dollar visa fee, which had to be paid to an American consul in the nation of origin, but also a sixdollar head tax for each applicant. Few Mexicans could afford these fees because their average wage was twelve cents for a ten-hour day in their homeland. These fees thus encouraged illegal entry and the smuggling of laborers. For a small sum paid to smugglers, Mexican peasants could avoid the fees and the literacy test and easily find jobs paying $1.25 a day in Texas, Arizona, and California. In its first year of operation, the small Border Patrol staff reported turning back 15,000 aliens seeking illegal entry, although an estimated 100,000 farmworkers successfully evaded the border guards. For that reason, in 1926 Congress doubled the size of the Border Patrol and made it a permanent part of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. Impact of Event During its first three years of operation, the Border Patrol turned back an annual average of fifteen thousand Mexicans seeking illegal entry. It did not have enough personnel to end all illegal entry, and Mexican workers were too valuable to the economy of the Southwest to eliminate completely. Ranchers and farmers who benefited greatly by using Mexican la100

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bor continued to oppose the picking up and deporting of field hands who preferred to deal with smugglers rather than paying the visa fee and head tax. In 1926, the Immigration Service backed away from strict enforcement of the law and entered into a “gentlemen’s agreement” with agricultural interests in California and Texas. This called for registration of all Mexican workers in the states. They would each receive an identification card that allowed them to work, in exchange for an eighteen-dollar fee payable at three dollars per week. When Congressman John Box heard about “immigration on the installment plan,” he was outraged and called for an end to this “outlaw’s agreement.” He denounced Mexicans as racially inferior to white Europeans, since they were mainly Indian, and warned that their illegal influx had been so large that they threatened to reverse the results of the Mexican War of 18461848. After that conflict, the United States had acquired California, Arizona, and much of the Southwest, but now, according to Box, “blood-thirsty, ignorant” bandits from Mexico were becoming the largest population in those areas and retaking them. Because of such fears, Congress, in 1929, voted to double the size of the Border Patrol and demanded a crackdown on illegal entry. Congress was also responding to union demands for increased border security. Steel corporations had recently begun to recruit Mexicans from the Southwest to work in places such as Chicago and Gary, Indiana, where they would be paid less than Anglo-Americans. As European labor became more restricted because of the national origins requirement, Mexico and Latin America were seen by northern industrialists as new sources of cheap labor, much to the annoyance of labor unions. For many impoverished agricultural workers, the economic rewards seemed worth the risk. Many Mexicans moved north to Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. In response, the Texas legislature passed a law charging a $1,000 fee for labor recruiters before they could begin operating in the state. The growers and farmers did not want all their cheap labor to move north. A new law, suggested by the State Department, said that anyone caught entering the United States after having been deported previously would be charged with a felony and be liable for up to two years of imprisonment. This legislation greatly decreased illegal entry into North America. The Border Patrol was also authorized to cover the borders of Florida and Canada. The gentlemen’s agreement was ended, and the full eighteen-dollar fee was again required. These measures, plus the economic insecurity brought about by the worldwide depression beginning in 1929, temporarily ended the conflict over illegal immigration from Mexico and other nations of the Western Hemisphere. The issue would not reemerge as an important problem until after World War II. The most important impact of the creation of the Border Patrol was to make illegal entry into the United States much more difficult than it ever had been before. A government agency now had the authority to arrest and deport illegal aliens. Leslie V. Tischauser Updated by the editors 101

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Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration. Among the specific subjects covered is the enforcement of laws regulating undocumented workers. Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto, John William Byrd, and Bobby Byrd, eds. Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Graffiti from La Frontera. El Paso, Tex.: Cinco Puntos Press, 2003. This collage of illustrations and writings attempts to portray the various cultural and geographical considerations of those people who live on the line. Considers how the destitute of Mexico are ignored and forgotten. Cull, Nicholas J., and David Carrasco, eds. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. Hunter, Miranda. Latino Americans and Immigration Laws: Crossing the Border. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2006. Up-to-date study of Latino immigration that considers the changing role of the Border Patrol in the twenty-first century. Krauss, Erich. On the Line: Inside the U.S. Border Patrol. New York: Kensington, 2004. A former border patrol agent details the five-month basic training regimen all agents must undergo and follows them into the field to give the reader a sense of how smugglers and drug dealers challenge these agents who work on the line every day. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Moore, Alvin Edward. Border Patrol. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Sunstone Press, 1991. Based on actual incidents, this fictional work describes a world of smugglers and illegal aliens and the dangerous nature of working on the U.S./ Mexico border. Nevin, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. Details the federal government’s Operation Gatekeeper, which in the 1990’s targeted the San Diego-Tijuana border in efforts to stop illegal immigration. The author argues that this assault on immigration did not effectively reduce unauthorized immigration and served to inflame anti-Hispanic racism in the United States. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Scholarly study of social and legal issues relating to illegal aliens in the United States during the twenty-first century. Perkins, Clifford A. Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexi102

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can Boundary, 1910-1954. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1978. The recollections and adventures of a former district officer. Discusses the founding, staffing, and organization of the Border Patrol and the contributions of some of its early members. Useful information on the education, attitudes, and responsibilities of officers. Told from the point of view of an officer who supported the mission of the Border Patrol. Many anecdotes concerning the methods used by enforcement officers. Has little to say in favor of open borders and free migration. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. Up-to-date analysis of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States since the 1960’s, with particular attention to issues relating to deportation. Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004. Graphic, true story describes the harrowing journey of twenty-six Mexican men who attempted to enter the Arizona desert. The author argues that U.S. immigration policies are inhumane. Urrea, Luis Alberto, and John Lueders-Booth. Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border. New York: Doubleday, 1992. The author describes his interactions with Mexicans who live on the border and the deplorable living conditions that many of them suffer. Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Various social, political, and legal viewpoints are given by experts and observers familiar with immigration into the United States. See also Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Justice and immigration; Operation Wetback.

Bracero program Identification: U.S.-Mexico government program undertaken to facilitate the importation of Mexican farmworkers into the United States Date: 1942-1964 Immigration issues: Border control; Economics; Illegal immigration; Labor; Latino immigrants; Mexican immigrants Significance: The shortage of farm labor caused by U.S. entry into World War II prompted creation of the bracero program, but growing dependence of American farms on Mexican labor kept the program going nearly two decades after the war ended. 103

Bracero program

Housing for Mexican migrant workers in Edcouch, Texas. (Library of Congress)

U.S. entry into World War II at the end of 1941 created an agricultural labor shortage in the United States. As early as 1942, American farmers were complaining about labor shortages farms faced and demanding that workers be brought in to help plant, harvest, and distribute their agricultural products. In response, the U.S. and Mexican governments created the bracero program, also known as the Mexican Farm Labor Program (MFLP). The program contained many provisions designed to protect both the farmers and the braceros (a term that comes from the Spanish word brazos, meaning “arms” or “helping arms”). Because many Mexicans were afraid of being forced into the U.S. military upon arrival in the country because of the war, one provision was that no Mexican contract workers could be sent to fight in the U.S. military. Another provision was that Mexican laborers were not to be subjected to discriminatory acts of any kind. The United States agreed that the contract laborers’ round-trip transportation expenses from Mexico would be paid and adequate living arrangements would be provided for them in the United States. There was also a provision that the braceros would not displace local workers or lower their wages. The braceros were to be employed only in the agricultural realm and on the basis of contractual agreements—written in English and Spanish— between the braceros and their employers. The farmers agreed to pay the braceros wages equal to those prevailing in the area of employment, and no less than thirty cents an hour, for a minimum of three-quarters of the duration of the contract. The braceros also were granted the right to organize. Ten per104

Bracero program

cent of the braceros’ earnings were to be deducted and deposited in savings funds, payable upon their return to Mexico. Finally, the braceros were to be given sanitary housing. In 1943, braceros would be granted the right to have a Mexican consul and Mexican labor inspectors intervene in disputes on their behalf. With these provisions and guidelines intact, on September 29, 1942, the first fifteen hundred braceros were transported to California by train. Problems Arise Braceros encountered a variety of problems in the United States. Although their contracts were explained to them before they signed them, many braceros did not have a basic understanding of the contracts’ terms and conditions. Workers often understood little beyond the fact that they were going to work in the United States. Despite the difficulties of moving from one country to another, when the braceros arrived in the United States, they were not given time to orient themselves to their new surroundings but were required to report for work the day after their arrival. Farmers were skeptical of the MFLP because they viewed it as infringing on their own welfare and traditional independence. The farmers wanted the federal government to provide workers, but they wanted it to be done on their own terms. However, the labor shortage crisis was so severe that the farmers consented to the government’s program. Once the braceros were consigned to their employers, the binational agreement between Mexico and the United States was followed weakly, if at all, by the farmers. The farmers, who had much more power and control than the Mexican labor inspectors did, could basically do as they pleased with the workers and their contracts. For example, as contract laborers, the bracero workers were expected to adapt to and stay on the job under adverse conditions from which local workers would have turned away. The bracero workforce was used for the heaviest and worst-paid jobs. This meant that the bulk of the imported workforce was used largely in the production and harvesting of crops that required large numbers of temporary, seasonal laborers for physically demanding stoop work. The braceros were considered a blessing, because local workers refused to do stoop labor. The farmers used the argument that Mexicans were better suited for back-bending labor than were the local workers to justify their claim that they could not continue farming without the braceros. Braceros frequently were treated as animals. Despite the ill treatment and harsh conditions, many braceros continued to migrate in order to find work and muchneeded money. Dependency Develops By entering into an agreement with Mexican workers and the federal government, agriculture began a dependency on braceros that continued after World War II had ended. Within a year of the program’s inception, braceros had in many areas become a mainstay in farm production. After World War II ended in 1945, the Migratory Labor Agreement was signed with Mexico to continue encouraging the seasonal importation of 105

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farmworkers. Between 1948 and 1964, some 4.5 million Mexicans were brought to the United States for temporary work. Braceros were expected to return to Mexico at the end of their labor contract, but often they stayed. Although the United States government sanctioned this importation of Mexican workers, it shunned the importation of workers during times of economic difficulties. During the 1953-1954 recession, the government mounted a campaign called Operation Wetback to deport illegal entrants and braceros who had remained in the country illegally. Deportations numbered in excess of 1.1 million. As immigration officials searched out illegal workers, persons from Central and South America, as well as native-born U.S. citizens of Central or South American descent, found themselves vulnerable to this search. Protestations of the violation of their rights occurred, but to little effect. Although the jobs reserved for the braceros were generally despised, they were nevertheless essential first links in the robust wartime food production chain. In this capacity, the Mexican workers made a vital and measurable contribution to the total war effort. Kristine Kleptach Jamieson Further Reading Copp, Nelson Gage. “Wetbacks” and Braceros: Mexican Migrant Laborers and American Immigration Policy, 1930-1960. San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971. Provides detailed accounts of emigration and immigration policies affecting migrant agricultural workers from Mexico. Craig, Richard B. The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971. Discusses the political agreement between the United States and Mexico regarding migrant laborers. Galarza, Ernesto. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally & Loftin West, 1978. Discusses the treatment of braceros and the effects of the bracero program in California. Gamboa, Erasmo. Mexican Labor and World War II: Braceros in the Pacific Northwest, 1942-1947. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. A detailed history of the life, conditions, and social policy affecting migrant workers from Mexico in the United States. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Study of the state of Mexican labor immigration to the United States in the early twenty-first century. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. General history of the problem of illegal immigration in the United States that includes a chapter covering Operation Wetback and the bracero program. Valdes, Dennis Nodin. Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917-1970. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. An in-depth discussion of the Mexican migration to and settlement in the upper Midwest regions. 106

British as dominant group

See also Chicano movement; Farmworkers’ union; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Operation Wetback; Undocumented workers.

British as dominant group Immigration issues: Discrimination; European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Slavery Significance: Beginning during the early seventeenth century and continuing unabated for more than three centuries, there was an immense flood of immigrants to North America from Great Britain. These people determined the linguistics, culture, religion, and politics of North America in ways that are still perceptible. The seventeenth century was marked by a wave of English immigrants, including some who were indentured, to remote colonies in England’s North American and Caribbean territories. These early arrivals were joined in the eighteenth century by Scotch-Irish and Scots settlers and, later, by Catholic Irish. In the first two centuries of settlement, African slaves were introduced to the New World. These later arrivals had an inestimable impact on North America, but certain factors help explain the British stamp. The dominance of the English, both in the colonies and in Britain, was one factor. The British crown exerted control over immigration in the seventeenth century, with more than 70 percent of immigrants being English. Few Scots, Welsh, or Irish immigrated in the first decades of the colonial period, thus giving the English language and the Anglican (Episcopal) Church a commanding position in everyday colonial life. When non-English groups arrived, they were confronted by a generally Anglicized society. The changing dynamics of political and religious thought and the distance across the Atlantic Ocean helped make settlement a regional phenomenon. The land settled by various Britons was isolated and inwardly divided, often along religious lines. For example, in the northern colonies, where there was less arable land and farms were small, dissenters from within the Anglican Church, known as Puritans, were the dominant group, along with a few Dutch- and German-speaking peoples. In the southern colonies, particularly in the tidewater regions, the traditional Episcopal faith was observed. Other Protestants, such as the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish, were pushed to the frontier, where they raised large families to work small farm plots. The dominant Anglo-Americans with the best land settled onto large plantations. It was in the coastal region, with its link to the Caribbean sugar centers, 107

British as dominant group

Romanticized painting of the first Thanksgiving celebrated by English pilgrims in the New World in 1621. The event has traditionally been seen as a symbol of hope and cordial relations between the new settlers and Native Americans, but it may also be seen as a symbol of the first step toward British domination of North America. (Library of Congress)

that African slavery took hold in British America. Slavery served as cheap labor that allowed for an almost aristocratic way of life that provided material benefit to the empire. Slaves contributed much to the way of life in the South but were in turn Anglicized. This continued until the British government made an effort to end the transatlantic (though not domestic) slave trade during the late eighteenth century.

British Domination of North America British domination of North America was seemingly ensured when the British defeated the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and with the decline of the Spanish in eastern North America. Ironically, these events precipitated the end of direct British rule in the colonies. Though the colonies remained divided on many issues, grievances against the British crown led to the American Revolution. Drawing from the ideas of leading Enlightenment theorists, especially Englishman John Locke, the American revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing British rule and establishing a fledgling republic. North America did not, however, become less British as a culture. The United States, and later Canada, essentially continued the same patterns of commerce, Indian affairs, and settlement begun in the colonial period. Sub108

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sequent non-British immigrants to North America thus entered a society defined by British roots but open to contributions from elsewhere. Gene Redding Wynne, Jr. Further Reading Menard, Russell R. Migrants, Servants, and Slaves: Unfree Labor in Colonial British America. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001. Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001. Van Vugt, William E. Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. See also Anglo-conformity; Assimilation theories; Euro-Americans; European immigrants, 1790-1892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; White ethnics.

Burlingame Treaty The Treaty: Treaty between the United States and China Date: July 28, 1868 Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Laws and treaties Significance: The Burlingame Treaty established reciprocal rights between China and the United States, including respect for territorial sovereignty and bilateral immigration. Formal American interest in China dates from the thirteen-thousand-mile voyage of the U.S. ship Empress of China, under the command of Captain John Green, which departed from New York City on February 22, 1784. The vessel returned from Canton in May, 1785, with tea, silks, and other trade goods of the Orient. Merchants in Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, and New York quickly sought profits in the China trade. By the late 1830’s, “Yankee clippers” had shortened the transit time from America’s Atlantic ports to Canton from a matter of many months to a mere ninety days. Chinese Politics Political problems, however, hindered commercial relations. The Manchu, or Ch’ing, Dynasty (1644-1912), fearful of Western intentions, restricted trade to one city, Canton, and sharply curtailed the rights of foreigners in China. Chafing at these limits, especially China’s refusal to deal 109

Burlingame Treaty

Illustration from an August, 1869, issue of Harper’s Weekly depicting the completion of the Pacific Railroad, which employed large numbers of Chinese workers. (Library of Congress)

with Europeans on terms of equality, caused Great Britain to begin hostilities with the Manchu Dynasty, occasioned by the “unsavory issue” of England’s trade in opium with China. The Opium War (1839-1842) resulted in the Treaty of Nanking (August 24, 1842), a triumph for the political and commercial interests of Great Britain in eastern Asia. Britain obtained the cession of the island of Hong Kong and the opening of four additional cities—Amoy, Ningpo, Foochow, and Shanghai—to British trade. The U.S. government desired similar rights and obtained them in the Treaty of Wanghia (named for a village near Macao) on July 3, 1844; Commissioner Caleb Cushing, although not formally received by China as a minister, was permitted to negotiate this landmark agreement. The United States secured access to the newly opened ports and was extended the right of extraterritoriality; that is, U.S. citizens were to be tried for offenses committed in China under U.S. law by the U.S. consul. Within the next twenty years, trade with China grew. The United States acquired Washington, Oregon, and California, and, with Pacific ports, had greater access to Chinese markets. The California gold rush (1849) and the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad (completed in 1869), with its need for labor, encouraged Chinese emigration to the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. missionaries, merchants, travelers, and adventurers were arriving in China. Conditions in “the Middle Kingdom,” however, were not good. The authority of the central government had been challenged by the anti-Western 110

Burlingame Treaty

Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) and was suppressed only with outside help. Further European incursions into China, epitomized by the Anglo-French War with the Manchus (1854-1858), threatened to curtail U.S. cultural and commercial opportunities in China. If the United States did not act, it would face the prospect of being excluded from China by European imperialism. American Diplomatic Representation Secretary of State William Henry Seward believed that it was time for the United States to have formal representation at the Manchu court. His fortunate choice was Anson Burlingame. Born on November 14, 1820, in rural New York, the son of a “Methodist exhorter,” Burlingame had grown up in the Midwest, graduating from the University of Michigan. After attending Harvard Law School, Burlingame went into practice in Boston. With a gift of oratory and exceptional personal charm, Burlingame served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1855-1861) and was a pioneer of the new Republican Party. As a reward for his labor and in recognition of his talents, Burlingame was offered the post of U.S. minister to Austria, but the Habsburgs refused him because of his known sympathies with Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionary. As a second choice and a compensatory honor, Burlingame was given the assignment to China. Because the United States was distracted with the Civil War, Burlingame was left on his own and could count on little U.S. military might to support his actions. Acquiring a great admiration for and confidence in the Chinese, Burlingame won the trust and respect of I-Hsin, known as Prince Kung, the co-regent of China with the dowager empress Cixi (Tz’u-hsi). When Burlingame resigned as the U.S. minister to China, in November, 1867, the Imperial Manchu court asked him to head China’s first official delegation to the West. The Burlingame mission toured the United States, being warmly received, and arrived in the United Kingdom as William Gladstone was assuming the prime ministership of that nation. Burlingame’s brilliant career was cut short during a subsequent visit to Russia, where he contracted pneumonia, dying in St. Petersburg on February 23, 1870. Few had served their own country so well, and it was said that none had given China a more sincere friendship. The most outstanding accomplishment of the Burlingame mis- Anson Burlingame, the American diplomatic minission was the Burlingame Treaty, ter to China from 1861 to 1867. (NARA) 111

Burlingame Treaty

signed on July 28, 1868, in Washington, D.C. This document dealt with a variety of issues between China and the United States. The United States pledged itself to respect Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, a position in sharp contrast to that of the European powers and one that anticipated the subsequent U.S. “open door policy” (1899). The Burlingame Treaty accepted bilateral immigration between China and the United States, and by 1880 there were 105,000 Chinese living in the United States. By the standards of the 1860’s, the Burlingame Treaty was a landmark of fairness and justice. However, the United States did not honor its spirit or letter. Anti-immigrant feeling focused on a fear of Chinese “coolie” labor. The infamous Sandlot Riots in San Francisco, in June, 1877, were symptomatic of both the mistreatment of Asian immigrants and the rising sentiment for Asian exclusion. On March 1, 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed a congressional bill limiting the number of Chinese passengers on board ships bound for the United States as a violation of the Burlingame Treaty. Hayes did, however, send a mission to China to work for the revision of the Burlingame Treaty. In 1880, China recognized the U.S. right to regulate, limit, and suspend, but not absolutely forbid, Chinese immigration. Two years later, President Chester A. Arthur vetoed a twenty-year suspension of Chinese immigration as being a de facto prohibition, but on May 6, 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act passed, suspending the importation of Chinese labor for a ten-year period. In 1894, another ten-year exclusion period was enacted; in 1904, exclusion was extended indefinitely. When, on December 17, 1943, Chinese immigration was permitted by an act of Congress, it was within the strict limits of the 1920’s quota system, allowing the entrance of only 105 Chinese annually. Not until the mid-twentieth century did the United States depart from an immigration policy centered on ethnic origin, thus allowing the original intent of the Burlingame Treaty to be realized. C. George Fry Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and European Americans in the United States during the midnineteenth century. Dulles, Foster Rhea. China and America: The Story of Their Relations Since 1784. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946. This brief, classic history places the Burlingame Treaty in the broad context of United StatesChinese trade and diplomacy over a period of 150 years. Fairbank, John K. China Perceived: Images and Policies in Chinese-American Relations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. A noted Harvard scholar compares the contrasting sensitivities, traditions, aims, and means of the United States and China as they have affected foreign policy. 112

Cable Act

Fairbank, John K., Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig. East Asia: Tradition and Transformation. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. This profusely illustrated and thoroughly documented survey, a standard introduction to the history of Asia’s Pacific Rim, illuminates the Chinese situation in 1868. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. A succinct analysis that explains why the Chinese were the only immigrants other than Africans to be forbidden by law from entering the United States in the nineteenth century. Mosher, Steven W. China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1990. This combination of psychohistory and political analysis examines the varied U.S. perceptions of China, ranging from infatuation to hostility. Carefully annotated. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Scholarly study of the special problems faced by Chinese women who wished to come to the United States. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 18681911. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1983. Well-documented, concise, in-depth study of the key issue between the United States and China during the late nineteenth century: immigration. See also Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Coolies; Gentlemen’s Agreement.

Cable Act The Law: Federal law restricting citizenship rights of immigrants Date: Became law on September 22, 1922 Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Families and marriage; Laws and treaties; Women Significance: The Cable Act revoked the principle of allowing immigrant wives of American citizens automatically to assume the American citizenship of their husbands. The Cable Act reformed the rules by which women lost or obtained U.S. citizenship through marriage to foreigners. Representative John L. Cable of Ohio noted when introducing his bill that “the laws of our country should 113

Cable Act

grant independent citizenship to women.” By this act, the United States took the lead among nations in the world in acknowledging the right of a woman to choose her citizenship rather than to lose or gain it upon marriage. During the early twentieth century, under the laws of virtually all nations, a woman automatically lost her citizenship and took that of her husband upon marriage to a foreigner. The Cable Act, supported by all major women’s groups at the time, was viewed as an important piece of reform legislation aimed at protecting a woman’s right to choose her citizenship. As Representative Cable noted upon the bill’s passage into law: “Justice and common sense dictate that the woman should have the same right as the man to choose the country of her allegiance.” The effects of the Cable Act were varied. Although aimed primarily at rectifying cases in which American women, under the 1907 Expropriation Act, automatically lost their U.S. citizenship upon marriage to an alien, it also revoked provisions of an 1885 act that automatically conferred U.S. citizenship on alien women who married Americans. Therefore, a foreign woman could not automatically become an American citizen upon marriage to an American, even if that were her desire. Instead, like any other alien, she would have to undergo an independent process of naturalization. One effect of this aspect of the law was to discourage Chinese American men from marrying immigrant women. For these reasons, the Cable Act has been considered antiimmigrant and anti-women by some latter-day observers. However, although an alien woman who married a U.S. citizen or whose husband became naturalized would no longer automatically be granted citizenship, she was not excluded from seeking U.S. citizenship. The act made the process of becoming an American citizen a matter of deliberate choice rather than an automatic effect of marriage. The Cable Act did not revoke the citizenship of any woman who before its passage had received American citizenship automatically by marriage. The ultimate effect of the Cable Act was to treat women of all ethnic and racial backgrounds with complete equality insofar as the acquisition of U.S. citizenship was concerned. Modern human rights treaties generally follow this U.S. practice, recognizing that acquisition of citizenship should be a matter of free and independent consent. Robert F. Gorman Further Reading Houle, Michelle E., ed. Immigration. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Greenhaven Press/Thomson/Gale, 2004. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 114

California gold rush

See also Chinese immigrants; Citizenship; Japanese American Citizens League; Naturalization; Naturalization Act of 1790; Ozawa v. United States; Wong Kim Ark case.

California gold rush The Event: Rapid influx of immigrants into California after the discovery of gold in the territory recently taken by the United States from Mexico Date: January 24, 1848-September 4, 1849 Place: Western slope of the Sierra Nevada Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Economics; European immigrants Significance: Discovery of the precious metal invited a flood of eastern fortune seekers and global immigrants into the new U.S. territory, accelerating the development of the western terrorities of the United States and raising issues about the immigration of Asians that would not be fully resolved for more than a century. On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold in the terrace of a mill that a group of men were erecting for John A. Sutter on the south fork of the American River, near Sacramento in Northern California. Despite Sutter’s efforts to keep the news secret until he could secure and protect the vast estates he had obtained by Mexican land grants, California newspapers revealed the find in March. By May, the rush had started, and San Francisco, Monterey, San Jose, and other California communities were depopulated of men who headed for the streams flowing westward from the Sierra Nevada. During the first working season in the summer of 1848, Californians, joined by a few men from Oregon and Hawaii, searched for the precious metal without competition from the horde of gold seekers who would soon descend on the gold country. The Rush Begins News of the discovery first reached the East in August, when the New York Herald published a report; the next month, official word arrived from Thomas O. Larkin, the U.S. consul in Monterey, who was alarmed at the impact of the event. After a tour of the diggings, Richard B. Mason, military governor of California, forwarded a report to Washington, D.C., accompanied by a small box of sample gold. In December, 1848, when President James K. Polk notified Congress of the gold discovery in his annual message, the United States and the whole world realized that earlier reports were true. Gold fever broke out in the eastern United States; thousands made arrangements to go to California in the spring. Some gold seekers planned to migrate 115


and operate independently, while others organized cooperative groups or companies to share expenses, labor, and profits. Many people living on the eastern seacoast elected to travel to California by sea. Within a month following the president’s message, sixty-one ships had left the Atlantic seaports for a voyage of six months around Cape Horn, arriving at their destination in the summer months of 1849. It was possible to shorten the journey by taking a steamship to Chagres, crossing the Isthmus of Panama by land, and boarding another ship at Panama, bound for California, but passages were uncertain, even the most expensive accommodations were inadequate, and the isthmus was disease-ridden. When this route became overcrowded, some travelers chose a longer crossing through Nicaragua; however, they found greater difficulty obtaining passage on the Pacific side, because the vessels headed north already had been overloaded in Panama. The largest number of gold seekers went to California overland, a shorter and cheaper trip. Warm weather permitted an early start on a journey across northern Mexico or New Mexico. Texas trails converged on El Paso, from which the adventurers headed west by way of Tucson and the Gila River into southern California, and then northward to regions in the Sierra where gold had been discovered. Santa Fe was another base, at which people arrived from Fort Smith, Arkansas, having ascended the valley of the Canadian River, or having come west from Missouri by way of the Santa Fe Trail. At Santa Fe, some people elected to turn southward down the Rio Grande and west along the Gila River, following the route of Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West into California. Others turned north and west in a greater semicircular path, known as the Old Spanish Trail, that went into southern California. The most popular route was the well-known Platte River Trail to the South Pass, then by way of Fort Hall or Salt Lake City to the California Trail, and across Nevada along the banks of the Humboldt River. The Hazards of Migration The overland migration of 1849 along this route appeared to duplicate that of earlier years, but there were considerable differences. The danger from attacks by Native Americans was minimized because of the number of travelers, and parties were not nearly so likely to lose the route. The heavy traffic exhausted the grass supply needed for animals, however, and water holes along the trail were infected with Asiatic cholera. Suffering was intense, because the immigrants knew nothing about traveling along plains or over mountains. Guides were scarce, and many guidebooks and newspaper accounts were misleading. The trails were marked by the graves of those who had succumbed to cholera, dysentery, or mountain fever. Beyond the South Pass, much of the route was over hot and dusty alkali deserts. In the desert crossing between the sinks of the Humboldt and Carson Rivers, the ground was littered with abandoned wagons and carcasses of dead animals. Many weary immigrants resorted to pack animals or walked across the Sierra Nevada. 116


Chinese and white miners sluicing for gold at Auburn Ravine in Northern California’s Placer County in 1852. (California State Library)

A relief society in Sacramento financed and delivered medical and food supplies to groups stranded in the desert, saving many lives. Conditions were equally bad in the desert west of the mouth of the Gila River. Those who wandered from the established routes encountered indescribable suffering; one party leaving the Colorado River to strike directly west into California left most of its members in a valley subsequently known as Death Valley. San Francisco became the metropolis of the gold country, and supply towns grew at the strategic locations of Marysville, Sacramento, and Stockton. Hundreds of mining camps sprang up near the diggings, with picturesque names such as Poker Flat, Hangtown, Red Dog, Hell’s Delight, and Whiskey Bar expressing the sentiments of a predominantly male society. Most of the “forty-niners” who migrated to California were young, unmarried, and male. However, thousands of women also made the voyage to California. The High Cost of Living So many people came to California that the majority of gold seekers found it necessary to labor long, hard hours to obtain the gold necessary to provide shelter and food. The weak and the defenseless were quickly weeded out. As economic pressures mounted, prejudice against 117


racial and national minorities increased. California mining camps were cosmopolitan, and the Euro-Americans from New England, the South, the Missouri frontier, and elsewhere used various devices to discriminate against such groups as the Chinese, Mexicans, and African Americans. Native-born Euro-Americans constituted almost 80 percent of all the fortyniners. The second largest group was from Mexico and other countries of Latin America. Approximately 7 percent came from Europe and Asia. English and German immigrants were more successful at mining than were the French, most of whom returned to the supply towns and became shopkeepers. To escape the drudgery, miners occasionally spent days of recreation engaged in contests of strength, endurance, and speed to demonstrate their physical prowess. Many found amusement at night in the saloons, where they gambled at red dog or faro, or in dancehalls with women. Nevertheless, the miners were noted for their spontaneous humanitarianism in aiding the distressed. When the gold rush began, California had a population of fourteen thousand; by the end of 1849, there were an estimated one hundred thousand in the former Mexican province. Exhibiting admirable leadership, some of these men laid plans for the calling of a constitutional convention to meet in September, 1849, to organize a new state seeking admission into the United States. During the early days, mining in California was highly rewarding—an average miner obtained between ten and fifty dollars a day—but the rate of return declined rapidly as time passed. Nevertheless, until 1865 or thereabouts, an average of almost fifty million dollars of gold per year was mined in California. While the first fortunes were made in the more easily accessible placer deposits, the later fortunes generally were made by mining corporations that could afford the capital and machinery required to work the deeper deposits. The Gold Rush in U.S. History The more than seventy-five thousand people who migrated to California in the hope of earning their fortunes had a significant effect on American history. The huge influx of people from the East displaced many Native Americans and highlighted racial tensions between the native-born and foreign-born. The notion of “manifest destiny” (a term that had surfaced three years earlier in an article by John L. O’Sullivan appearing in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review)—whereby expansionist interests held that it was the “fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”—had taken hold of the nation. Because of the large numbers of westward-moving fortune seekers, California was admitted as a state in 1850. California miners developed new mining technology that benefited mining in other regions of the country. W. Turrentine Jackson Judith Boyce DeMark 118

Celtic Irish

Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and European Americans in the United States during the midnineteenth century that includes a discussion of the gold rush era. Gordon, Mary M., ed. Overland to California with the Pioneer Line. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Collection of memoirs of participants in various land expeditions to California during the 1840’s. Levy, Jo Ann. “Forgotten Forty-Niners.” In American History. Vol. 1. Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin, 1995. Provides new information on the experiences of women in the California mining camps and surrounding towns. Paul, Rodman W. California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947. Covers several economic and social aspects of the gold rush era, including the impact on California, the contributions of the California miners to mining technology, and the regulation of mining society, particularly the growth of vigilante committees. Royce, Sarah. A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. A diary that describes the author’s experiences as a wife who took part in the California gold rush. See also Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Celtic Irish Identification: Immigrants to North America of southern Celtic Irish descent Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: The Celtic Irish were first brought to English colonies in North America as servants and laborers during the colonial era and long faced discrimination and abuse. During the 1650’s, the first immigrants from Ireland began to arrive in North America. It was not until the early eighteenth century that large numbers of people from throughout Ireland emigrated to North America. The majority of these immigrants were from northern Ireland and of Scottish ancestry; 119

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lesser numbers were from southern Ireland and identified themselves with traditional native peoples of Ireland and a Celtic heritage. The Scotch-Irish immigrants to North America were fourth- or fifth-generation Scots in Ireland who had largely assimilated into the Irish culture except for their religious faith and their family names. The Scotch-Irish were predominantly Protestant rather than Roman Catholic, and their family names revealed a Scottish heritage. Scotch-Irish living in northern Ireland considered themselves Irish, not Scottish. Immigrants to North America from southern Ireland were predominantly Catholic and usually bore family names of Celtic origin. Despite the common heritage of Ireland, these two groups of immigrants were regarded quite differently upon their arrival in North America. The Protestant Scotch-Irish shared a common faith with the large numbers of established Protestant English settlers. The smaller numbers of southern Irish of Catholic and Celtic heritage became the focus of widespread ethnic discrimination. Randall L. Milstein Further Reading Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; European immigrants, 1790-1892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Censuses, U.S. Definition: Official federal government enumerations of the nation’s entire population—both citizens and noncitizens—taken every tenth year Dates: Begun in 1790 Immigration issue: Demographics Significance: Information collected by the U.S. Census includes each person’s ethnic or racial background. This enables the size of each ethnic or racial group to be compared over time and allows governmental programs 120

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to take the size of an ethnic or racial group into account when determining policy. The U.S. Constitution requires that population be the basis for determining the number of seats apportioned to each state in the U.S. House of Representatives. As the population of the country shifts, the decennial census permits a readjustment in the number of seats for each state. Census reports have also been used to calculate how many immigrants from particular countries are allowed admission into the United States as well as to determine what constitutes unlawful discrimination. Censuses A population census is a complete count of all persons residing in a particular area. A census differs from a population sample, which scientifically selects a percentage of persons in an area in order to estimate characteristics of the entire population of the territory. To undertake a population census, census takers must identify the dwelling units in the area to be covered; then they must go to each abode and obtain information from all persons residing therein. Inevitably, census takers miss some people because not everyone is at home when the census taker arrives, some people choose to evade being counted, others are homeless or transient, and not all dwelling units are easy to identify. Censuses, thus, generally undercount population, especially in areas where less affluent minorities reside. That is why, some argue, a method known as “statistical sampling” may be more accurate than an actual headcount, provided that the census has identified all dwelling units. Legal Requirements The Constitution of the United States requires a population census every ten years. Because the Constitution requires that each state’s representation in the federal House of Representatives be based on population, a major purpose of the decennial census is to increase or decrease the number of seats in the House of Representatives apportioned to each state in accordance with relative changes in the population of each state. The Constitution did not consider Native Americans to be citizens of the United States, so they were not originally counted in the census; those living on reservations did not affect the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives until after 1924, when they were granted American citizenship. Those of African descent were counted in each state, but before the Civil War (1861-1865), when they were not considered citizens, their number was multiplied by three-fifths for the purpose of reapportioning representation in the House of Representatives. Beginning during the 1960’s, affirmative action began to be applied to remedy employment discrimination in the United States. One aspect of the policy is that federal government employers and those with federal contracts are supposed to hire men and women of the various ethnic or racial groups in the same proportions as their relative availability in the workforce. To deter121

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mine the composition of the workforce, employers usually rely on census data, which are disseminated by the U.S. Department of Labor. Ethnic/Racial Categories In the first federal census of 1790, each individual was assigned membership in one of two racial groups: white and colored. The colored population was divided into free colored and slaves, and both categories were divided into black or mulatto. These census categories were used until 1860, when the Asiatic category was added and a count was made of the people in various Indian tribes. The 1870 census used four categories: white, colored, Chinese, and Indian. In 1880, Japanese became the fifth category, and the term “Negro” replaced “colored.” These five categories remained on census reports through 1900. The 1910 census added several new categories: Filipinos, Hindus, and Koreans. A footnote in the census

Census taker collecting information during the early twentieth century. Under the U.S . Constitution, the federal government is required to conduct a comprehensive census of the United States every ten years. (Library of Congress)

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report noted that Hindus were “Caucasians” but still were counted separately from other categories of “whites.” The 1920 census added Hawaiians and part Hawaiians, but these two categories were removed from the national enumeration in 1930 and 1940. Mexicans joined the category list in 1930 and 1940. In 1950, the only racial categories were white and nonwhite. In 1960, six categories were used: “white,” “Negro,” Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Indian. In 1970, Hawaiians and Koreans returned to the list, making eight categories. In 1980, the category “black” replaced “Negro,” and the list of Asian and Pacific races expanded to include Asian Indians, Samoans, and Vietnamese. In 1990, nearly every country in Asia was represented as a separate category. Although Mexicans appeared as a category in 1930 and 1940, they did not reappear in national statistics for forty years. In 1970, the census counted “Persons of Spanish Heritage,” but in 1980, the census counted Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans separately. In 1990, the census reported the number of persons from almost all countries in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Census reports on the territories of Alaska and Hawaii used unique category schemes. For Alaska, the census counted Aleuts, Eskimos, and Alaskan Indians; Aleuts and Eskimos became national categories in 1980 and 1990, but Alaskan Indians were pooled with all other American Indians in both years. For Hawaii, the indigenous Hawaiians were counted, although up to 1930, they were divided into pure Hawaiians, Asiatic Hawaiians, and white Hawaiians. From the beginning, the census had separate subcategories for European ethnic groups (British, French, German, and so on), all of which were counted as white. The breakdown was made to record the number of foreignborn individuals in the population. Due to concerns among the earlier immigrants from western and northern Europe that too many eastern and southern Europeans were arriving, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924. This act replaced a temporary immigration law, passed in 1921, which had restricted immigrants to 3 percent of each admissible nationality residing in the United States as of 1910. According to the 1924 immigration act, known as the National Origins Act, the maximum from each European country was calculated as 2 percent of the nationality group already inside the United States as determined by the federal census of 1890. Most Asians, effectively, were barred from immigration under the law with the exception of Filipinos, as the Philippines was an American possession as of 1898. The restrictive 1924 immigration law imposed no quota on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. With the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Congress established equal quotas for all countries, regardless of hemisphere. With the advent of affirmative action, a five-category scheme was developed by federal civil rights enforcement agencies. The so-called COINS categories stood for “Caucasian, Oriental, Indian, Negro, and Spanish.” Later, the 123

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term “Oriental” was replaced by the term “Asian and Pacific islander,” and the term “Hispanic” replaced the term “Spanish.” Census for the Year 2000 During the 1990’s, considerable pressure was brought to bear to change the categories for the census for the year 2000. Some blacks wanted to be called “African Americans.” Hispanics wanted to be counted as “Latinos” and as members of a race rather than an ethnic group. Native Hawaiians wanted to be moved from the category “Asians and Pacific islanders” and included with “American Indians and Native Alaskans.” Middle Easterners, particularly those from Islamic countries, wanted separate status. Finally, some mixed-race or multiethnic people who spanned two or more of the categories wanted to be counted as “multiracial.” Advocates of a society in which ethnic and racial distinctions would not be recognized officially wanted to drop all references to race and ethnicity in the census. After many hearings and studies on the subject, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget decided to keep the previous categorizations with one modification: “Asians” would be counted separately from “Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific islanders.” The proposal for a separate “multiracial” category was rejected, but persons with multiracial backgrounds would be allowed to check more than one category. Thus, data on ethnic backgrounds of people in the United States have been collapsed into five racial categories: African American or black, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific islander, and white. The census of the year 2000 permits a member of any of these five categories to also check “Hispanic or Latino.” Impact on Public Policy The ethnic and racial diversity of the United States is best documented by the decennial federal census. The count of each ethnic or racial group is crucial in determining whether discrimination occurs, but questions about ethnic group membership or race on a census deeply affect the identity of many persons, who in turn may support efforts either to abolish ethnic and racial counts or to change categories. Michael Haas Further Reading Anderson, Margo J. The American Census: A Social History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. Historical account of the taking of censuses that includes many of the associated controversies. Choldin, Harvey M. Looking for the Last Percent: The Controversy over Census Undercounts. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Critical study of the tendency of censuses to undercount minorities. Kertzer, David I., and Dominique Arel, eds. Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Census. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Study of the counting of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. Census. 124

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Perlmann, Joel, and Mary Waters, eds. The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Collection of critical essays on the U.S. Census’s changing racial categories and the social and political effects of these changes. Rodriguez, Clara E. Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Study of the treatment of ethnic minorities in the U.S. Census, with special attention to the counting of Latinos. Skerry, Peter. Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. Analytical study of the problems of accurately counting members of racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Census. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2004-2005. 124th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005. Starting place for any research on demographics. Updated annually, this reference source is available on compact disc, and much of its information is freely available online on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site. See also Demographics of immigration; European immigrants, 17901892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; Immigration “crisis”; Justice and immigration; Racial and ethnic demographic trends.

Chicano movement The Event: Period of Mexican American cultural and political awakening Date: 1960’s-1970’s Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Latino immigrants; Mexican immigrants Significance: During the era of the Chicano movement, Mexican Americans defined and took pride in their own identity, asserted their civil rights, and worked toward self-determination by improving their financial, social, and political circumstances. The Chicano movement began during the early 1960’s and peaked during the early 1970’s. Many historians view the movement as a concise expression of the Chicano perspective on the Mexican American community’s history. Chicano history begins with the indigenous peoples of what is now Mexico and the southwestern United States, proceeds with the Spanish conquest and colonization and the Mexican War (1846-1848), and continues during the subsequent expansion of European Americans into the American Southwest. 125

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Historical Background According to Chicano analysts, Chicanos are a people who are indigenous to the Americas, originating from Aztlán, the Aztec homeland in Central and North America. After the Spanish conquest and colonization in the sixteenth century of what is now Mexico and the American Southwest, Chicano culture became a blend of Indian and Spanish customs and practices. Although the Spanish attempted to suppress the indigenous culture, the Indians’ response to the influx of Spanish culture was to practice accommodation, outwardly accepting their “inferior” status to obtain concessions from the dominant group and occasionally rebelling. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, settlers from the United States began to arrive in the Southwest, then part of Mexico. These settlers, mostly of European ancestry, brought with them the concepts of white supremacy, patriarchy, Christianity, and capitalism. Under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, Mexicans who remained in the new territories of the United States were designated as citizens with all constitutional rights and guarantees; land acquired under Mexican law was to be protected by U.S. law. However, by 1900, European Americans (called Anglos by Chicano historians) had seized 95 percent of Mexican-owned land. The Mexican way of life gradually was replaced by the lifestyle of the Anglo settlers. Mexican farmers and ranchers were replaced by Anglos, who ran the farms and ranches differently, often along more capitalistic and less paternalistic lines. Some of the ranchers viewed Mexican Americans primarily as a reserve workforce. Across the Southwest, American businesses, courts, and law enforcement agencies replaced existing facilities. Schools were segregated; a triple system separated Mexican Americans, African Americans, and European Americans. From approximately 1900 to 1930, millions of Mexican citizens migrated to the United States. Some fled to avoid the violent and economic dislocations of the Mexican Revolution; others came to fill the U.S. labor shortage caused by economic growth in industry and agriculture. Communities in the Southwest that historically had contained many Mexican Americans and industrial cities in the Midwest became destinations for those seeking employment, and migrant trails of Mexican and Mexican American workers developed throughout the United States. Changing Generations During the 1930’s, the political and nationalistic loyalties of members of the Mexican American community underwent profound change. The Mexican immigrants who arrived from 1900 to 1930 often did not think of themselves as citizens of the United States because of Mexico’s geographic proximity and the ease of returning to their native country. Discrimination and anti-Mexican attitudes also made it hard for them to feel a part of their adopted country. However, in the post-World War I era, as millions of migrants moved into Mexican American communities and the U.S.born generation began to grow up, more of the migrants began to think of themselves as Mexican Americans. 126

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The Great Depression of 1930 resulted in the deportation of many Mexican immigrants. From 1930 to 1937, U.S. law officials and political authorities deported approximately 500,000 Mexican people (250,000 of whom were children born in the United States and therefore American citizens). The deportation demonstrates how many Americans viewed Mexican immigrants: as inexpensive and exploitable labor to be disposed of in times of economic distress. This negative perception persisted even after World War II. From 1942 through 1945, several hundred thousand Mexican Americans were active in combat zones; several received the highest military honors. When the war ended and the veterans returned home, they discovered that their sacrifices had minimal effect on prewar attitudes toward and policies and structures affecting Mexican Americans. However, these veterans no longer accepted the status quo, and they joined with members of the community who had already rejected the ideas of gradualism and assimilation. From 1946 through 1963, Mexican American veterans, believing in the American ideal of equality and equal opportunity and having proved their patriotism and loyalty, created new organizations to address what they perceived to be barriers to their reform-oriented strategies. However, despite these organizations’ numerous successful efforts against economic, political, and social discrimination (including the legal defeat of the triple school system and a significant role in helping elect John F. Kennedy to the U.S. presidency), many members of the Mexican American community became disillusioned at the lack of substantive improvement for communities and individuals. The most prominent problems were the continued exploitation of agricultural workers, immigration issues, low levels of educational achievement, and limited economic opportunities. Chicano Generation In the Southwest, many Mexican Americans, particularly young people, began to reexamine their identity, especially their experience as a mestizo (mixed race) people in a culture and society dominated by white European Americans. The election in 1963 of five Mexican Americans to the town council of Crystal City, Texas, a town where the majority of the population was Mexican American, marked the birth of a new political generation. This new generation rejected European Americans’ definition of “Mexican American”; they saw themselves as Chicanos, an indigenous people with roots in the Aztec homeland of Aztlán and possessing their own mestizo culture. The word chicano was appropriated from the denigratory use of “Mexicano” by whites who had stereotyped Mexican immigrants and citizens alike as lazy and dirty. Chicano came to connote ethnic pride, a defiant turning of the old hate language on its head. Members of the Chicano movement felt that to continue the previous (Mexican American) generation’s strategy of reform was to practice accommodation and might even constitute an acceptance of European American constructions and a rejection of their mestizoindigenous history. 127

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“Chicano” The origin of the term “Chicano” is uncertain; however, some experts believe that the word originated from an improper pronunciation or slang version of “Mexicano.” Consequently, the user was viewed by middle-class Mexicans or Mexican Americans as uneducated, poor, and probably “Indian,” a pejorative appellation from those of Mexican origin who rejected their indigenous roots. In the Chicano critique of Anglo society, the rejection of Anglo racial and ethnocentric designations also included the repudiation of those in Mexicano communities who accepted anti-Native American and capitalist belief systems. To call the self Chicano is to affirm that which is denounced by Anglo-created racial constructs and ethnocentric depictions. To be Chicano is to affirm and proclaim historic, indigenous origins and to understand that Chicano culture has Spanish-Indian roots in a land invaded and conquered by the European Americans.

Four individuals form the core of the Chicano generation and movement: José Ángel Gutiérrez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, Reies López Tijerina, and César Chávez. During the 1960’s, Gutiérrez of South Texas organized young Chicanos into the Mexican American Youth Organization, which emphasized their right to cultural self-determination and had the development of bilingual/bicultural education for all Mexican American children as one of its principal goals. In 1965, Gonzáles founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado, to improve education, job opportunities, and police relations for Chicanos. He also organized the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969, which brought together representatives from a number of Chicano organizations. At the first conference, the delegates adopted El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a manifesto of political and cultural nationalism. Tijerina of New Mexico formed La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in 1963 in an effort to reclaim land he and many Chicanos felt had been taken from the Mexican owners in violation of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He led a 1967 raid on the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. Chávez, probably the best-known Chicano activist, led farmworkers in Delano, California, on a strike that developed into a grape boycott and lasted from 1965 to 1970. In many ways during these early years, the Chicano movement was integrated with Chávez’s call for migrant farmworkers’ rights because a huge proportion of the farmworkers were, and remain, Mexican or Mexican American. These four men were the impetus for the Chicano movement and the core of its activities. Their concerns— improving the financial, social, and political status of Mexican Americans, gaining the respect due to Mexican Americans, claiming the right to self-determination, and building Chicano pride—were echoed in the goals of the many other Chicano organizations that were formed during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. These and later organizations deal with additional issues such as the distinction between illegal workers and 128

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immigrants, legal problems involving the use of the Spanish language, the lack of mestizo-Chicano peoples in American history instruction, police brutality, lack of health and education services, lack of education, and structural poverty. The final politicization of the Chicano generation grew out of the Vietnam War. Many Chicanos saw the overrepresentation of Mexican Americans in the combat zones of Vietnam as proof of the veracity of the Chicano view of European American society and as a further betrayal of Mexican American World War II veterans’ beliefs and sacrifices. The Vietnam War and the older and younger generations’ differing feelings about it produced great tension within Mexican American communities; some older Mexican Americans were compelled to question and adjust their basic beliefs about patriotism and reform. The 1970 Chicano Moratorium was the largest Chicano antiwar demonstration and also the most violent police riot involving Chicano protesters. All of these events, issues, and concerns fueled an attempt by Gutiérrez and others to organize a national political party, La Raza Unida, during the early 1970’s. Although some of the party’s local efforts favorably altered political relations between Chicanos and European Americans, the party was not successful at the national level. After 1975, the Chicano movement no longer was a cohesive force in Mexican American communities, although Chávez’s widow, Helen Chávez, continued his leadership of the fight for the rights of farm laborers. However, during its heyday, the Chicano movement did engage a new generation of Mexican Americans with a much more comprehensive and complete vision and understanding of the Mexican American/ Chicano experience in the United States. Carl Allsup Further Reading Rodolfo Acina’s Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle for Liberation (2d ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1976) presents the Chicano perspective on the Mexican American experience. Mario Barrera’s Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976) looks at both class and race. Arnoldo de Leon’s They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980) offers a history of the development of racial and ethnocentric constructs by European American society. David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987) demonstrates the complex interaction of race, ethnicity, and class and the evolving response by Mexican Americans toward European Americans’ efforts to control Mexican American people. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), edited by Nicholas J. Cull and David Carrasco, is a collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. 129

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See also Bracero program; Farmworkers’ union; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Operation Wetback; Undocumented workers.

Chinatowns Definition: Ethnic enclaves outside traditional Chinese homelands in which Chinese immigrants are concentrated Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Demographics; Ethnic enclaves Significance: Chinatowns can be found in almost every major city with a high clustering of Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, South and North America, Europe, and Oceania. The first significant Chinatown to emerge in the United States arose in San Francisco. It began to take shape in 1850 as large numbers of Chinese immigrants were lured there by the California gold rush. Initially called Little Can-

Entrance to modern Los Angeles’s Chinatown, which is a popular tourist attraction. (David Fowler)

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Corner of Clay Street and Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1927. Almost every major American city had a “Chinatown,” but San Francisco’s was to Chinese immigrants the one true center of Chinese culture in America. They called it Tangrenbu, the “port of the people of Tang.” Grant Avenue was used as the title of a song in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical about Chinatown, Flower Drum Song (1958). (Library of Congress)

ton, it was christened Chinatown by the press in 1853. In the next several decades, more than two dozen Chinatowns were established in mining areas, railroad towns, farming communities, and cities of California, as well as in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. As the Chinese diaspora accelerated, especially after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinatowns gradually emerged in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, and other cities. The formation of Chinatowns in the United States was an outcome of both voluntary and involuntary forces. In a foreign land and with language barriers, the Chinese needed their own communities for information sharing, life131

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style preservation, business transactions, cultural maintenance, kinship networking, and psychological support. Externally, hostility and violence against the Chinese, housing and employment discrimination, and institutional exclusion forced them to establish their own enclaves for self-protection and survival. Over time, some Chinatowns have survived and continued to grow, whereas other Chinatowns, such as Pittsburgh’s, have faded. Many important demographic, economic, social, and geographical factors have contributed to the growth or decline of a Chinatown, including the size of the city in which the Chinatown is located; the number of Chinese residents in the city; the sex and age distribution of the Chinese population in the Chinatown; the demand for Chinese labor in the area; the demand of the Chinese in the Chinatown for goods and services; the continuation of new Chinese immigration and settlement into the Chinatown; land-use patterns and land values in the Chinatown and its surrounding areas; changes in the socioeconomic status of Chinese residents; relationships between the Chinese and other groups; and adaptation strategies of the Chinatown. During the 1990’s, there were more than two dozen Chinatowns in the United States, of which New York’s Chinatown was the largest. Modern Chinatowns have been transformed into tourist centers and Chinese shopping bazaars. They also serve as living Chinese communities, Chinese cultural meccas, commercial cores, suppliers of employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, historical education hubs, and symbolic power bases for political office holders and seekers. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that injustice and the exploitation of new Chinese immigrants also take place in some Chinatowns. Despite the existence of the three types of traditional social organizations in Chinatowns (huiguan or district associations, zu or clans, and tongs or secret societies), they have much less influence on the lives of Chinese residents than they did in the past. Historically, all Chinatowns were located in urban centers, and residents tended to have a lower socioeconomic status. However, during the late 1970’s, the first suburban Chinatown emerged in Monterey Park, located east of Los Angeles. Also dubbed the Chinese Beverly Hills or Little Taipei, it is home to mainly middle-class people. Chinese Americans are the dominant economic, social, and cultural force in the city. In November of 1983, Monterey Park elected the first Chinese American woman mayor, Lily Lee Chen. There are signs that suburban Chinatowns are multiplying in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles and in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, and they are likely to grow in the foreseeable future as a result of an influx of highstatus Chinese immigrants. Philip Q. Yang Further Reading Chen, Shehong. Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 132

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Guest, Kenneth J. God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Kwong, Peter. Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950. Rev. ed. New York: New Press, 2001. Ling, Huping. Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Ma, L. Eve Armentrout. Hometown Chinatown: The History of Oakland’s Chinese Community. New York: Garland, 2000. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wong, William. Oakland’s Chinatown. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2004. Zinzius, Birgit. Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality—History, Present, and Future of the Chinese Americans. New York: P. Lang, 2005. See also Asian American stereotypes; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Ethnic enclaves; Little Havana; Little Italies; Little Tokyos.

Chinese American Citizens Alliance Identification: Chinese American rights advocacy organization Date: Founded on May 21, 1895 Place: San Francisco, California Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Civil rights and liberties Significance: The Chinese American Citizens Alliance became a major social and political force in the Chinese American community. Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States during the midnineteenth century. Most of the immigrants were young men who left their families behind in China and who intended to return home after they secured sufficient money to support their families comfortably. To secure passage to the United States, most of them indentured themselves to merchants or labor agents in a system called the credit-ticket arrangement whereby merchants advanced Chinese money for passage to the United States and kept collecting payments for years. Some Chinese left less willingly, emigrating because of famine and political and social unrest in southern China or falling victim to the so-called “Pig Trade,” which replaced slavery after it was out133


lawed following the Civil War. They chose the United States because of exaggerated tales of wealth and opportunity spread by traders and missionaries. Chinatowns Formed After the Chinese immigrants landed in the United States, labor agents, under the credit-ticket arrangement, gained almost complete domination of their indentured workers and kept them in isolated communities that became known as Chinatowns. Many Chinese ultimately were unable to secure sufficient money for return passage to China; however, because they did not want to remain permanently in the United States, they had little incentive to assimilate. Their unwillingness or inability to become acculturated into the American “melting pot” became an indictment against all Chinese.

Contemporary newspaper illustration of the anti-Chinese rioting in Denver, Colorado, in 1880. (Library of Congress)

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Editorial cartoon by J . A. Wales commenting on the convergence of anti-Chinese policies of the Democratic and Republican Parties in 1880. (Library of Congress)

Life in California during the late ninteenth century was difficult at best for most Chinese. The Chinese communities organized huiguan (merchant guilds) that served as welcoming committees, resettlement assistance services, and mutual help societies for newly arrived immigrants. Chinese immigrants were also organized by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (the Chinese Six Companies), originally agents of Chinese firms in Hong Kong that had established the “coolie trade” to San Francisco. The Six Companies kept traditional Chinese rules, customs, and values as the basis for appropriate behavior, helping protect Chinese from an increasingly antiChinese atmosphere. Violence—External and Internal Anti-Chinese sentiments and violence against Chinese began almost as soon as they arrived in North America. These attitudes existed at the top levels of government and labor unions as well as being held by local citizens. During the mid- to late nineteenth cen135


tury, various political parties, including the Know-Nothing Party, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party, promoted anti-Chinese platforms. During this time, workers’ unions organized anti-Chinese activities, and antiAsian sentiments were propagated by newspapers in western states. In 1871, twenty Chinese in Los Angeles were killed and their homes and businesses looted and burned. In 1877, a similar incident occurred in San Francisco. In Chico, California, five farmers were murdered. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in Denver, Colorado, and in Rock Springs, Wyoming. In 1885, Chinese workers, employed as strikebreakers, were killed at a Wyoming coal mine. Chinese residents in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, were driven out of town, and thirty-one Chinese were robbed and murdered in Snake River, Oregon. In 1905, sixty-seven labor organizations, in order to prevent employers from hiring Asians, formed the Asiatic Exclusion League. During the early 1890’s, the Chinese Six Companies influenced Chinese not to sign documents required by the Geary Act (1892), an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which required all Chinese residing in the United States to obtain certificates of eligibility with a photograph within a year. When the Geary Act was ruled legal, thousands of Chinese Americans became illegal aliens in the United States. The tongs, secret societies of criminals that originated in China, used this opportunity to take control of the Chinatowns. The result was a vicious and bloody civil war among Chinese Americans. Few first-generation Chinese Americans actively opposed the rule of the tongs. Native Sons of the Golden State Many young American-born (secondgeneration) Chinese opposed these “old ways” of doing things. They accepted the idea that they were never going to return to China and wanted to adopt American ways and fit into American culture. These young, secondgeneration Chinese formed the Native Sons of the Golden State in San Francisco in an effort to assimilate into American mainstream culture. The Native Sons of the Golden State emphasized the importance of naturalization and voters’ registration. All members were urged to become American citizens and to vote. The organization also encouraged active participation in the civic affairs of mainstream American life. The leaders thought that some of the anti-Chinese sentiments and discriminatory actions were, in part, caused by the traditional attitudes and behaviors of the Chinese immigrants who remained isolated, did not learn English, and did not take part in politics. As the organization grew, it established chapters in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Portland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Boston, eventually changing its name to the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA). In 1913, CACA defeated a California law designed to prevent Chinese from voting. The group fought against the National Origins Act and sought the right for Chinese men to bring their wives to the United States. CACA helped defeat the Cinch bill of 1925, which attempted to regulate the manufacture and sale of Chinese medicinal products such as herbs and roots. By promoting nu136


merous social functions, CACA also helped keep Chinese American communities together and moved them toward assimilation. CACA fought against the stereotyped portrayals of Chinese in films, newspapers, and magazines as heathens, drug addicts, or instigators of torture. In 1923, for example, the organization attempted to block publication of a book by Charles R. Shepard, The Ways of Ah Sin, depicting negative images of Chinese. CACA has also supported other community organizations, such as Cameron House, Self-Help for the Elderly, and the Chinese Historical Society of America. Gregory A. Levitt Further Reading Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. General reference work on Asian American political activism. Chung, Sue Fawn. “The Chinese American Citizens Alliance: An Effort in Assimilation.” Los Angeles: University of California, 1965. An unpublished doctoral dissertation, a rare secondary source devoted entirely to the organization. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. Excellent overall account of Asian America that includes a brief description of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance. Dillon, Richard H. The Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco Chinatown. New York: Coward-McCann, 1962. A dated but interesting account of the violence in San Francisco’s early Chinatown under the rule of the tongs. Lai, H. Mark. Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004. Study of cultural adaptations of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Includes chapters on Chinese cultural and rights advocacy organizations. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. An account of Asians coming to live in America. Provides some discussion of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance during the 1940’s and the late 1980’s. See also Chinatowns; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies.

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Chinese detentions in New York

Chinese detentions in New York The Event: When a Thai ship carrying 276 illegal émigrés from mainland China grounded off New York, federal authorities took the would-be immigrants into custody and prosecuted those responsible for transporting them to the United States Date: June 6, 1993 Place: Rockaway Peninsula, Queens, New York Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Border control; Chinese immigrants Significance: The federal government successfully prosecuted the persons responsible for attempting to smuggle unauthorized immigrants into the United States in this highly publicized case; however, the incident merely called attention to the fact that tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants were entering the country illegally during the early 1990’s. In the early morning hours of June 6, 1993, the Golden Venture, a 150-foot freighter, ran aground in the Atlantic Ocean a quarter of a mile off the coast of Queens, New York. On board were 285 Chinese people, most of them from China’s southern coastal province of Fujian, who were attempting to enter the United States without proper authorization. The ship had left Bangkok, Thailand, in February, crossing both the Indian and Atlantic oceans before reaching the United States. In the course of the arduous trip, at least five of the émigrés were thought to have contracted tuberculosis. Living conditions on board were squalid. Each passenger was given only one bottle of water a week and one meal a day, consisting primarily of rice. The Golden Venture arrived in U.S. waters in May but, after two attempts, was unable to connect with the smaller ships that were to smuggle the Chinese passengers ashore. On May 17, an agent of New York’s Fuk Ching gang, which ran the smuggling operation, wrested control of the freighter from its crew of seven Burmese and six Indonesians. In an act of desperation, the Golden Venture was purposely permitted to run aground on June 6. As the ship foundered fifteen hundred feet off the New York coast, some of its human cargo dived into the cold water, attempting to swim through sixfoot waves to the shore. A rescue effort involving hundreds of police officers, firefighters, and members of the Coast Guard was launched immediately. The rescuers were shocked by the appalling sanitary conditions aboard the grounded ship. By the time the rescue was completed, six of the Chinese émigrés had drowned. Of those remaining, 276 were remanded to the custody of the Im138

Chinese detentions in New York

migration and Naturalization Service (INS) and dispatched to detention centers to await hearings on their requests for asylum. The INS announced its opposition to granting these requests. Illegal Chinese Immigration Illegal immigration from China to the United States has occurred for more than a century, particularly from the southern province of Fujian, home of the Chinese aliens aboard the Golden Venture. As early as the 1849 gold rush in California, crime syndicates in China lured people to the United States with promises of wealth and virtually limitless possibilities. The system used in those early days differed little from the system employed by the current syndicates. They offer transportation to the United States, housing and jobs for people after they arrive, forged documents, and virtual immunity from deportation. In return, those who leave China pay a substantial down payment of the syndicate’s fees and sign agreements to pay the remainder from the money they expect to earn upon arriving in New York City, San Francisco, or one of the other popular destinations for illegal aliens. Once they reach their destinations, the Chinese usually realize that they have been deceived. They frequently work long hours in sweatshops, often for as little as a dollar an hour. Their income is barely enough to cover their living expenses, let alone repay the syndicate quickly and save enough money to bring other family members to the United States. They live in a condition of indentured servitude as virtual slaves, but they can do little to help themselves because of their tenuous legal status in the country. An estimated fifty thousand to eighty thousand illegal Chinese aliens were smuggled into the United States each year during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, paying fees of between $20,000 and $35,000 each. Only about 10 percent of these immigrants are apprehended by the INS and returned to China. In essence, then, the syndicates honor their claims of succeeding in helping people to escape from China. The rate of defection from China accelerated sharply in the years following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Illegal immigration to the United States from China far exceeds such immigration from most other countries. Chinese immigrants enter the country by land, sea, and air. Some are smuggled into Mexico and make their way over the U.S.-Mexico border. On July 6, 1993, the U.S. Coast Guard stopped three ships smuggling a total of 658 Chinese nationals, mostly young men, in international waters off Mexico’s northern coast. Mexican immigration officials finally permitted these three dilapidated ships to dock in the Pacific port city of Ensenada, where the immigrants were held in custody. Eventually they were returned to China in a chartered Mexican jet aircraft. Crew members of these three ships were arrested and charged with violations of Mexican immigration laws. Most of the crew members of the Golden Venture were charged with violating American immigration laws. 139

Chinese Exclusion Act

Consequences An immediate consequence of the grounding of the Golden Venture was that nine crew members of the vessel were tried and convicted of smuggling. On December 3, 1993, they were each sentenced by the U.S. District Court in New York City to six months of imprisonment. These arrests and convictions did not, however, strike at the heart of the problem, the crime syndicates behind the smuggling. On August 27, 1993, Guo Liang Chi, leader of New York’s Fuk Ching gang, was arrested in Hong Kong. That gang was thought to have been involved in the Golden Venture debacle. Charged in the January deaths of two of his New York accomplices, Guo Liang Chi faced extradition to the United States. The following day, federal investigators arrested fourteen other Fuk Ching gang members in New York City on charges of conspiring to smuggle immigrants, kidnapping, and extortion. R. Baird Shuman Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Chinese immigrants; Coast Guard, U.S.; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Justice and immigration.

Chinese Exclusion Act The Law: Federal law restricting Asian immigration Date: May 6, 1882 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Discrimination; Laws and treaties; Nativism and racism Significance: The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first federal effort to exclude immigrants by race and nationality; it marked a turning point in what had been, until then, an open door to immigrants from around the world. The Chinese Exclusion Act suspended immigration by Chinese laborers to the United States for a period of ten years and prohibited Chinese residents in the United States from becoming naturalized citizens. Merchants, students, and tourists, however, were still permitted to enter the United States for visits. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was established as a tempo140


rary suspension of immigration by Chinese laborers, it was only the first of many laws designed to exclude Asians from entry into the United States. This law was both a political and social reaction to increasing non-European immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century. As the country became more industrialized and its frontier began to disappear, Americans became increasingly apprehensive about employment and the role of immigrants. American labor organizations objected to what they perceived as unfair competition by Chinese laborers.

Federal government photograph of Sun Yat-sen, the future first president of the Republic of China, that was made during his 1909-1910 visit to the United States. The photograph was kept in a file relating to Sun’s entry into the United States under the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act. (NARA)

Background Chinese immigration to the mainland United States began in earnest after the Taiping Rebellion in 1848. Most Chinese immigrants headed for California, where the gold rush of 1849 led to an increased need for labor. In 1854, 13,100 Chinese came to the United States. This immigration, regulated by the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, was unrestricted; by 1880, the number of immigrants had risen to 105,465. The majority remained in California, where they were hired as laborers by the railroads, worked as domestics, and opened small businesses. San Francisco was the port of entry for many Chinese; the population of its Chinatown grew from two thousand to twelve thousand between 1860 and 1870. The size and nature of this early Chinese immigration brought a longlasting prejudice. Californians thought of Chinese laborers as “coolies”—that is, as cheap labor brought to the United States to undercut wages for American workers. Chinese workers were also accused of being dirty. Authorities in San Francisco suspected that crowded areas of Chinatown were the focus for disease and passed the Cubic Air Ordinance, prohibiting rental of a room with fewer than five hundred cubic feet of space per person. This municipal ordinance was later declared unconstitutional. Discrimination and violence increased during the 1870’s. In 1871, a mob attacked and killed nineteen Chinese people in Los Angeles. Dennis Kearney, a naturalized citizen from Ireland, organized the Workingmen’s Party in 1877 to oppose Chinese immigrants. Shouting, “The Chinese must go!” Kearney threatened violence to all Chinese immigrants. In July, 1877, men from an “anti-coolie club” led workers into San Francisco’s Chinatown on a rampage that lasted several days. Because most local ordinances against the Chinese had been declared un141


constitutional, people who opposed Chinese immigration turned to Congress for new legislation. Congress responded in 1879 with a bill to limit Chinese immigration by prohibiting ships from bringing more than fifteen Chinese immigrants at a time. The bill was vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes on the grounds that it violated the Burlingame Treaty. With popular sentiment against continuing Chinese immigration, however, the treaty was amended in 1880, allowing the United States to limit the number of Chinese immigrants. Exclusionary Legislation The Chinese Exclusion Act was a response to the intensity of anti-Chinese feelings in the West and to close political elections that made western electoral votes critical. As signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, the act suspended immigration by Chinese laborers for ten years. The vote in the House of Representatives reflected the popular-

Contemporary editorial cartoon depicting president Rutherford B . Hayes standing on an ice drift representing the United States as he vetoes the Chinese Exclusion bill of California senator Denis Kearney, who is shown standing a piece of the ice drift (“Kearneyfornee”) that is breaking away from the United States. (Library of Congress)

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ity of the measure. There were 201 votes in favor, 37 against, and 51 absent. Representatives from every section of the country supported the bill, with southern and western House members voting unanimously for the legislation. Later laws were even more draconian. An amendment in 1884 excluded all Chinese and Chinese residents living in other countries from entering the United States except as students, merchants, or tourists. The Scott Act of 1888 prohibited outright the entry of Chinese laborers and denied reentry to those who traveled abroad, even if they held reentry visas. The law also placed additional restrictions on those who were still permitted to come to the United States. In 1892 the Geary Act extended for an additional ten years the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, prohibited the use of habeas corpus by Chinese residents in the United States if arrested, and required all Chinese people to register and provide proof of their eligibility to remain in the United States. The act was renewed in 1902, and Congress made permanent the exclusion of Chinese immigrant laborers in 1904. These exclusionary laws reflected a bias in American attitudes toward immigration by non-Europeans and increasing racial discrimination. Restrictions on intermarriage and land ownership by Chinese in many western states during the early nineteenth century led to a reduction in the number of Chinese residing in the United States from more than 100,000 in 1890 to 61,639 by 1920. On December 17, 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. By then the threat of competition by Chinese labor was no longer an issue, and China was an ally of the United States in the war with Japan. James A. Baer Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and European Americans in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, up until the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Barth, Gunther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 18501870. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Although it does not treat events after 1870, this book is important to an understanding of anti-Chinese sentiment in California. Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Explores the legal ramifications of the Exclusion Act and the act’s effects on Chinese who were living in the United States. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese 143

Chinese exclusion cases

Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s, with an afterward on U.S. immigration policies after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. LeMay, Michael C. From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820. New York: Praeger, 1987. Examines underlying causes of the anti-immigration movement in the United States in response to European and Chinese immigration since 1820. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. General history of changing American immigration legislation. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Countering Coolidge’s argument of an economic basis for the Exclusion Act, argues that racism was at the root of Californian and U.S. hostility toward Chinese immigrants. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Study of the special problems faced by female Chinese immigrants in the years leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1943; Migration; Page law; Wong Kim Ark case; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Chinese exclusion cases The Cases: Six U.S. Supreme Court rulings (Chew Heong v. United States; United States v. Jung Ah Lung; Chae Chan Ping v. United States; Fong Yue Ting v. United States; Wong Quan v. United States; and Lee Joe v. United States) addressing issues raised by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 Dates: 1884-1893 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Court cases; Discrimination; Nativism and racism 144

Chinese exclusion cases

Significance: Using the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court first ruled in favor of challenges to laws excluding the Chinese from immigrating and becoming U.S. citizens, then succumbed to popular sentiment and upheld exclusionary statutes. In 1882 Congress enacted the first Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese laborers and miners from entering the United States. An 1884 amendment required resident Chinese laborers to have reentry certificates if they traveled outside the United States and planned to return. The 1888 Scott Act prohibited Chinese laborers temporarily abroad from returning, thereby stranding thousands of Chinese. Merchants and teachers were exempted from the Scott Act if they had “proper papers,” thereby beginning the practice of using “paper names” to create new identities so that Chinese could return. The 1892 Geary Act banned all future Chinese laborers from entry and denied bail to Chinese in judicial proceedings. All Chinese faced deportation if they did not carry identification papers. The 1893 McCreary Act further extended the definition of laborers to include fishermen, miners, laundry owners, and merchants. The 1902 Chinese Exclusion Act permanently banned all Chinese immigration. The Supreme Court initially attempted to defend Chinese rights under the Fourteenth Amendment; however, as anti-Chinese sentiment grew more pronounced, the Court withdrew even its limited protections from Chinese immigrants. The Court defended the right of Chinese to reenter the United States in Chew Heong and Jung Ah Lung. In Chae Chan Ping, it found the Scott Act unconstitutional. However, in the three 1893 cases, it upheld a law retroactively requiring that Chinese laborers have certificates of residence or be deported. Richard L. Wilson Further Reading Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Reentry documents carried by a Chinese immigrant in 1891. Under an amendment to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese immigrants wishing to visit their homeland were denied reentry to the United States if they failed to secure such documents before returning to China. (National Archives)

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Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. See also Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1943; Migration; Page law; Wong Kim Ark case; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Chinese immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from mainland China Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Demographics Significance: The Chinese first came to the United States as laborers during the early to mid-nineteenth century, finding considerable prejudice and discrimination, which diminished after World War II. Chinese people began to immigrate to the United States in 1820, but their numbers remained small until the late 1840’s, when the decaying empire of China was defeated in 1848 by Great Britain in the First Opium War. In 1849, gold was discovered in California, and the gold rush began. When word of the gold rush reached Canton, in the southeastern province of Kwangtung, many Cantonese peasants, who had made their living as laborers, farmers, and fishermen for centuries, began to leave their impoverished homeland for the chance of riches just across the Pacific. According to U.S. Census figures, 1,477,680 people immigrated to the United States from China between 1820 and 2003. During the first three years of the twenty-first century, Chinese immigrants continued to enter the country at a rate of about 48,000 persons per year. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, Americans of Chinese ancestry from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan numbered more than 1,700,000 persons. Most of these early Chinese immigrants worked with exceptional diligence, industry, and enterprise and led a reticent existence in the mining camps and cities. These positive qualities earned the early Chinese immigrants acceptance among the California business community. Although their appearance set them apart from the rest of the townspeople, they were warmly welcomed as a valuable and respected segment of the citizenry. That goodwill wore thin as increasing numbers of Chinese arrived. In 1852 alone, 146

Chinese immigrants

Chinese immigrants eating a meal aboard the crowded ship carrying them to the western United States. (Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley)

more than twenty thousand Chinese landed at San Francisco, bringing the total number of Chinese on the coast to approximately twenty-five thousand. The flood of new arrivals severely taxed the city’s resources, particularly in Chinatown, where most settled, at least temporarily. The white settlers’ attitude toward the Chinese and Chinatown began to shift from curiosity to contempt. Under the slogan “California for Americans,” nativists began demanding legislation to restrict Chinese laborers and miners. In 1852, the California legislature responded by passing the state’s first discriminatory tax law, the Foreign Miners’ Tax. This law required all miners who were not citizens of the United States to pay a monthly license fee. Because the Chinese were the largest recognizable group of foreign miners and already were concentrated in easily accessible mining camps, they constituted the majority of those taxed. California governor John Bigler also began a crusade against Chinese immigration on the grounds that it constituted a danger to the welfare of the state. The efforts of California nativists culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, one of the earliest federal laws restricting immigration to the United States. Other legislation followed, including the alien land laws (1913-1923), the Cable Act (1922), and the National Origins Act (1924). As a result of the exclusion, and because men far outnumbered women, the American Chinese population remained stable until the 1950’s. 147

Chinese immigrants

Chinese American Experiences The image of Chinese Americans improved during this period, which ranges from 1942, the first full year of U.S. war against Japan, to 1965, the year of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This improvement was in part the result of China’s being an important ally of the United States in World War II. A public awareness of the difference between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans began to develop, at the expense of the latter. The Chinese American literature of this period is dominated by two sentiments, a diplomatic sentiment, which seeks to explain the values and virtues of the Chinese heritage to the general reader, and a sentiment of belonging, of claiming America as home. After 1965, the Chinese population of the United States rose from 250,000 in 1966 to 1.6 million in 1990. This gave rise to a debate over what, if any, distinctions should be drawn between the native-born and the foreign-born. Frank Chin and the other editors of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (1991) attempt to differentiate between the nativeborn and the foreign-born, implying that Chinese American identity should be determined on the basis of an American, rather than Chinese, mindset.

Chinese Immigration to the United States, 1851-2003 1979 U.S.-Chinese relations are normalized

50,000

Average immigrants per year

45,000 40,000 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

35,000 30,000 25,000

1850’s California gold rush

20,000 15,000

1930’s Japanese invasion of China

10,000 5,000 0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1931-1940

1921-1930

1911-1920

1901-1910

1891-1900

1881-1890

1871-1880

1861-1870

1851-1860

Source: U.S . Census Bureau. These figures do not include immigration from Hong Kong but do include Taiwanese immigration from 1957-2003.

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Chinese immigrants

Chinese fire-hose teams racing down the main thoroughfare of the notorious mining town Deadwood, Dakota, during a Fourth of July celebration around the end of the nineteenth century. (Library of Congress)

Newcomers (sometimes derided as “fresh off the boat,” source of the title of David Henry Hwang’s FOB, 1979) and more recent arrivals have brought with them significant resources and skills. These conditions render moot the American-centered definition of Chinese American identity. The increased diversity of the Chinese American community has made the issue of identity complex. A common theme in twentieth century Chinese American literature is the critical representation of social issues. Cultural conflicts, generation gaps, and gender troubles are common to the experiences of many Chinese Americans from diverse backgrounds. This literature, including Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), is essential to Chinese American identity and tends to problematize rather than resolve its dualities. This exploration of social issues has given rise to critiques of the American Dream (for example, Gish Jen’s Typical American, 1991), of Western ideology regarding Asia (Hwang’s M. Butterfly, 1988), and of the intricate complicities between American and Chinese ideologies. These thoughtful works epitomize the complex maturity of the Chinese American identity. Compiled from essays by Balance Chow and Daniel J. Meissner 149

Chinese immigrants

Further Reading For comprehensive and up-to-date studies of Chinese immigrants, see H. Mark Lai’s Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004) and Birgit Zinzius’s Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality—History, Present, and Future of the Chinese Americans (New York: P. Lang, 2005). Victor R. Greene’s A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004) is a comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups, including the Chinese. Gunther Barth’s Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) describes the early years of Chinese immigration, providing a good examination of the development of anti-Chinese sentiment in California. Stuart Creighton Miller’s The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1795-1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) examines Chinese immigration in terms of coolie labor and the fear that Chinese laborers would undermine labor and revive slavery. Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) explores the period of limited Chinese immigration after the Chinese Exclusion Act and includes an afterward on U.S. immigration policies after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including China. Studies of the adaptation of Chinese immigrants to life in the United States include Nazli Kibria’s Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and Lee-Beng Chua’s Psychosocial Adaptation and the Meaning of Achievement for Chinese Immigrants (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002). See also Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese detentions in New York; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Generational acculturation; Immigration Act of 1943; Lau v. Nichols; Page law; Tibetan immigrants; Wong Kim Ark case.

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Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush

Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush The Event: Participation of Chinese immigrants in California’s gold rush Date: 1849-1852 Place: San Francisco Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Economics; Labor; Nativism and racism Significance: A major impetus to immigration from East Asia, the California gold rush drew thousands of Chinese immigrants, who furnished hard labor and suffered nativist antipathy. In 1848, the electrifying news that gold had been discovered in California was carried by every ship sailing from U.S. ports. Spread to every corner of the world, the word soon began to draw adventurers away from family and livelihoods to seek their fortunes in this distant land. In 1849, a tremendous number of pioneers—German, Irish, Scandinavian, Russian, Mexican, and others—streamed into San Francisco, doubling the population of the state within two years. Among these “forty-niners” was one group set apart by race, dress, and language—the Chinese. Drawn to the United States by the promise of golden wealth, the Chinese arrived in ever-increasing numbers, to the growing alarm of California residents. Almost all the Chinese entering the United States at this time came from the area around Canton, in the southeastern province of Kwangtung. For centuries, Cantonese peasants had made their living as laborers, farmers, and fishermen. During the late 1840’s, floods, famines, peasant revolts, and overpopulation forced many to leave their villages and seek work in nearby countries in the South China Sea. When word reached the province of gold mines opening in California, Cantonese were eager to leave their impoverished homeland for the chance of riches just across the Pacific. They were cautious, however—the journey was long, expensive, and uncertain. Only three Chinese made the trip in 1848. Gold Strikes in California In 1849, the news of larger and richer gold claims in California enticed 325 Cantonese to set sail for San Francisco. Most of these young, unskilled men were sojourners, hoping to prospect for a few years, acquire wealth, and return home. Like other new arrivals in the city, they outfitted themselves with supplies, including sturdy boots in place of their cotton shoes, and set out for the gold-bearing mountains around Sacramento. They often traveled and worked in groups for companionship and protection, taking over low-yielding claims that had been abandoned for 151


more prosperous sites. Through diligence and frugality, honed by generations of marginal existence in China, they frequently turned abandoned claims into profitable ventures. Not all Chinese immigrants, however, sought wealth in the gold mines. Some found work in the cities, particularly San Francisco, which offered abundant opportunity for unskilled laborers. Shops, restaurants, liveries, hotels, and other businesses grew desperately short of workers as able-bodied men abandoned their jobs to pan for gold. Chinese—newly arrived immigrants or disheartened miners—began filling these positions as general laborers, carpenters, and cooks. They also assumed jobs normally reserved for women—who were in short supply in this rugged frontier boomtown—such as seamstresses, launderers, and domestics. Their conscientious work style, quiet demeanor, and dependable service made them ideal employees. California businessmen soon began sending advertising notices to Canton, recruiting Chinese workers for their various enterprises.

Chinese immigrant panning for gold in a California stream. (Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley)

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Successful Chinese miners and workers also began opening their own businesses in the cities. In addition to equipping miners and supplying mining camps, they established restaurants, hotels, and various small businesses catering to both Chinese and Westerners. Norman As-sing, an English-speaking Chinese man who settled in San Francisco, managed his own candy store, bakery, and a popular restaurant in which he often entertained local politicians and policemen with lavish banquets. In December, 1849, his fellow countrymen elected him as the leader of the first Chinese mutual-aid society in the United States, an organization assisting newly arrived Chinese immigrants. This association filled an important role for the Chinese, who relied greatly on family and village relations for social and economic sufficiency. Through letters and returning sojourners, news of profitable work in the cities and mines reached relatives and friends in Kwangtung. In 1850, approximately 450 more Chinese emigrated to California; the following year, the number jumped to more than 2,700. These new arrivals found assistance and familiar food and lodging in San Francisco’s new Chinatown, a district in which Chinese had begun to settle for convenience and safety. After a short period of adjustment, most Chinese immigrants followed their predecessors into the mountains, joining one of the many Chinese mining camps operating around Sacramento. Others remained in the city to work as manual laborers. In general, these early Chinese immigrants worked with exceptional diligence, industry, and enterprise and led a reticent existence in the mining camps and cities. Acceptance by the Business Community These positive qualities earned the early Chinese immigrants acceptance among the California business community. Although their waist-length braided hair, blue cotton pants and jackets, and broad-brimmed straw hats set them apart from the rest of the townspeople and “forty-niners,” they were warmly welcomed as a valuable and respected segment of the citizenry. A San Francisco judge summed up the early goodwill of Americans toward the Chinese: Born and reared under different Governments and speaking different tongues, we nevertheless meet here today as brothers. . . . You stand among us in all respects as equals.

That goodwill wore thin as increasing numbers of Chinese arrived in the city. In 1852 alone, more than twenty thousand Chinese landed at San Francisco, bringing the total number of Chinese on the coast to approximately twenty-five thousand. The flood of new arrivals severely taxed the city’s resources, particularly in Chinatown, where most settled, at least temporarily. In packed Chinese boardinghouses, one cot was often rented to a number of workers who slept on it on a rotating basis. Overcrowding created sanitation problems, increased crime, and caused higher prices. Abundant cheap labor stimulated competition for unskilled work that, over time, drove down wages. 153


The white settlers’ attitude toward the Chinese and Chinatown began to shift from curiosity to contempt. The attitude of white miners in the goldfields also changed. Prior to 1852, bandits and claim-jumpers had occasionally driven Chinese off successful excavations, but these attacks were generally motivated by greed, not racism. After 1852, antagonism and violence against Chinese miners increased. In Jacksonville, white miners drove Chinese miners off their claims and out of town. In Chili Gulch, a mob beat a Chinese miner to death. For protection, Chinese banded together in large mining camps, easily recognized by names such as China City, China Creek, China Flat, China Gulch, and China Town. Nativist Backlash Under the slogan “California for Americans,” nativists began demanding legislation to restrict Chinese laborers and miners. In 1852, the California legislature responded by passing the state’s first discriminatory tax law, the Foreign Miners’ Tax. This law required all miners who were not citizens of the United States to pay a monthly license fee. Since the Chinese were the largest recognizable group of foreign miners and already were concentrated in easily accessible mining camps, they constituted the majority of those taxed. The same year, California state senator George B. Tingley introduced a bill to eliminate “coolie labor”—contracts made with Chinese laborers for work in California—for a set number of years. California governor John Bigler also began a crusade against Chinese immigration on the grounds that it constituted a danger to the welfare of the state. Tong K. Achick, a missionary-schooled, English-speaking Cantonese who emigrated to San Francisco, represented the Chinese position before the California legislature. As leader of the Four Great Houses in San Francisco— forerunner of the famous Six Companies—he argued that these laws unfairly targeted law-abiding Chinese, who were an asset, not a liability, to the state. The mood in California, however, had changed, and Tong and other Chinese advocates were unable to stop the growing anti-Chinese sentiment. California nativists continued to push for state and national legislation limiting Chinese immigration. Their efforts culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first federal legislation restricting immigration to the United States. Daniel J. Meissner Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Study of the interrelationships among African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and European Americans in the United States during the midnineteenth century. Barth, Gunther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 18501870. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Describes the 154

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early years of Chinese immigration, providing a good examination of the development of anti-Chinese sentiment in California. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1795-1882. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Examines Chinese immigration in terms of coolie labor and the fear that Chinese laborers would undermine labor and revive slavery. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Study of the special problems confronting female Chinese immigration to the United States during a period when the overwhelming bulk of Chinese immigrants were men. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Chapter 3 succinctly examines the early years of Chinese immigration. Other chapters explore the Asian immigrant experience in detail. See also Burlingame Treaty; California gold rush; Chinatowns; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Chinese immigrants and family customs Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Families and marriage Significance: Chinese Americans have drawn on a tradition of strong family relationships to help overcome discrimination and become one of the most successful immigrant groups in the United States. Chinese Americans constitute the oldest and largest Asian American group in the United States. North Americans who identify themselves as Chinese are scattered throughout the fifty states and Canada with their largest concentrations in California, New York, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Illinois, British Columbia, and Ontario. More than many other ethnic groups, Chinese Americans have labored to maintain the tradition of strong families and obedience to cultural traditions. While the roles of Chinese Americans underwent great changes after World War II, most of them strongly desire to maintain traditions fostered by obedience to Confucian values. 155


Immigration and Discrimination Significant Chinese immigration to North America began in response to the California gold rush of 1848-1849. Seven thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean, China was a rapidly growing country plagued by foreign domination, political instability, and a weakened dynastic government. Before 1848, political and social stability in China had discouraged emigration to North America. After news of American “mountains of gold” reached southern China, thousands of Chinese men joined Germans, Irish, Spanish, English, and other immigrants in the hunt for gold in Northern California. San Francisco was soon dubbed Jinshan, or “golden mountain,” by newly arrived Chinese settlers. Mainly from southern China, Chinese immigrants were predominantly male. Most hoped to make money and return to their families in China. Like most gold seekers, these settlers became more frustrated than rich. Reluctant to return home without money, most Chinese accepted positions in various trades that sought workers to offset severe labor shortages in the West. While typically paid less than non-Asian workers, Chinese immigrants were reluctant to return to the political instability and lower wages that awaited them in China. Chinese workers played an important part in the construction of the western section of the transcontinental railroad. Chinese im-

Family-run Chinese laundry operation around 1910. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese immigrants became so closely associated with laundries that Chinese laundry workers became a popular stereotype. (California State Library)

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Chinese woman with her five children in Hawaii in 1913. (NARA)

migrants working on the railroad were so valued for their dedication to hard work that the Central Pacific Railroad began to recruit workers in China. Even after the railroad was completed, immigration from China continued, and newly arrived Chinese immigrants were able to find jobs in factories and farms. Between 1860 and 1880 immigrants from China constituted more than 8 percent of California’s population. Scapegoating Chinese Immigrants As the North American economy entered a depression during the early 1880’s, Chinese immigrants became convenient scapegoats for populist politicians, labor unions, and unemployed non-Asians. Even in Canadian British Columbia, the small Chinese population was blamed by many for the overall economic downturn. In response to growing anti-Chinese sentiments in the West, the United States moved to ban Chinese immigration with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The law suspended Chinese immigration and declared Chinese immigrants already in the United States ineligible for citizenship. While Chinese immigrants made up only an estimated 0.002 percent of the American population at the time, the act received wide support and severely limited Chinese immigration into the next century. In 1888 the Scott Act stiffened the 1882 law by prohibiting the entry of Chinese nationals into the United States. The Geary Act of 1892 extended the exclusion of Chinese immigrants by denying habeas corpus rights to persons of Chinese ancestry and requiring all persons of Chinese ancestry to register with local authorities. Immediate deportation threatened those Chinese immigrants who failed to comply with the requirement that they carry official permits. Despite a court challenge by 157


American citizens of Chinese ancestry, the act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. On the West Coast, numerous local laws were passed to limit the growth of Chinese businesses and settlements. Severely hindered by discriminatory legal codes and racism, Chinese immigrants responded by constructing social structures to serve the needs of their existing population. So-called “Chinatowns” established schools, newspapers, businesses, and cultural institutions. For the most part, Chinese immigrants maintained a willingness to preserve family and cultural traditions despite the racism they experienced in North America. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake marked an important milestone in the growth of the Chinese American family. At that time, only 5 percent of the city’s Chinese population were female. After the city’s birth records were destroyed in the earthquake, thousands of Chinese claimed they had been born in the United States. Unable to refute their applications for naturalization, the U.S. government was forced to grant them citizenship and allow Chinese spouses to immigrate to the United States. After Chinese families were reunited, the traditional Confucian values of obedience and dedication to family remained an important element in Chinese American culture. The Making of a “Model Minority” As discriminatory practices and laws were overturned in the twentieth century, Chinese Americans moved to integrate themselves into the mainstream of American culture. The U.S. alliance with China in its fight against Japan during World War II served as a major impetus to repeal barriers to immigration. As restrictions on immigration eased, families grew and typically worked hard to obtain educational opportunities for their children. The emphasis on education was so successful that by 1970, 56 percent of working Chinese held white-collar jobs, a figure above the national average. Chinese Americans have generally attempted to maintain ties to their homeland and adhere to cultural traditions. Central to this effort is their use of the Chinese language as part of primary and secondary education. Knowledge of the Chinese language is a valued cultural tradition and a marketable job skill, particularly as North American trade with Asia has grown. In addition to preserving their language, most Chinese Americans observe traditional Chinese festivals. The most significant, the so-called Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, is widely observed by Chinese Americans. This celebration is based upon the Chinese lunar calendar and is marked by a large family meal on New Year’s eve. Children are presented with hong bao, red envelopes containing money, and fireworks are often used to scare off evil spirits. In 1993 the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in honor of the Chinese New Year. Other major festivals include the mid-autumn Moon Festival to celebrate the annual harvest. Similar to the North American tradition of Thanksgiving Day, this festival celebrates the harvest and the good fortunes of the previous year. This holiday also centers on a large family dinner and is marked by the 158


consumption of moon cakes stuffed with candied fruits. Other major festivals include the Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth moon according to the Chinese calendar. This festival is celebrated with sticky rice cakes and boat races. As Chinese immigration swelled during the 1980’s and 1990’s, the role of the family in Chinese culture continued to change. As Chinese Americans became socially and economically diverse and obtained higher-paying jobs, the traditional commitment to the wishes of the family weakened. Because of the economic successes of some Chinese Americans, current stereotypes have also undergone radical change. Once denounced as “coolies” for their willingness to work hard for lower wages, many Chinese have been labeled a “model minority” for their perceived overcommitment to financial responsibility, education, and work. While it is significant that many Chinese Americans have college degrees, many of them resent the model-minority stereotype, because it tends to overlook the discrimination toward Chinese Americans that has persisted in American culture. Lawrence I. Clark Further Reading Brownstone, David M. The Chinese-American Heritage. New York: Facts On File, 1988. General survey of the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States. Chen, Shehong. Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Scholarly study of the sociological evolution of Chinese American communities since the early twentieth century. Chua, Lee-Beng. Psycho-social Adaptation and the Meaning of Achievement for Chinese Immigrants. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Sociological analysis of the adaptative processes through which Chinese immigrants to the United States go, with a close examination of traditional Chinese belief systems. Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The Chinese American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Exploration of the experiences of Chinese Americans that contains a broad range of first-person accounts—including personal recollections, diary entries, and letters—to accompany many photographs. Kibria, Nazli. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Comparative study of second-generation Chinese and Korean Americans. Lai, H. Mark. Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004. Study of cultural adaptations of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Includes chapters on Chinese cultural and rights advocacy organizations. Louie, Vivian S. Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 159

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Sociological study of the largely family-driven Chinese drive to achieve success in education and business. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Study of female immigration during a period when the bulk of Chinese immigrants to the United States were young men. See also Asian American stereotypes; Chinatowns; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Filipino immigrants and family customs; Korean immigrants and family customs; Southeast Asian immigrants; Vietnamese immigrants.

Chinese Six Companies Identification: Chinese immigrant protective association that merged several older organizations Date: Begun in 1854 Place: San Francisco, California Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Civil rights and liberties Significance: Rising anti-Asian nativism prompted Chinese immigrants living on the West Coast to organize for political representation, social services, and physical protection. News of the California gold rush of 1848-1849 was the first catalyst for large Chinese emigration across the Pacific to the United States. Most of the immigrants were young men who worked as laborers, often on the transcontinental railroads. The completion of the railroads and the Panic of 1873, which was brought on by an international financial crisis, had caused great economic difficulties in the West, and many white Americans and elements of organized labor began to blame the Chinese for the lack of jobs and the economic recession. Violence against Chinese became widespread. In October, 1871, crowds of whites burned and looted the Los Angeles Chinatown after two white policemen were killed by Chinese assailants. Nineteen men, women, and children were killed and hundreds injured as angry whites randomly attacked crowds of Chinese. Anti-Chinese Laws Under intense political pressure from white voters in the West, Congress moved to exclude Chinese and other foreign-born Asians from obtaining citizenship. The 1870 Nationality Act denied the Chinese the 160


possibility of becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. In 1878, California convened a constitutional convention that prohibited further Chinese immigration and granted local municipalities the right to exclude Chinese immigrants or confine them to specified areas. Chinese immigrants were prohibited from owning property, obtaining business licenses, procuring government jobs, and testifying in any legal proceedings. At the urging of white voters in California, the U.S. Congress in 1882 passed the first of a number of Chinese exclusion acts that prohibited the entrance of Chinese into the United States. The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion acts, ruling in 1889 that the Chinese were “a race that will not assimilate with us[and] could be excluded when deemed dangerous to peace and security.” In San Francisco, anti-Chinese laws were supplemented to isolate its large Chinese community. Local laws and hostility from whites forced newly arrived Chinese to settle in Chinatown. Segregated by these discriminatory laws, Chinatown began to establish structures to govern and protect its residents. San Francisco’s Chinatown, made up primarily of men as a result of the immigration control acts, had developed a reputation as a center of vice. Chinatown leaders moved to control the small criminal element that had begun to define Chinese society to the non-Chinese residents of San Francisco.

Unemployed men loitering on the “Street of the Gamblers” in San Francisco’s Chinatown around the turn of the twentieth century, when San Francisco had the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in North America. (Library of Congress)

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The Six Companies Form Most of the early Chinese immigrants to San Francisco’s Chinatown came from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Early on, wealthy merchants in Chinatown had organized around clan groups and district associations in their hometowns in China. By 1854, there were six main associations in Chinatown. The first, formed in 1849, was the Gangzhou Gongsi, named after the district in Guangdong province that was the source of most of its members. The second, the San Y i Gongsi, consisted of immigrants from the administrative districts of Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde. Immigrants from the districts of Yanging, Xinning, Xinhui, and Kaiping made up the third association, the Si Y i Gongsi. Immigrants from the Xiangshan area formed the fourth association, the Yang He Gongsi. The fifth, the Ren He Gongsi, was made up of the so-called Hakka peoples from Guanxi province. The formation in 1854 of the sixth association, the Ning Yang Gongsi, marked the informal beginnings of the Chinese Six Companies Association. The Six Companies served as a public association for leaders of the major associations in Chinatown to mediate disputes between its members and serve as a representative of the Chinese community as a whole. Newly arrived immigrants from China who were in need of assistance sought out these family or district associations. When business or personal disputes developed between members of different associations, the Six Companies would provide a forum for peaceful mediation of disputes. The Role of the Companies The anti-Chinese legislation of the 1880’s forced the Six Companies to move toward a more overt role as representatives of Chinese interests in San Francisco. On November 19, 1882, the group formalized its existence by establishing an executive body drawn from members of the existing associations. The Six Companies, formally known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), adapted some of the representative principles of U.S. political culture. The CCBA was recognized by the state of California in 1901. At the time, the Six Companies sought to create a body above family clans or associations that would resist the growing anti-Chinese movements in California and the western United States and would assume a more public role in its resistance to anti-Chinese legislation. The Six Companies in San Francisco had limited success in challenging anti-Chinese legislation as violations of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Six Companies supported the 1886 case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, which forced the Supreme Court to overturn San Francisco safety ordinances designed to harass Chinese laundrymen. Anti-Chinese attitudes in San Francisco and across the United States did not diminish after 1900. In 1902, an amendment to extend the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 indefinitely was passed by Congress without debate. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Six Companies in San Francisco supported measures to improve the quality of life in Chinatown. In 1905, the Six Companies established a school in Chinatown to teach children 162


Chinese culture and language. During the 1920’s, it helped raise funds to construct the Chinese Hospital to serve the Chinatown community. The Six Companies also established block watch programs and night patrols to prevent crime in the Chinatown area. The group still worked to overturn antiChinese sentiment and was an increasingly powerful political force, able to deliver votes to local politicians sympathetic to the views of Chinatown citizens. In 1943, Congress passed an Immigration Act that repealed the exclusion laws, and barriers to Chinese Americans in the United States began to fall. In California, many Americans of Chinese ancestry moved to white neighborhoods after anti-Chinese laws were overturned. In this period, one of the major activities of the Six Companies was the promotion of the Nationalist government in Taiwan. Because most of the residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown had immigrated from mainland China, significant opposition to the historical leadership of the group appeared. The Six Companies’ promotion of social isolation from white society was very divisive during the 1960’s. A longtime opponent of federal social programs to aid the poor, the Six Companies eventually embraced government assistance and even administered federal job training programs during the 1970’s. As Chinese Americans became more involved in Chinese politics and gained access to higher-paying jobs, participation in Chinatown affairs decreased significantly. The Six Companies became less of a force in Chinese American politics on a national scale, but it continued to work from its base in San Francisco. Lawrence I. Clark Further Reading Victor Nee and Brett de Barry Nee’s “The Establishment,” in Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), examines the founding of the Six Companies and its role in Chinatown in the twentieth century. Thomas W. Chinn’s Bridging the Pacific: San Francisco Chinatown and Its People (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1989) provides a detailed look at San Francisco from its founding to the late 1980’s, by the cofounder of the Chinese Historical Association of America. See also Burlingame Treaty; California gold rush; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Coolies; “Yellow peril” campaign.

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Citizenship

Citizenship Definition: Status of being a citizen—an inhabitant of a country who enjoys its full privileges and rights, such as the right to vote, to hold elective office, and to enjoy the full protections of government Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties Significance: Citizenship is a legal term recognizing certain rights and protections; it implies responsibilities as well as privileges. A large portion of immigrants to the United States seek citizenship, but not all qualify for it. Residence in a particular place does not automatically give a person citizenship. Citizenship must be conferred by law or by constitution. The definition of a citizen was not spelled out in the U.S. Constitution until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868. That amendment states, All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Birthright Citizenship and the English Heritage Americans are accustomed to the concept of automatic citizenship granted to persons born in the United States, who are called “natural-born citizens.” Historically, this was not a common concept. Most nations were more like ancient Rome, which had different degrees of citizenship while the majority of people in the Roman Empire were merely “subjects” of Rome and did not have the rights of citizenship. Many were slaves of Rome. Rome had two classes of citizens: full citizens and those who could own property and engage in business but could not hold public office. The children of these “half citizens” received the same political status as their parents. The concept of American citizenship grew from English roots. During the Middle Ages, political loyalties and protections came from the feudal system that operated in Europe for a thousand years. A characteristic of modern times was the development of the idea of nation-states and with that the concept of nationality. Both obligations and rights were intrinsic to the status of having a nationality. The English common law held that people born within the royal dominions were automatically the “king’s subjects.” If one’s parents were “naturalborn subjects,” then one had an inherent claim to the “rights of Englishmen.” As early as 1350 it was clear that in English law the place of birth was not so important as the citizenship of a child’s parents. In legal terms, citizenship was affected by jus soli (birthplace) and jus sanguinis (descent). 164

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Colonial Background The American colonists were merely English people residing in America, and they claimed all their rights as Englishmen. The Virginia Charter of 1606 recognized that situation, and in it the king granted to all his subjects living in the “Colonies and Plantations,” as well as to any children born there, “all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities, within any of our other Dominions, to all intents and purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England.” In fact it was this very concept of equality of Englishmen, regardless of where in the realm they lived, that provided a philosophical basis for the American war for independence. The Americans demanded equal treatment and claimed that their own “American parliaments” (assemblies) should rule over them rather than the British Parliament in London. Not all American colonists were English, however, and that fact raised questions of citizenship. It was much easier to become naturalized citizens in America than in England. English Americans from the earliest days of settlement had accepted “foreigners” as equal subjects of the king. Citizenship: Limited or Absolute? Are the obligations of citizenship and allegiance limited or absolute? This was a key question in the disputes between England and the American colonies before the American Revolution. In the Declaratory Act of 1766 the British Parliament claimed to have full authority “to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain.” The Americans categorically rejected that idea of unlimited political authority over them. They claimed their rights as Englishmen to make their own laws within their colonial assemblies. They rejected the idea that the British Parliament could dictate to them and accepted the authority of the English king only in a limited constitutional sense. Citizenship required allegiance, but as freemen, not as slaves. Patrick Henry eloquently expressed the attitude of his countrymen: Is life so sweet and peace so dear as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but, as for me, give me Liberty or give me Death!

Contractual American Citizenship The result was an independent United States and a constitution that spelled out the limits of governmental authority. The government was to be strong enough to provide for the common defense and a stable society, but it was to be limited in its interference in the lives of the free citizens of the United States. Citizens owed obedience to governments only in exchange for the protection of their fundamental rights. It was essentially a contract with mutual obligations on both sides. The new state governments had the authority to grant citizenship within their borders. They did so and welcomed many new immigrants. Typically the 165

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A newly naturalized American citizen from Japan. (NARA)

states required a year or two of residence within the state and an oath of allegiance and good moral character for a person to become a citizen. After the U.S. Constitution went into effect, the Naturalization Act of 1802 required five years of residence, a loyalty oath accepting the principles of the Constitution, and proof of good character and behavior for a person to become a United States citizen. The law also required all immigrants to register with the government. Citizenship Denied During the nineteenth century there were two classes of people born in the United States who were denied citizenship in that country: slaves and American Indians. Even the 250,000 free blacks in the United States did not have equal protection of the law and political opportunities associated with citizenship during the first half of the nineteenth century. The conscience of many Americans was stirred, but it took a civil war and further political upheaval before these matters were addressed. Former slaves were—at least on paper—granted citizenship and guaranteed civil rights with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (1865-1870). Some American Indians were granted citizenship with the Dawes Act of 1887; others had to wait until the Citizenship Act of 1924. “Natural-born citizens” are either born in the United States or born in a foreign country of one or two parents who are United States citizens. A “certificate of citizenship” is issued to confirm that fact, but normally a five-year 166

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period of continuous residency in the United States is required between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight years. Naturalization A “naturalization paper” is issued for naturalized citizens when they acquire citizenship. They must have been lawful residents of the United States for five years and must demonstrate a knowledge of the fundamentals of American government and history, and they must be of good moral character. They must also promise to obey the laws of the United States and defend its Constitution and laws and agree to serve in the United States military if required to do so. The process includes a hearing before a United States district court or certain state courts of record. That hearing is followed, at least thirty days later, by the administering of the oath of allegiance. Foreign Visitors Aliens visiting the United States have certain rights and protections, but remaining in the United States is not one of them. Aliens are sometimes expelled from the United States for subversion, criminal or immoral behavior, violation of narcotics laws, or mental or physical defects. More often, however, expulsion is for failure to comply with conditions of nonimmigrant status or for entering the United States without legal documents or by false statements. Approximately ten thousand aliens a year are thus deported from the United States. Deportation of aliens is an administrative enforcement of the laws and not a judicial procedure, so court trials are not involved. Expatriation American citizens have the right, if they choose, to relinquish their citizenship. This process is called “expatriation.” They cannot, however, lose their citizenship simply by fleeing the country to avoid serving in the military or by serving in a foreign military without United States consent. A request to renounce citizenship can be accomplished in the United States only in time of war. In a foreign country a person can make the renunciation before a diplomatic officer or can take an oath of allegiance to another government. Expatriation is a very rare occurrence among American citizens because citizenship is so highly prized. There are many millions of people in other parts of the world who would quickly take American citizenship if they had the opportunity. Many do immigrate to the United States, but American immigration laws slow the flow of naturalization, and many people must wait many years before becoming American citizens. William H. Burnside Further Reading Becker, Aliza. Citizenship for Us: A Handbook on Naturalization and Citizenship. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Legal Immigration Network, 2002. Practical guide to U.S. citizenship laws for lay readers. 167

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Hing, Bill Ong. Immigration and the Law: A Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999. Detailed reference work on immigration law that addresses citizenship issues. Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Offers a historical perspective on changing views and laws relating to citizenship in U.S. history. Kondo, Atsushi, ed. Citizenship in a Global World: Comparing Citizenship Rights for Aliens. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Collection of essays on citizenship and immigrants in ten different nations, including the United States and Canada. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Broad survey of the history of changing federal legislation relating to immigration and naturalization. Rubio-Marn, Ruth. Immigration as a Democratic Challenge: Citizenship and Inclusion in Germany and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Comparative study of American and German laws concerning the naturalization of immigrants. See also Alien land laws; Cable Act; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Naturalization; Naturalization Act of 1790; Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Ozawa v. United States; Wong Kim Ark case.

CLOTILDE slave ship The Event: Last American ship to carry African slaves to the United States Date: July, 1859 Place: Mobile Bay, Alabama Immigration issues: African Americans; Slavery Significance: Seizure of the Clotilde finally ended the importation of African slaves to the United States that had been illegal since 1808. There are contradictory reports about slavers—ships especially built to transport slaves—during the period from 1858 to 1861. Historians, however, have managed to piece together an accurate account of the Clotilde, the last U.S. slave ship, which smuggled more than a hundred Africans into Alabama. The Slave Trade The slave trade was outlawed by Congress in 1808. This brutal business continued without serious interference, however, until the early 1820’s, when federal officials began capturing slavers and freeing their prisoners. Public sentiment, even in the South, did not favor revival of the 168

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trade. To annoy northern antislavery and abolitionist advocates, numerous rumors were spread by slave traders and sympathizers about slavers landing on the southeastern coast. For example, the New York Daily Tribune received many letters reporting landings of slavers in Florida and the Carolinas. There were even rumors during the 1860’s of a prosperous underground slavetrading company operating in New Orleans. The Clotilde’s history, however, has been confirmed by eyewitness accounts and careful reconstruction of events by historians. Congress had revived laws against slave trading and declared that anyone convicted would be hanged. The United States had been later than almost every other civilized nation in the world in abolishing slave trading. Even New York City, bastion of abolitionists, became a refuge for eighty-five slave ships, many of them built and sent to Africa from that city. Much profit could be made in the $17,000,000-per-year business. According to one account, 15,000 Africans were smuggled to the United States in 1859 alone, the last 117 of whom were brought by the Clotilde. In contrast, the British government, after issuing its injunction against the slave trade in the eighteenth century, seized and destroyed 625 slave ships and freed their forty thousand prisoners. In the United States, only the abolitionists consistently confronted the government for its apathy toward slave smuggling. The CLOTILDE Project Timothy Meagher, with brothers Jim and Byrns, masterminded the Clotilde project. Timothy, an imposing Irishman known for his adventurous character, was a plantation owner and captain of the steamboat Roger B. Taney, which carried passengers, cargo, and mail to and from Montgomery on the Alabama River. Apparently in a lighthearted argument with some passengers on his steamboat, Meagher made a thousand-dollar bet that within a year or two he would bring a ship full of slaves to Mobile Bay without being apprehended by federal officials. Meagher had many years’ experience in cruising the Alabama River. He knew his way around every hidden bayou, swamp, canebrake, and sandbar better than anyone else in the South. For his operation, he needed a slave ship. He purchased a lumber schooner called the Clotilde for thirty-five thousand dollars in late 1858 and rebuilt it as a 327-ton slaver. He hired his friend Bill Foster, who was experienced in constructing and sailing the old slavers, as skipper. Foster was to sail to the west coast of Africa and seek King Dahomey’s assistance in procuring two hundred young slaves. The Clotilde was equipped with a crew, guns, and cutlasses. To control the prisoners, Meagher supplied the ship with iron manacles, rings, and chains. Foster hired his crew from all over the South, enticing them with liquor, money, and promises of adventure. In the dead of night, massive quantities of food, mainly yams and rice, and drinking water were transported to the ship from Meagher’s plantation. To give the ship the look of a lumber schooner, some piles of lumber were placed on the deck. Captain Foster hired the infamous King Dahomey and his drunken thugs to raid villages and capture two hundred young, healthy men 169

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and women. The attacks must have taken place early one summer morning in May or early June of 1859. King Dahomey’s band raided the two peaceful villages of Whinney and Ataka. They burned huts, injured women and children, and tied up more than 170 young Africans by their necks. The captives were forced into the hold of the Clotilde. The return trip was an awful scene of helpless people, racked with convulsions, crammed into dark, damp quarters, lacking adequate food and water. Foster had as many as thirty-nine bodies thrown overboard before arriving back in the United States. The ship returned in July, 1859, and waited in front of Biloxi in the Mississippi Sound. Foster hired a friend’s tugboat and in the dead of night, pulled the Clotilde, undetected by government vessels present in Mobile Bay, to a prearranged location in the swamps of the Tombigbee River. Meagher was the best man to maneuver the craft in the treacherous bayous. The sick, exhausted Africans were moved quietly to an out-of-the-way plantation belonging to Meagher’s friend, John M. Dabney, who hid them in the canebrakes. From there, Meagher took charge of his steamer, the Roger B. Taney, and kept Foster and the Clotilde crew members hidden aboard her until they reached Montgomery, where they were paid off and whisked to New York City for dispersal. Landing the Slave Cargo The slaver Clotilde was promptly burned at water’s edge as soon as its African cargo had been removed. Meagher made elaborate preparations to throw townsfolk and government officials off the track. The Department of Justice was informed, however, and Meagher was arrested at his plantation and placed on trial in short order. Meagher’s trial was a sham. He was released on bond for lack of evidence. His efforts to conceal all signs of the ship and its cargo had paid off, but he had to spend close to $100,000 in lawyers’ fees and bribes. The prosecution was delayed, and the secessionists came to his rescue. News of the Clotilde’s landing and Meagher’s trial was drowned by the presidential campaign and widespread talk of civil war. Government officials finally learned where the Africans were hidden. They commissioned the steamer Eclipse for finding and transferring the Africans to Mobile. Meagher, learning of the government’s decision, got the Eclipse crew and government passengers drunk, giving him and his men time to move the prisoners to a friend’s plantation two hundred miles up the Alabama River. Meagher’s slave-smuggling venture was a financial disaster. He bought the Africans from King Dahomey for $8,460 in gold plus ninety casks of rum and some cases of yard goods. He was able to sell only twenty-five slaves; it is not clear exactly what happened to the rest. There were reports that Meagher later transferred the others to his plantation near Mobile. Some ended up marrying and living with local African Americans in the vicinity. Some were reported to have died of homesickness or other maladies. Many others settled in cabins behind the Meagher plantation house, which was burned in 1905. 170

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The CLOTILDE in History In 1906, a journalistic account of the Clotilde episode appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine. The author, H. M. Byers, had found several soft-spoken Africans who told of having been smuggled aboard the Clotilde. They still maintained some of their own culture and language, along with their African gentleness of demeanor. Most of their children were married to local black residents of Mobile and neighboring areas. Byers conducted extensive interviews with two who had endured the journey from Africa to Alabama: an old man named Gossalow, who had a tribal tattoo on his breast, and an old woman named Abaky, who had intricate tribal tattoos on both cheeks. Gossalow and his wife had been stolen from the village of Whinney, and Abaky from the town of Ataka, near King Dahomey’s land. They had kept many of their old traditions in their original form with little modification. For example, they still buried their dead in graves filled with oak leaves. They spoke nostalgically of their peaceful West African farms, planted with abundant yams and rice. The destruction of the Clotilde might be said to symbolize the end of one of the most despicable enterprises in modern history and the beginning of the infusion of the vibrant African culture into North American society. Chogollah Maroufi Further Reading Byers, H. M. “The Last Slave Ship.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 53 (1906): 742746. A sensationalized journalistic version of the episode, but filled with valuable and accurate details. Especially valuable are the author’s interviews with two surviving Africans who were smuggled into the United States aboard the Clotilde. Howard, Warren S. “The Elusive Smuggled Slave.” In American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837-1862. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Provides various accounts of the Clotilde. Sellers, James Benson. Slavery in Alabama. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1950. Conveys the historical and social mood of the slave era and gives some details of the Clotilde’s smuggling operation. Spear, John R. The American Slave Trade: An Account of Its Origins, Growth and Suppression. Williamstown, Mass.: Corner House, 1978. A well-researched and thoroughly documented book about the slave trade in general. Chapter 19 provides an account of the Clotilde voyage and its aftermath. Wish, Harvey. “The Revival of the African Slave Trade in the United States, 1859-1860.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (1940-1941): 569-588. A comprehensive account of various smuggling operations just before the Civil War. See also

African immigrants; Afro-Caribbean immigrants.

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Coast Guard, U.S. Identification: Federal military service and law-enforcement agency that provides maritime support for the war on terror as part of the Department of Homeland Security Date: Established in 1790 as the Revenue Marine Immigration issues: Border control; Illegal immigration; Law enforcement Significance: The nation’s oldest maritime military service, the U.S. Coast Guard is responsible for protecting coastal boundaries and infrastructure and intercepting illegal drugs, goods, and aliens that are attempting to enter the United States. The modern-day U.S. Coast Guard is the largest and most advanced maritime law-enforcement agency in the world and has a long and distinguished history as an autonomous military branch. In contrast to other branches of the U.S. military, the Coast Guard has never been part of the Department of Defense. The forerunner of the Coast Guard was established in 1790 as the Revenue Marine. Since then, the service has undergone major changes and restructuring. In 2003, the Coast Guard became part of the Department of Homeland Security, and since then its primary mission has been to defend more than 95,000 miles of U.S. coastlines, 360 ports, 10,000 miles of interstate riverfronts, and 3.4 million square miles of ocean. This monumental responsibility requires the joint cooperation of local, state, and other federal agencies, as well as the private maritime industry and international entities. The Coast Guard receives its law-enforcement statutory authority under Title 14 of the United States Code. Historically, the service has had three primary law-enforcement charges. These have included collection of tariffs for imported goods, protection of shipping from piracy on the high seas, and the interception of illegal goods and persons. Of these tasks, the primary goal of the Coast Guard prior to World War II involved the confiscation of material contraband. During the 1960’s, however, the service began increasingly to limit the flow of illegal immigration coming from Cuba. After large numbers of Cuban refugees were intercepted during the early and mid-1960’s, the numbers decreased until the landmark Mariel boatlift of 1980. That massive exodus of 125,000 Cuban refugees to the United States marked the largest Coast Guard peacetime operation to that date. The 1970’s saw a noticeable increase in the role of the Coast Guard in stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the United States. The service’s drugenforcement duties continued to increase throughout the first years of the twenty-first century, as the service seized large quantities of marijuana, cocaine, and other illicit drugs. Particularly notable were seizures of 13 tons of 172

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marijuana in San Diego in 1984, 20 tons of marijuana in Jamaica in 1987, and 13.5 tons of cocaine from a vessel 1,500 miles south of California in 2001. The Coast Guard has also served in virtually every major military engagement since the founding of the United States. It has assisted U.S. Navy operations with personnel and equipment and has also been assigned special missions. It has a rich and well-documented history of recognized service during the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991. As part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003, the Coast Guard continued to support other branches of America’s armed services. Current Day and Beyond On February 25, 2003, supervision of the Coast Guard was passed from the Department of Transportation to the newly founded Department of Homeland Security. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 lists five specific law-enforcement directives for the Coast Guard. These directives focus on securing ports, waterways, and coastal security; defense readiness and response; drug interdiction; illegal immigrant interdiction; other law-enforcement duties as needed. In 2004, the Coast Guard employed approximately 39,000 active duty personnel, 8,100 reservists, and some 37,000 civilian auxiliary personnel. On a typical day the Coast Guard boards 138 vessels for law-enforcement checks, performs 450 waterway or port security operations, opens 38 federal cases for law violations, monitors more than 2,500 commercial vessels entering or exiting ports of entry, confiscates 39 pounds of marijuana and 324 pounds of cocaine, arrests 15 illegal immigrants, and enforces 103 security zones. Since the unprecedented loss of life and the disruption of domestic commerce that came with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard has faced significant challenges as it has defended ports, waterways, and maritime industries. Even before these attacks, however, the Coast Guard had a desperate need to replace its aging and technologically deficient fleet of equipment. The Coast Guard’s increased responsibilities have made correcting those shortcomings a major area of concern for adequate domestic security. To maintain the Coast Guard’s state of preparedness and intelligence necessary to prevent and intervene in terrorist threats, a new generation of boats, cutters, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopters was under development in 2005. This state-of-the-art system, known as the Integrated Deepwater System (IDS), was designed to integrate, link, and network all new equipment assets, both within the Coast Guard and between the Coast Guard and other military and government agencies. The new system promised to be a highly effective, efficient, and intelligent use of resources, equipment, and manpower by establishing a fully integrated communications system. After it is fully implemented, it is expected to provide a modern infrastructure to support the Coast Guard’s increasingly complex operations. Denise Paquette Boots 173

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Further Reading Beard, Tom, Jose Hanson, and Paul Scotti, eds. The Coast Guard. Westport, Conn.: Hugh Lauter Levin, 2004. Containing a foreword by veteran broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite, this illustrated book covers the duty, history, life, and devotion of the Coast Guard and its people through a number of essays and contributors. Johnson, Robert Erwin. Guardians of the Sea: History of the U.S. Coast Guard, 1915 to the Present. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987. Comprehensive and detailed account of the history of the Coast Guard from the early twentieth century through the 1980’s. It offers explicit accounts of rescues, military operations, and more. Krietemeyer, George. The Coast Guardsman’s Manual. 9th ed. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2000. Designed for members of the Coast Guard, this book offers a thorough overview of the Coast Guard history, uniforms, and operations, and is mandatory reading for recruits in boot camp. Ostrom, Thomas. The United States Coast Guard: 1790 to the Present. Oakland, Oreg.: Elderberry Press, 2004. Written for serious scholars of American military and agency history, this book offers an exhaustive history of the Coast Guard. White, Jonathan R. Defending the Homeland: Domestic Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Security. Stamford, Conn.: Wadsworth, 2003. Survey of law enforcement in the United States discussing how the criminal justice system has changed since September 11, 2001. See also Chinese detentions in New York; Cuban refugee policy; González rescue; Haitian boat people; Homeland Security Department; Mariel boatlift.

Coolies Definition: Pejorative term of the past for unskilled laborers from Asia, particularly those from the Far East Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Labor; Slavery; Stereotypes Significance: Already discriminated against and treated poorly by their American employers, Asian laborers who were regarded as “coolies” faced additional stigmatization and mistreatment. “Coolie” derives from a Tamil word meaning hireling and was adapted by the British to refer to unskilled laborers in India and the Far East in the seventeenth century. The word was also used to describe unskilled five-year con174

Coolies

Chinese mine workers traveling on a railroad handcart. Often called “coolie hats,” the broad conical straw hats worn by Chinese laborers became one of the defining characteristics of “coolies.” (Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley)

tract laborers, usually Indian or Chinese, working for low wages in exchange for free passage to British or Dutch colonies. Conditions were abysmal in the depots where the passengers waited and even worse on the ships, producing death rates comparable to those during the former slave trade. Horrid work conditions awaited the survivors. With the influx of Chinese to the United States following the California gold rush of 1849, the pejorative term “coolie” was adapted to refer to any Chinese immigrant, creating the fiction that Chinese people were all slave laborers brought to the United States as part of a conspiracy to avoid paying decent wages to American workers. The racist coolie stereotype also connoted spreaders of disease, gambling, opium, prostitution, and heathenistic religious practices. As Chinese laborers helped build the railroads and worked in mines (often during strikes), this dehumanizing stereotype encouraged antiChinese riots and lynchings during the 1870’s. Although only 105,000 Chinese had come to the United States by 1880, pressure from labor and western politicians resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning all Chinese immigration. Irwin Halfond Further Reading Aarim-Heriot, Najia. Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. 175

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Barth, Gunther. Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 18501870. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1795-1882. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Zinzius, Birgit. Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality—History, Present, and Future of the Chinese Americans. New York: P. Lang, 2005. See also Alien land laws; Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Page law; Wong Kim Ark case.

Cuban immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Caribbean island of Cuba Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Demographics; Latino immigrants; Refugees; West Indian immigrants Significance: Large numbers of Cuban refugees entered the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century and during the 1960’s and 1980’s. Their tightly knit, prosperous communities, and later, their sheer numbers, caused racial tension and conflict, particularly with African American communities in Miami, into the twenty-first century. In 1959, Fidel Castro led a popular revolt that toppled the government of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar in Cuba. A small number of Cubans who had sympathized with the Batista government fled to the United States. This tiny trickle of wealthy Cubans grew to torrential proportions as more and more people became dissatisfied with the new regime. The immigrants who came in this migratory wave, like those who came in the two that preceded it, met with discrimination and racial tensions in their new home. Early Immigrants Twice before, large numbers of Cubans had sought refuge from war by traveling to the United States and various Latin American nations. The first group left Cuba between 1868 and 1878 during the battle for independence known in Cuba as the Ten Years’ War. Most of the Cubans went to the Florida cities of Key West and Tampa, although some relocated in New York City and New Orleans. After the peace accord was signed in 1878, many Cubans returned to the island, although quite a large number remained in both Key West and Tampa (actually Ybor City) to work in the newly established tobacco factories. 176

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These early immigrants—whose descendants still live in the area—formed tightly knit communities that revolved around the Roman Catholic Church and Spanish culture. Because the principal reason for the migration had been political, not economic, most Cubans viewed their time in the United States as temporary. Perhaps for this reason, they assimilated to a lesser extent than most immigrant groups and did not adopt many American norms or much of the culture. This was a major cause of tension between Cubans and the established population. The end of the nineteenth century brought another large influx of Cubans. When the Cuban War of Independence started in February, 1895, and as conditions on the island deteriorated, large numbers of Cubans migrated to the United States and Latin America. As in the previous migration, Cubans settled mostly in Florida and other large eastern American cities. This time, the immigrants did not suffer as much culture shock because the Cubans who remained behind after the end of the Ten Years’ War provided a ready-made Cuban American community where they could settle.

Fidel Castro at the time of his accession to power in Cuba in 1959. (Library of Congress)

177

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Cuban Immigration to the United States, 1921-2003 35,000


30,000 1959 Castro takes power

25,000 20,000

1980 Mariel boatlift

15,000 10,000 5,000 0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1931-1940

1921-1930

Source: U.S . Census Bureau.

Twentieth Century The Cuban War of Independence, which in the United States became known as the Spanish-American War (1898), lasted three years, during which Cuban exiles lived in communities separated in many ways from the local population. Then, in 1953, Fidel Castro began a revolt against the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar that resulted in the Cuban Revolution and Castro’s socialization of the economy under a communistallied government. By the early 1960’s, when the wave of Cubans fleeing the Castro regime arrived, many of the Cuban Americans were second- or thirdgeneration Americans and did not have a lot in common with the newer arrivals. Therefore, the post-Castro Cubans had to contend with the criticisms of the older, established Cuban Americans. The first wave of post-Castro Cubans arrived immediately after Castro took over. Shortly after the United States and Cuba broke diplomatic relations in January, 1960, the next migratory wave began. In this wave were more than fifty thousand children without their parents, who were brought to the United States by a former president of Cuba and other Cubans, the U.S. Catholic Welfare Bureau, and Senator George A. Smathers of Florida. The next large wave was made up of refugees who arrived on the Freedom Flights initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the mid-1960’s. Two 178

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daily flights brought thousands of Cubans, straining the economy of Florida, where most of them settled. Working-class Americans, especially African Americans in Miami, suffered when jobs were lost to workers willing to work for any wage simply to have employment. During this time, many Cubans, formerly professionals, worked menial jobs while they attended night school in order to perfect their English and perhaps return to their chosen professions. During the 1970’s, the number of Cuban refugees fell, and many earlier arrivals began to move away from Miami’s Little Havana to its suburbs or to other southern cities. By the time the Mariel boatlift of 1980 started, the early refugees were enjoying a high standard of living and were able to help the new arrivals establish themselves. However, the boatlift strained the public resources of southern Florida and created racial tensions. A riot broke out in the African American community in Miami after the acquittal of a Hispanic police officer who shot an African American. After much destruction, order was restored although the underlying tension did not go away. Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act, which substantially lowered the number of Cuban refugees that could be admitted each year. Cuban Americans constitute the third largest Hispanic group in the United States, after Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. Because the earlier waves of Cuban refugees were composed of middle- to upper-class Cubans, the south Florida area has experienced tremendous growth. Studies suggest that significant differences exist between refugees—like the Cubans—who migrate for political reasons and those who migrate for economic reasons. The Cuban American community is very tightly knit, although its members vary greatly in their cultural affiliations: Some members follow Cuban customs and traditions; others tend to live more or less typical American lifestyles. One attribute that separates Cuban Americans from other immigrant groups is their staunchly anti-communist stance. Although other immigrant groups have softened their stance on communists in China or Vietnam, the Cuban American community, especially in Miami, has tended to view this change in stance as a weakness. This attitude is likely to prevail until the community is predominantly second- and third-generation Cuban Americans. Peter E. Carr Further Reading For a thorough review of Cuban Americans, see Thomas D. Boswell and James R. Curtis’s The Cuban American Experience (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), which Michele Zebich-Knos and Heather Nicol’s Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005) helps to bring up-to-date. Robert M. Levine and Moisés Asís’s Cuban Miami (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000) explores the Cuban immigrant community of South Florida, which is home to the bulk of the nation’s Cuban immigrants. Other informative 179

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sources include John Crewdson’s The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America (New York: Times Books, 1983), Raul Moncarz and Jorge Antonio’s “Cuban Immigration to the United States” in Contemporary American Immigration, edited by Dennis Laurence Cuddy (Boston: Twayne, 1982), Norman Zucker’s “Contemporary American Immigration and Refugee Policy: An Overview,” in Journal of Children in Contemporary Society (15, no. 3, Spring, 1983). For other useful sources, see Lyn MacCorkle’s Cubans in the United States: A Bibliography for Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 1960-1983 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984). Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Cuba. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, is a collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes a chapter on Cubans. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Cuban refugee policy; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; González rescue; Haitian immigrants; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Little Havana; Mariel boatlift; Santería.

Cuban immigrants and African Americans Immigration issues: African Americans; Cuban immigrants; Latino immigrants; West Indian immigrants Significance: The tension that arose between African Americans and post1959 Cuban refugees in the Miami area of Florida represents an illuminating case study of the effects of immigration on urban racial and ethnic relations during the late twentieth century. During the late twentieth century, the attitude of African Americans and their organizations to immigration was one of ambivalence. As a minority group, African Americans could not consistently oppose immigration as a threat to some imagined American cultural or ethnic purity. Yet many African Americans, struggling against discrimination and disadvantage, feared immigrants as competitors for scarce jobs and public services. In Dade County, Florida, unrestricted immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 fed Miami African Americans’ anxieties about economic displacement 180


and political disempowerment. The black riots that erupted in Miami in 1980, 1982, and 1989, although ostensibly sparked by police brutality, were widely ascribed by contemporary commentators as resentment against Cuban refugees. Cuban Refugees Tensions between African Americans and black immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti have been mitigated somewhat by a shared African heritage; with the refugee flow from Cuba, however, this factor did not come into play as much. When Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, people of full or partial African descent constituted nearly 40 percent of the total population of Cuba; yet 90 percent or more of the Cuban refugees of the 1960’s and early 1970’s were white. It was not until the Mariel boatlift of May to September, 1980, that the proportion of Afro-Cubans in the refugee flow came to approximate that of the island’s population. By the beginning of 1980, many of the Cuban refugees of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, who had arrived nearly penniless, had grown prosperous. Such success was due to the relatively high proportion of professionals and entrepreneurs among the earliest refugees, the refugees’ hard work, and the generous financial assistance that the refugees, as defectors from a communist regime, received from the federal government to help defray the costs of vocational training and retraining, transportation, and resettlement. African Americans complained that the refugees received more assistance than either other immigrants or poor native-born Americans did. The Mariel boatlift refugees of May to September, 1980, and refugees who arrived after that year did not, however, receive as much government help as the earlier waves of immigrants. African Americans also complained about the way refugees benefited from federal programs not specifically targeted at refugees. When affirmative action policies were implemented during the late 1960’s to provide set-asides for minority businesses, Hispanics were considered to be a minority and Cubans were Hispanics; hence, refugee-owned businesses were judged to qualify as minority-owned businesses. Local African Americans resented what they saw as poaching by white newcomers on an entitlement originally intended for African Americans. Cubans’ Immigration Status as Bone of Contention From 1959 to 1980, few Cubans reaching U.S. shores were deported. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 enabled all Cuban refugees to change their status to that of permanent resident after one year of living in the United States; other immigrants did not enjoy this privilege. After 1972, more and more Haitians, like Cubans, tried to reach the United States. Cubans fleeing by boat were always welcomed. In contrast, Haitians fleeing by boat were unceremoniously sent back to Haiti if intercepted at sea, detained in prison if they reached Florida, and often deported. Although the official justification for the disparity in treatment was ideological (Cuba was communist; Haiti was not), many Miami 181


black activists perceived racism. Many Cuban escapees were white; almost all Haitian escapees were black. In May, 1995, U.S. president Bill Clinton officially ended the privileged status of Cuban refugees. When the first Cuban escapees were sent back to Cuba, on May 10, Miami Cubans staged a four-day action of civil disobedience; Miami’s native-born African Americans stayed away from the protest. Between 1968 and 1989, there were several episodes of rioting by black Miamians, the bloodiest of which took place in 1980. The riots of 1980, 1982, and 1989 were widely attributed by journalists and scholars to the resentment of Miami African Americans against Cuban refugees, although this was only one reason. All the riots stemmed from responses to alleged police misuse of force. In 1982 and 1989, the officers who used force were Hispanic, and Cubans did tend to rally around Hispanic police officers accused of brutality. Yet conflict between African Americans and police officers had existed even before the mass arrival of Cuban refugees. Although one victim of black violence during the 1980 riot was a Cuban refugee, other victims were nonHispanic whites: The mob was as much anti-white as anti-Cuban. Nor were native-born African Americans the only ones to complain about police brutality. In 1992, an incident of police violence against a Haitian in a Cuban-owned store aroused protest; and in 1990, Miami’s Puerto Ricans also rioted against an alleged police abuse of force. Whether Cuban refugees gained occupationally at the expense of Miami’s African Americans is a controversial issue, although local black leaders lodged complaints about such displacement as early as the early 1960’s. Allegations that Cubans ousted African Americans from service jobs in hotels and restaurants were met by counterallegations that African Americans were themselves leaving such jobs voluntarily and that the percentage of Miami African Americans in white-collar jobs had increased by 1980. By founding many new businesses, Cuban refugees created jobs; many such jobs, however, went to fellow refugees rather than to African Americans. As the Hispanic population grew and trade links with Latin America expanded, native-born African Americans were hurt by the job requirement of fluency in Spanish. Although the Miami area economic pie grew during the 1960’s and 1970’s, African Americans’ slice of that pie, scholars concede, was stagnant; compared with pre-1980 Cuban refugees, they suffered in 1980 from greater poverty and unemployment and had a lower rate of entrepreneurship. Black-Cuban Conflict in Local Politics From 1960 to 1990, the Hispanic percentage of Dade County’s population (most, but not all of it, Cuban) rose from barely 10 percent to 49 percent; the black percentage of the county’s population never rose above 20 percent. By the late 1970’s, more and more Cuban refugees were becoming naturalized U.S. citizens, gaining both the right to vote and a decisive weight in local politics. In 1983, the Puerto Rican-born mayor dismissed the black city manager, replacing him with a Cuban. Cuban American candidates defeated African American candi182


dates for the posts of mayor of Miami in 1985, Dade County Schools superintendent in 1990, Dade County district attorney in 1993, and mayor of Dade County in 1996. The Cuban influx into elective politics prevented a black takeover of city hall (as had taken place in Atlanta, Georgia, and Detroit, Michigan), thereby reducing the chances for black businesspeople to benefit from municipal contracts. Yet African Americans’ powerlessness was relative: They could vote and affect the outcome of elections. In spring of 1990, Mayor Xavier Suar persuaded the Miami city government to withdraw its official welcome to Nelson Mandela, the leader of the black liberation struggle in South Africa, who was then touring the United States. Mandela, in a television interview, had praised Castro. Partly in response to this slap at Mandela, a Miami black civil rights leader, H. T. Smith, called for a nationwide boycott by black organizations of Miami-area hotels; this boycott was remarkably effective. It was ended in 1993 with an agreement promising greater efforts to employ African Americans in Miami’s hospitality industry. Complexities of Miami-area Interethnic Relations Dade County’s politics were not simply a Cuban-African American struggle. Sometimes African Americans saw non-Hispanic whites as allies against the Cubans: In his losing bid for Congress against a Cuban American in 1989, the non-Hispanic white candidate won most of the black votes. Sometimes African Americans saw both Cubans and non-Hispanic whites as oppressors of African Americans. In a lawsuit that met with success in 1992, African Americans and Cubans cooperated in an effort to make the Dade County Commission more representative of ethnic minorities. African Americans did not always form a united front against the Cubans: In a 1980 referendum ending the provision of Spanish-language documents and services by the Dade County government, black voters split, 44 percent for the proposition and 56 percent against. (Bilingualism was restored in 1993.) Haitians and native-born African Americans did not agree on all issues; among non-Hispanic whites, white ethnic migrants from the North did not always agree with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of southern background; and some of Miami’s non-Cuban Hispanics resented Cuban predominance. In other major U.S. cities, Cubans were, if present at all, a smaller part of the larger Hispanic group. Only in Miami did Hispanics build up a powerful political machine; hence, black resentment of Hispanic political power played little role in race relations elsewhere. The police brutality issue also operated differently: in Compton, California, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, Michigan, for example, there were complaints, during the early 1990’s, about alleged brutality by black police officers against Hispanics. Paul D. Mageli 183

Cuban refugee policy

Further Reading This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) by Alex Stepick and others is a study of competitition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups— Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. In Imagining Miami (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), the best introductory study, Sheila Croucher attacks the notion that either the black or the Cuban community is a monolith. Her analysis of the Mandela affair and the subsequent boycott is especially enlightening. Marvin Dunn’s Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 1997) is informative on the riots. On the politics of bilingualism, consult Max Castro’s essay in Guillermo J. Grenier and Alex Stepick’s Miami Now! (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1992). The displacement thesis is presented most clearly in historian Raymond A. Mohl’s “On the Edge: Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan Miami Since 1959,” Florida Historical Quarterly (69, no. 1, July, 1990). For rebuttals of this thesis, consult chapter 3 of Alex Stepick and Alejandro Portes’s City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Alex Stepick and Guillermo Grenier’s “Cubans in Miami,” in In the Barrios: Latinos and the Underclass Debate, edited by Joan Moore and Raquel Pinderhughes (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993). City on the Edge is also informative on Miami’s Haitians. For a general study of racial issues relating to West Indian immigrants, see Milton Vickerman’s Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), edited by Frank D. Bean and Stephanie Bell-Rose, is a collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. See also Cuban immigrants; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Little Havana; Mariel boatlift; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations; Santería.

Cuban refugee policy Definition: Changing federal government policy regarding the immigration of Cuban refugees Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Refugees; West Indian immigrants Significance: In 1994, in a decision reflecting a broad shift in American attitudes toward immigration, President Bill Clinton ended the long-standing practice of automatically granting asylum to Cubans fleeing their country. 184


During the first half of August, 1994, thousands of Cubans, determined to flee their island nation’s poverty and repression, set out from the port of Cojimar in makeshift rafts, braving shark-filled waters in an effort to reach southern Florida, ninety miles away. There, they assumed, freedom and a better life awaited them. For almost three decades, the United States government had granted asylum automatically to virtually all Cubans who reached United States soil. As more and more Cuban refugees landed at Key West, Governor Lawton Chiles, Jr., of Florida pleaded with President Bill Clinton to do something about the influx. Chiles, running for reelection, feared that Florida taxpayers would rebel against the costs that a fresh wave of refugees might impose on the state. On the evening of August 18, 1994, Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, announced at a hastily assembled news conference that Cuban refugees would no longer be entitled to automatic asylum. On the following afternoon, Clinton, in a televised press conference, repeated Reno’s statement. He warned that Cubans intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard would henceforth no longer be taken to Florida; instead, they would be transferred to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, at the eastern tip of Cuba, for detention for an indefinite period. In the future, Clinton proclaimed, Cubans who claimed refugee status would have to prove that they were threatened by persecution. Each individual case would be examined by the American interests section of the Swiss embassy in Havana. On September 9, 1994, after negotiations between the Cuban and United States governments, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader, promised to stop further attempts by rafters to flee Cuba. In return, the United States agreed to accept about twenty thousand immigrants from Cuba per year. Anticommunism Versus Xenophobia In making his decision, Clinton responded to two strands of American public opinion: animosity toward immigrants and refugees in general, and a deep-rooted hostility to Cuba’s leader, Castro. After taking power in January, 1959, Castro expropriated Americanowned property without compensation and converted Cuba into a Communist state allied with the Soviet Union, America’s archrival in the Cold War. In 1961, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, and in 1963, it imposed a trade embargo on the island nation. Castro’s espousal of Communism was only one reason that so many Americans disliked him; another was the humiliation of having to tolerate an outspoken foe of the United States on an island that had been within the United States sphere of influence before 1959. The Cuban exile community that developed in Miami, Florida, provided a focus of anti-Castro sentiment on American soil. From 1959 to 1962—when commercial airplane flights from the island were halted—about 200,000 Cubans fled their homeland. In late 1965, special “Freedom Flights” were organized with Castro’s cooperation. Although registration for these flights was closed in 1966, the flights themselves continued until 1973. The last mass influx of Cubans before 1994 was the Mariel 185


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boatlift of May to September, 1980, which took about 125,000 Cubans to American soil. Between 1980 and 1994, Castro forbade emigration. During the economic boom years of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, neither the extreme liberality of the United States government’s asylum policy toward Cubans nor the extensive financial assistance Washington offered Cuban refugees between 1962 and 1976 aroused much resentment among Americans. The Cuban refugees’ flight to the United States was widely hailed as a propaganda victory for democracy in its worldwide struggle with communism, and their climb up the socioeconomic ladder in the United States was widely applauded as a triumph of hard work and determination. As the American economy came to be beset by frequent short-term downturns and various long-term problems, many people in the United States came to view immigrants and refugees from Latin America as unwelcome competitors for jobs and public services. As president, Clinton heard widespread calls for cutbacks in legal immigration and witnessed widespread alarm over illegal immigration. In 1994, Clinton still had bitter memories of the 1980 Mariel boatlift. President Jimmy Carter had ordered those refugees who lacked close relatives or other sponsors in the United States to be interned in camps across the United States until their fate could be determined bureaucratically. In June, 1980, a riot took place in a camp in Arkansas, where Clinton was then governor. Clinton later came to believe that popular indignation over the Mariel boat186


lift had cost him his chance of being reelected to the governorship in November, 1980, and had also contributed to the defeat of Carter’s bid for reelection to the presidency in the same year. In 1992, the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, which further tightened a thirty-year-old embargo. Serious shortages of oil and of medicine began to be felt in Cuba. Signs of malnutrition began to appear among its people and, on August 5, 1994, a riot erupted in Havana. The riot persuaded Castro to permit limited emigration by those who wanted to leave. The need to keep already bad relations with the United States from becoming worse moved him to crack down on emigration once again in September, 1994. Consequences In a second agreement with Castro, signed on May 2, 1995, Clinton promised that the Coast Guard would intercept at sea all Cubans fleeing their country and return them to Cuba. Those Cubans already interned in Guantánamo would be allowed to enter the United States. By early August, 1995, about half of the Guantánamo internees had been admitted to the United States, and the internment camp was slated to be closed by March, 1996. The 1994 Cuban influx and Clinton’s effort to stop it probably helped shift the debate in the U.S. Congress against advocates of free immigration and in favor of restrictionists. Proposals for reducing the total number of immigrants and refugees admitted to the United States, cracking down more severely on illegal immigration, and excluding legal aliens from certain welfare state benefits seemed to have better prospects of being enacted into law. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Boswell, Thomas D. A Demographic Profile of Cuban Americans. Miami: Cuban American National Council, 2002. Cohen, Steve. Deportation Is Freedom! The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2005. Hamm, Mark S. The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Masud-Piloto, Felix R. From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Zebich-Knos, Michele, and Heather Nicol. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. See also Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Mariel boatlift; Model minorities; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations. 187

Cultural pluralism

Cultural pluralism Definition: Approach to cultural diversity that emphasizes intergroup tolerance and the maintenance of cultural distinctions among groups, in contrast to assimililation Immigration issue: Sociological theories Significance: Cultural pluralism rejects the melting pot theory of cultural assimilation, with its emphasis on Anglo-conformity. The concept of cultural pluralism has its origins in a 1915 essay by educator and social philosopher Horace Kallen, who argued—during an era rife with xenophobia, nativism, and anti-immigrant attitudes—that ethnic groups had a right to exist on their own terms, retaining their unique cultural heritage while enjoying full participation in, and the benefits of, a democratic society. Beyond the Melting Pot (1970), a controversial book by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, expanded Kallen’s early concept and revived the intense debate over the degree to which immigrant customs should, or would, survive with passing generations. In a new nation, Moynihan and Glazer argued, few vestiges of the immigrant culture would remain. Decades later, opinions of Beyond the Melting Pot still run a broad spectrum from praise to condemnation, but the book probably introduced one of the most important social science dialogues of the twentieth century.

Growing evidence of multiculturalism in the United States can be read in signs such as that of a Miami merchant clock repair service that is patronized by both English- and Spanish-speaking people. (Library of Congress)

188

Cultural pluralism

Much of the debate over cultural pluralism has focused on the issues of bilingual (and multicultural) education in public schools and universities. The high point of disagreement appears to be over the concept of assimilationism versus multiculturalism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others have argued that different ethnic groups in the United States share a common culture, and that cultural pluralism is not a model for which the United States should strive. Critics respond that the melting pot paradigm is a fantasy, and that “vegetable soup” or “tossed salad” might be more accurate models. They also point out that if society blends itself into one culture, the cultural values of that finished product will probably be strongly European. Asiatic, African, and Hispanic cultures would not survive the meltdown. Christopher Guillebeau Further Reading Baghramian, Maria, and Attracta Ingram, eds. Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity. New York: Routledge, 2000. Collection of scholarly essays on a wide variety of aspects of cultural pluralism. Barone, Michael. The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001. Reconsideration of the melting pot theory in the context of early twenty-first century America. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration, including the impact of cultural diversity on American society. Brooks, Stephen, ed. The Challenge of Cultural Pluralism. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Collection of essays on cultural pluralism in modern world history. Includes chapters on theoretical aspects of the subject and on pluralism in Canada. Buenker, John D., and Lorman A. Ratner, eds. Multiculturalism in the United States: A Comparative Guide to Acculturation and Ethnicity. Rev. ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Up-to-date collection of essays on aspects of pluralism. Cook, Terrence E. Separation, Assimilation, or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Sociological study of the dynamics of power relationships among different ethnic groups. Denton, Nancy A., and Stewart E. Tolnay, eds. American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-First Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Collection of papers presented at a conference on ethnic diversity in the United States. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are race, government policy, sociological theories, naturalization, and undocumented workers. 189

Demographics of immigration

Vermeulen, Hans, and Joel Perlmann, eds. Immigrants, Schooling, and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Collected papers from a 1996 conference on culture and worldwide immigration that was held in Amsterdam. See also Assimilation theories; English-only and official English movements; European immigrant literature; Generational acculturation; Settlement house movement.

Demographics of immigration Definition: Characteristics of immigration populations that can be measured statistically Immigration issues: Border control; Chinese immigrants; Demographics Significance: Although the forces underlying immigration to North America have remained essentially unaltered throughout the histories of the United States and Canada as nations, the primary sources of immigrants to each country have changed. Until the late twentieth century, Europe supplied the overwhelming majority of immigrants to both countries, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, Asia had become the principal supplier of immigrants. The United States has experienced four major waves of immigration. In the first wave, between 1790 and 1820, most immigrants came from Great Britain and spoke English. During the second wave, from 1840 to 1860, the majority of immigrants were from northern and western Europe, most particularly Ireland and Germany. The third wave, from 1880 to 1914, is characterized by a transition in sources from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe. This wave is associated with a peak period of U.S. immigration. In 1907, a record 1.3 million immigrants entered the country, with Italy accounting for more than 20 percent of this total. The outbreak of World War I effectively ended European immigration—numbers declined from 1 million in 1914 to 31,000 in 1918. The transition in immigrant sources aroused nativist sentiments among older immigrant groups. Fear of Asian immigration, for example, led the U.S. Congress to enact the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Other Asian groups were added to the exclusion list with the creation of the Asiatic Barred Zone in the 1917 Immigration Act. The justification for excluding these groups was 190


found in racist theories of Anglo-Saxon superiority. The U.S. Congress responded to public pressure to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe by enacting the National Origins Quota system in 1924. Under this system, immigrant visas were apportioned for each country according to its contribution to the U.S. population in 1910. Because Britain, Ireland, and Germany had provided the largest number of immigrants, they received the largest quotas. No restrictions were placed on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, largely in response to U.S. agricultural interests that wanted access to cheap Mexican labor that could be recruited when needed. In 1952, the so-called Texas Proviso was added to immigration law; the proviso exempted employers from sanctions for hiring undocumented workers. This had the effect of increasing illegal immigration after the United States ended its formal system of hiring agricultural workers, the bracero program, in 1964. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers. Immigration levels declined from 1924 to 1945 as a result of the National Origins system, the Great Depression, and World War II. After 1945 U.S. concerns with immigrant origins (that is, worries about race) were replaced with concerns about immigrant skills and educational background (the United States, amply populated, began to wish only for immigrants who could contribute to the economy). Changing U.S. Immigration Policies In 1965, the secretary of state testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the significance of immigration to the United States “now depends less on the numbers than on the quality of immigrants. . . . We are in the international market of brains.” Restrictions on immigration from Asia and southern and eastern Europe were gradually removed during and after World War II. The National Origins system was formally replaced by the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allocated an annual ceiling of 170,000 immigrants for the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 for the Western Hemisphere. Within this overall ceiling, a system of priority categories was established based upon family reunification criteria and labor requirements, with the immediate relatives of U.S. citizens being exempt from the numerical cap. In 1990, a global quota of 714,000 immigrants was established for 1992 to 1994, and 675,000 beginning in 1995, with the majority of visas being allocated to spouses, children, and other relatives of U.S. citizens. In addition to this global quota are refugees, who are admitted under the 1980 Refugee Act, which had a 1992 ceiling of 142,000 persons and a series of smaller quotas designed for particular groups which have been adversely affected by earlier immigration laws. These changes in legislation have coincided with a fourth wave of immigration. Since 1970 immigration has gradually increased to approach the record levels, in raw numbers, that were reached at the beginning of the twentieth century. The number of immigrants in the fourth wave relative to the rest of 191


Average Annual Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 1,000,000 950,000 900,000 850,000 800,000


750,000 700,000 650,000 600,000 550,000 500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

1991-2000

2001-2003

1971-1980

1981-1990

1951-1960

1961-1970

1931-1940

1941-1950

1911-1920

1921-1930

1891-1900

1901-1910

1871-1880

1881-1890

1851-1860

1861-1870

1831-1840

1841-1850

1821-1830

the population, however, is far less than at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the 1970’s the United States admitted 4.4 million immigrants. The following decade this figure increased to 7.3 million. In 1993, a total of 904,300 immigrants legally entered the country. Concurrent with this boost in immigration has been a change in immigrant sources from the “developed” to the “developing” world. During the 1960’s, the six leading suppliers of U.S. immigrants were Mexico (443,300), Canada (286,700), Cuba (256,800), United Kingdom (230,500), Italy (206,700), and Germany (200,000). The comparable figures for the 1980’s were: Mexico (1,653,300), the Philippines (495,300), Vietnam (401,400), China (388,800), Korea (338,800), and India (261,900). The six leading sources of immigration during the 1990’s were Mexico (2,249,400), China 192


and Hong Kong (529,000), the Philippines (503,900), former Soviet republics (462,870), India (363,000), and the Dominican Republic (335,300). This transformation in immigrant sources is also associated with a change in immigrant settlement patterns. During the third wave of immigration, the United States was undergoing industrialization, which meant a large demand for factory labor in cities. European immigrants settled in Northeastern and Midwestern industrial cities and transformed the urban landscape. Italian, Polish, and Greek neighborhoods, for example, grew up around Chicago’s downtown district. Since the 1950’s, factory closures in such traditional industries as textiles, automobiles, and steel have reduced the demand for labor and brought long-term economic decline to the region. Economic growth and the demand for labor have shifted to the rapidly growing service-based economies of the so-called Sun Belt states, which stretch from Southern California to Florida. Many of the new immigrant groups have settled in the rapidly growing cities of this region. The resulting ethnic diversity from this settlement can be seen in Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. Adding to the immigrant population during the early 1990’s was an annual flow of an estimated 250,000 illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants include those who overstay a visa (often a student visa) and those who simply walk across the border. Mexico is the leading source of these migrants, followed by El Salvador and Guatemala, two Central American countries torn, especially during the 1980’s, by terrorism and warfare. California contains the largest number of illegal migrants. The net effect of the fourth wave of immigration has been to accelerate—not cause—the cultural transition of the United States from a predominantly white population rooted in western culture to a diverse society comprising many different ethnic and racial minorities. Canadian Immigration In 1867, at the time of national confederation, Canada had a population of 3.2 million. During the following thirty years the young country struggled to obtain population growth as thousands of Canadians moved to the United States. The post-Confederation National Policy was designed to help establish the new country. Two aims of the National Policy were the construction of the transcontinental railroad and homestead settlement in the West. The Canadian government was fearful of American northward expansion and annexation, and so viewed immigration to the prairies as an essential component of nation building. As in the United States, there were concerns about who immigrated. Chinese workers, for example, had been recruited to work on the railroad and in lumber camps, and their presence in British Columbia aroused racist fears. Opposition to the Chinese was particularly pronounced in Vancouver, where a dilapidated Chinatown had been established. The federal government responded to these nativist sentiments by taxing Chinese immigration. Later, the Canadian government pressured Japan into voluntarily limiting its emigrants to four hundred per year. The beginning of the twentieth century was a boom period in Canadian 193


immigration; 1.5 million immigrants entered the country between 1900 and 1914. In 1913 a record 400,000 arrived in the country. Many of these immigrants were from eastern and central Europe and were responding to the same factors that led their counterparts to settle in the United States. Instead of settling in urban areas, as in the United States, the Canadian immigrants generally settled on the prairies in rural ethnic communities. The relative isolation of these small towns and villages helped the immigrants sustain their cultural identity and in effect laid the foundation for the so-called Canadian mosaic and later multiculturalism. After World War I, Canada established a national origins system, classifying prospective immigrants into ethnic categories: British and Northwest Europeans were classified as “preferred”; central and eastern Europeans “nonpreferred,” while in the “restricted” category were Italians, Greeks, and Jews. The responsibility for administering this system was transferred to the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways in 1925. These companies owned vast tracts of land in the West and it was in their interest to sell off this land to new settlers. As a result, the preference categories were ignored. By the late 1920’s, the majority of Canadian immigrants were from the non-preferred and restricted categories. The Great Depression and World War II all but ended immigration to Canada. Canadian immigration policy changed after World War II. Non-Jewish displaced persons from Europe who had been made homeless by the war were admitted in 1946; Jews were allowed to immigrate two years later. The expanding industrial economies of Ontario and Quebec needed labor that could not be supplied from Britain, so the government began an active proimmigration policy in 1949. Europe continued to supply most of Canada’s immigrants during the 1950’s and 1960’s, but the majority of them came from Italy, Greece, and Portugal. Amendments to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act in 1962 and 1966 formally abolished the previous exclusions of particular racial groups and established a universalistic point system for admission into the country. Points were awarded for educational attainment, for the ability to speak the major languages, and for having Canadian family members. These reforms stemmed from the need to attract professionals to the expanding scientific, educational, governmental and health care sectors, from a reduction in racist attitudes, and from an increasing acceptance of Canada’s multicultural character. Since 1971, the federal government has actively promoted multiculturalism by providing grants for ethnic histories and promoting cultural heritage. The new admissions policy resulted in a shift away from Europe as the country’s principal supplier of immigrants. Canadian support for diversity has also included the appointment in 1972 of the first Minister of State for Multiculturalism and the passage in 1988 of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. In 1992, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines were the four leading sources of Canadian immigrants. In 1994, the province of Ontario, with 37 percent of Canada’s population, 194

Deportation

received 52 percent of Canada’s immigrants, while the comparable figures for British Columbia were 12 percent and 22 percent respectively. Most immigrants of the late twentieth century have settled in urban areas. The 1991 census reported that 38 percent or 1.5 million residents of the Toronto metropolitan area were immigrants, while the comparable figures for Vancouver and Montreal were 30 percent and 17 percent respectively. Michael Broadway Further Reading Hughes, James W., and Joseph J. Seneca, eds. America’s Demographic Tapestry: Baseline for the New Millennium. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Kertzer, David I., and Dominique Arel, eds. Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Census. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Massey, Douglas S. “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States.” Population and Development Review 21, no. 3 (September, 1995): 631-652. Perlmann, Joel, and Mary Waters, eds. The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Skerry, Peter. Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. See also Arab American intergroup relations; Asian American literature; Asian American women; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Censuses, U.S.; Chinatowns; English-only and official English movements; Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Korean immigrants and family customs; Racial and ethnic demographic trends; Vietnamese immigrants.

Deportation Definition: Forcible removal of noncitizens from the territory of a country Immigration issues: Border control; Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Illegal immigration; Law enforcement Significance: As a sovereign nation, the United States has always had the authority to deport noncitizens for any reason it chooses. During the 1990’s, the federal government began using its deportation power on a larger scale as a weapon against illegal immigration. 195

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During the 1990’s, as the intensity of the debate over immigration in the United States steadily rose, church groups, civil libertarians, and immigration lawyers demanded severe limitations, in the interest of humanitarianism and due process, on the long-recognized power of the U.S. federal government to deport noncitizens. President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress, by contrast, insisted on the vigorous exercise of that power to promote greater control over immigration. From 1992 to 1997 the number of persons deported rose from 38,000 per year to more than 111,000 per year. U.S. Citizens as Targets of Deportation Normally, U.S. citizens who have been born in the United States cannot be deported unless they renounce their U.S. citizenship or lose it as a result of desertion from the military in time of war. For example, the U.S.-born writer Margaret Randall, who lived in Mexico for more than twenty years, was a target of deportation when she returned to live in the United States for family reasons. Not until the early 1990’s did the campaign to have her ousted from the United States finally cease. The pretext for the deportation proceedings was Randall’s adoption of Mexican citizenship (she claimed, in order to make getting a job easier). Many suspected that her outspoken left-wing views were the real reason for the deportation effort. Whether someone is an alien who is susceptible to deportation or a citizen is determined on legal rather than cultural grounds. Because citizenship was conferred by the U.S. Congress on Puerto Ricans in 1917, a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican living on the mainland cannot be deported to Puerto Rico. On the other hand; a Spanish-speaking Mexican or an English-speaking Canadian or Australian may be deported to the lands of their birth. Naturalized citizens are usually immune to deportation unless they are stripped of their citizenship for having concealed or distorted crucial information about themselves. Eastern Europeans or Germans suspected of having committed war crimes during World War II (1939-1945) have been the chief targets of such action. Conceivably, naturalized Americans of Bosnian or Rwandan background could be stripped of their new citizenship if it were discovered that they had committed war crimes in the past. Aliens with Permanent Resident Status Aliens who have been granted permanent resident status may normally be deported only if they have committed certain types of crimes. The nature of the crimes that make a resident alien deportable has varied with changes in the immigration laws. Some of those deported for crimes have lived in the United States since childhood and may have few ties to the mother country. After the passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, complaints arose that too many aliens were being deported for crimes that were relatively minor or that had been committed decades before deportation proceedings were begun. The new laws mandated 196

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deportation for certain kinds of felonies, but exactly what crime is a felony and how serious a felony it is can vary from one U.S. state to another. The post-1996 practice of retroactivity deporting individuals for crimes that would not have made them targets of deportation prior to the passage of the 1996 laws has also been sharply criticized by some legal scholars and by some judges in the federal court of appeals. Nonimmigrant Aliens Those most vulnerable to deportation are foreigners residing in the United States who have never been granted permanent residence status. Such persons include those who entered the United States without submitting to inspection (the popular notion of “illegal aliens”); those who have overstayed temporary student, tourist, or work visas; applicants for asylum whose claims are denied; and even those who have fled strifetorn countries and been admitted to the United States on a temporary basis. In the latter case, such persons may be deported if the U.S. Congress decides that the emergency in their homeland has passed, a situation that afflicted Central Americans admitted to the United States in the turbulent 1980’s who were threatened with deportation in the supposedly more peaceful 1990’s. During the late 1990’s most applicants for asylum wound up in deportation proceedings, although not all of them were actually deported.

Detention pen at Ellis Island in which immigrants are waiting to be deported in 1902. (Library of Congress)

197

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Aliens sometimes think that they have permanent residence status when they actually do not. Marriage to an American citizen, if undertaken in good faith, can make it possible for an immigrant to gain resident alien status. However, acquisition of the status of permanent resident does not come automatically with marriage, however; an application for a change of status must be made, and getting a reply one way or the other can be time-consuming if the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the agency responsible for noncitizens, is understaffed or overloaded with requests in any given year. During the late 1990’s, some alien spouses of Americans found themselves barred from the U.S. after having briefly left the country. With their resident alien status not yet formally approved, they were still subject to deportation. Deportation and Due Process The target of deportation efforts by the federal government does not usually enjoy quite the same level of rights as the target of criminal prosecution by a local government. Some deportations of aliens, particularly those who have entered without inspection, can take place without much protection of individual rights. In other instances, an alien threatened with deportation can get a hearing before an immigration judge and can appeal the judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). However, the judges in this system, unlike most federal judges, possess neither lifetime tenure nor salary guarantees. Changes in the immigration law passed in 1996 seemed to aim toward reducing the barriers to deportation presented by due process. The right of the regular federal courts to review deportation decisions has long been a matter of controversy; legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996 attempted to severely limit the scope of such judicial review. New restrictions were placed on those claiming the right of asylum; the window of opportunity to make a claim for asylum was narrowed, and the right of an official to order out of the country an alien whose claims seemed unconvincing was broadened. If asylum applicants have recently arrived in the United States, they can find themselves detained in prison for a long time until their asylum claims are decided one way or the other by immigration judges or the Board of Immigration Appeals. Whether an asylum seeker is locked up or released into the community with permission to work depends on which INS district handles the matter, how many beds the nearest detention center has, and on prevailing attitudes toward immigrants. Before the mid-1990’s most asylum seekers were released into the community; thereafter, the number of those detained rose sharply. In criminal trials the accused have the right to cross-examine witnesses for the prosecution and to be informed of the exact nature of the evidence against them. Aliens who are targets of deportation on the grounds of alleged terrorist activities or any other political activities deemed dangerous to U.S. national security may be deported on the basis of evidence they are not allowed to see and testimony by witnesses they are not allowed to confront if it is deemed essential to U.S. national security to keep the evidence and the iden198

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Aliens Expelled and Immigration Violations, 1985-1991 Item Aliens expelled Deported Required to depart

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1,062,000 1,608,000 1,113,000 934,000 860,000 1,045,000 1,091,000 21,000 22,000 22,000 23,000 30,000 26,000 28,000 1,041,000 1,586,000 1,091,000 911,000 830,000 1,019,000 1,063,000

Prosecutions disposed of Immigration violations Nationality violations

17,688 16,976 712

23,405 22,751 654

18,894 18,360 18,580 18,200 17,590 17,992 694 770 588

20,079 19,351 728

18,882 18,297 585

Convictions Immigration violations Nationality violations

9,833 9,635 198

15,259 15,104 155

11,996 12,208 12,561 11,786 11,929 12,379 210 279 182

12,719 12,515 204

11,509 11,392 117

Source: U.S . Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1992. Washington, D.C .: U.S . Government Printing Office, 1992.

tity of the prosecution witnesses secret. During the late 1990’s this problem often arose in the case of aliens from such Middle Eastern countries as Iraq. Deportation as Punishment There are two rationales for restricting aliens’ rights. One is the notion that the U.S. Congress has, by law, nearly absolute control over who can migrate to the U.S. (the so-called plenary power doctrine); the other is the idea that deportation is not a criminal punishment. Because deportation proceedings are carried out under civil rather than criminal law, deportation is technically not considered to be a punishment. The reality can, however, diverge from legal doctrine. Unlike voluntary departure from the U.S., deportation severely limits deportees’ rights to reenter the United States in the future. Individuals who have been in the United States only a short time and have been unable to make a living may welcome deportation to the home country. Persons who have lived in the United States for many years (sometimes since childhood), who have strong family and work ties to U.S. citizens and legal residents, and who have no family ties in the countries of their origin may view deportation as a catastrophe. Deporting aliens sometimes means sending them back to certain death at the hands of a brutal dictatorship. Hence, immigration judges have, for a long time, been permitted to grant relief from deportation if an immigrant has sufficient ties (called “equities”) to the United States. Such relief is not a right but a matter of judicial discretion. Aliens must show that they have lived in the United States a certain minimum number of years (at least seven), that they are of good character, and that the well-being of family members would be severely damaged if they were deported. For claimants to asylum, relief from deportation is a matter of right if they can prove to the satisfaction of an immigration judge or the BIA that they face a real threat of persecution upon returning to their home countries 199

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and that no other country besides the United States will admit them. Changes in the law in 1996 aimed at making such relief from deportation harder for individual aliens to obtain. Blanket relief from deportation for refugees from specific countries is a matter of congressional and executive whim. In a 1997 law, for example, such protection against deportation was extended by act of Congress to Nicaraguans but not to Haitians. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading For an up-to-date analysis of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States since the 1960’s, see Rob Staeger’s Deported Aliens (Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004), which gives particular attention to issues relating to deportation. A good introduction to the subject of deportation can be found in Nadia Nedzel’s “Immigration Law: A Bird’s Eye View” in Immigration: Debating the Issues, edited by Nicholas Capaldi (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997). A look at one protracted case, begun during the early 1970’s and finally decided during the 1980’s, Barbara Hinkson Craig’s Chadha: The Story of an Epic Constitutional Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) illuminates the relevant legal principles of political asylum and relief from deportation in language accessible to lay readers. Journalist Debbie Nathan’s “Adjustment of Status: The Trial of Margaret Randall” in Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border (El Paso, Tex.: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991) discusses a rare late twentieth century deportation case involving a native-born American. For an insightful study by a legal scholar of the effects of the AEDPA and the IIRIRA on the law of deportation, see Nancy Morawetz’s “Rethinking Retroactive Deportation Laws and the Due Process Clause” New York University Law Review, 73 (April, 1998). Allan Wernick, a lawyer who writes on immigration law for the New York Daily News, has written, for the English-literate immigrant U.S. Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete Guide (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1997), which offers tips on how to avoid deportation. Syed Refaat Ahmed’s Forlorn Migrants: An International Legal Regime for Undocumented Migrant Workers (Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press, 2000) provides an international perspective on deportation issues. See also Arab immigrants; Border Patrol, U.S.; Chinese Exclusion Act; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Naturalization; Operation Wetback; Twice migrants; Zadvydas v. Davis.

200

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Discrimination Definition: Unequal or unfavorable treatment of persons on the basis of their membership in certain categories or groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities Immigration issues: African Americans; Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination Significance: Responding to racial and ethnic discrimination and conflict has been particularly challenging for the U.S. government, given the immigrant nature of American society and the long-standing commitment to the principle of equality before the law in the country’s political culture. Within the founding documents of the United States are contradictory statements on equality and freedom—and hence on people’s right not to be discriminated against. The Declaration of Independence calls it self-evident that “All men are created equal” and have “unalienable rights,” yet prior to ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Constitution upheld the institution of slavery, notably in a provision that fugitive slaves must be returned to their owners. Any new country proclaiming equality while allowing slavery and thinking of an entire race as inferior is founded on an impossible contradiction, one that many of the founders undoubtedly realized would have to be faced in the future. Until the mid-twentieth century, however, the federal government generally avoided becoming involved in attempts to legislate against discrimination, allowing the states to establish their own policies. Many of the states, being closer to the people and their prejudices than the federal government was, were inclined to condone discrimination and even actively encourage it through legislation. Discrimination existed in many different areas of life, including education, employment, housing, and voting rights. Two major pieces of legislation of the 1960’s were designed to attack discrimination in these areas: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The primary avenue for fighting discrimination is through the courts, a fact which causes problems of its own. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), for example, has the power to bring lawsuits involving employment discrimination; however, a huge number of charges of discrimination are brought before the agency. For that reason, by the mid-1990’s it had a backlog of many thousands of cases awaiting its attention. In discrimination cases the courts have sometimes applied a standard of discriminatory intent and sometimes relied on a standard of discriminatory impact. Some types of discrimination are easier to see and to rectify than others. A number of activists and legal experts had shifted their attention by the 1980’s 201

Discrimination

to a type of discrimination generally known as “institutional discrimination.” Institutional discrimination is a type of discrimination that is built into social or political institutions, frequently in nearly invisible ways. Institutional discrimination is sometimes not even intentional. Development of the American Nation The framework for the development of the United States and its treatment of ethnic minorities was established during the first half century of the nation’s history. When the American Revolution ended in 1783, there were few people in the thirteen colonies who considered themselves “Americans,” as opposed to Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and so on. Nevertheless, the people who joined under the Articles of Confederation had much in common. They shared a common language, ethnic stock, and history as well as a philosophy of government that stressed individual rights over group rights. Given time and interaction, one would expect these former colonials to develop a common sense of national identity. To a substantial extent, that integration occurred during the nineteenth century via such common endeavors as the successful wars against the Spanish in Florida, against Great Britain in 1812, and against various Indian tribes. As people moved westward to the frontier, the conquest of the continent itself also became a unifying national purpose. Yet a major challenge to the development of this emerging sense of national identity also arose during the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1910, while the country was absorbing new territory, approximately fortyfour million immigrants entered the United States, mostly Europeans with backgrounds differing from the white Anglo-Saxon prototype of the founders. Moreover, the Civil War resulted in the freeing of millions of African American slaves, who suddenly became American citizens. There was also a trickle of immigrants arriving from Asia. Finally, there were Jewish immigrants, primarily in the Northeast, and Hispanics, primarily in the Southwest. The country’s citizenry was becoming multiethnic and multiracial. Native Americans Adopted in 1789, the U.S. Constitution made Native Americans wards of the federal government. Treaties with the tribes, like all treaties, were to be federal affairs, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the exclusive nature of this power of Congress (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; New York Indians v. United States, 1898). The Supreme Court has also repeatedly upheld the federal government’s right to rescind—by ordinary legislation or the admission of new states to the union—those rights accorded the tribes by prior treaties (the Cherokee Tobacco case, 1871; United States v. Winans, 1905). Even the rationale for the guardian-ward relationship existing between the federal government and the tribes has been elucidated in the opinions of the Court. Essentially, it involves three elements: the weakness and helplessness of Native Americans, the degree to which their condition can be traced to their prior dealings with the federal government, and the 202

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government’s resultant obligation to protect them. Few of the federal policies adopted before World War II, however, can be described as protective or even benign toward Native Americans. Policies toward Native Americans traditionally built on the pattern of relations with the tribes established by Europeans prior to the ratification of the Constitution. For hundreds of years, the French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch subdued the tribes they encountered, denigrated their cultures, and confiscated their lands and wealth. Early U.S. actions continued the pattern, especially where tribes physically hindered western expansion. During the 1830’s, the concept of Indian Territory (land for the Native Americans territorially removed from European settlers) gained favor among European Americans. When even the most remote of areas were eventually opened to European immigrants, the Indian Territory policy was abandoned in favor of a reservation policy: relocating and settling tribes within contained borders. Meanwhile, contact with European diseases, combined with the increasingly harsh life forced on Native Americans, had devastating effects on the tribes in terms of disrupting their societies and dramatically reducing their numbers. Beginning during the 1880’s, reservation policies were frequently augmented by forced assimilation policies: Many young Native Americans were taken from their reservations and sent to distant boarding schools. There, tribal wear and ways were ridiculed, and speaking native languages in class could mean beatings. Only with World War I did these policies soften. Significant changes in government attitudes toward Native Americans did not come until the Indian New Deal was instituted by reform-minded commissioner of Indian affairs John Collier during the 1930’s. During the late 1960’s, another chapter opened as Indians began to demand their own civil rights in the wake of the predominantly African American Civil Rights movement. More enlightened federal policies toward Native Americans began to emerge, and since the 1960’s considerable legislation has appeared, including the 1968 American Indian Civil Rights Act and the 1975 Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act. A number of factors have worked against Native Americans in advancing their own cause, among them the small number of Native Americans (less than 1 percent of the American population), the assimilation of their most educated members into the general population, and the fact that Native Americans generally think of themselves not as “Indians” or “Native Americans” but as members of a specific tribe. Discrimination in Immigration Policy Fulfillment of the U.S. selfdetermined manifest destiny to spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean required people, and early in the nineteenth century the government opened its doors wide to immigrants from Europe. Yet even during this period, the door was open to few beyond Europe. Hispanic immigrants could enter the country fairly easily across its southern bor203

Discrimination

Sign on a Parker, Arizona, barbershop near a Japanese relocation center making it clear that persons of Japanese ancestry were not welcome inside. The term “Jap” arose around 1880 as a colloquial short form for “Japanese.” It originally carried no negative connotations, but during World War II, it took on intensely pejorative meanings that now make it highly offensive, especially to Japanese Americans. (National Archives)

der, but American memories of Texas’s war with Mexico made the country inhospitable toward them. More conspicuously, immigration policy was antiAsian by design. The Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, passed in 1882, prohibited unskilled Chinese laborers from entering the country. Later amendments made it even more restrictive and forced Chinese people living in the United States to carry identification papers. The law was not repealed until 1943. Beginning with the exclusion laws of the 1880’s, quotas, literacy tests, and ancestry requirements were used individually and in combination to exclude Asian groups. Indeed, even after the efforts during the 1950’s to make the immigration process less overtly discriminatory, preferences accorded to the kin of existing citizens continued to skew the system in favor of European and—to a lesser extent—African immigrants. Meanwhile, Asians who succeeded in entering the country often became the targets of such discriminatory state legislation as California’s 1913 Alien Land Bill, which responded to the influx of Japanese in California by limiting their right to lease land and denying them the right to leave any land already owned to the next generation. The most overtly discriminatory act against Asian immigrants or Asian Americans was perpetrated by the federal government, however, which under the color of wartime exigencies relocated tens of thousands of U.S.-born Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to detention camps during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld the relocation program in Korematsu v. United States (1944). 204

Discrimination

It was not until the 1960’s and 1970’s, during and following the Vietnam War and the collapse of a series of United States-supported governments and revolutionary movements in Asia and Latin America, that the United States opened its doors to large numbers of immigrants and refugees from Asia and the Hispanic world. The government went so far as to accord citizenship to children born of foreigners illegally living in the country. African Americans Nineteenth century European immigrants generally were able to make the transition to American citizenship effectively. The urban political machines found jobs for them and recruited them into the political process as voters who, in turn, supported the machines. The prosperity of the country, manifested in the land rushes of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution, and the postwar economic booms of the twentieth century, enabled the vast majority of these immigrants to achieve upward mobility and a share of the good life. The citizens who were unable to fit into this pattern, apart from the reservation-bound American Indian tribes, were the African Americans. Enslaved in thirteen states prior to the Civil War (1861-1865) and kept in subservience by state laws and various extralegal arrangements for generations afterward, African Americans remained a social, economic, and political underclass with little expectation of progress until nearly eighty years after the Civil War Amendments were added to the Constitution to free and empower them. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was designed to prevent states from interfering with the rights of former slaves, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) constitutionally enfranchised African Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Supreme Court opinions and state action had combined to minimize the impact of these amendments. In the Slaughterhouse cases (1873), the Supreme Court crippled the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s decision limited the amendment’s privileges and immunities clause only to those rights a citizen has by virtue of national citizenship, not state citizenship. Second, it interpreted the due process clause as a restraint only on how a state may act, not on what it can do. Only the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Court limited to issues of race, continued to offer protection to the newly freed slaves, and in two subsequent cases even that protection was substantially reduced. First, in the Civil Rights cases of 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause applies only to state action, not to private discrimination. Then, in the pivotal case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court held that states could satisfy the requirements of the equal protection clause by providing “separate-but-equal” facilities for African Americans and whites. In the meantime, the states began to employ literacy tests, poll taxes, and other devices and arrangements to restrict the ability of African Americans to vote. 205

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Inclusion Policies Between 1896 and 1936, not only did the separate-butequal doctrine legitimize racial discrimination, but also the Supreme Court persistently sustained separation schemes as long as facilities of some kind were provided to a state’s black citizens—even if the facilities were woefully inferior to those provided to the white community. During the mid-1930’s, however, responding to cases being appealed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Supreme Court began to shift direction. Between 1936 and 1954, it began to demand that states provide equal facilities to both races and to adopt more demanding tests for measuring the equality of segregated facilities. A Texas system providing separate law schools for African Americans and whites, for example, was ruled unconstitutional in 1950 in Sweatt v. Painter because the black law school lacked the “intangibles” (such as reputation and successful alumni) that confer “greatness” on a law school and hence was unequal to the long-established school of law for white students at the University of Texas. Likewise, during the same period the Supreme Court began to remove some of the state-imposed obstacles to African Americans voting in the South and to limit the use of state machinery to enforce private acts of discrimination. The separate-but-equal test itself was finally abandoned in 1954, when, in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities are inherently unequal in public education. The Brown decision led to a decade-long effort by southern states to avoid compliance with desegregation orders. With the Supreme Court providing a moral voice against segregated public facilities, however, these state efforts failed when challenged in court. Moreover, a powerful multiracial Civil Rights movement emerged to demand justice for African Americans in other areas as well. In response, Congress enacted such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act (outlawing discrimination in employment and in places of private accommodation), the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and a series of affirmative action laws designed to benefit groups traditionally discriminated against in American society. As a result of these laws, the profile of the United States as a multiracial society was irrevocably altered. This change occurred almost entirely as a result of action within the country’s legal and constitutional channels. To be sure, prejudice cannot be legislated away even though discrimination can be made illegal. During the mid-1990’s, most American cities continued to possess a large African American underclass even as affirmative action and Head Start programs were becoming controversial and being canceled. On the other hand, the policies that had been adopted during the 1950’s and 1960’s enabled a sizable African American middle and professional class to develop, and many American cities had elected African Americans to govern them by the 1990’s. It has been argued that the growing prosperity of a subgroup of the African American community undercut the power of the Civil Rights movement. By the 1990’s, a number of successful and affluent African American leaders, such 206

Dominican immigrants

as Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, were themselves opposing further affirmative action plans as well as further efforts to finance welfare programs perceived as primarily benefiting a heavily minority urban underclass. Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr. McCrea Adams Further Reading For good short discussions of government policies toward Native Americans, see Edward H. Spicer, The American Indians (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), and Francis Paul Prucha, Indian Policy in the United States: Historical Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). Immigration and discrimination is well treated in Nathan Glazer, ed., Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1985); Ronald Takaki, ed., From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s classic, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). Interesting works within the vast literature on the Civil Rights movement include Leon Friedman, The Civil Rights Reader: Basic Documents of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Walker, 1968); Anna Kosof, The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy (New York: Watts, 1989); and Dennis Chong, Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Two books that look at issues of discrimination as they relate to immigrants are Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), edited by Susanne Jonas and Suzanne Dod Thomas, and Donna R. Gabaccia’s Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). See also Accent discrimination; Arab American stereotypes; Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Celtic Irish; Chinese Exclusion Act; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1990; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; Lau v. Nichols; League of United Latin American Citizens; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Nativism; Naturalization; Plyler v. Doe; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Dominican immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Caribbean island nation of the Dominican Republic Immigration issues: Demographics; Latino immigrants; West Indian immigrants 207


Significance: Although the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic has a comparatively tiny population, its emigrants make up one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States. Situated between Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea, the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with its neighbor Haiti. The country is known primarily for its warm tropical climate, its sugarcane and tobacco exports, and its contributions to the international community in the personages of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, musician Juan Luis Guerra, and major league baseball players such as Sammy Sosa, Juan Marichal, George Bell, and Pedro Guerrero. According to U.S. Census figures, 915,274 Dominicans entered the United States between 1820 and 2003. During the 1990’s, they arrived at an average rate of 33,500 immigrants per year. During the first three years of the twentyfirst century, that rate dropped significantly, to about 23,300 immigrants per year. Dominican immigrants are especially evident in New York City, where they ranked as the most populous immigrant group during the mid-1990’s. Their significant presence in that city has led to the emergence of a Dominican American community. During the early 1960’s, after the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Léonidas Trujillo, the Dominican Republic was affected by political and economic turmoil. The ensuing unrest resulted in the outbreak of civil war on April 25, 1965, which led to a U.S. military occupation of the country in an effort to protect American economic interests. Following the U.S. intervention, many political activists were granted visas to the United States in an effort to stem political dissent against the new U.S.-sponsored right-wing government of Dominican president Joaquín Balaguer. This marked the beginning of a continued pattern of Dominican emigration to North America that was fueled by political as well as economic reasons. Following a brief period of industrial growth under the new leadership of President Balaguer, Dominicans saw their country’s economy worsen. The middle class all but disappeared in the wake of escalating oil prices, a massive foreign debt, and a decline in exports that resulted in a 23 percent unemployment rate during the early 1990’s. This factor, coupled with the increased sentiments of frustration by Dominicans toward the leadership of the country, led to a Dominican diaspora in search of a place in which to obtain political and economic freedom. Like other immigrant groups in the United States, Dominicans have tended to settle in only a few states. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, 70 percent of all Dominicans in the nation resided in New York, followed by New Jersey with 11 percent, Florida with 7 percent, and Massachusetts with 5 percent. A New Community The Dominican American community is made up of people who have obtained U.S. citizenship after their arrival to North America as well as those that are born in the United States of Dominican parents. 208


So salient is the Dominican migratory pattern to the New York City area that it has earned Dominican Americans the nickname of Dominicanyorks. Mass migration into New York City has resulted in the “Dominicanization” of neighborhoods such as Washington Heights. However, Dominican Americans have found some challenges in adapting to their new environment. Some resistance from the established residents, as well as political challenges in their local community, has led many Dominican Americans to become more actively involved in the political and economic activities of their community. Part of the acculturation of Dominican Americans into mainstream society has been brought about through active participation in their neighborhood schools. During the early 1980’s, a campaign was mounted to gain greater control over the schools in Washington Heights in order to make them more responsive to the needs of the local community. In 1980, the Community Association of Progressive Dominicans confronted the school board to demand bilingual education for newly arrived immigrants. Their presence in the political arena was also established in 1991 with the election of Guillermo Linares, the first Dominican ever to sit on the New York City Council. However, as is often the case with newly arrived immigrant groups to the United States, the moderate success of Dominican Americans has been considered by some as a challenge to the established residents of Washington Heights (mainly Jews, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans).

Dominican immigrants in New York City protesting the U.S . occupation of their homeland in early 1965. (National Archives)

209


Ethnic Relations As Steven Lowenstein explains in his 1989 work titled Frankfort on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, the move by Dominican Americans to gain greater control over the local schools came at the expense of the established Jewish population in that area. Some see this as a source of tension between the two groups. One Jewish leader is quoted as saying: In order to save our own congregation, we have to live with our neighbors, even if they are different from us, even if we don’t like them. But we cannot help it. We have to live with the Blacks, with the Spanish.

During the initial migration years, Dominicans rented apartments in the mostly Jewish-owned tenements; however, as the years progressed, the Jewish population became increasingly sparse in the Washington Heights area. The newly arrived Dominican immigrants found acceptance within the Puerto Rican community during the early 1960’s. Many Dominican immigrants were able to find housing and employment through friendships with Puerto Ricans. Some argue that the preexisting presence of the Puerto Rican community was helpful to the newly arrived Dominicans in that it led both Jewish and African Americans to come to terms with the unavoidable reality of a Latin American presence in New York City. However, as more and more Dominicans began migrating to the area, tensions arose within the Puerto Rican community. The growing sentiment was that Dominican Americans were accepting low-wage jobs and undercutting the Puerto Ricans in the job market. Likewise, as the Dominican population grew, many Dominican Americans began to feel that the Puerto Rican agenda followed by most of the Latino community leaders was not representative of the ever-growing Dominican population. Similarly, African Americans have found themselves in competition with Dominican Americans for jobs and housing. Some African American business owners have complained about the aggressive tactics of some of the Dominican business owners. According to Linda Chavez’s study titled Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (1991), Dominicans own 70 percent of all Hispanic small businesses in New York. Although sociable relations between these two groups continue, they tend to reside in partially segregated neighborhoods, perhaps because of racial and ethnic preconceptions held by both groups. Not unlike their African American neighbors, Dominican Americans have also been subject to racial discrimination based on physical appearance. As Patricia Pessar pointed out in her 1995 book A Visa for a Dream, often Dominicans who are perceived as “white” by AngloAmericans are treated better and offered better jobs than Dominicans who are dark-skinned. The mixture of races found among Dominicans has frequently led to many dark-skinned Dominican Americans being misidentified as African Americans and subsequently being subjected to the same kind of racism experi210


enced by African Americans. In Sakinah Carter’s 1994 work titled Shades of Identity: Puerto Ricans and Dominicans Across Paradigms, a twenty-two-year-old Dominican is quoted as saying: All we see on television when we arrive is how bad blacks are, so we cling to our difference, our Latino-ness, in order to say we are not those blacks that you hear about in the streets or see on the news. We aren’t bad. But at the same time, it feels ridiculous not to embrace our blackness because many dark Dominicans do live as other blacks, treated as blacks by white people, and other Latinos who act like there is one Latino phenotype, like there’s a way to look Latino. . . . I’m black and Latino, a black Latino—we exist, you know.

However, dating back to the initial wave of Dominican immigrants during the 1960’s, and in spite of some social challenges, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and African Americans have all been able to coexist as productive members of their communities despite their cultural differences and racial preconceptions. Pedro R. Payne Further Reading For a thorough study of the history of the Dominican Republic, see Frank Moya Pons’s The Dominican Republic: A National History (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Hispaniola Books, 1995). Luis E. Guarnizo writes a chapter on “Dominicanyorks” in Challenging Fronteras, edited by Mary Romero, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Vilma Ortiz (New York: Routledge, 1997), which explores the “binational interconnection” that has resulted from Dominican immigration into the United States. Another good source for issues pertaining to Dominican migration and adaptation to American society is Ramona Hernandez and Silvio Torres-Saillant’s chapter in Latinos in New York, edited by Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Sherrie L. Baver (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Patricia Pessar, in A Visa for a Dream (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1995), manages to capture the Dominican immigrant experience as well as the cultural factors that affect Dominican acculturation into American society. For a historical account of the African and European ancestry of Dominicans and other Latin Americans, see Afro-Latin Americans Today: No Longer Invisible (London: Minority Rights Group, 1995). Works that discuss Dominican immigrants in the broader context of West Indian immigration include Melonie P. Heron’s The Occupational Attainment of Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, Canada, and England (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2001) and Milton Vickerman’s Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), edited by Nancy Foner, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, is a collection of papers on immigration from a conference held in 1998 that includes a chapter on Dominican immigrants. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Haitian immigrants; Immigration “crisis”; Latinos; Latinos and family customs; West Indian immigrants. 211

Eastern European Jewish immigrants

Eastern European Jewish immigrants Identification: Jewish immigrants to North America from eastern European nations Immigration issues: European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Religion Significance: Among Jewish immigrants to North America, eastern Europeans were relative latecomers and were not well received by either Christian Americans or other Jewish Americans. The major emigration of eastern European Jews to the United States did not begin until the 1880’s. Jews began to emigrate when the services they performed as small-scale merchants and artisans were rendered obsolete by the modernization of agriculture and the early impact of industrialization on the peasant economy of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Polish territory held by Germany. The migration became a mass movement, however, when deadly state-sponsored riots left hundreds dead and thousands homeless in Russia and Russian Poland following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. About 250,000 Jews lived in the United States in 1880; by 1920, more than

Eastern European immigrants crossing the Atlantic in 1899. (Library of Congress)

212

Eastern European Jewish immigrants

2 million eastern European Jews had joined them. They were not given a warm welcome. The American Jewish community reacted with alarm, fearful that the upsurge in immigration would stimulate anti-Semitism and undermine the relatively comfortable position that Jews had attained in the country. Only as the magnitude of the problem became clear did the established Jewish community begin to organize an array of philanthropic institutions and establish defense organizations to combat antiSemitism. The migration’s size and the tendency of the new arrivals to cluster within the nation’s largest cities, especially New York, made them particularly conspicuous. Crowded into slum areas where they transformed whole neighborhoods into regions where no English could be heard, they seemed particularly threatening to native-born Americans. Many of the men, possessing few skills valuable to an industrial economy, became peddlers pushing carts or carrying packs filled with merchandise until they accumulated enough cash to open small retail stores. Many of the women and a significant proportion of the men One of the best-known Jewish immigrants in found work in the garment industry. A U.S . history was the magician and escape few had previous experience in the nee- artist Harry Houdini. The son of a Hungarian dle trades, but of more importance was rabbi, he was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in the willingness of owners to hire them. 1874 and came to the United States with his Manufacturing ready-to-wear clothing family as a boy. (Library of Congress) was a relatively new and risky industry that attracted Jewish entrepreneurs who were open to hiring and training Jewish workers. Eastern European Jews settled in dense concentrations in their own neighborhoods and rarely interacted with other ethnic groups. Those whom they displaced, especially the New York City Irish, often responded with smallscale street violence. In addition, the Jewish community experienced sharp internal divisions. Jews from a given area of Europe tended to settle near each other, build separate synagogues, and create self-help and burial societies de213

English-only and official English movements

signed to serve migrants from the specific city or region from which they had come. A hierarchy of prejudice separated Jewish groups and influenced the choice of marriage partners. German Jews looked down on Polish and Russian Jews. Russian Jews were reputed to view marriage with Galician Jews, who came from the most poverty-stricken region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as equivalent to marrying a Gentile, which was taboo. Economic success increased the interaction of the eastern European Jews with the larger American society. In the affluent post-World War II years, they moved into the suburbs. Their children, fluent in English and increasingly college-educated, entered the professions as teachers, doctors, and lawyers. As the descendants of the eastern European Jews merged with the American middle class, relations with other ethnic and religious groups became easier and less antagonistic. Milton Berman Further Reading Cohen, Naomi Werner. Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984. Gerber, David, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Sanders, Ronald. Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Immigration. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. Sterba, Christopher M. The Melting Pot Goes to War: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in America’s Great Crusade, 1917-1919. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1999. See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

English-only and official English movements Definition: Attempts by federal and state governments, lobbyists, organizations, or private citizens to make English the “only” or “official” language in the United States Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Language; Nativism and racism 214


Significance: Although some Americans see English-only movements as patriotic or well-intended, others regard such efforts as anti-immigrant or racist. Determining how many Americans cannot or do not use English for everyday activities is very difficult. According to the 1996 Statistical Abstract of the United States, more than thirty-two million Americans, or more than 13 percent of the population, speak a language other than English at home. Of these, around 44 percent, or about fourteen million people, do not speak English “very well.” Figures such as these are cited by many Americans as evidence of national unity eroding under a wave of linguistic diversity and cultural strife. During the 1980’s, organizations such as U.S. English began pressing for state, local, and federal legislation to make English the only official language in various parts of the country. Several attempts have been made to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment mandating English as an official national language, but they have all failed. However, eighteen states have passed some form of official English legislation. In response to these activities, other organizations, such as English Plus, have worked to maintain linguistic and cultural pluralism in the United States. Four states have passed some kind of mandate supporting such sanctions. Historical Precedents Although two-thirds of Americans believed that English already was the official language of the United States during the

Immigrants in an English-language class being conducted in a Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit during the early twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

215


1990’s, the Founders did not establish an official language, perhaps because they felt no need to address the issue. Although the United States has always had a large number of non-English speakers on its soil, English has been the dominant language in the land since the first settlements in the original thirteen colonies. In 1790 after the Revolutionary War—when the nation was perhaps at its height of linguistic diversity—the population was still 76 percent English-speaking, apart from many slaves. The second most commonly spoken language in the new nation was German, spoken in states such as Pennsylvania, originally a bilingual English and German state. However, by 1815, the German speakers had largely merged linguistically and culturally with the English-speaking majority. English became the de facto national language. Although some of the nation’s leaders occasionally complained about non-English speakers (for example, Theodore Roosevelt once said that Americans should not be “dwellers in a polyglot boarding house”), and the issue was occasionally raised, the official language debate did not receive much thought until the mid-1980’s. The debate reached the national level in 1986 when California’s Proposition 63, which made English the official state language, passed with 73 percent of the vote. The Debate Those who argue for an official language policy say that to live successful and fruitful lives in the United States, immigrants and non-English speakers must learn English: Without fluency in English, they will forever remain in a linguistic underclass, economically and educationally deprived. They believe that bilingual education and multilingual voting ballots and driver’s license exams serve only to foster and perpetuate these people’s dependence on other languages. They say that the situations in pluralistic countries such as Canada, India, or Belgium, where linguistic wars have been fought, demonstrate the need for a single language to unify the country. English-only supporters cite statistics showing that immigrants want to learn English and argue that, therefore, their efforts are not anti-immigrant. Probably the most organized and outspoken English-only group is U.S. English, which was established in 1983 and by the year 2005 claimed a membership of 1.8 million. The original board of directors and advisers included many well-known and respected individuals, including Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, social critics Alistair Cooke and Jacques Barzun, former university president and senator S. I. Hayakawa, actor and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and newscaster Walter Cronkite (who resigned in 1988). The organization has argued that English is the common bond that unites all Americans and that the United States shoud take active steps to avoid language segregation to avert some of the bitter linguistic conflicts that have plagued many pluralistic nations. They advocate adopting a constitutional amendment establishing English as the official language in the United States, restricting or eliminating bilingual education programs, requiring English 216


State Language Policies State

Year

Action

States Where English Has Become the “Official” Language Alabama Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Florida Georgia Hawaii Illinois Indiana Kentucky Mississippi Nebraska North Carolina North Dakota South Carolina Tennessee Virginia

1990 1988 1987 1986 1988 1988 1986 1978 1969 1984 1984 1987 1920 1987 1987 1987 1984 1981

by constitutional amendment by constitutional amendment by legislative statute by constitutional amendment by constitutional amendment by constitutional amendment by legislative statute by constitutional amendment by legislative statute by legislative statute by legislative statute by legislative statute by constitutional amendment by legislative statute by legislative statute by legislative statute by legislative statute by legislative statute

States Supporting “English Plus,” Official Linguistic Pluralism New Mexico Oregon Rhode Island Washington

1989 1989 1992 1989

by legislative resolution by legislative resolution by legislative statute by legislative resolution

All U.S. states

1990

Native American Language Act gives American Indian languages special rights and status.

Arizona

1999

Grade 1 through 8 foreign-language instruction is mandated by statute.

Other Policies

competency for all new citizens, and expanding opportunities for learning English. The storm over official English surprised many people when Senator Hayakawa, a Republican from California, during the early 1980’s introduced a constitutional amendment to make English the official language. The amendment also would have eliminated many foreign-language supplementary materials in both the public and private sector and, therefore, appeared to be aimed at ending bilingual education. Many people perceived the English217


only movement as an attempt to disfranchise immigrants or nonnative English speakers by depriving them of access to basic social services and education. Many people felt that the amendment would only splinter the country into even more divisive interest and ethnic groups and foster xenophobia and intolerance. English Plus One of the groups that formed to combat English-only initiatives was English Plus, established in 1987. The group is a coalition of more than fifty prestigious educational and civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Applied Linguistics, and the National Council of Teachers of English. The organization’s stated goals are to strengthen the vitality of the United States through linguistic and cultural pluralism. English Plus recognizes that English is, and should be, the primary language of the United States; however, the group argues that the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution requires that language assistance be made available to all who require it in order for them to enjoy equal access to essential public services, education, and the political process. Their efforts include advocating the acquisition of multiple language skills to foster better foreign relations and U.S. competitiveness in the global economy, encouraging people to retain their first language, working to develop and maintain language assistance programs such as bilingual education in elementary and high schools, and launching campaigns against legislative initiatives or actions that would make English the official language. The Future Many Americans feel threatened by rising immigration and changing demographics. Others see little reason to oppose English-only or official-English amendments or statutes since English is so necessary to life in the United States. Some Americans, however, believe that these amendments and statutes are really a form of racism. These people ask why proponents of English-only want to pass a law to enforce what is already in effect, unless they have a hidden agenda. However, regardless of what legislators or voters do, American identity, culture, and intellectual achievement will continue to be influenced by immigrants, who no doubt will be making their contributions in English. James Stanlaw Further Reading Fernando de la Peña’s Democracy or Babel: The Case for Official English (Washington, D.C.: U.S. English, 1991) makes the argument that English should be the official language in the United States. S. I. Hayakawa, the most influential spokesperson for the English-only movement, argues for amending the U.S. Constitution in The English Language Amendment: One Nation . . . Indivisible? (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, 1985) and states his case in “Why English Should Be Our Official Language” in The Educational Digest (52, 1987). Arguments against official En218

Ethnic enclaves

glish are found in Not Only English: Affirming America’s Multilingual Heritage, edited by Harvey Daniels (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990), and Official English/English Only: More Than Meets the Eye (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States, 1988). Bill Piatt’s ¿Only English? Law and Language Policy in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990) discusses the legal downsides to making English the national language. Political scientist Raymond Tatalovich’s Nativism Reborn? The Official English Language Movement and the American States (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995) examines the state legislatures and legislators who passed English-only measures and suggests that such sentiment is closely tied to anti-immigration politics. English: Our Official Language?, edited by Bee Gallegos (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1994), and Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy, edited by James Crawford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), present articles on the English-only controversy that appeared in the popular media and scholarly journals. Other works offering broader perspective on language include Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), edited by Terry A. Osborn; Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities, and Schools: Intersections and Tensions (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2005), edited by Jim Anderson and others; Charmian Kenner’s Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems (Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004); and Terrence G. Wiley’s Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States (2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005). See also Accent discrimination; Anglo-conformity; Bilingual education; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; British as dominant group; Generational acculturation; Hansen effect; Lau v. Nichols; Proposition 227.

Ethnic enclaves Definition: Isolated ethnic communities, free from contact from the majority population, that are usually intended to maintain customs and traditions that are under attack by outsiders Immigration issues: Discrimination; Ethnic enclaves Significance: Ethnic enclaves—such as Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, and Koreatowns—are usually created by groups that feel oppressed or discriminated against by outside forces. Ethnic enclaves are territories inhabited by a distinct group of people who are separated from the dominant population by differences in language, reli219

Ethnic enclaves

gion, social class, or culture and who are frequently subjected to prejudice and discrimination. An ethnic group has a shared history based on a sense of difference from others resulting from several factors, including a unique set of experiences (such as being enslaved or defeated in a war), skin color or other physical differences (such as height), or geography. Reasons for Formation Enclaves are established for two major reasons. Some are found in nations and among groups where a distinct sense of injustice exists between peoples. This sense of discrimination prevents communication and results in isolation and a sense of inferiority within the minority group. The dominant group persecutes persons deemed inferior who then withdraw into isolated communities to protect themselves from attack. Enclaves can also be built because of a sense of ethnic superiority, or ethnocentrism. In this case, one group sees itself as being far superior to any others and deliberately separates itself from the rest of society. This self-imposed isolation results from the view that the way of life being lived by group members should not be contaminated by “inferior” outsiders. Ethnic enclaves result from the failure of groups to accommodate, acculturate, or assimilate. Accommodation is a reduction of conflict among groups as they find ways of living with one another based on mutual respect for differences. Groups maintain their differences but agree to live with one another. In places where enclaves develop, only physical separation lessens conflict:

Vietnamese American community center in the Little Saigon district of Garden Grove, California, which has one of the largest concentration of Asian immigrants in the United States. (David Fowler)

220

Ethnic enclaves

Groups continue to hate and discredit one another but geography keeps them apart. Acculturation, meaning taking over some of the attitudes and beliefs of the other group, fails to take place in these situations because contact between different peoples is rare, and they stick to their traditional values. Instead of becoming more alike, as would be true under the process of assimilation, the groups become more and more different. A common culture fails to develop, and frequently misunderstandings and miscommunication can lead to violent conflicts. It is as if each group lives in a different world, with memories, sentiments, feelings, and attitudes that are totally unknown to the other. The more divergent peoples are or become, the more difficult assimilation will be. This situation is evident among the peoples of southeastern Europe, especially in areas of the former Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. It is also true in African states such as Burundi, Nigeria, and South Africa. In a few situations, enclaves develop as a defense against attacks by physically or numerically superior outsiders. If the group does not retreat and separate from the dominant society, it will be annihilated. In this case, cutting off the community from contact with others serves the function of preserving traditions, customs, and beliefs. Most often, this is done by withdrawing into the wilderness beyond the reach of the persecutors. In the United States during the 1840’s, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) adopted this strategy to save themselves from mob attacks in the East. Brigham Young, the successor to the group’s founder Joseph Smith, deliberately chose to settle his people by the Great Salt Lake, then part of Mexico, because it seemed far enough away from the United States that no one would bother them. The Mormons lived in this isolated area free from contact with others well into the 1880’s and preserved their distinct religious beliefs. Development of the Concept The concept of ethnic identity and ethnic enclaves developed in the nineteenth century, though different words and phrases such as “immigrant group,” “foreign stock,” and “race” were used in place of “ethnic.” The term “ethnic” was first used by social scientists during the 1920’s to differentiate the supposedly less fervent attachments based on language and history in comparison to the supposedly more fundamental biological attachments based on racial inheritance. Many social scientists were interested in the question of how people of different linguistic and historical traditions would become part of modern, specifically American, society. Robert Ezra Park of the University of Chicago developed a theory of intergroup relations based on an inevitable process of contact, competition, accommodation, and, finally, full assimilation. As group members moved upward in the American class system, they would gradually lose their ethnic attachments and ultimately be accepted as true citizens. The more different groups were from the white, Anglo-Saxon, majority, however, the longer and more difficult the process would be (as in the case of 221

Euro-Americans

American Indians and African Americans). Gunnar Myrdal, the great Swedish sociologist, supported this view in his classic An American Dilemma (1944), a study of race relations in the United States. Park’s analysis of assimilation has been mostly accepted by sociologists, though Milton Gordon, in Assimilation in American Life (1964), pointed out that assimilation takes much longer than has been assumed and is frequently marred by conflict and disorder. Most sociologists and historians writing on the subject since then have agreed with Gordon and have detailed the difficulties experienced by various American ethnic groups. Most observers have agreed that retreating into enclaves is sometimes necessary for group survival but always makes cooperation between groups more difficult. Leslie V. Tischauser Further Reading Broad studies of ethnic enclaves in American cities include Susan K. Wierzbicki’s Beyond the Immigrant Enclave: Network Change and Assimilation (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2004), Michel S. Laguerre’s The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), and Stephanie Bohon’s Latinos in Ethnic Enclaves: Immigrant Workers and the Competition for Jobs (New York: Garland, 2000). Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963) is a classic study of the long-term persistence of ethnic identities in the United States. Milton M. Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) outlines the factors involved in the process of assimilation. Martin N. Marger’s Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Press, 1985) surveys ethnic problems from a worldwide perspective. See also politics.

Chinatowns; Little Havana; Little Italies; Little Tokyos; Machine

Euro-Americans Identification: Also known as European Americans, a panethnic identity that encompasses all Americans of European ancestry, ranging from descendants of the earliest colonizers to recent immigrants Immigration issue: European immigrants Significance: “Euro-American” is a problematic group label in that it is less widely used than other panethnic identities. 222

Euro-Americans

German American farmers in Nebraska during the mid-twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

In Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (1990), Richard Alba observed that the emergence of a Euro-American group has been shaped by the decline of individual European ethnic affiliations, the creation of a common historical narrative of immigration, struggle, and mobility, and the increasing Euro-American reaction to political challenges from peoples of color and post-1965 immigrants. As a group label, “Euro-American” is less widely used than other panethnic identities, such as Asian American, Hispanic, and Native American. Dominant identities tend to be “hidden” in intergroup interactions, and the lack of awareness or use of the Euro-American label reflects the dominant status of the group in the United States. This process is compounded by the existence of competing labels for Euro-Americans: “white,” “Caucasian,” and AngloAmerican—the latter term reflecting the historical dominance of British Americans within the group. The future role of Euro-American group identity will be determined by both the political and social strategies of the group itself, and the external and structural forces that mold all panethnic identities. Ashley W. Doane, Jr. Further Reading Alba, Richard D. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. 223

European immigrant literature

Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. See also European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 17901892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; Generational acculturation; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; German immigrants; Gypsy immigrants; Irish immigrants; Italian immigrants; Melting pot; Nativism; Polish immigrants; Scandinavian immigrants; White ethnics.

European immigrant literature Definition: Fiction, essays, and other works written by immigrants of European ancestry Immigration issues: European immigrants; Literature; Nativism and racism Significance: The literaure produced by European American writers has, to a great extent, reflected the struggles of assimilation, the loss of identity in that process, and the pain of being torn between different cultures. As part of the graduation ceremonies at the Ford Motor Company English school in Detroit during World War I, students climbed to the stage wearing the native dress of their European homelands, carrying signs that read Greece, Syria, Italy, and so on. They then entered a giant cardboard cauldron labeled “Melting Pot” and emerged dressed in coats and ties and carrying their diplomas and small American flags. Assimilation was dramatically complete. This stage show is symbolic of a much larger (and usually more subtle) process that millions of immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent. Between 1820 and 1990, more than fifty million immigrants entered the United States, and three-quarters of them came from Europe. Before 1890, the majority of these immigrants were—in descending numbers—German, Irish, and English. Between 1890 and 1914 fifteen million Europeans arrived in the United States, and most of them came from southern and eastern Europe: Greece, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. By 1980, individuals of European origin composed the bulk of the United States population (approximately 75 percent) and Europeans continued to immigrate to the United States in large numbers. 224


The Statue of Liberty Poet Emma Lazarus wrote this sonnet in 1883 in support of the fund organized to raise money to build the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty was placed three years later. The sonnet now appears on a bronze plaque at the base of the statue. In 1972, the American Museum of Immigration was opened inside the base of the statue.

The New Colossus Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “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-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Demographics In the 1980 U.S. Census, 50 million Americans reported their ancestry as English, 49 million listed German, and 40 million cited Irish. African Americans numbered 21 million, French 13 million, Italian 12 million, Scottish 10 million, Polish 8 million, Mexican 8 million, American Indian 7 million, and Dutch 6 million. Such distinctive and overwhelming national identification has often been blurred in American cultural consciousness by the peculiar assimilative process of the United States. Economic and social discrimination, on one hand, pushed immigrants into early and often involuntary assimilation. The dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886—where the Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus’s words “Give me . . . your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are inscribed—was not unanimously endorsed. In the press and on the streets there were attacks on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. When not changed by officials at the government’s Ellis Island reception center, the names of many European immigrants often quickly were changed by the immigrants themselves, who as foreigners were greeted with hostility and suspicion but who as Americans were welcome. The Polish name Sciborski might become Smith; the Italian name Pina, Pine; the Jewish name Greenberg, simply Green. European Americans during the late nineteenth century were drawn by the lure of the American Dream, which promised equal access to wealth and 225


possibility to all. Supporting this dream was the dominant ideological construct of the melting pot, which, like the symbolic cauldron in the Ford Motor Company graduation ceremonies, encouraged immigrants to give up their native heritage and take on a narrower American identity. Behind the melting pot theory was the belief in homogeneity over heterogeneity, assimilation over pluralism. The term itself was first popularized in a play, The Melting-Pot, by the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in 1908. As Werner Sollors noted in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986): More than any social or political theory, the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept.

Opponents of immigration have a long history in the United States, and the objects of their attacks have kept changing. The first nativist expression was an anti-Catholic sentiment, aimed mainly at the millions of Irish who immigrated after 1820. By the end of the nineteenth century, xenophobic feelings had shifted and were aimed at Slavic, Italian, Greek, and other eastern and southern European immigrants. The height of nativist opposition to immigration came during World War I. The literacy test of 1917 marked the beginning of the end of the open-door immigration policy of the United States. Legislation during the 1920’s closed the door. Assimilation vs. Ethnic Identity The process of assimilation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a profound effect not only on European American identity but also on the literature and culture that different European American ethnic groups produced. In many cases forced by discrimination, loss of language, loss or change of name, and the ideological impetus of Americanization to give up ethnic roots, many European Americans ended up torn between American and European ethnic identities. If the members of an ethnic culture did not assimilate, they faced the danger of becoming ghettoized, forced into an almost secretive, subcultural status. Writers in the twentieth century, in common with the cultures they represented, were often afraid to exhibit their ethnic identity. As late as 1969, when Mario Puzo published The Godfather, for example, critics within the Italian American community argued that the work would only confirm the worst stereotypes of Italians in the United States. In another novel of the same year, Philip Roth was condemned by Jewish community leaders for his characters in Portnoy’s Complaint. Ethnic writers were hindered by their own ethnic communities from revealing too much, which made it easier for them to make the sometimes Faustian bargain with the dominant culture to trade their ethnic consciousness for entrance into the literary mainstream. The dominant culture of the earlier twentieth century was clearly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, and the ideology of the melting pot reinforced the dominant culture’s hold on the popular mind. All writers should be Ameri226


can, this theory held, and ethnic cultural and literary artifacts were exotic and suspect. One perhaps could go folk-dancing as a cultural curiosity, but European American ethnic identification was discouraged on a number of ideological and institutional levels. The dominant literature and literary culture were Anglo; students in different parts of the country all read the most famous works that had been written in England and New England, but they had little knowledge of works in other languages—including their native languages. High school students from New York City to rural New Mexico, from Seattle to Maine, might know the nineteenth century English novelist George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) by the time they finished high school but nothing of their own ethnic literary heritage. Sociological theory supported the notion that ethnic identification was an insignificant factor in success in American life. During the 1960’s, however, this cultural history changed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), as James A. Banks has written in Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies (1991), presented one of the first theoretical arguments that the melting pot conception . . . was inaccurate and incomplete. They argued that ethnicity in New York was important and that it would continue to be important for both politics and culture.

Similarly, Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the 1970’s (1971) helped to fuel the growth of the “new ethnicity” and the new ethnic consciousness during the 1970’s, a consciousness that used not the melting pot metaphor but rather metaphors of a patchwork quilt, a salad bowl, or a kaleidoscope to explain the pluralistic nature of ethnicity in the United States. This theoretical underpinning worked to support the massive search that members of many ethnic groups were making for their history. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), which traces his ancestors back to Africa (and which became a popular television miniseries), helped to encourage similar rediscoveries in other ethnicities—and not only in those which had experienced the most recent discrimination (African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American) but also in those European American communities that had supposedly been dominant through the twentieth century but that actually had been downplaying their ethnicity. Although American culture was decidedly European American in essence and influence from its beginnings, the assimilative process often meant that individual European identities—Scandinavian as well as Slavic—were lost. The multicultural movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s helped to recover and reinvigorate a number of ethnic identities and literatures, and the last quarter of the twentieth century saw the publication of many literary works reflect227


ing the change: ethnic autobiographies, accounts of the search for ethnic roots, studies of ethnic culture and ethnic literatures, and novels and plays about the ethnic experience. The European American experience was at the center of this ethnic renaissance. European American Identity and Literature Critics and scholars began to talk about ethnic literature only at the end of the period of unrestricted immigration, when the closed doors into the United States threw the assimilative process into a sharper, harsher focus. Probably the keystone work in this regard is Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917. As David M. Fine has written in The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880-1920 (1977), the novel occupies a pivotal position in the history of American literature. It . . . stands at the head of a long line of twentieth-century novels which would portray modern urban America from the eyes of the city’s non-Anglo component. The novel’s ambitious mixture of material success and spiritual failure, its insistence on the high cost of assimilation, and its concern with the identity crisis bred by the Americanization process place it squarely in the forefront of twentieth-century “minority voice” fiction.

The themes that Fine lists permeated all immigrant literature, in nonfiction (essay, autobiography) and in fiction (short story, novel), through the twentieth century. Repeatedly after 1917, European American writers depicted in depth and detail the painful process of assimilation, the pull between native and adoptive cultures, the mixed feelings of insecurity and hope. Where does my identity come from—the protagonists of dozens of plays and novels and autobiographies asked—from which of my two selves? A whole range of replies were given, from full assimilation to marginality, but under the hegemonic hold of melting-pot theory, more often than not the replies were unclear and confused. In 1916, the critic Randolph Bourne posed the basic problem in his essay “Trans-National America” by citing the failure of the melting pot. “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born,” the Anglo-Saxon Bourne argued, and assimilation has clearly failed. “Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe made them more and more intensely real.” Bourne’s call for a truly multicultural and pluralistic “TransNational America” would not be heeded for more than half a century. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) is a sensitive and touching account of a young Jewish woman’s journey from rural Russia to urban America, and represents one end of the assimilative continuum, since it is an autobiography arguing for total Americanization. Her vivid description of the assimilation process is told through stories like the one of her father accompanying his children to their first day of school—and following his dream 228

European immigrant literature The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny.

Other autobiographers of the period were less sure of the truth of the American Dream. The Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis, who in How the Other Half Lives (1890) describes the terrible conditions in New York City tenements, narrates the struggles of his own life in The Making of an American (1901) and urged his fellow Danish Americans to remain loyal to Denmark and its traditions. Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932) and My America (1938) describe his journey from Slovenia to America, criticize several aspects of American democracy, and conclude that immigrants must take pride in the customs and qualities of their lands of origin. Autobiography has often been a more common and powerful literary genre than fiction, especially for ethnic writers, who could use the form to wrestle with their immigrant history and try to figure out their own identity. Ludwig Lewisohn’s Mid-Channel (1929) and Edward Bok’s The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), the one German Jewish and the other Dutch, are two other examples of European American autobiography from this period. Perhaps the most poignant and powerful literary representative of early European immigration was Anzia Yezierska, who traveled from Russian Poland to New York’s Lower East Side. Writing under her European name (rather than Hattie Mayer, the name which she had been given at Ellis Island), she was the only Jewish woman from eastern Europe of her generation to produce a real body of fiction. Her novels and short stories, including Hungry Hearts (stories, 1920) and Bread Givers (novel, 1925), depict the lives of marginalized Americans, especially immigrant women. These histories—of immigration and assimilation, of the hope and failure of the American Dream—would be told again and again through the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and in spite of the restrictions facing European American writers. Carl Sandburg (a second-generation Swede) produced some of the most powerful poetry about urban America written during the middle of the twentieth century, in addition to writing a multivolume biography of a true American hero, Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg never lost the workingclass perspective of his immigrant family. Likewise, William Saroyan produced some of the most poignant descriptions of life in his Fresno, California, Armenian community (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1934, and My Name Is Aram, 1940), and wrote plays, including The Time of Your Life (1939), and novels, such as The Human Comedy (1943), that capture his genial spirit. Other European American writers were depicting the struggles of life for immigrants on the margin. Henry Roth in Call It Sleep (1934) follows a young Austrian Jewish immigrant through his harrowing adventures in New York City. Thomas Bell, in Out of This Furnace (1941), a novel of immigrant labor in 229


America, details the hardships that faced his Slovak family in the western Pennsylvania steel mills. The two novels are comparable to a number of other Depression-era works—Roth in his implied criticism of capitalist society, and Bell in his argument that his characters should be able to retain their native heritage. The immigrant story was told by nonimmigrant writers as well. Upton Sinclair, in The Jungle (1906), depicts the horrendous working conditions which his Lithuanian characters and other eastern European immigrants faced in the stockyards of ChiWilliam Saroyan, the most prominent literary voice of cago. Willa Cather, in another classic of American literature, Armenian Americans. (D.C . Public Library) My Ántonia (1918), told the story of a Bohemian family struggling to make a living on the Nebraska prairie. The dying grandmother in Tillie Olsen’s powerful story “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961) was once an orator during the 1905 Russian revolution. In spite of the melting-pot theory that prevailed through the middle of the twentieth century, in other words, writers continued to tap the rich vein of their ethnic and immigrant roots. Many of the best descriptions of immigrant life—Roth’s and Olsen’s and Lewisohn’s, or Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930)—came from Jewish American writers whose sense of community was so strong that they could more easily dip into that heritage. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud tapped that source after World War II, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland and emigrated to the United States in 1935, and Cynthia Ozick have also explored it. Immigration did not cease during the twentieth century for European writers. Polish American writer Jerzy Kosinski, in the secretive style that characterized so much of his life, fled his native Poland for America in an elaborate scheme during the 1950’s and wrote about his childhood there during World War II in the vivid novel The Painted Bird (1965). Vladimir Nabokov, who was born in Russia and educated in England, lived and wrote in Germany and France. In 1940, he came to the United States and produced some of his most important novels after that date. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, who emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union during the 1970’s, never matched the literary power he had achieved when he was writing in his native Russia. 230


Irish American Literature Irish American literature is one of the oldest and largest collections of writing produced by a European American group. Before the Revolutionary War, the English were the majority of migrants to America. After independence, it was the Irish: Between 1820 and 1930, more than 4.25 million Irish immigrants came to the United States. For their first decades, life was hard, and they faced constant discrimination. The sign “No Irish Need Apply” could be seen on businesses into the twentieth century. The people Henry David Thoreau mentions in Walden (1854) at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are Native Americans, black slaves, and the Irish. In spite of their tremendous difficulties, the Irish produced a cultural legacy in the United States second to none. A number of major nineteenth century writers—Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Dean Howells among them—had Irish ancestry that played no part in their literature, but dozens of writers used that heritage in their literary work. The first Irish American writer to gain national prominence was Peter Finley Dunne, the turn-of-twentieth-century newspaperman whose fictional Irish bartender Mr. Dooley became the most popular figure in American journalism. Up until World War I, Mr. Dooley commented in Dunne’s columns on every important American political or social event—including immigration: As a pilgrim father that missed the first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again’ the invasion iv this fair land be th’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe. Ye bet I must—because I’m here first.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill with his third wife, Carlotta, in 1933. (Library of Congress)

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Dunne’s sharp, often fatalistic humor was characteristic of much later Irish American literature. Several of the major twentieth century American modernists were Irish. F. Scott Fitzgerald boasted of his Irish heritage, and a number of minor Irish American characters figure in his romantic novels and short stories. In Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941) Irish characters play major roles, and Fitzgerald seems in that book to be grappling with his own Irishness. Perhaps the most important playwright of the American stage, Eugene O’Neill, was the son of an Irishman who had come to America after the great potato famine. Some of O’Neill’s masterpieces feature Irish American characters. O’Neill Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a wrote about his family and trou- novel about the Irish experience in America. bled childhood late in his career in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). James T. Farrell, in his Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935) and in the later four novels centering on the character of Danny O’Neill (including My Days of Anger, 1943), describes Irish families struggling on Chicago’s South Side to overcome economic and personal oppression, often holding on to their ethnic and religious prejudices. John O’Hara was much less sympathetic to his Irish characters, and in his novels set in the fictional Gibbsville (resembling his native Pottsville, Pennsylvania), such as the 1934 Appointment in Samarra, the Irish characters are usually outsiders and often contemptible. Other writers in mid-century continued to add to the Irish American heritage. Betty Smith, who was not Irish herself but who had grown up in the Irish American Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, wrote one of the best novels about the Irish experience in America in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1947). Mary McCarthy’s novels occasionally contain Irish characters, and her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) is a compelling account of growing up in America during the early decades of the twentieth century. The Southerner Flannery O’Connor’s novels and short stories are greatly influenced by her Irish Catholic heritage. Many Irish American writers, as might be expected, deal with the Irish in the cities. Edwin O’Connor paints a masterful portrait of Boston Irish political bosses in The Last Hurrah (1956), and William Kennedy’s novels about Albany, New York (including Ironweed, 1983) have been critical and commercial 232


successes. Maureen Howard’s Natural History (1992) deals with the Irish power structure in Bridgeport, Connecticut, early in the twentieth century. Late twentieth century Irish American writers include the novelists Mary Gordon, J. F. Powers, J. P. Donleavy, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, poets from Frank O’Hara to Tess Gallagher, and journalists from the streetwise Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, and Joe Flaherty to the elegant Brendan Gill of The New Yorker. Italian American Literature The largest immigrant groups to arrive in the latter part of the nineteenth century were southern and eastern Europeans. Between 1820 and 1930, more than 4.5 million Italians arrived in the United States, and, like the Irish Americans, they produced a number of writers whose work expressed particular awareness of their background. Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) depicts the squalid world of Italian construction workers, and is the classic expression of the Italian American experience. John Fante wrote a number of novels and short stories about the Italian American experience: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) tells of family life in his native Colorado. Ask the Dust (1939) follows the hero, Arturo Bandini, to Los Angeles, and Dago Red (1940) includes a number of family sketches. Jerre Mangione in Monte Allegro (1943) tells of a son who returns to Sicily and feels a mystical sense of being at home. The list of successful and popular Italian American novelists runs from Paul Gallico through Mario Puzo and Evan Hunter to Don De Lillo. Italian American writers have in fact contributed to every literary genre. Bernard DeVoto was one of the most important literary critics during the middle of the twentieth century, and John Ciardi was a preeminent American poet and translator. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso were leading members of the Beat movement of the 1950’s, and later poets include Helen Barolini, Rose Basile Green, Diane DiPrima, and Dana Gioia. Finally, Italian Americans have become prominent journalists. Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) is one of the best accounts of the Vietnam War, for example, and Gay Talese has written a number of volumes of note, including Unto the Sons (1992), about the Italian American immigrant experience. Immigrant literature has often dealt with the American Dream, with its promise as well as with its collapse. More than most literatures, the body of work produced by European American writers has reflected the struggles of assimilation, the loss of identity in that process, and the pain of being split between two cultures. The heroes and heroines of European American literature—David Levinsky, Studs Lonigan, and Arturo Bandini among them—are often filled with self-doubt and search blindly for their identity. In those characters and their struggles, their creators helped to expand the definition and the canon of American literature. David Peck 233


Further Reading Banks, James A. Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies. Newton, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1991. Useful for the student as well as the teacher; relates key themes and concepts to texts. Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Collection of essays on the theme of ethnic identity and its expression among immigrant communities. Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings. Edited by Olaf Hansen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. An overview of Bourne’s ideas. Fine, David M. The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880-1920. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. A starting place for study of immigrant fiction. Fuchs, Lawrence H. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Comprehensive review of American culture, in the context of a non-melting-pot metaphor. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963. A landmark of ethnic studies, centered on New York City but with implications for ethnic studies in all America. Greeley, Andrew. Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974. Ethnicity of European origin is the focus. Lowery, Ruth McKoy. Immigrants in Children’s Literature. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Examination of the depictions of immigrants in children’s fiction that focuses on seventeen novels. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Novak, Michael. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the 1970’s. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Central work in the revival of interest in ethnicity during the 1970’s and after. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Argues that ethnic literature is the prototypical American literature. See also Euro-Americans; European immigrants, 1790-1892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; Generational acculturation; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Gypsy immigrants; Irish immigrants; Italian immigrants; Melting pot; Nativism; Polish immigrants; Scandinavian immigrants; White ethnics.

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European immigrants, 1790-1892

European immigrants, 1790-1892 The Event: The first century of immigration after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution Date: 1790-1892 Immigration issues: European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: Between 1790 and 1892, more than sixteen million Europeans migrated to the United States. Because they constituted nearly one-third of the total population and 53 percent of the urban residents, European immigrants played a disproportionately important role in the development of American intergroup relations. In 1790, the initial U.S. Census was conducted and Congress passed the first uniform naturalization law. For the next 102 years, more than 90 percent of the immigrants came from Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia (“Old Immigrants”). In 1892, for the first time, more arrivals were from eastern and southern Europe (new immigrants) than from northern Europe. During that same year, Ellis Island replaced the Castle Garden as the major receiving center for immigrants landing in New York when the federal government took control of the process. From 1821 to 1892, approximately 4.5 million German Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews; 3.5 million Irish Catholics; 2.7 million British Protestants; and 1 million Scandinavian Protestants emigrated, with more than two-thirds coming to the United States. The Irish gravitated toward unskilled labor in the eastern cities; the English, Welsh, and Scots often found work as skilled laborers in this same region. Germans tended to find positions as skilled craftspeople or in the trades in both eastern and midwestern cities. Many Germans, Scandinavians, and Dutch became farmers in the Midwest. Relations with the Dominant Culture At the onset of large-scale immigration, the descendants of the early colonists, who were mostly Protestants of English and Scotch-Irish descent, dominated the United States in numbers and control over society. They resented and discriminated against the new arrivals for a variety of reasons. As a group, they were generally satisfied with their lives in the United States and had established an “American culture” separate from that of Europe. A new wave of Europeans could disrupt this. Consequently, many Americans became nativists, hoping to prevent what they viewed as an immigrant “takeover” of the nation. The hierarchical structure of Roman Catholicism, which they considered at odds with the tenets of democracy, negatively affected the large Irish and 235


German Catholic population. Jews were still blamed for the death of Christ, and many people overestimated their influence in the financial world. Although American Protestants increasingly embraced temperance and prohibition of alcoholic beverages, many Irish and German immigrants saw spirits as a part of their culture. Irish, Welsh, and English laborers often believed that organized labor was the key to better pay and working conditions; however, many native stock Americans felt that labor unions were in opposition to American individualism and free labor capitalism. Germans and Scandinavians, who desired to maintain Old World languages and traditions, were chastised for being un-American. All of these factors were responsible for divisions between colonial-stock Americans and the immigrants. Relations Among Old Immigrants Despite commonalties of the ethnic experience, the old immigrants never viewed themselves as a unified group. Conflict between the groups was more apparent than cooperation. These differences often had European roots that combined with American circumstances. Religious differences continued to separate people in the United States as they had in Europe. Almost all the British, Scandinavians, and Dutch were Protestants, as were half of the Germans. Like their American counterparts, the British Protestants were at odds with Irish Catholics. The religious differences in the German states were also brought to the United States. Individual Germans viewed themselves as German Protestants, German Catholics, or German Jews rather than as members of a single culture. Political issues also divided the old immigrants. Catholics and urban laborers, especially the Irish, gravitated toward the more open Democratic Party.

Cartoon in an 1881 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper showing Columbia—the symbol of the United States—welcoming refugees from German oppression to the “asylum of the oppressed.” (Library of Congress)

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European Immigration to the United States, 1821-1890 900,000 850,000 800,000 750,000 700,000 650,000 600,000 550,000 500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

European revolutions of 1848 1845-1849 Great Irish Famine 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War

1881-1890

1871-1880

1861-1870

1851-1860

1841-1850

1831-1840

1821-1830 Source: U.S . Census Bureau.

Protestant skilled workers and midwestern farmers believed that the Whigs, and later the Republicans, reflected their interests of upward socioeconomic mobility and conservative social values. Catholics and the less conservative German Protestants objected to any laws restricting alcohol. Conversely, many English, Welsh, and German Pietist Protestant immigrants abstained from liquor and favored its prohibition. In regard to slavery, unskilled Irish laborers feared that emancipation could bring about competition with African Americans for low-paying jobs; English, Welsh, and German skilled workers and tradespeople believed that the extension of slavery would damage the freelabor, capitalist economy. The Assimilation Process The Americanization process for the older group of immigrants was hastened because all ethnic groups began to enjoy increased social and economic mobility by the latter part of the nineteenth century and because the arrival of the new immigrants lifted them to a higher level of social status. 237


The various ethnic groups achieved social and economic mobility differently. The English, Welsh, and Scots often moved from their skilled labor positions to become bosses, supervisors, and managers in corporate America. They used the school systems to educate their children, who moved into professional positions. Many descendants of the Welsh and English immigrants became teachers and administrators in elementary and secondary education systems, giving those groups a tremendous impact upon education in the United States. Working from positions as unskilled laborers, the Irish moved through the corporate ranks. Politics was also a means of Irish mobility. Colonial-stock Americans found local politics disdainful; however, the Irish recognized an opportunity to gain political power in the growing urban areas. By the late nineteenth century, many eastern cities were under the control of political machines dominated by the Irish. Although colonial stock and other old immigrants criticized boss politics, the machines served the rapidly expanding urban-ethnic community at a time when official government agencies were lacking. The Irish were also able to gain mobility through their leadership in the Roman Catholic Church. The church became a major force in American life with the arrival of numerous Catholic immigrants. The Irish church hierarchy was instrumental in sponsoring a vast educational network that educated all Catholics from elementary school through the university. Germans and Scandinavians were perhaps less inclined to use higher education as a means of mobility. However, as the United States rapidly expanded, the services of German tradespeople and farmers were all the more needed. This, in turn, brought about a growth in German businesses and farms, resulting in the upward mobility of shipowners and workers alike. German Jews, many of whom began as peddlers and small shopkeepers, were able to expand their businesses to meet the increasing consumer demand. This economic success combined with a strong emphasis upon education was responsible for a remarkable degree of socioeconomic mobility for German Jews. The arrival of ten million eastern and southern Europeans resulted in a higher socioeconomic status for the old immigrants. The new arrivals provided a large labor pool to fill unskilled positions. The old immigrants could move into the more lucrative skilled and management jobs or expand their businesses to serve the growing population. Also, many of the values of the northern European immigrants were more identifiable as American ideals. To both colonial stock and old immigrants, the new immigrants appeared to be considerably different. Consequently, the colonial stock found the old immigrants more acceptable. By the mid-twentieth century, the descendants of the old immigrants were less commonly viewed as distinct ethnic groups. The British found their heritage largely assimilated into the larger American culture, and Germans’ ethnic identification diminished during the two world wars. Certain groups, such as the Welsh and Scandinavians, still maintain ethnic institutions. How238


ever, these institutions are intended more to preserve the vestiges of the cultures than to help immigrants deal with challenges in the United States. To most observers, the descendants of the old immigrants are firmly entrenched in mainstream American culture. Paul J. Zbiek Further Reading Berthoff, Rowland. British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. Classic study of British immigration to the United States. Dolan, Jay. The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 18151965. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Chronicles how the Irish and Germans established Roman Catholicism in America. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Work by one of the pioneering scholars on ethnic history that deals extensively with the old immigrant period. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Van Vugt, William E. Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Scholarly study of nineteenth century immigrants to the United States from Great Britain. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. See also European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 18921943; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; German immigrants; Italian immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Know-Nothing Party; Migration; Nativism.

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European immigrants, 1892-1943 The Event: The last major phase of European immigration to the United States Date: 1892-1943 Immigration issues: European immigrants; Nativism and racism Significance: A new wave of southern European immigrants met with nativist resentment and federal controls. In 1808, the U.S. government purchased Ellis Island from the state of New York for ten thousand dollars. The new federal property, located in New York Harbor about one mile from the southern tip of Manhattan Island, served first as a fort and later as an arsenal. Until 1882, the state of New York had guided the influx of immigration from the old Castle Garden station at the tip of Manhattan. The opening of Ellis Island on January 1, 1892, as the first federal immigration station symbolized a new era for the United States as well as the beginning of the end of free immigration to the New World. San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island later served a similar role for immigrants entering the United States on the West Coast. Congress had begun the selective process of excluding undesirable elements among those emigrating to the United States with the passage of the federal Immigration Act in 1882. That measure was designed to prevent the immigration of persons who had criminal records and those who were mentally incompetent or indigent. That same year, Congress also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act (later extended to all Asians), barring an entire nationality from entry as racially undesirable for a period of ten years. In 1904 the act’s provisions were extended indefinitely, to be repealed only in 1943. Immigration Patterns Shift Most immigrants before the 1890’s had come from northern and western Europe. During the 1880’s a fundamental change occurred. In addition to the traditional immigrants, who shared common language patterns with persons already in the United States, people from Mediterranean and Slavic countries began to arrive in increasing numbers. One may measure the change more dramatically by comparing two peak years in U.S. immigration. In 1882, 87 percent of the 788,000 immigrants came from northern and western Europe. In 1907, only 19.3 percent were from northern and western Europe, while 80.7 percent came from southern and eastern Europe. A great impetus to immigration was the transportation revolution engendered by the steamship. In 1856, more than 96 percent of U.S. immigrants 240


came aboard sailing ships, on trips that took between one and three months. By 1873, the same percentage came by steamships, which took only ten days. The new steamships were specifically designed for passengers, and while still subject to overcrowding and epidemics, they were a major improvement over the sailing ships. Steamship companies competed for immigrant business and maintained offices in Europe. The Hamburg-Amerika line, for example, had thirty-two hundred U.S. agencies throughout Europe. More than half of the immigrants in 1901 came with prepaid tickets supplied by relatives in the United States. As the older agricultural economy of Europe was replaced by an industrial one, many former farmers moved to European cities in search of employment; often unsuccessful in that search, they were easily persuaded to try the New World, where jobs were said to be plentiful. The same railroad-building process that opened the American West to the immigrant made it easier and cheaper for the Europeans to reach their coastal areas and embark for the United States. Most of the emigration from southern Europe was occasioned by economic distress. Southern Italy’s agriculture was severely affected by competition from Florida in oranges and lemons, as well as by a French tariff against Italian wines. The Italian emigration began with 12,000 in 1880 and reached a peak of nearly 300,000 in 1914. After immigration restriction laws took full effect, Italian immigration fell to 6,203 in 1925.

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1902. Through this reception center, New York City was the principal port of entry for European immigrants from 1892 until 1954. (Library of Congress)

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European immigrants being processed inside Ellis Island’s vast reception center around 1904. (Library of Congress)

From Russia and the Slavic areas, emigration was also caused by political and religious problems. Jews fled in reaction to the riots set off by the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1882, the pogroms of 1881-1882 and 1891, and the 1905-1906 massacres of thousands of Jews. Jewish immigration to the United States began with 5,000 in 1880 and reached a peak of 258,000 in 1907. Some two million Roman Catholic Poles also arrived between 1890 and 1914. In 1925, however, the Immigration Service recorded only 5,341 entrants from Poland and 3,121 from Russia and the Baltic states. Nativist Fears Two issues caused the greatest concern to American nativists during the 1890’s: the tendency of the new immigrants to congregate in the cities, and the fact that they spoke seemingly unassimilable languages. One of the first articulate spokesmen against unrestricted immigration, the Reverend Dr. Josiah Strong, was alarmed by the concentration of foreign peoples in cities. Strong’s famous book, Our Country, published in 1885, clearly stated what many other U.S. citizens feared: that the new influx of immigrants would create permanent slums and perpetuate poverty. 242


The urban nature of the settlement was unavoidable. U.S. agriculture was suffering from the same shocks that had disrupted European agriculture, and the populist movement in the country made clear that the myth of utopia in the western United States was no longer believable. Most of the new immigrants were attracted by the pull of U.S. industry and opportunity, and they came to the United States with the express purpose of settling in a city. In addition, new industrial technology had reduced the demand for skilled labor, while the need for unskilled and cheap factory help increased. To add to the social clash between the new and old immigrants, the arrival of a new labor force in great numbers probably allowed some older laborers to move up to more important supervisory and executive positions. Many new immigrants did not share the optimism and enthusiasm of established Americans. Some tended to be pessimistic and resigned, distrustful of change, and unfamiliar with democratic government after having lived in autocratic situations. At the height of the new immigration occurred the Panic of 1893, followed by a depression that lasted until 1897, which seemed to con-


European Immigration to the United States, 1891-2003 900,000 850,000 800,000 750,000 700,000 650,000 600,000 550,000 500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0

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firm the fears of persons already settled in the United States that the country and the system were failing. The new immigration, however, was but one of the major social, cultural, and economic changes taking place in the turbulent United States of the 1890’s. In 1907, Congress created the Dillingham Commission to investigate the problems of immigration. Many of the commission’s findings reflected the fears of citizens concerning the new immigration and led to the passage of restrictive legislation during the 1920’s. Unrestricted immigration ended with the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which restricted immigrants in any year to 154,277. Each country’s quota could be no more than 2 percent of the number of its native inhabitants counted in the 1890 census, a year in which few born in southern and eastern Europe were part of the U.S. population. When Ellis Island closed as a reception center in 1954, few immigrants still arrived by ship, and the Immigration Service could handle all arrivals at Manhattan’s docks. When the Atlantic reopened after World War II, planes began to replace ships as vehicles of immigration, and there was no need for Ellis Island. By that time, much of the fear of the “new” immigration had evaporated. Italian, Slavs, and Jews had not remained in permanent slums, mired in perpetual poverty, as Strong had feared, and their descendants had fought side by side with U.S. soldiers of British and German ancestry against the Nazis and the Japanese. During the 1940’s, there was much criticism of the rigidity of the immigration restriction legislation that hampered attempts to deal with the problems of refugees. Not until 1965, however, would the rigid quota system established in 1924 be replaced with a more flexible system. When that reform opened the door to increased entry by Asians and Latin Americans, complaints about the new “new immigrants” began to echo nineteenth century uneasiness about the former “new immigrants.” Richard H. Collin updated by Milton Berman Further Reading Briggs, Vernon M. Mass Immigration and the National Interest. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. An economist argues that nineteenth and early twentieth century immigration aided the U.S. economy but the post-1965 immigration does not. Brownstone, David M., Irene M. Franck, and Douglas L. Brownstone, eds. Island of Hope, Island of Tears. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Interviews with elderly people who went through Ellis Island during the early years of the twentieth century provide highly personal accounts of the “new” immigrants. Many photographs. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. A well-written, scholarly account of U.S. immigration from the colonial period through the 1980’s. 244


Dinnerstein, Leonard, Roger H. Nichols, and David H. Reimers. Natives and Strangers: Blacks, Indians, and Immigrants in America. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A comparative study of immigrant and minority groups in the United States. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with an emphasis on cultural and social trends, with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Dramatic narrative focusing on the life experiences of immigrants. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Analyzes the nativist movements that led to the passage of immigration restriction. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Study of twentieth century immigration to the United States, primarily after World War II. Sandler, Martin W. Island of Hope: The Story of Ellis Island and the Journey to America. New York: Scholastic, 2004. History of the most important immigrant reception, from 1892 through 1954. Written for younger readers. Vought, Hans Peter. Redefining the “Melting Pot”: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897-1933. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 2001. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. See also Eastern European Jewish immigrants; European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 1790-1892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; German immigrants; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1924; Italian immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Migration; Polish immigrants; War brides.

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Family businesses

Family businesses Definition: Commercial enterprises owned and operated by individual families Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Cuban immigrants; Economics; Families and marriage; Labor Significance: Family businesses, which represent the oldest form of business enterprise in the world, continue to affect the U.S. economy during the twenty-first century, and they play a special role in many immigrant communities. From ancient pottery makers of Mesopotamia to the family farm of nineteenth century America, a natural form of business organization consisted of using the varied talents of family members to achieve efficiency. Indeed, the very concept of “home economics” implies that all families had to operate— at times—like businesses in their allocation of scarce resources and utilization of labor. The rise of the modern corporation during the mid-nineteenth century reduced the overall influence of family firms on the economies of nations but did not eliminate family businesses or reduce their popularity. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most business organizations, especially in the United States, were family firms. These included farms, plantations, small shops, and factories and covered areas of endeavor as varied as banking, mining, textile manufacturing, bookselling, and rice planting. In family firms on farms or plantations, husbands generally oversaw “outdoor” activities, such as planting, harvesting and mining. In the case of artisans or merchants, husbands managed the shop floor or store office. On farms, wives managed purchases for personnel, and on larger plantations they managed the “inside” work related to the plantation houses and slave quarters, such as clothing and feeding the people in residence as well as their own family members. In cities, wives helped clean stores, keep books, take orders, and—in cases of illness or death of their husbands—they actually managed the businesses. Children were viewed as a source of unpaid labor, with the understanding that they were learning a trade as well as earning their keep. In some cases, parents sent male children to other merchants or artisans as apprentices to “learn the business,” as was the case with the American banker J. P. Morgan. The division of labor allowed the family to retain as profits all the money they would have had to spend paying laborers and training employees. Immigrants and Family Businesses For generations, immigrants have constituted an important segment of family businesses, from Italian restaurants to Japanese gardening services. Beginning during the 1960’s and 1970’s, 246

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new waves of Cuban, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Mexican immigrants came to the United States. More than 200,000 Cubans arrived in Florida in the first two years after Fidel Castro came to power, creating 25,000 new businesses in Dade County alone. Michael Zabian, a Lebanese refugee who settled in Lee, Massachusetts, developed a family-run business that eventually encompassed a grocery store and a department store. Numerous studies of Haitian, Jamaican, and Vietnamese families in the United States have shown that they capitalize on family labor to achieve business success. As a result, they have higher per-capita incomes than many white families. Proportionally, far more black Jamaicans, Haitians, and Dominicans in the United States run businesses than American-born whites. Child labor laws and compulsory education have limited the extent to which immigrants have been able to utilize family labor to expand family wealth. Moreover, not all immigrants have the same cultural perspectives. Adult Chinese immigrants, for example, sometimes work extra hours so that their children can concentrate on their education. Immigrant couples often run businesses as a team. More often, however, immigrant wives manage their households while their husbands concentrate on their family businesses. The key to these immigrants’ success—and that of previous generations of European immigrants—is their commitment to hard work through harnessing the efforts of their extended families. Lebanese businesses, for example,

Members of a Chinese family posing in front of their New York City grocery store. (Smithsonian Institution)

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stay open between sixteen and eighteen hours a day. A study of Korean family businesses in Atlanta found that they worked an average of sixty hours a week. The work habits of Jamaican immigrant families were so pronounced that they were spoofed in many of the skits performed on the cutting-edge variety series In Living Color. However, most statistics concerning wealth accumulation in the United States have not accounted for the labor or on-the-job experience gains of family members, thus dramatically underestimating the value and influence of family-owned companies. Ironically, legislation designed to limit part-time work and require minimum wages has reinvigorated family businesses paying no detectable wages at all, for families’ children have become the only labor that many low-profit operations can afford. Government Regulations and Family Businesses As immigrants have quickly learned, many of the regulations enacted between 1960 and 1990 have enhanced the desirability of owning small businesses predominantly operated by family members. Small dry cleaners, independent restaurants, or tanning salons cannot hire many employees at the increasing minimum wage rates and stay competitive. People hoping to develop and sell new products and needing employees to operate telephones and offices cannot afford the rising taxes required by the government. Very few small businesses can begin to comply with the blizzard of regulations related to employee health and protection, sexual harassment, disabilities acts, and dozens of other expensive laws and regulations. As a result, small firms have increasingly turned to family members to help operate their businesses. There is no way of determining how many of the 14 million sole proprietorships in the United States in 1995 were family firms, but evidence suggests that the number was large and growing, as witnessed by the fact that “microbusinesses” (firms with fewer than five employees) constituted the most rapidly growing category of all enterprises. The arrival of widespread computer technology and the Internet, with its commercial operations on the World Wide Web, have accelerated the expansion of microbusinesses and broadened the appeal of the family firm. A family of four, with a capable teenager who is computer competent, can operate a thriving Web-based business from the home, thus avoiding government regulations that apply to hired employees. This is seen in the fact that most corporations have less than $100,000 in total assets. Yet while the U.S. economy has continued to grow, the sales of the top corporations has fallen steadily as a share of gross national product (GNP), buoyed only by the spectacular rise of a few companies such as Microsoft. One of the most rapidly rising new areas of family business—again, populated by immigrants—are nail salons. By 1996 nail salons constituted a $6 billion business (equal to that of the video game market dominated by Japanese corporations such as Nintendo), a figure that industry analysts suggest underestimates the level of activity. Family-owned salons have appeared in “upscale” malls, and in Los Angeles County alone the number of nail techni248

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cians rose from 9,700 to 15,200 in five years, with more than 80 percent being Vietnamese-born. During the 1980’s virtually no economist predicted the growth of such family businesses, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not even track the listing for manicurists as late as 1979. A significant problem facing small business family firms, which has implications for the entire family, is that nearly half of the 800,000 new firms launched annually fail. The central fact of entrepreneurial life is that of risk, and every family enterprise confronts the competition of the market each day. Unlike arrangements whereby family members might be employed by different companies and are thus somewhat protected against layoffs or business failures, family business failures can imperil the structure of the family itself. Yet, virtually all of the founders of successful family businesses have failed at least once. Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, banker A. P. Giannini, and retailer Sam Walton all either declared bankruptcy or were kicked out of companies they created. In general, most small firms have small annual incomes hovering around $16,000, as compared to General Motors’ annual sales of $126 billion. Nevertheless, many family-owned small businesses remain small deliberately, with adults choosing to work fewer hours or to be less aggressive at expanding their enterprises in order to focus on nonbusiness family relationships. The number of individual family businesses that become large, however, represents an ever-increasing share of all business activity, because the overall pool of small businesses and family firms continues to swell. Expansion of the Internet can further accelerate the advantages already enjoyed by home-based, family-run operations. In 1997, the Internet service provider America Online recorded more than 16 million “log ons” in a single day, most of which the government has little control over. Businesses can take and ship orders, determine customer satisfaction, and maintain all records without expanding their employee base outside the family. The economic cost of regulation and taxation facing large firms with many employees, combined with the computer/Internet revolution, can accelerate the increasing number of family businesses and their influence on the market. Mandatory retirement ages and the desperate need for reliable employees by small businesses means that retirees will increasingly be approached by family members for part-time employment. Finally, family farms—the essence of the family business in previous eras—still exist and even thrive in modern society. Larry Schweikart Further Reading Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. 249

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Bruchey, Stuart, ed. Small Business in American Life. New York. Columbia University Press, 1980. Essay collection that features an excellent overview by the author and contains a number of specialized, highly useful essays on small business growth and operations. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered is immigrant businesses. Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise. San Francisco: C. S. Press, 1992. An updated version of Gilder’s The Spirit of Enterprise (1984), this work approaches entrepreneurship with attention to analysis of macroeconomic data and to numerous case studies. Kretsedemas, Philip, and Ana Aparicio, eds. Immigrants, Welfare Reform, and the Poverty of Policy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Collection of articles on topics relating to the economic problems of new immigrants in the United States, with particular attention to Haitian, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian immigrants. Min, Pyong Gap. Ethnic Business Enterprise: Korean Small Business in Atlanta. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1988. Excellent source dealing with the situation of Korean small businesses. Neff, Alixa. “Lebanese Immigration into the United States: 1880 to the Present.” In The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, edited by Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi. London: Taurus, 1992. Details the history of Lebanese immigration to the United States. Park, Lisa Sun-Hee. Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Cultural study of Asian immigrants who operate family businesses. Schweikart, Larry. “Business and the Economy.” In American Decades: The 1950’s, edited by Richard Layman. Detroit: Gale Publications, 1994. Includes material dating to World War II dealing with such business developments as franchises, the revival of the family firm, and the dominance of large corporations. Sowell, Thomas. Race and Culture: A World View. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Synthesizes a great array of data on immigrants to various nations, emphasizing their contributions to the economies in their new homes. Yoon, In-Jin. On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Study of the highly entrepeneurial Korean immigrants. See also Jews and Arab Americans; Korean immigrants; Korean immigrants and African Americans; Korean immigrants and family customs.

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Farmworkers’ union

Farmworkers’ union The Event: Formation of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)— a predecessor to the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), the first permanent agricultural workers’ union in the United States Date: September 30, 1962 Place: Fresno, California Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Economics; Labor; Mexican immigrants Significance: The organization of farmworkers brought the plight of both American and immigrant farmworkers to the attention of the public and called attention to the suffering and indignities farmworkers endured. Throughout the twentieth century farmworkers struggled to organize themselves against a politico-agribusiness complex that has been rather successful at resisting them. Only after the mid-1960’s did working conditions for farmworkers begin to improve substantially. Improvements in income and working conditions have been the direct results of the termination of the bracero program as well as the struggles for union recognition and collective bargaining by the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) and its organizational predecessors, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC). The September, 1962, founding of the NFWA in Fresno, California, by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others signaled a new era in the efforts by farmworkers to unionize and bargain collectively with their employers, mostly large agricultural growers. In 1966, Chicanos and Mexicanos in the NFWA and Filipino farmworkers in the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), merged organizations to form the UFWOC. In February of 1972, the UFWOC became a full-fledged affiliate of the AFL-CIO and formed the UFW. In 1975, straggles by the UFW culminated in the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) by the California legislature. Led by Chávez and Huerta, the NFWA brought years of community organizing experience to bear on the problems of farmworkers. These problems included economic hardship, general powerlessness against employers, and the lack of adequate facilities in the fields. Establishment of the NFWA The NFWA was established as an independent, service-oriented, Chicano farmworkers’ labor organization that provided credit, burial, and other family services. It sought to organize farmworkers one by one. Prior to the 1960’s one important factor hindering the 251


unionization of farmworkers was the bracero program, which was established under the Emergency Labor Program of 1942 to ease the labor shortage brought on by World War II. The bracero program supervised the recruitment of Mexican nationals to meet U.S. growers demands for labor. It was continued by Public Law 78 after the end of World War II and was maintained until 1963, when PL 78 expired. During the 1950’s, Mexican braceros greatly influenced the unionization of U.S. farmworkers. By serving as alternate sources of cheap labor, they often were used as strikebreakers by growers. In 1947, the newly founded National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) led a strike against the powerful Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation at Arvin, California. The union demanded an increase in wages, seniority rights, grievance procedures, and recognition of the union as sole bargaining agent. Robert Di Giorgio refused the demands and launched an assault on the NFLU. He used braceros as strikebreakers and manipulated both the press and politicians in his favor. The U.S. Senate Committee on UnAmerican Activities set upon investigating the union. In 1949, a special subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee held hearings on the Di Giorgio strike. The committee supported the growers and Di Giorgio won the strike. This particular strike taught Ernesto Galarza, one of the strike leaders, an important lesson in the struggle between farmworkers and growers. In his view, farmworkers could not be organized until growers’ access to exploitable immigrant labor groups was halted. Braceros, as international migrant workers, were more exploitable than American workers. If they tried to organize, they were labeled as communists and deported. Federal Government Involvement Those braceros seen by growers as causing unrest among farmworkers were often reported to the Immigration Service, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Justice, each of which would investigate the “leaders” for violations of U.S. laws. Consequently, during the 1950’s, there was not a single strike by braceros, although the NFLU continued to organize strikes among other farmworkers. In 1960, when the NFLU surrendered its charter, the AWOC replaced it. AWOC was the AFL-CIO’s new organizational effort to organize farmworkers. With the aid of the United Packinghouse Workers (UPWA), AWOC quickly initiated farmworkers’ strikes in the lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley in California. The AWOC-UPWA effort was based on the enforcement of federal regulations that prohibited the use of braceros on ranches where there were strikes. Although these initial strikes were successful, competition from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters led to the demise of the AWOC-UPWA effort. In the period following these strikes, AWOC membership declined as a result of disillusionment, leaving only a group of Filipino agricultural workers as members. By 1962, the year the NFWA was founded, economic conditions for farmworkers had worsened as a result of increased mechanization on farms and the continued negative impact of the bracero program on union252


ization efforts. In 1965, farmworkers in Tulare County, California, lived in dilapidated labor camps condemned by the Tulare Housing Authority. The labor camps had been built by the U.S. Farm Security Administration near the end of the Great Depression to provide temporary shelters for Dust Bowl migrants. Condemnation led to rent increases meant to yield the necessary revenue to build new housing. Strikes Late in the summer of 1965, the NFWA led rent strikes among farmworkers. The rent strike at Woodville, one of the labor camps, evolved into an employment strike at the nearby J. D. Martin Ranch. Strikers complained about low pay, the lack of toilets in the fields, and a peeping crew boss. The strike failed. Within two weeks, however, the NFWA became involved in a strike for higher wages initiated by the Filipino membership of the AWOC local at Delano. On September 16, 1965, the NFWA formally joined the Delano Grape Strike. Four days later NFWA picket leaders asked farmworkers to walk off the fields. The AWOC-NFWA strike spread throughout the DelanoEarlimart-McFarland area, affecting approximately thirty ranches and involving several hundred farmworkers. Hundreds of college students, civil rights workers, and religious groups joined the farmworkers within days of the onset of the strike. Civil rights organizations quickly sent members of their staff to help with the strike. In October, under the charismatic leadership of Chávez, the NFWA launched a grape boycott. Supporters quickly started picketing stores and piers throughout California. In response, growers began to bully picketers, often in the presence of law enforcement officials who did nothing to stop them. Growers also resorted to spraying sulfur near the picket lines. The strike continued to gain momentum, and within two weeks nearly four thousand farmworkers were out of the fields. Many growers were not economically hurt because they were able to import workers from neighboring cities who were willing to cross picket lines to work. Strike leaders began to spread word of the strike to farmworkers in neighboring areas. In March, 1966, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor conducted public hearings in Delano and other nearby cities. At the Delano hearings, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a member of the subcommittee, reminded the local sheriff to brush up on the rights of all people, including farmworkers. In 1966, some growers slowly began to settle with the strikers; others continued to hold out, turning instead to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union for “sweetheart contracts.” The strike continued through the years 1966 and 1967. In 1968, the union, now called the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), extended its boycott to include every California grower of table grapes. Slowly, more individual growers agreed to recognize the union, but many powerful others continued to hold out. Finally, in July of 1970, UFWOC scored the largest victory in the history of farm-labor organizing when several of the most powerful growers agreed to the union’s demands, 253


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thereby officially ending the strike. Several other victories by the UFWOC followed during the next several months. Farmworkers had finally achieved union recognition among growers and begun to participate in the collective bargaining process. Conflict with the Teamsters, however, continued to thwart the union, which had again changed its name and was known as the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). In 1975, the UFW was instrumental in the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA) in California. The ALRA brought some order to the rivalry between the UFW and the Teamsters. The Union’s Impact The major consequences stemming from the founding of the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 were the eventual establishment of a permanent farmworkers’ labor union and passage of the ALRA in California. The farmworkers forced growers to recognize their union and to agree to collective bargaining. This meant improvements in wages and working conditions for farmworkers. The ALRA eliminated “sweetheart contracts,” permitted union organizers on the property of employers, and established a California Agricultural Labor Relations Board that, among other things, conducted elections, determined bargaining units, and investigated unfair labor practices. The ALRA also prohibited secondary boycotts, which stop the delivery of goods from primary employers (growers) to secondary employers (retail stores), but permitted unions to organize consumer boycotts by discouraging 254


the public from trading with stores. Within a few months of the passage of the ALRA, over four hundred union representation elections were held. Mexican immigrants, Chicanos, and other poor groups have provided a steady supply of cheap labor to agribusiness, especially in the Southwest. In order to maintain access to cheap labor and to thwart unionization efforts, growers have generally been highly supportive of unrestricted immigration from Mexico. Efforts by farmworkers to organize unions and bargain collectively have been brutally suppressed by growers, who often have had local criminal justice systems and federal immigration agencies on their side during periods of labor disputes. Growers’ use of sheriffs, police officers, judges, strikebreakers, and private armies against farmworkers were common. Indeed, the U.S. government itself, through the bracero program, was a “labor contractor” for growers. The NFWA brought the plight of the farmworkers to the forefront of America’s conscience and highlighted the suffering and indignities farmworkers were forced to endure. It also marked the inception of the farmworkers’ first permanent, broad-based organization. Chicano and Filipino farmworkers, long neglected by labor legislation and traditional trade unions, organized their own independent labor union and assumed their rights to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. The Delano Grape Strike, begun in September of 1965, propelled César Chávez and the NFWA to the front of the civil and labor rights struggles. Chávez turned the strike into a crusade by promoting the view that farmworkers are human beings who deserve respect and a living wage. In 1968, he fasted for twenty-five days in order to gain support for the farmworkers’ struggle. He ended the fast by “breaking bread” with Senator Robert Kennedy, then a candidate for the U.S. presidency. Chávez’s nonviolent approach and charismatic qualities brought dignity and strength to the farmworkers and greatly influenced the consciousness of Americans. Through use of the consumer boycott, farmworkers were able to involve the American public in their struggle for human and union recognition. As a result, Americans “discovered” the farmworkers, who through their own efforts affirmed and reclaimed their humanity. Their struggles did not end, however. Pro-grower politicians and bureaucrats have continued to pose problems, and widespread use of toxic pesticides by growers has continued to affect the health and well-being of farmworkers. Rubén O. Martinez Further Reading Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 3d ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. General history of Chicanos. It includes detailed sections on Chicano agricultural labor organizing, tracing Chicano labor struggles to the turn of the century. It also details labor struggles in other sectors of the economy. 255


Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. Briggs, Vernon M. Immigration and American Unionism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Scholarly survey of the dynamic interaction between unionism and immigration. Covers the entire sweep of U.S. national history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Cull, Nicholas J., and David Carrasco, eds. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. Dunne, John Gregory. Delano. Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. Detailed description of the events leading up to the formation of the United Farm Workers of America. It also describes the union’s organizing efforts during the 1960’s. Galarza, Ernesto. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Charlotte, N.C.: McNally & Loftin, 1964. Excellent historical analysis of the bracero program from its inception to 1960. Examines the structure of control affecting the lives of Mexican nationals and American agricultural workers in the fields. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Historical study of Mexican farmworkers in the United States that examines the subject in the context of American dominance over Mexico. Hernandez, Donald J., ed. Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. Collection of papers on issues of public health and welfare among immigrants to the United States, with extensive attention to immigrant farmworkers. Kretsedemas, Philip, and Ana Aparicio, eds. Immigrants, Welfare Reform, and the Poverty of Policy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Collection of articles on topics relating to the economic problems of new immigrants in the United States, with particular attention to Haitian, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian immigrants. Kushner, Sam. Long Road to Delano. New York: International Publishers, 1975. Provides a class analysis of the development of agribusiness in California. It describes farmworkers’ working conditions and their struggles against exploitation. There is a chapter on the organizing efforts of the Communist Party during the 1930’s among farmworkers. The foreword is by Bert Corona, a major Chicano community leader. Milkman, Ruth, ed. Organizing Immigrants: The Challenge for Unions in Contemporary California. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2000. Broad study of unionism and immigrants in the nation’s most populous state. 256

Federal riot of 1799

Nelson, Eugene. Huelga: The First Hundred Days of the Great Delano Grape Strike. Delano, Calif.: Farm Worker Press, 1966. Brief account of the events that led up to the Delano Grape Strike and details the activities up to December, 1965. Written by one of the organizers of the strike, the book captures the mood and views of the farmworkers. Contains several photographs, including some of law enforcement officials and strikebreakers. Taylor, Ronald B. Chávez and the Farm Workers: A Study in the Acquisition and Use of Power. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Provides a sympathetic description of the César Chávez-led farmworkers’ struggles during the 1960’s and early 1970’s. In particular, the book details some of the struggles the farmworkers had with the Teamsters union. Contains some photographs, including one of Chávez and Robert Kennedy. See also Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance; Bracero program; Chicano movement; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Undocumented workers.

Federal riot of 1799 The Event: Public riot in protest of the federal government’s passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts Date: February 10, 1799 Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Immigration issues: Government and politics; Irish immigrants Significance: A turning point in intergroup relations in the United States, the federal riot became a symbol of conflict between an established, dominant group and an incoming immigrant population. A riot at Saint Mary’s Church in Philadelphia in February, 1799, was the direct result of the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. These four laws—the Naturalization Act, the Alien Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act—had been passed in June and July and sought collectively to limit the rights of immigrants and to silence criticism of the new U.S. government. Two main political factions dominated at the time, the conservative Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. Federalists were mainly the wealthy and established, and Roman Catholics as well as Protestants were among this group. Saint Mary’s Church, considered one of the most venerable and wellrespected Catholic congregations in the United States, counted many of these Federalists among its members and included both established Anglo257

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Americans and Irish Americans. Republicans were made up largely of immigrants, including many new Irish immigrants, and these less affluent and newer Americans felt the impact of the Alien and Sedition Acts most sharply. They circulated petitions protesting the acts and gathered signatures throughout Philadelphia without incident. They intended to present the petitions to Congress. Four of these immigrant Republicans—James Reynolds, Samuel Cummings, Robert Moore, and William Duane—posted fliers protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts at Saint Mary’s, again requesting signatures from the Irish members of the congregation. Following the February 10, 1799, Sunday service at Saint Mary’s, a violent confrontation took place between these men and members of the congregation. The four were tried on February 21, 1799, for causing the riot. Saint Mary’s Father Leonard Neale, who had accused the men, strongly condemned the actions of the Republicans, while Father Matthew Carr testified that it was a long-honored tradition in Ireland to post notices and seek support for petitions following church services. The jury delivered a verdict of “not guilty” to the charge of causing a riot. The riot signified a turning point during the early history of intergroup relations in the United States. Although the short-range effect of this conflict was to weaken the Federalist hold within Saint Mary’s congregation, the “Irish riot” became a symbol of conflict between an established, dominant group and an incoming immigrant population. Such conflicts would characterize much of U.S. history. Kathleen Schongar Further Reading Elkins, Stanley, and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Miller, John C. Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and discrimination.

Filipino immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Philippines, an archipelago nation located across the China Sea from mainland Southeast Asia Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics 258

Filipino immigrants

Roadside stand of a fruit seller in San Lorenzo, California, during World War II. This picture was taken in May, 1942—three months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to intern all persons of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. At a moment of anti-Japanese hysteria in California, Asian entrepreneurs such as this Filipino farmer advertised their nonJapanese ethnic identities in order to do business safely. (National Archives)

Significance: Filipino Americans rank as the second-largest Asian American group in the United States, after Chinese Americans, and substantial numbers of Filipino immigrants also live in a few parts of Canada. There are several large Filipino American communities in California and Hawaii, and Filipinos can be found throughout North America, often thoroughly integrated into American neighborhoods and workplaces. The Philippines has long had close ties to the United States because it was a U.S. possession or territory from 1898 to 1946. The United States established English as the language of instruction in high schools and colleges in the Philippines, and Filipinos have long been familiar with American movies and other media. Filipinos began settling in North America soon after the Philip259

Filipino immigrants

pines became part of the United States, and the numbers of Filipino Americans began to increase greatly during the late 1960’s. History of Filipino American Settlement Filipino settlement in North America falls into three major periods. The first period, from 1906 to the beginning of World War II in 1941, resulted from the U.S. demand for cheap agricultural labor. Sugar plantations dominated the economy of Hawaii early in the twentieth century, and plantation owners were interested in finding hardworking field hands who would work for low wages. The Hawaii Sugar Planters Association began recruiting in the Philippines, and by 1946, the association had brought more than a quarter of a million Filipinos to Hawaii. California, which also had a need for seasonal agricultural workers, was the home of more than thirty-one thousand of the forty-six thousand Filipinos living on the mainland in 1940. Filipino Americans continue to make up part of the migrant farm labor force of California and other western states, but the numbers of migrant Filipino workers are steadily decreasing. The second migration period began in 1946, when the Philippines became politically independent of the United States. Large U.S. military bases had been established in the Philippines, and many of the Filipinos admitted to the United States were women married to American servicemen. At the same time, Filipinos who had become naturalized American citizens after the war were able to petition to have family members enter the United States. Because of these two factors, most immigrants in this period came as a result of marriage or family connections. The United States maintained military bases in the Philippines until 1991,

Filipino farm workers. (Library of Congress)

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so Filipinos who married U.S. military personnel continued to arrive in the United States. Another form of migration through marriage is the phenomenon of mail-order brides, women who meet and marry American men through correspondence. During the 1990’s, approximately nineteen thousand mailorder brides were leaving the Philippines each year to join husbands and fiancés abroad, with the United States as the primary destination. In 1997, social scientist Concepcion Montoya identified Filipina mail-order brides, who often establish social networks among themselves, as a rapidly emerging American community. The third migration period began in 1965, when the United States passed a new immigration law that ended the discrimination against Asians present in all previous immigration laws. The result was a rapid growth in the Asian American population in general and in the Filipino American population in particular. The number of Filipinos living in the United States grew by roughly 100 percent in each ten-year period from 1960 to 1990: from 176,000 in the census of 1960 to 343,000 in that of 1970, to 775,000 in 1980, to more than 1,400,000 in the 1990 census. Between 1971 and 2003, new immigrants entered the United States from the Philippines at an average of 45,000 persons per year. The third period of Filipino immigration differs greatly from the earlier periods. Although immigrants before 1965 were mostly laborers from the rural Philippines, immigrants after 1965 tended to be highly educated professionals (such as doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers), and they often came from cities. Migration to the United States became a goal for many Filipino professionals because economic opportunities were much greater in the United States. During the 1970’s, one out of every five graduates of nursing schools in the Philippines left for the United States, and the majority of those nurses did not return to the Philippines. This may have created “brain drain” problems for the Philippines, because it lost many of its medical professionals, executives, and technicians to the United States, but this migration has been a benefit to the American economy. Filipino doctors and nurses are on the staffs of many U.S. hospitals, and teachers from the Philippines are employed in many U.S. schools. Filipinos in American Society By 1990, more than 1.4 million people in the United States identified themselves as Filipino Americans. About 740,000 of these Filipino Americans lived in California, and 170,000 members of this group lived in Hawaii. The Chicago area is also home to a fairly large number of Filipinos. Most Filipino Americans are immigrants. In 1990, of all Filipinos in the United States, 64 percent were foreign-born and almost one-third had arrived during the previous decade. Numbers of foreign-born Filipinos increased even more during the 1990’s. From 1990 to March, 1997, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the number of foreign-born Filipino Americans grew from 913,723 to 1,132,000. 261

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Filipino Immigration to the United States, 1934-2003 60,000 55,000 50,000


45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 1946 Philippine independence

10,000 5,000 0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1934-1940

Source: U.S . Census Bureau. Note that Filipino immigration before 1934 was regarded as insular.

Women outnumber men among foreign-born Filipinos, largely because marriage to U.S. citizens has continued to be a major source of migration from the Philippines. In 1990, women made up 57 percent of all foreign-born Filipino Americans and almost 60 percent of foreign-born Filipino Americans who had arrived during the 1980’s. The fact that professionals, especially medical professionals, have been such a large part of the third wave of immigrants has meant that many Filipino Americans hold middle-class jobs. A majority of employed Filipinos in the United States (55 percent) held white-collar jobs in 1990. Almost one out of every four employed Filipino Americans over the age of sixteen worked in health services. By contrast, fewer than one out of every ten employed Ameri262

Filipino immigrants

cans of all backgrounds worked in hospitals or in health-related jobs in that year. The professional specialization of so many Filipino Americans tends to make them a relatively prosperous group. The median household income of Filipino Americans in 1990 was $43,780, compared with $30,056 among Americans in general. Further, although 10 percent of all American families lived below the poverty level in 1990, only slightly more than 5 percent of Filipino families in the United States lived in poverty. Many Filipino Americans, especially the early agricultural laborers in California, experienced discrimination. However, modern Filipinos usually report relatively few problems in their relations with members of other racial and ethnic groups. Familiarity with the English language and with mainstream American culture, high levels of marriage with white and black Americans, and a concentration in skilled occupations and white-collar professions tend to help Filipino Americans in interethnic relations. One reflection of the high degree of integration of Filipino Americans into American society is the high percentage of foreign-born Filipino Americans who take on U.S. citizenship. More than one-fourth of the Filipinos who arrived in the United States during the 1980’s had been naturalized as citizens by 1990. More than 80 percent of those who had arrived before 1980 had become citizens. By contrast, fewer than 15 percent of all people who had immigrated to the United States during the 1980’s had become citizens, and only 61 percent of foreign-born people who had immigrated before 1980 had become citizens. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading For broad surveys of Filipino American history and communities, see Veltisezar B. Bautista’s The Filipino Americans: From 1763 to the Present—Their History, Culture, and Traditions (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Bookhaus, 1998) and Barbara Mercedes Posadas’s The Filipino Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999). Yen Le Espiritu’s Filipino American Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995) presents the narratives of thirteen Filipino Americans who tell the stories of their lives. Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997), edited by Maria P. P. Root, is a collection of essays that consider immigration from the Philippines to the United States, Filipino American communities and community institutions, mixed-heritage Filipino Americans, and Filipina mail-order brides in the United States. Luciano Mangiafico’s Contemporary American Immigrants: Patterns of Filipino, Korean, and Chinese Settlement in the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988) describes major waves of migration, locations of large communities of these three ethnic groups, and contemporary social conditions of the groups. Michel S. Laguerre’s The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) is a study of Asian ethnic enclaves that 263

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considers Filipino communities. For a more general study of Asian immigrants, see Uma Anand Segal’s A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), which survey the history and economic and social conditions of Asian immigrants, both before and after the federal immigration reforms of 1965. See also Asian American stereotypes; Censuses, U.S.; Filipino immigrants and family customs; Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants; Mail-order brides; Refugee fatigue.

Filipino immigrants and family customs Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Families and marriage Significance: Immigrants of Filipino ancestry have a number of distinctive values and customs regarding family, and there are large Filipino populations in the United States and Canada. By 1990 there were more than 1.4 million people identifying themselves as Filipinos in the United States and an estimated 127,000 in Canada. Both countries experienced a continuous flow of immigrants from the Philippines from the 1970’s through the 1990’s. About 40,000 entered the U.S. and about 6,500 entered Canada each year. Although Filipinos lived in all parts of the United States, Southern California and Hawaii were home to large, concentrated Filipino communities. About 740,000 members of this group lived in California and another 170,000 lived in Hawaii. More than half of all Canadian Filipinos lived in Ontario, primarily in Toronto. The large numbers of Filipinos, the continuing flow of new arrivals, and the existence of large ethnic communities all helped to maintain distinctive Filipino American family customs. In general, Filipino American families who live in areas where there are few other people from the Philippines retain few distinctive family characteristics. In the large Filipino concentrations, such as Los Angeles, continual contact among Filipinos has helped members maintain cultural continuity. Cultural Values and Family Relations Four widely recognized key cultural values guide Filipino family relations and family customs. These are utang na loob (moral debt), hiya (shame), amor proprio (self-esteem), and pakikisama (getting along with others). Children, from the Filipino perspective, owe an eternal debt to their parents, who gave them life. Children are 264


therefore expected to show obedience and respect to parents and grandparents. The cultural value hiya dictates that individuals feel ashamed when they fail to behave according to expected social roles, which are often thought of in terms of family relations even when they involve people who are not actually family members. Younger people are expected to show respect for their elders at all times. When children greet an older person, such as a grandparent, they show respect by taking the elder’s hand and bowing slightly to touch the back of the hand with the forehead. Older brothers and sisters are not to be treated as equals but are addressed as kuya (“big brother”) and ate (“big sister”). Moreover, older friends are often called kuya or ate. Children call unrelated adults tita (“aunt”) or tito (“uncle”). People who do not seem to recognize or care about these types of social relations may be referred to as walang hiya (“shameless”), a term that expresses very strong disapproval. Even when people violate social expectations, others will be reluctant to criticize them openly out of fear of offending their sense of amor proprio. Criticisms must be indirect, and they depend on individuals’ own sense of shame. Pakikisama, or getting along with others, dictates that people avoid direct confrontation. In terms of the family, it also means that individuals should always place the interests of the family and the maintenance of relations within the family first and consider their own interests and desires as secondary. In respect to these customs and values, life in North America has often led to tension within Filipino families. Children raised in the United States, for example, sometimes feel that it is humiliating to place the hands of elders against their foreheads. Adults, in turn, feel frustrated if children refuse to follow accepted customs, and they sometimes see their children as rude or even walang hiya. Young people exposed to American ideas of individualism also find it difficult to place the interests of the family before their own, which parents may find disturbing. Baptism and Sponsors Godparents or sponsors are virtual members of Filipino families, a cultural practice known as compadrazgo. When children are due to be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, mothers and fathers ask a number of men and women to stand as sponsors or godparents for their children. Two of the sponsors are recognized by the Church as the children’s godparents, but Filipinos rarely distinguish between these two primary sponsors and the other secondary sponsors; all are referred to as the children’s ninongs, if they are men, and ninangs, if they are women. Sponsors are regarded as being close to additional parents, and they are expected to help the children in any way they can. They give the children presents on birthdays and other major occasions and they play key roles in baptisms, religious confirmation, and wedding ceremonies. Since sponsors have an obligation to help children, people in the Philippines often seek out powerful or influential persons to play this role. In the 265


United States and Canada, however, it is much more common for close friends to act as sponsors, creating formal, customary ties among people who refer to each other as compadre or copare and comadre or comare (literally “co-father” and “co-mother”). Friends, even if they are not actually sponsors of one another’s children, often shorten these terms and address each other simply as pare or mare. Wedding Customs Since the majority of Filipino Americans are Roman Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church is usually central to wedding ceremonies. Even when Filipinos marry in civil ceremonies, they almost always get married again in the church. In the Philippines, grooms’ families traditionally pay all wedding expenses. Some Filipino families native to the United States or Canada have adopted the North American custom in which brides’ families pay wedding expenses, but most either continue to follow Filipino ways or compromise and share costs. Weddings in the Philippines, especially in the countryside, are often lavish events in which families spend far beyond their means providing food and entertainment for large numbers of guests. Filipino Americans rarely go to these extremes, however, and most restrict their guest lists to friends and relatives. Nevertheless, food remains an important part of wedding ceremonies, and guests at Filipino American marriages can expect to find a large array of Filipino dishes. Wedding rites among Filipino Americans often retain many Spanish Catholic customs not seen in other North American Catholic weddings. During weddings in which couples adhere strictly to Filipino traditions, bridegrooms give brides silver coins, known as aras, which symbolize wives’ control of household finances. This type of traditional wedding includes the brides’ and grooms’ sponsors as well as the maid of honor and the best man. One set of sponsors holds the veil, one holds a rope, and one holds a candle. Brides wear gowns that are very similar to those worn in other American weddings, but instead of tuxedos grooms and the best man may wear the barong tagalog, the formal Filipino shirt. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Almirol, Edwin B. Ethnic Identity and Social Negotiation: A Study of a Filipino Community in California. New York: AMS Press, 1985. Bandon, Alexandra. Filipino Americans. New York: New Discovery Books, 1993. Bautista, Veltisezar B. The Filipino Americans: From 1763 to the Present—Their History, Culture, and Traditions. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Bookhaus, 1998. Espiritu, Yen Le. Filipino American Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. ____________. Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 266

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Laguerre, Michel S. The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Mangiafico, Luciano. Contemporary American Immigrants: Patterns of Filipino, Korean, and Chinese Settlement in the United States. New York: Praeger, 1988. Posadas, Barbara Mercedes. The Filipino Americans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Root, Maria P. P. Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. See also Asian American stereotypes; Censuses, U.S.; Filipino immigrants; Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants; Mail-order brides; Refugee fatigue.

Florida illegal-immigrant suit The Event: Florida state lawsuit against the federal government demanding restitution for state expenditures on illegal immigrants, who were principally from Cuba Date: April 11, 1994 Place: Miami, Florida Immigration issues: Border control; Cuban immigrants Significance: Although the state’s lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, it helped to focus national attention on the inadequacy of federal funding of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. After claiming that illegal immigration to Florida was out of control, Governor Lawton M. Chiles, Jr., filed a lawsuit against the federal government demanding more than $884 million reimbursement for education, health, and prison expenditures incurred by the state of Florida. These expenses were related to illegal aliens who entered the state during 1993. To emphasize the serious economic pressures on local governments caused by illegal immigration, both the Dade County Public Health Trust and the county’s school board joined Governor Chiles as plaintiffs in the suit. The lawsuit named as defendants commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Doris Meissner and U.S. attorney general Janet Reno, along with regional and district officials of the INS. The complaint was filed on April 11, 1994, as Chiles v. United States. It al267


leged that the federal government, through the defendants and their predecessors, had since before 1980 “abdicated its responsibility under the immigration laws and the Constitution to enforce and administer rational immigration policies.” The suit also pointed out that, according to the INS’s own figures, at least 345,000 undocumented aliens resided in Florida in 1991. That number constituted at least 36 percent of all immigrants in the state. The lawsuit stated that Florida is a victim of an ongoing immigration emergency that endangers the lives, property, safety, and economic welfare of the residents of the state. On December 20, 1994, Federal District Judge Edward B. Davis threw out the lawsuit. In his decision, Davis said that he recognized the financial burden to Florida resulting from “the methods in which the Federal Government has chosen to enforce the immigration laws” but ruled that this did not give the state the right to recover money. He concurred instead with the federal government’s argument that the case represented a political rather than a legal question over “the proper allocation of Federal resources and the execution of discretionary policies” dealing with immigration. A National Immigration Crisis? In November, 1994, Governor Chiles faced a reelection campaign in a state in which much of the electorate was tired of successive waves of refugees from Cuba and Haiti. Political considerations were important in his decision to file the lawsuit early in the campaign year. Judge Davis, in denying the suit, admitted that Florida faced “a Hobson’s choice.” His written decision stated that if Florida chose not to provide services to illegal aliens, including closing schools, emergency rooms, and other service providers, the impact on the health, safety, and welfare of its citizenry could be devastating. If, on the other hand, Florida chose to provide the services, the costs could cripple the state. In the meantime, Governor Chiles’s lawsuit and other pressures pushed the Bill Clinton administration to ask Congress later that year for $350 million to help governors pay the costs of imprisoning illegal aliens convicted of felonies. In November, 1994, Attorney General Reno and INS commissioner Meissner promised a 40 percent increase in border patrol resources along the Mexico-U.S. border within the next six months. Such moves were clearly in response to the popular perception—in the other politically powerful border states of Texas and California as well as in Florida—that the federal government was not meeting its responsibility for controlling immigration. Many citizens were concerned that illegal immigration diminished the number of jobs available in an already tight job market. California’s Proposition 187, a ballot initiative passed by a large majority in November, 1994, threatened to cut off most public services to illegal immigrants. These services, according to Governor Pete Wilson of California amounted to more than $3 billion annually in a state with increasingly serious budget problems. 268


More than simple economics was at work. Both the Florida lawsuit and California’s Proposition 187 reflected a growing public backlash against large numbers of illegal immigrants and perhaps even against the relatively high rate of legal immigration. Not only was Chiles reelected in Florida, but Wilson also was re-elected, by a substantial margin. Most observers attributed Wilson’s margin of victory in large part to his tough stance on illegal immigration. Some immigrant-rights advocates accused Wilson of pandering to racial and ethnic divisions in a state with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Consequences Illegal immigration clearly remains a politically volatile issue. During the year following Florida’s unsuccessful lawsuit, a new Republicancontrolled Congress gave evidence of responding to growing public concern over illegal immigration. In March, 1995, House Speaker Newt Gingrich formed a bipartisan task force to consider strategies to crack down on illegal immigration. That same month, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat, assailed the Clinton administration for lax enforcement of immigration laws. Political pressures indicated the likelihood of much larger appropriations for INS enforcement of immigration laws. Increased funding for the INS eventually materialized. The service’s 2001 budget was set at $4.8 billion—a figure roughly triple its 1994 budget. Anthony D. Branch Further Reading Hernandez, Donald J., ed. Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. Collection of papers on issues of public health and welfare among immigrants to the United States. Levine, Robert M., and Moisés Asís. Cuban Miami. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Broad study of Cuban immigrants in Miami, which is the center of the largest Cuban community in the United States. Stepick, Alex, et al. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Study of competition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups—Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. Zebich-Knos, Michele, and Heather Nicol. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Critical study of changing U.S. policies toward Cuba. See also Cuban immigrants; Cuban refugee policy; González rescue; Haitian immigrants; Illegal aliens; Justice and immigration; Mariel boatlift; Proposition 187. 269

Garment industry

Garment industry Definition: Clothing-manufacturing businesses in urban centers Immigration issues: Economics; Labor; Women Significance: The decentralized structure of the garment industry, with its small and medium-sized firms and varying degrees of labor specialization, has always offered respectable but poorly paid wage labor for unskilled female workers, especially immigrants. In 1818, two-thirds of all clothing in the United States was homemade. The mechanization of the textile industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century provided cheap cloth, which needed to be processed to be marketable. The textile industry was therefore interested in speeding up the production process through the mechanization of the garment industry and the creation of a market of ready-made clothes. The introduction of the Singer sewing machine in 1852 and the mass production of paper patterns during the 1860’s were stepping stones on the way to the ready-made industry. Ready-made clothing was first produced for men, especially sailors, miners, lumbermen, soldiers, and plantation owners, who demanded cheap clothing for slaves. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing middle class emerged, which increased the market for ready-to-wear men’s clothing. The immigration of skilled and unskilled workers from southern and eastern Europe beginning during the late nineteenth century provided the needed labor force for the expansion of the garment industry. The market for readymade women’s clothing increased because of the growing number of women in clerical and sales jobs, as well as in light manufacturing. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the women’s garment industry expanded tremendously, and, by 1914, the women’s clothing sector had surpassed that for men’s clothing. During the 1920’s, the garment industry lost importance as a result of shifts in spending patterns away from clothing and toward personal transportation. Consequently, in search of cheap labor, manufacturers moved from the unionized cities in the Northeast—such as New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago—to smaller Appalachian communities in Pennsylvania as well as to Connecticut, the Southwest, and the Southeast. During the 1960’s, these so-called runaway shops started to go overseas, especially to Southeast Asia. Chinese immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and other minority groups continue to provide a cheap labor force in the sweatshops of the American garment industry. Gender Division of Labor in the Industry Before the mechanization of the garment industry, men produced custom-made men’s clothing, while 270

Garment industry

women made cheap clothing for women and children. Men worked as skilled tailors, while many women found work as seamstresses. Skilled female dressmakers underwent a “deskilling” process during the modernization process of the garment industry. Dressmakers became “operatives,” while male workers could secure skilled work. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the division of labor shifted from the types of garments that were produced to the types of tasks that were performed. During the 1870’s, male skilled and semiskilled workers invaded the women’s clothing industry, which had been a predominantly female domain. Male tailors continued to perform the skilled tasks, such as pattern making and cutting. The sewing machine opened the men’s clothing industry for female workers, who found work as poorly paid finishers. Seamstresses, who represented the majority of female garment workers, did piecework for clothing manufacturers or contractors. They received precut garments and finished them in their homes. Seamstresses not only received the lowest wages of all workers but also had to pay for rent, fuel, candles, and even needles in order to do their work. Low wages were the result of a huge labor supply: The seamstresses competed with prison labor, poorhouse labor, farmer’s wives and daughters, and church women’s sewing circles who did not depend on this income. Before 1880, Irish, English, German, and Swedish immigrant women worked in the garment industry. Between 1880 and 1890, Jewish and Italian immigrant women began to replace them. By 1890, about 40 percent of New York City’s garment workers were Russian Jews and 27 percent came from Southern Italy. In Chicago, Eastern Jews, Italians, Bohemians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Moravians worked in the garment industry. In 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City killed 146 garment workers, most of them European immigrant women. The public outrage caused by the tragedy led to the formation of the New York Factory Investigation Commission and paved the way for industrial regulations. Unionization of the Garment Industry Before 1900, the unionization of garment workers was mainly restricted to the organization of skilled male workers in the craft unions. This situation changed as a result of the militancy of immigrant garment workers. One of the most famous chapters in the history of immigrant women’s organizing is the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand.” In November, 1909, 20,000 New York City waistmakers (factoryemployed seamstresses) went on strike. The vast majority of the strikers were Russian Jewish women, joined by Jewish men, Italian women, and native-born women. Women became some of the most dedicated and idealistic participants in the labor movement. Militant and with a socialist background, they helped to form the new unionism—labor unions that organized throughout the industry. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers were the first unions to organize female 271

Garment industry

workers on a large scale and the first to employ women as organizers. Rose Schneiderman was a socialist activist and union leader who fled the pogroms in Russian Poland in 1891. She organized her first union in the United States at the age of twenty-one and was the first female vice president of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union. Schneiderman, an organizer of the ILGWU, later became president of the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), an alliance of immigrant women workers and upper-class white women that was supporting women’s unionization and lobbying on behalf of women’s concerns, such as protective legislation. Fannia Cohn, also an organizer with the ILGWU, established the education department of the union, which laid the cornerstone of workers’ education. Silke Roth Further Reading Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Blicksilver, Jack. “Apparel and Other Textile Products.” In Manufacturing: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, edited by David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten. Vol. 1 in Handbook of American Business History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Briggs, Vernon M. Immigration and American Unionism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Jensen, Joan M., and Sue Davidson, eds. A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Karas, Jennifer. Bridges and Barriers: Earnings and Occupational Attainment Among Immigrants. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2002. Levine, Louis. The Women’s Garment Workers: A History of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924. Waldinger, Roger, ed. Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. See also Asian Indian immigrants; Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Thai garment worker enslavement; Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire; Women immigrants.

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Generational acculturation

Generational acculturation Definition: Different degree and speed of changes in cultural patterns of groups when two or more ethnic and racial groups interact over a series of generations Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Japanese immigrants; Language; Religion; Sociological theories Significance: Although assimilation and acculturation are used interchangeably by sociologists and anthropologists, acculturation is a part of the assimilation process. Since its colonial period, America has received immigrants from all over the world and created a mosaic of ethnic groups of various races, religions, and national origins. However, Anglo-Saxons from England had the greatest impact on American culture, particularly in American language, religion, and cultural values. Many ethnic and racial groups have gone through voluntary and involuntary acculturation processes over time to conform to this AngloSaxon culture. Members of the second generation (children of foreign-born parents) are more acculturated than their parents, and members of the third generation (children of native-born parents) are more acculturated than theirs. The concept of generational acculturation assumes that the foreign cultures that immigrants bring with them will be attenuated over generations. Generational Difference The first generation of many immigrant groups established ethnic enclaves, such as Little Italies, Little Tokyos, Chinatowns, and Jewish communities, and provided new immigrants of the same national origin with elements of their old culture, including ethnic grocery stores, cafés, and restaurants, and protection from societal hostility. Firstgeneration immigrants were able to function in their own ethnic enclaves without speaking English and without changing their religious faith or cultural values. These immigrants were structurally and culturally separated from each other and from the core society, thus creating what scholar Horace Kallen called “structural pluralism.” Members of the second generation (American-born children) in general, however, achieved English competence and acquired American values through the public school system and the mass media. Because of societal hostility toward immigrants who possessed cultural traits not derived from Euro-American culture, native-born children, who witnessed their parents’ hardships, tended to abandon their parents’ culture. The second genera273


tion’s relinquishment of distinctive cultural traits frequently created a gap between them and their parents, who retained the cultural values of their nation of origin. Linear Model Historians often cite a theory of second-generation rejection, as if there were ironclad laws that dictated the cultural changes undergone by immigrant children. Generational acculturation tends to assume linear assimilation of immigrants to the core culture over generations. Members of the third generation (Americanborn children of American-born parents) are more acculturated than their parents. According to this linear model of generational acculturation, newer generations will either eventually be absorbed into Euro-American culture or con- This poster issued by the federal government during tribute to creating the American World War II to remind Americans of the positive melting pot. contributions made to the nation by immigrants Since the 1960’s, scholars have draws upon the concept of the “melting pot”—one frequently conducted research on of the underpinnings of generational acculturation. Chinese and Japanese Americans (NARA) to study generational differences in acculturation processes. Unlike most European immigrants, the first generations of Chinese and Japanese entered the mainland of the United States during a short and distinctive span of time; then immigration was blocked. Chinese first entered the U.S. mainland as unskilled cheap labor during the 1850’s, and their immigration was blocked by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. After the exclusion of Chinese, the demand for cheap labor attracted the Japanese, and their immigration continued until it was restricted by the Immigration Act of 1924. For both groups, the second generation was born during a rather distinctive span of time, and even the third generation can be fairly well defined by span of years of birth. The three generations were also rather discrete birth cohorts and experienced distinctive acculturation processes in the change of cultural and behavioral patterns, in integration with whites, and in intermarriage with other racial and ethnic groups. Nonlinear Model In 1952, scholar Marcus Lee Hansen described a renewed interest in ethnicity among members of the third generation: “What 274


the second generation tries to forget, the third generation tries to remember.” He argued that there may be internal social and psychological forces rather than external social forces that explain the persistence of white ethnicity. Members of the second generation, who observed the hardships that their foreign-born parents had experienced, tended to de-emphasize their ethnicity and cultural traits to avoid prejudice and discrimination from the larger society. Hansen found that members of the third generation, who are more acculturated in terms of English skills and American values and are free from severe discrimination, try to reconnect with their grandparents and their ethnic roots. Ethnogenesis theory, set forth by Andrew M. Greeley in Ethnicity in the United States (1974), also argues that ethnic identity and acculturation are situational. Although newer generations of immigrants share cultural traits with the host group, they also retain distinctive characteristics. This process of rejection and maintenance of original cultural traits is situational and contextual according to an ethnic group’s nationality, mode of entrance to the United States, political and economic climate at the time of entrance, and a host of other factors. Therefore, according to Greeley, acculturation is neither linear nor accelerated over generations. Scholars during the late twentieth century criticized the linear acculturation model, which assumed an Anglo-conformist perspective to analyze the acculturation process of ethnic and racial minority groups. These scholars argue that acculturation of these groups was a forced and involuntary process in order for them to be accepted as members of the host society. These processes are reflected in the episodes of boarding schools for Native American children, a different taxation system for Roman Catholics, prohibition of Spanish in public education, and so forth. Acculturation Process for Later Immigrants Generational acculturation of immigrants since the late 1980’s is different from the patterns mentioned above. Recent immigrants tend to retain their distinctive cultural traits over generations because of the emphasis on cultural diversity in the workplace and in the educational system in American society. The motives behind cultural maintenance are also related to the social class of recent immigrants. Immigrants who lack English skills retain their own language out of necessity, but immigrants who possess English skills and high socioeconomic status retain their language and culture out of desire. These immigrant parents hope their children will become bilingual and bicultural—able to speak two languages and live in two cultures. With an increasing number of immigrants expected in the twenty-first century and a continuing appreciation of diversity, more and more immigrants are expected to retain their distinctive cultural traits. Hisako Matsuo 275

Gentlemen’s Agreement

Further Reading Gordon, Milton. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Seminal work that remains the standard reference on the assimilation process. Greeley, Andrew M. Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974. Exposition of Greeley’s ethnogenesis theory, which argues that ethnic identity and acculturation are situational. Hansen, Marcus Lee. “The Third Generation in America” Commentary 14 (1952). Presentation of Hansen’s theories on third-generation immigrants. Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. Presents Kallen’s views on structural pluralism. Lai, H. Mark. Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2004. Study of cultural adaptations of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Includes chapters on Chinese cultural and rights advocacy organizations. Matsuo, Hisako. “Identificational Assimilation of Japanese Americans: A Reassessment of Primordialism and Circumstantialism.” Sociological Perspectives 35 (1992). Examination of the assimilation process among Japanese Americans. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants. Includes chapters on Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Haitians, and other West Indians. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Survey of the cultural adjustments through which new immigrants to the United States must go. Waldinger, Roger, ed. Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of essays on urban aspects of immigration in the United States, particularly race relations, employment, and generational acculturation. See also pot.

Assimilation theories; Ethnic enclaves; Hansen effect; Melting

Gentlemen’s Agreement The Treaty: Treaty between the United States and Japan that limited immigration from Japan to the mainland United States to nonlaborers, laborers already settled in the United States, and their families Date: March 14, 1907 276


Place: United States and Japan Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Government and politics; Japanese immigrants; Laws and treaties Significance: As a consequence of this 1907 agreement between the U.S. and Japanese governments, immigration from Japan to the mainland United States was limited to nonlaborers, laborers already settled in the United States, and their families. The first Japanese immigrants who arrived in California in 1871 were mostly middle-class young men seeking opportunities to study or improve their economic status. By 1880, there were 148 resident Japanese. Their numbers increased to 1,360 in 1891, including 281 laborers and 172 farmers. A treaty between the United States and Japan in 1894 ensured mutual free entry although allowing limitations on immigration based on domestic interests. By 1900, the number of Japanese recorded in the U.S. Census had increased to 24,326. They arrived at ports on the Pacific coast and settled primarily in the Pacific states and British Columbia. An increase in the demand for Hawaiian sugar in turn increased the demand for plantation labor, especially Japanese labor. An era of governmentcontract labor began in 1884, ending only with the U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Sixty thousand Japanese in the islands then became eligible to enter the United States without passports. Between 1899 and 1906, it is estimated that between forty thousand and fifty-seven thousand Japanese moved to the United States via Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico. Tensions Develop On the Pacific coast, tensions developed between Asians and other Californians. Although the Japanese immigrant workforce was initially welcomed, antagonism increased as these immigrants began to compete with U.S. labor. The emerging trade-union movement advocated a restriction of immigration. An earlier campaign against the Chinese had culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for ten years. This act constituted the first U.S. law barring immigration based on race or nationality. A similar campaign was instigated against the Japanese. On March 1, 1905, both houses of the California state legislature voted to urge California’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., to pursue the limitation of Japanese immigrants. At a meeting in San Francisco on May 7, delegates from sixty-seven organizations launched the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, known also as the Asiatic Exclusion League. President Theodore Roosevelt, who was involved in the peace negotiations between Japan and Russia, observed the developing situation in California. George Kennan, who was covering the Russo-Japanese War, wrote to the president: 277

Gentlemen’s Agreement It isn’t the exclusion of a few emigrants that hurts here . . . it’s the putting of Japanese below Hungarians, Italians, Syrians, Polish Jews, and degraded nondescripts from all parts of Europe and Western Asia. No proud, high spirited and victorious people will submit to such a classification as that, especially when it is made with insulting reference to personal character and habits.

Roosevelt agreed, saying he was mortified that people in the United States should insult the Japanese. He continued to play a pivotal role in resolving the Japanese-Russian differences at the Portsmouth Peace Conference. Anti-Japanese feeling waned until April, 1906. Following the San Francisco earthquake, an outbreak of crime occurred, including many cases of assault against Japanese. There was also an organized boycott of Japanese restaurants. The Japanese viewed these acts as especially reprehensible. Their government and Red Cross had contributed more relief for San Francisco than all other foreign nations combined. Tension escalated. The Asiatic Exclusion League, whose membership was estimated to be 78,500 in California, together with San Francisco’s mayor, pressured the San Francisco school board to segregate Japanese schoolchildren. On October 11, 1906, the board passed its resolution. A protest filed by the Japanese consul was denied. Japan protested that the act violated mostfavored-nation treatment. Ambassador Luke E. Wright, in Tokyo, reported Japan’s extremely negative feelings about the matter to Secretary of State Elihu Root. This crisis in Japanese American relations brought the countries to the brink of war. On October 25, Japan’s ambassador, Shuzo Aoki, met with Root to seek a solution. President Roosevelt, who recognized the justification of the Japanese protest based on the 1894 treaty, on October 26 sent his secretary of commerce and labor to San Francisco to investigate the matter. In his message to Congress on December 4, President Roosevelt paid tribute to Japan and strongly repudiated San Francisco for its antiJapanese acts. He encouraged Congress to pass an act that would allow naturalization of the Japanese in the United States. Roosevelt’s statements and request pleased Japan but aroused further resentment on the Pacific coast. During the previPresident Theodore Roosevelt. (Library of Con- ous twelve months, more than seventeen thousand Japanese had engress) 278


Japanese sugar plantation workers in Hawaii around 1890. (Hawaii State Archives)

tered the mainland United States, two-thirds coming by way of Hawaii. Roosevelt recognized that the basic cause of the unrest in California—the increasing inflow of Japanese laborers—could be resolved only by checking immigration. U.S. and Japan Negotiate Negotiations with Japan to limit the entry of Japanese laborers began in late December, 1906. Three issues were involved: the rescinding of the segregation order by the San Francisco school board, the withholding of passports to the mainland United States by the Japanese government, and the closing of immigration channels through Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico by federal legislation. The Hawaiian issue, which related to an earlier Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1900, was the first resolved through the diplomacy of Japan’s foreign minister, Tadasu Hayashi, ambassadors Wright and Aoki, and Secretary of State Root. Before Japan would agree to discuss immigration to the mainland, it was necessary for the segregation order to be withdrawn. In February, 1907, the president invited San Francisco’s entire board of education, the mayor, and a city superintendent of schools to Washington, D.C., to confer on the segregation issue and other problems related to Japan. On February 18, a pending immigration bill was amended to prevent Japanese laborers from entering the United States via Hawaii, Mexico, or Canada. Assured that immigration of Japanese laborers would be stopped, the school board rescinded their segre279


gation order on March 13. An executive order issued by the president on March 14 put into effect the restrictions on passports. Subsequently, the Japanese government agreed to conclude the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In January, 1908, Foreign Minister Hayashi agreed to the terms of immigration discussed in December, 1907. On March 9, Secretary of State Root instructed Ambassador Wright to thank Japan, thus concluding the negotiations begun in December, 1906. As reported by the commissioner general of immigration in 1908, the Japanese government would issue passports for travel to the continental United States only to nonlaborers; laborers who were former residents of the United States; parents, wives, or children of residents; and “settled agriculturalists.” A final provision prevented secondary immigration into the United States by way of Hawaii, Mexico, or Canada. When the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 cut off new supplies of Japanese labor, Filipinos were recruited to take their place, both in Hawaii and in California, as well as in the Alaskan fishing industry. As U.S. nationals, Filipinos could not be prevented from migrating to the United States. Susan E. Hamilton Further Reading Esthus, Raymond A. Theodore Roosevelt and Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. Extensive, detailed examination of President Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship with Japan. Kikumura, Akemi. Issei Pioneers: Hawaii and the Mainland, 1885 to 1924. Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1992. Brief but wellresearched text, with photographs that accompanied the premiere exhibit of the Japanese American National Museum. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Comprehensive history of American immigration policy. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. United States Department of State. Report of the Hon. Roland S. Morris on Japanese Immigration and Alleged Discriminatory Legislation Against Japanese Residents in the United States. 1921. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1978. Contemporary correspondence relating to the Gentlemen’s Agreement. See also Alien land laws; Border Patrol, U.S.; History of U.S. immigration; Immigration Act of 1921; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; Picture brides; Women immigrants; “Yellow peril” campaign. 280

German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s

German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s The Event: Period during which more than one million Germans and Irish immigrated to the United States Date: 1840’s Immigration issues: European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Nativism and racism Significance: The years before the Civil War, during which there was an influx of Germans and Irish into the United States, was one of the most significant periods in U.S. immigration history. Of the 31,500,000 persons counted in the 1840 U.S. Census, 4,736,000 were of foreign birth. That year’s census also showed that the greatest number of immigrants had come from two countries: 1,611,000 from Ireland and 1,301,000 from Germany (principally from the southwestern states of Württemberg, Baden, and Bavaria). The migration, which had gained momentum in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, reached large numbers by the 1840’s and grew dramatically during the 1850’s, when more than one million Germans and Irish came to the United States. The Crimean War, the Panic of 1857, and the Civil War were among the events that brought an end to this wave of immigration. When seen in broad perspective, the migration reflected the process of economic and social change that had gathered force in the period of peace after 1815. The rapid increase in the population of Europe served to magnify the evils that the factory system had brought about by displacing old societal patterns and swelling the army of paupers. Of far greater importance at the time, however, was the disruption of life for the agricultural masses. In Ireland, population pressures had led to a continuing subdivision of land and to a structure of paying rent to absentee landowners that amounted to economic persecution. The remarkably fecund potato made this complex system possible, but events would soon uncover its tragic limitations. Dependence on the potato was not as great in southwestern Germany, but the process of subdividing the land there had grown considerably. Moreover, the encumbrance of ancient tithes and dues was compounded by a web of mortgages, as debts were incurred to improve farming practices. In both countries, tenant farmers constituted the bulk of emigrants before the 1840’s. Yet their departure, inspired chiefly by the fear of losing status and not by immediate need, revealed that a long-run process of adjustment was in the making. The potato famine precipitated this process. The blight began in 1845 and 281


assumed devastating proportions by the following year. Untold suffering and death marked the movement of the Irish to the coast, where ship fever took its toll in 1847. Although the potato famine extended to Germany, there was less actual misery in the country. The rumor that the United States was about to close its gates, however, created a situation approaching panic among the many who were desperately seeking to emigrate before it was too late. The great exodus enabled a process of land consolidation to begin; consolidation, in turn, stimulated further emigration after the famine had passed. Repression in the wake of Europe’s Revolution of 1848 also added political exiles to the tide of migration from Germany, but their numbers were small. The overwhelming mass of people were driven by economic, rather than political, forces. Patterns of commerce that had developed between North America and Europe made cheap transportation available and helped to determine the way the newcomers settled in the United States. Irish immigrants came by two major routes. Ships carrying timber from Canada to Ireland made the return trip with cargoes of emigrants, most of whom then began the trek southward to New England. Another route lay through Liverpool, where the cotton ships from Southern ports returned to Boston and New York. Once in the new land, the mostly unskilled Irish took whatever jobs were available. It was common for male immigrants to start in canal and railroad construction and then move into the mill towns to take on more permanent work in large urban areas. Among the unique aspects of Irish immigration in the nineteenth century was that more women emigrated than men; thus, there were more Irish women than men in the United States throughout the century. Although female Irish immigrants have often been stereotyped as maids, they worked in many of the same occupations as other U.S. women in the nineteenth century and were often able to see their daughters move into higher-paying or more prestigious positions, such as that of schoolteacher. Germans, on the other hand, were unique because of the large number of family groups that emigrated. Approximately two-thirds of the Germans who emigrated came as family groups. The first large group of German Jews came during the 1840’s, as thousands fled social and economic persecution in Bavaria. The Germans, like the Irish, came by two basic routes, but greater diffusion and diversity characterized their settlement. Many chose to stay in the East, while others moved westward along the Erie Canal through Buffalo and out to Ohio. By the 1840’s, a larger contingent came to New Orleans on the cotton ships from Le Havre. Some remained in the South, notably in Texas, but the majority of German immigrants moved to the valleys of the Upper Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There, as in the East, they brought a range of craft and professional skills into the urban centers. The vast number who settled on the land, meanwhile, generally preferred to buy farms already cleared by earlier settlers. The reception of the newcomers was somewhat mixed. The abundance 282


of space and the ideal of asylum generally tended to make the reception of immigrants favorable. Persons of influence, such as Governor William H. Seward of New York, added to this positive viewpoint by recognizing the contributions that immigrants had made to the development of the country. Opposition arose on several grounds, however. The influx of immigrants undoubtedly increased the problems of crime, poverty, unemployment, and disease, particularly in large urban areas. Bloc voting and the fear of political radicalism made many fear the newcomers. The different customs of the Irish and Germans, such as German beer gardens and Irish wakes, offended many Americans. The belief that there was a papal plot among Irish and German Catholics to subvert Protestantism and democracy provided the greatest focus to nativist sentiments. During the 1850’s, a nativist movement known as the Know-Nothings attempted to harness such feelings; its timing and rapid demise reflected less a fear of foreign influences than the internal tensions engendered by the conflict of slavery and the disruption of the Whig Party. Few people in the United States called for anything more than closing the gate on any undesirable immigrants, and the lengthening of the probationary period of citizenship from five to twentyone years. The significance of German and Irish immigration in the two decades prior to the Civil War lies in the cultural diversity they gave to the United States and the assistance they gave to the building of their new country. Major L. Wilson Judith Boyce DeMark Further Reading Clark, Dennis. Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures. Contributions in Ethnic Studies 14. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Discusses the Irish in the United States from the colonial era through the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the push/pull factors of immigration. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Wellbalanced portrayal of Irish immigrant women, describing their lives in Ireland and their successes and failures in the United States. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with an emphasis on cultural and social trends and attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. 283

German immigrants

Griffin, William D. A Portrait of the Irish in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Photographic essay of Irish immigration, with detailed captions. Includes an introductory text with many drawings and photographs from the nineteenth century. Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Discusses the relationship of Germans in Europe and the United States. Compares the Revolutions of 1848 and the American land debates that led to war. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Brief survey of Irish immigrant history for young adult readers. Rippley, LaVern J. The German-Americans. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Focuses on Germans in the United States in the nineteenth century. Discusses German American contributions to U.S. culture. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German immigrants; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; ScotchIrish immigrants.

German immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Germany Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Native Americans Significance: Since the early nineteenth century, German Americans have constituted a major ethnic group in the United States. These early immigrants—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Separatist, and Jewish—assimilated relatively easily and completely and dispersed throughout the country. In contrast to other immigrant groups, such as the Irish, Italians, and Poles, few negative characteristics were attributed to Germans. The first German colony was established in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683 by Mennonites, an Anabaptist sect. (The Amish later separated from the Mennonites.) However, individual Germans were already present in the En284

German immigrants

German emigrants embarking for the United States at the port of Hamburg. (National Archives)

glish colonies and in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Hutterites, another Anabaptist sect, came to America in 1874, settling in South Dakota. Although pacifists, they were subjected to conscription during World War I. Most of the community migrated to Canada, but many later returned. Two Hutterites who were sentenced for refusing conscription died from maltreatment. Methodism developed a following among German Americans in the nineteenth century, and although the Methodist Church began phasing out the German branch in 1924, some congregations of the German Methodist Church persisted throughout the twentieth century. Germans also set up Baptist and Presbyterian Churches. By 1890, nearly half of German Americans were Roman Catholic. Catholics and Lutherans did not mix much, which tended to divide German American political influence. The German and Irish wings of the American Catholic Church experienced some conflict during the 1880’s and 1890’s, and before World War I, German, Irish, and Polish congregations attended separate Catholic churches. Similarly, German and Scandinavian congregations often established separate Lutheran churches, and German American and eastern European Jews generally formed separate worship groups, although the eastern European Jews commonly spoke Yiddish, which is more than 80 percent German. German American Jews maintained cultural ties with Germany until the Nazi period. 285

German immigrants

Relations with American Indians The Germans seemed to have less trouble with American Indians than other settlers in the eighteenth century, and in Texas, where thriving German settlements were established during the 1830’s and 1840’s, the Meusenbach-Comanche Treaty of 1847, negotiated between John Meusenbach and Comanche leaders Buffalo Hump, Santana, and Old Owl, was never broken by either side. Two German travelers and a German American made significant contributions to American Indian ethnology. Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, visited the United States in 1832 and produced a comprehensive study of the Mandan tribe, which later became extinct. Friedrich Gerstäcker, who visited the United States from 1837 to 1843 and again in 1849 and 1867, created a detailed ethnography of American Indian culture. German American Gustavus Sohon, born in Prussia, served in the U.S. Army as a surveyor in the Northwest. There he became familiar with several American Indian tribes along the Columbia River and made numerous sketches of their lives, which are a valuable part of the anthropological record. German Americans and Slavery Various German American groups spoke out against slavery in the United States. The Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania, made the first protest in 1688. The Salzburger Protestant colony of Ebenezer in Georgia, founded in 1734, also opposed slavery. The failed Revolution of 1848, during which reactionary authorities in Berlin and Vienna suppressed attempts at constitutional reform, resulted in thousands of liberal intellectuals migrating to the United States. These new immigrants, who were particularly active in establishing newspapers, had a major impact on the cultural life of German American communities. The Forty-eighters, as they were known, were strongly opposed to slavery, and under their influence, a strong alliance formed between abolitionist forces and the German press in the United States. Among the Forty-eighters was Mathilde Franziska Anneke-Giesler, an early champion of women’s rights who came to the United States in 1850. Although she wrote almost exclusively in German, she was in close contact with suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and often lectured in English. Antagonism to her feminist and antislavery attitudes caused her to go to England in 1860, where she lectured against slavery, returning to the United States in 1865. In 1854, Germans meeting in San Antonio, Texas, declared their opposition to slavery, and German Americans fought on the North’s side during the Civil War. In a battle with Confederate soldiers, one German American guard of sixty-five men lost twenty-seven people and had nine of its wounded murdered by opposition forces. Relations with Anglo-Saxon Society During the early nineteenth century, the German community in New York was significant enough to be courted by both political parties. A German Democratic Party organization 286

German immigrants

was created in 1834, and eventually a German language newspaper was established to reflect the party’s platform. The years before the Civil War saw the rise of nativism, and anti-Catholicism was rampant. In 1855, murderous rioters in Louisville, Kentucky, attacked German Americans because many of them were Catholic and foreign-born and tended to be politically radical. The German Americans’ opposition to slavery also created hostility in several regions. German Americans experienced some friction with Anglo-Saxon Protestants of a puritanical bent, who disdained frivolity, especially on Sunday, and disliked some German customs associated with Christmas because they appeared to be pagan in origin. This immigrant group also clashed with the growing temperance movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The breweries founded by Germans in cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and St. Louis, Missouri, contributed to the economic development of these cities, and German Americans largely controlled the American brewing industry. German Americans in Texas kept that state from becoming a dry state until national Prohibition went into effect. One of the major purposes of the German American Alliance was to oppose Prohibition. The German American Alliance (Deutsch-Amerikanische Nationalbund) was formed in 1901 as a national, sectarian, politically nonpartisan German American organization.

German immigrants celebrating at a folklore festival in Washington, D.C . The slogan on the banner translates as “A Toast, a toast to happiness: One, two, three, drink up!” (Smithsonian Institution)

287

German immigrants

German Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 150,000 140,000 130,000


120,000 110,000

Revolution of 1848

100,000


90,000

1933-1945 Nazi government

80,000 70,000

1939-1945 World War II

60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

1991-2000

2001-2003

1971-1980

1981-1990

1961-1970

1941-1950

1951-1960

1921-1930

1931-1940

1901-1910

1911-1920

1891-1900

1871-1880

1881-1890

1851-1860

1861-1870

1841-1850

1821-1830

1831-1840


It reached a membership of three million by 1916 to become the largest ethnic organization in U.S. history. Congress abrogated the organization’s charter in 1918. Germans were also active in the labor movement that began after the Civil War and in radical politics, which caused some conflict with the dominant society. World War I U.S. entry into World War I unleashed a tremendous irrational hostility toward anything German, including music—not just folk or popular music but classical music and opera. German Americans were harassed and subjected to physical assault, vandalism, and even murder. This hysteria existed even in areas where German Americans constituted more than onethird of the population or even a majority. Laws in various states forbade teaching German in schools and speaking German in public, and thousands were convicted. Such laws were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923. Anti-German attitudes lin288

German immigrants

gered for a few years after the war and accelerated Anglicization of churches, social organizations, and newspapers. World War II In 1936, the Deutschamerikanische Volksbund, the German American Bund, replaced an earlier organization intended to represent the Nazi Party in the United States. The membership was believed to be only sixtyfive hundred, and 40 percent were not actually of German stock, but the organization’s posturing, arrogance, and hostility in effect mobilized public opinion against the Nazis and complicated diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany. The Steuben Society, the most prestigious German American organization, and other German organizations felt it necessary to repudiate the Bund, and German American antifascist organizations were formed. After World War II, German American ethnic identity became increasingly tenuous as the population moved to the suburbs, and changes in recreational tastes weakened ties to German culture. Postwar German immigrants were less inclined to take part in German cultural organizations. In 1948, the Russian blockade of the land routes to West Berlin made that city, and by extension West Germany, a symbol of freedom and democracy, giving Americans a more positive attitude toward Germany. West Germany became a military ally, and during the second half of the century, became increasingly integrated into the pan-European identity of the European Union. Similarly, German Americans came to identify more with the broader European American culture. William L. Reinshagen Further Reading Victor R. Greene’s A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004) is a comparative study of challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups including Germans. LaVern Ripley’s The German-Americans (Boston: Twayne, 1976) is a well-written history of Germans in the United States from colonial times to the U.S. Bicentennial, explaining contemporaneous events in German Europe and mentioning prominent German Americans. Alfred Llau’s Deutschland––United States of America, 16831983 (Bielefeld, Germany: Univers-Verlag, 1983) covers three hundred years of immigration and German-American relations. Gerard Wilk’s Americans from Germany (New York: German Information Center, 1976) focuses particularly on the experiences of German Americans over the years, and Irene M. Franck’s The German American Heritage (New York: Facts On File, 1988) provides details and statistical information. German Culture in Texas, edited by Glen E. Lich and Dona B. Reeves (Boston: Twayne, 1980), is a collection of articles on various aspects of the German regions of Texas. The University of Wisconsin publishes The Yearbook of German American Studies and annotated bibliographies. 289

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See also Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; English-only and official English movements; Euro-Americans; European immigrants, 1790-1892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Jewish immigrants; War brides; War Brides Act.

González rescue The Event: Rescue of Elián González, a young Cuban boy who survived the sinking of a refugee boat off the coast of Florida Date: November 25, 1999 Place: Miami, Florida Immigration issues: Border control; Cuban immigrants; Families and marriage; West Indian immigrants Significance: González’s rescue and transportation to Florida touched off a long battle between his relatives in Miami and his father in Cuba that influenced U.S. immigration policy and altered American images of Cuban Americans and their place in American society. On November 22, 1999, a five-year-old Cuban boy named Elián González and thirteen other Cubans left Cardenas, Cuba, bound for the United States on a sixteen-foot motorboat. At 10 p.m., their boat capsized and Elián’s mother, Elizabeth Brotons, and at least ten other passengers drowned. Three days later, Elián was found floating on an inner tube three miles from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and was taken to Hollywood Regional Medical Center. He was later released to his great-uncle, Lázaro González, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) until his immigration status could be determined. Lázaro González and Elián’s cousin Marisleysis González wanted to keep the boy in the United States, but Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, demanded that the boy be returned to him in Cuba. After González and his wife had divorced, Elián had lived with his mother, although the father, who had remarried, maintained a relationship with the boy. González believed that he had the right to claim his son, who was allegedly taken out of Cuba without his knowledge. Elián’s stateside relatives argued that his mother had died bringing her son to the United States in search of freedom and that she would have wished for her child to live in the United States. On December 8, Cuban president Fidel Castro demanded that Elián be returned to Cuba. After Castro’s statement, Lázaro González submitted Elián’s political asylum application to the INS. A policy created in 1994 grants any Cuban who makes it to land the right to apply for asylum and to stay in the 290

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United States. However, anyone caught before reaching land is sent back to Cuba. Political Battle On January 5, the INS announced that Elián belonged with his father and must be returned to Cuba. However, Elián’s Miami relatives’ attorneys pleaded for the attorney general to reconsider the case. In Miami, in response to the INS statement, hundreds of Cuban American protesters blocked intersections and cut off access to the port. Many were arrested. Following the protests, Lázaro González filed petitions for temporary custody of Elián in a Florida state court. Attorney General Janet Reno denied González’s request to overturn the decision of the INS commissioner. On January 22, Elián’s Cuban grandmothers came to the United States and met with Reno to appeal for Elián’s return to Cuba. They also met with Elián but returned to Cuba without the boy. Subsequently, Elián’s Miami relatives argued for an asylum hearing. U.S. district judge K. Michael Moore was assigned to hear the case, and U.S. gov-

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ernment lawyers asked Moore to dismiss the asylum lawsuit. Demonstrators tied up traffic outside the court, and others gathered outside the González home in support of the family. Judge Moore dismissed the lawsuit, and the INS informed the Miami relatives that it would revoke Elián’s legal status in the United States and strip them of their right to care for him if they did not hand over the boy once the appeals were exhausted. In March, Castro announced that he would send Juan Miguel González to the United States to pick up his son. The U.S. State Department approved visas for González, his wife, and their infant son as well as Elián’s cousin, his teacher, and his pediatrician to travel to the United States. On April 6, the Cubans arrived in Washington, D.C. Following more demonstrations, Miami Dade mayor Alex Penelas called on the Cuban American community for peace. Reno met with Elián’s Miami relatives and ordered them to surrender the boy. However, the relatives defied the order and obtained a court order to keep Elián in the United States. The federal appeals court extended the court order until a May hearing. Nevertheless, on April 22, after long negotiations with Elián’s Miami relatives and their lawyers, Reno gave orders for federal agents to seize Elián from their home. In response to the surprise 5:15 a.m. raid in which Elián was removed from the home, people in Miami rioted in the streets for two days. More than 268 people were arrested. On May 11, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta heard oral arguments from lawyers for Elián’s father and Miami relatives. However, on June 1, the Atlanta federal court ruled Elián was not entitled to a political asylum hearing and upheld a Miami federal judge’s ruling that Elián’s father had the right to speak on his behalf. After several requests from the Miami relatives’ attorneys, the court advised them that the injunction preventing Elián from leaving the United States would expire at 4 p.m. on June 28, and on that day, Elián, his father, and the rest of his family and friends returned to Cuba. Consequences For Castro and his people, Elián represented a kidnapped child who should be returned to his father. The streets of Cardenas, Elián’s place of birth, were filled with posters demanding Elián’s return to Cuba. Castro’s ultimatums and his handling of the situation may have enhanced his stature among his followers. However, some Cuba experts suggested that Castro used the situation to distract human rights advocates from political and human rights problems during 1999 in Cuba and his own people from severe economic problems during 2000. For Cuban Americans in Miami, Elián was a symbol of Cuban suffering and a poster child for the anti-Castro movement. They felt that he would have access to a more prosperous life in the United States and that once he returned to Cuba, he would live a life of communist brainwashing. Although many Cuban Americans thought that trying to keep the boy in the United States was the right thing to do, influential voices questioned whether they should have made a five-year-old child a symbol of the battle 292

Green cards

against Castro. Others thought that the Elián saga weakened the influence of Cuban Americans in the U.S. government. Finally, the case raised an important question of who should decide a child’s future—parents or government officials. José A. Carmona Further Reading Levine, Robert M., and Moisés Asís. Cuban Miami. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Stepick, Alex, et al. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Zebich-Knos, Michele, and Heather Nicol. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. See also Coast Guard, U.S.; Cuban immigrants; Cuban refugee policy; Haitian boat people; Mariel boatlift; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

Green cards Definition: Identification documents carried by immigrants in the United States certifying that they are legal residents Immigration issues: Border control; Citizenship and naturalization; Illegal immigration; Labor; Law enforcement Significance: Crucial possessions to resident aliens in the United States, green cards have come to symbolize the aspirations of many immigrants. The formal name of the plastic identity cards certifying that their bearers are legally admitted resident aliens is Alien Registration Receipt Cards. First used during the 1940’s, when the United States began registering and fingerprinting aliens as a wartime security precaution, the cards were originally green. They have continued to be known as “green cards,” even though their color and design have been changed several times to deter forgery. They were blue during the 1960’s and 1970’s, white during the 1980’s, and pink during the 1990’s. The cards are issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to aliens who have fully complied with the provisions of the immigration laws governing their admission to the United States as permanent residents eligible for naturalization. Each card contains the alien’s name, photograph, thumbprint, date of birth, registration number, and an expiration date. Cards issued since 1989 expire after ten years. 293

Green cards

The cards are highly valued, because they permit holders to legally seek gainful employment and to live undisturbed anywhere in the United States. Illegal aliens violate the immigration laws if they accept employment and are subject to deportation when discovered living in the United States. Students and visitors temporarily resident in the country are also barred from working and are subject to deportation if they overstay the visitor’s period specified in their entrance visas. Because of the value of green cards, a whole indusMexican farmworkers presenting their green cards as they try has sprung up to forge cross the border into the United States at Calexico to shop them. On occasion, INS employees have succumbed to in American stores. (NARA) the temptation to sell cards for substantial payments. Prices vary widely. In 1990, for example, an INS manager was accused of accepting more than $100,000 in bribes from Colombian drug smugglers for supplying false official documents that authorized the issuance of authentic green cards. Reportedly, false green cards could be purchased for as little as twenty dollars in central Los Angeles. Even if crude, the cards permit employers to hire cheap labor while appearing to comply with the letter of the law, which prohibits them from knowingly hiring illegal aliens. Green card holders are entitled to apply for naturalization as United States citizens after five years of residence provided they have not engaged in criminal activity, can read and write simple English, and demonstrate a basic knowledge of the history and government of the United States. They must pay income tax on all money earned anywhere in the world and cannot remain outside the country for more than one year without special permission. Aliens enjoy the civil rights, liberties, and due process of law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, as well as the protections of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments in criminal matters. When conscription is in force, green card holders can be drafted into the armed forces and may be required to register with the Selective Service. However, unlike American citizens, they are not entitled to U.S. passports or the protection of U.S. consulates when traveling abroad. Milton Berman 294

Gypsies immigrants

Further Reading Baldwin, Carl R. Immigration: Questions and Answers. New York: Allworth Press, 1995. Becker, Aliza. Citizenship for Us: A Handbook on Naturalization and Citizenship. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Legal Immigration Network, 2002. Kimmel, Barbara B., and Alan M. Lubiner. Immigration Made Simple: An Easy Guide to the U.S. Immigration Process. Rev. ed. Chester, N.J.: Next Decade, 1996. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Lewis, Loida Nicolas. How to Get a Green Card. 6th ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo, 2005. See also

Border Patrol, U.S.; Illegal aliens; Immigration law.

Gypsy immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from various European countries who call themselves Rom Immigration issues: European immigrants; Stereotypes Significance: The United States is home to an estimated quarter of a million to one million people of Gypsy ancestry. Nevertheless, Gypsies are one of the least assimilated and most misunderstood ethnic groups in North America. Most scholars believe that the Gypsies are descended from a caste of entertainers in ancient India. No one knows precisely why they left their original home, but ancient historical records report that thousands of these entertainers were sent to Persia in the ninth century b.c.e. From Persia, they apparently migrated to various parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Some Gypsies migrated to North America and Latin America during colonial times from the British Isles and from Spain and Portugal. The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte deported hundreds of Gypsies from France to the then-French colony of Louisiana, which became part of the United States in 1803. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North America received large waves of immigrants from southern Europe, and many Gypsies arrived at this time. The fall of European communism during the early 1990’s led to another wave of Gypsy migration from eastern Europe. 295

Gypsies immigrants

Gypsies living in Chicago’s South Side in 1941. (Library of Congress)

Despite their long history in the United States, Gypsies have retained a distinctive ethnic identity and resisted assimilating into mainstream American culture. They frequently avoid census takers, and because of the negative stereotypes often attached to them, many Gypsies are somewhat secretive about their ethnic identity. Therefore, there is no precise count of the Gypsies in the United States, although estimates run from 250,000 to 1 million. The two largest Gypsy American groups are those who trace their ancestry to southern and eastern Europe and refer to themselves as the Rom and those who trace their ancestry to the British Isles and refer to themselves as Romnichals. Gypsies from Mexico, who migrated to the Americas from Spain, often call themselves Gitanos. Most Gypsy Americans speak some branch of the Romani language as well as English. Modern Gypsies are less nomadic than their ancestors were, but Gypsies still move around much more often than most other Americans do. They tend to make their homes in large cities, where employment is available. The largest concentrations are found in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, and Portland. Relations between Gypsy Americans and other ethnic groups are often troubled by a lack of trust and understanding. Gypsy Americans do voluntarily remain separate from non-Gypsies, and traditional Gypsy belief even teaches that non-Gypsies are ritually unclean. They prefer to avoid public schooling and often educate their children within their own families, which perpetuates their distinctiveness. Popular images of Gypsies stereotype them as romantic wanderers or as career criminals preying on all outsiders. Despite the latter stereotype, though, the conviction rates of Gypsy Americans for se296

Haitian boat people

rious crimes such as rape and murder are actually lower than comparable rates of other Americans. Gypsy American conviction rates for theft, moreover, are no higher than those of the American population in general. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Sutherland, Anne. Gypsies: The Hidden Americans. London: Tavistock, 1975. Sway, Marlene. Familiar Strangers: Gypsy Life in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Tong, Diane, ed. Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. New York: Garland, 1998. See also European immigrants, 1790-1892; European immigrants, 18921943; White ethnics; Xenophobia.

Haitian boat people Definition: Haitian refugees who attempt to reach the United States on small boats Immigration issues: African Americans; Border control; Illegal immigration; Refugees; West Indian immigrants Significance: During the mid-1980’s, increasing numbers of Haitians attempted to reach the United States by boat to escape the political chaos in their homeland. U.S. policy toward these illegal immigrants has varied between receiving the Haitians as refugees and treating them as unwanted illegal aliens. On January 31, 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court voted, by a vote of six to three, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Harry A. Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens dissenting, to grant the government’s motion to stay an injunction prohibiting the forcible return of Haitians who had fled their country. Attorney General William Barr stated that the government now had clear authority to return the more than nine thousand Haitian refugees held at Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. That authority would remain in force until a decision on repatriation could be made by the United States Court of Appeals of the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, and that decision appealed to the Supreme Court. In the weeks preceding the lifting of the injunction, the number of refugees fleeing Haiti had increased dramatically. When the government could 297

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no longer accommodate the refugees aboard the Coast Guard cutters patrolling the waters between Haiti and the United States, the naval base at Guantánamo was prepared for them. The base quickly became overcrowded as more refugees arrived daily. The U.S. State Department estimated that only one-third of the refugees qualified for political asylum. The remaining refugees were fleeing economic conditions. Hours after the Supreme Court lifted the injunction, the Coast Guard cutter Steadfast, with 150 Haitians on board, sailed from Guantánamo on the ten- to twelve-hour voyage to Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. Additional Haitians were sent back in the next two days. Previously, about four hundred Haitians had returned voluntarily through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. President George Bush had strongly condemned the growing political violence in Haiti. On January 25, 1992, he recalled Ambassador Alvin P. Adams, Jr., following an attack by police officers in civilian clothes on a political meeting called by Communist Party leader René Theodore, who had been nominated prime minister in a compromise concluded several weeks before the meeting. President Bush believed that chances for a political settlement in Haiti were decreasing and was concerned that the increasing number of Haitian refugees would be too large for the United States to handle. Opposition to the administration’s repatriation policy was raised by civil rights groups and others who charged that the policy was racist. Their attempt to stop the program by injunction had delayed the return of the boat people but did not stop it. The Refugee Problem In February of 1986, the military seized power in Haiti after a thirty-year rule by the Duvalier family. François Duvalier had ruled from 1956 to 1971 and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled from 1971 to 1986. After 1986, the military continued the extremely repressive and brutal policies of the Duvaliers. In 1990, popular demonstrations and a general strike brought about the downfall of the military, followed by open elections in December. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest, was elected president. He advocated far-reaching political reforms and social changes. He was able to remain in office not quite a year before being overthrown by the military. Amnesty International reported that under military rule the Haitian people were living in a climate of fear and repression and that hundreds of people were extrajudicially executed or were detained without warrant and tortured. Many were brutally beaten in the streets. Freedom of the press was severely curtailed, and property was destroyed by members of the military and the police. The nations of the Organization of American States, including the United States, imposed an embargo to pressure Haiti for the return of the duly elected president to power. The embargo added to the problems of the Haitian people, who were the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Shortages of 298

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fuel, food, medicines, and potable water developed, and unemployment increased because factories had to close when they ran out of fuel. More than 140,000 Haitians fled after the coup. During the month of January, 1992, 6,653 were picked up at sea. The Bush administration felt compelled to return those Haitians it regarded as economic, rather than political, refugees. The United States government had begun returning Haitians in November, 1991, but at the end of the year had been restrained by the injunction obtained by civil rights advocates in Miami, Florida. The Bush administration feared that at least an additional twenty thousand Haitians would flee the island. The lifting of the injunction in January, 1992, gave the administration a victory. The return of refugees resumed with the voyage of the Steadfast. Consequences The Supreme Court again refused, on February 11, 1992, to end the return of the refugees, and the repatriation program continued. When opponents failed to stop the program by court order, they turned to Congress. Representative Charles E. Summer, a member of the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees, introduced legislation granting Haitians protected status that would permit them to stay in the United States until Haiti’s military government was overthrown. The proposed legislation also granted a quota of two thousand refugees from Haiti. The legislation was not passed. The repatriation problem was solved in September, 1994, when President Bill Clinton sent former president Jimmy Carter, General Colin L. Powell, and Senator Sam Nunn to negotiate an agreement with General Raoul Cédras, the ruler of Haiti, for the return of Aristide to serve the remainder of his term. United States forces temporarily occupied Haiti to ensure an orderly transition of political power and the development of democratic government. The United States obtained a foreign policy victory in 1994 with the return of Aristide to the presidency in Haiti—where he was again ousted in 2004. At the same time, the problem of Haitians fleeing to the United States was solved. Civil rights groups in the United States and abroad, however, criticized U.S. policy on the basis of humanitarian and civil rights concerns. Others charged the United States with racism. Overall, the gamble by President Clinton when he sent troops into Haiti redounded to his credit and gave a boost to his foreign policy. Robert D. Talbott Further Reading Blake, Nicholas J., and Razan Husain. Immigration, Asylum and Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Laguerre, Michel S. Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. 299

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Stepick, Alex. Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998. Yoshida, Chisato, and Alan D. Woodland. The Economics of Illegal Immigration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Zéphir, Flore. The Haitian Americans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. See also González rescue; Haitian immigrants; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Mariel boatlift; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

Haitian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Caribbean island nation of Haiti Immigration issues: African Americans; Demographics; Refugees; West Indian immigrants Significance: Primarily of African descent, Haitians have immigrated to the United States, particularly New York and Florida, in significant numbers since the 1950’s. In general, U.S. policy toward Haitians has been unreceptive since the 1970’s, treating them as economic migrants rather than refugees. During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, many Haitians seeking asylum in the United States were intercepted at sea and forced to return to Haiti. This treatment contrasts with that of Cuban asylum seekers, who have generally received a generous welcome to U.S. shores as legitimate refugees. The U.S. government’s differential treatment of Cubans fleeing the Marxist-dominated Fidel Castro government and of Haitians fleeing a very poor country governed by right-wing repressive leaders caused many to question U.S. refugee policy. In addition, Haitians speak Creole and are black, leading some to suggest latent racist motivations for the U.S. government’s actions. The Haitian Immigration Experience Haitians, like citizens of most Caribbean countries, have for many decades participated in labor-based migration throughout the Caribbean region, including the United States. Haiti’s economy is among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, providing a significant reason for migration. However, authoritarian regimes also contributed to migration, as some people fled political repression. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, skilled Haitian professionals legally entered the United States and Canada as permanent or temporary immigrants. Although many left 300

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Haitian Immigration to the United States, 1932-2003 20,000 1986-1990 military rule

18,000


16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 1915-1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti

4,000 2,000

1957-1986 Duvalier family dictatorships

0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1932-1940 Source: U.S . Census Bureau.

Haiti in part because of political repression, they were treated as routine immigrants rather than refugees. Legal immigration continued throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, but larger numbers of much poorer people also began to leave Haiti by boat. For many years, Haiti was governed by the authoritarian regimes of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who finally fled the country in 1986. A series of repressive regimes continued to rule the country until Haiti’s first democratically elected government, that of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was established in 1990. This government was overthrown by a military coup in 1991, however, and had to be reinstalled by the international community in 1994, after three years of devastating economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations that, coupled with domestic political repression, precipitated large flows of refugees. The refugee flows subsided once the military regime gave up power, the U.N. peacekeeping forces were deployed, the Aristide government was reestablished, and the economic sanctions were removed. However, another military coup overthrew Aristide a second time in early 2004. 301

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Thousands of Haitians have immigrated to the United States since the early 1970’s. Many thousands more were deported because they were judged to be lacking legitimate asylum claims. Those who managed to stay in the United States concentrated around already existing Haitian communities in Florida, especially in the Miami area, and in New York City, where several hundred thousand Haitians make their home. Lacking significant public assistance, the Haitians who settled in the United States during the 1970’s and 1980’s were obliged to rely on aid from charitable organizations and the already established local Haitian communities. Reactions to the Immigrants Reactions to the Haitian migration varied considerably. Generally, the earlier and more skilled migration out of Haiti was uncontroversial. As larger numbers of poorer Haitians, especially the “boat people,” sought entry into the United States, however, concern about the economic implications of these undocumented migrants arose. Local politicians, especially in southern Florida, under pressure from their constituents, including elite members of the Cuban exile group, along with others concerned about the potentially disruptive Haitian flow, put pressure on Congress and successive presidents to deter the Haitian migration. However, steps by the federal government to staunch the Haitian migratory flows eventually prompted political opposition by second-generation Cubans, voluntary agencies, human rights groups, and the Congressional Black Caucus. Many of these groups charged that the discriminatory treatment of Haitians was based at least in part on race. Efforts to detain Haitians in the United States were successfully challenged in court, and advocates for Haitians won a number of court-related victories to ensure fairer treatment for Haitian asylum seekers. The interdiction programs instituted by President Ronald Reagan, however, continued under the presidencies of George Bush and Bill Clinton. Only with the return of democracy to Haiti in 1994 did the migration pressures from Haiti to the United States ease. Future Prospects The return of stability to the Haitian political system and the application of considerable international economic assistance holds out hope that Haiti will benefit from economic development, thus encouraging investment at home and further reducing pressures for migration abroad. The booming economy in the United States during the 1990’s and the reduction in illegal and undocumented migration from Haiti helped to reduce the controversy surrounding Haitian migration. Robert F. Gorman Further Reading Three books that discuss the Haitian experience in the United States are Flore Zéphir’s The Haitian Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), Michel S. Laguerre’s Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), and 302

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Alex Stepick’s Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998). Stepick’s Haitian Refugees in the U.S. (London: Minority Rights Group, 1982) and Jake Miller’s The Plight of Haitian Refugees (New York: Praeger, 1984) provide critiques of the Haitian predicament in the United States. To set the Haitian situation into the wider immigration experience, see Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut’s Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a contrast of the Cuban and Haitian refugee and resettlement experience, see Felix R. Masud-Piloto’s From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). On the foreign policy implications of U.S. Haitian policy, see Western Hemisphere Immigration and United States Foreign Policy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), edited by Christopher Mitchell. Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) includes a firsthand account of an immigrant from Haiti. Flore Zéphir’s Trends in Ethnic Identification Among SecondGeneration Haitian Immigrants in New York City (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 2001) examines the Haitian community of New York City. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, is a collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes chapters on Haitians and other West Indians. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), by Alex Stepick and others, is a study of competitition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups—Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Dominican immigrants; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Haitian boat people; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations; Santería; West Indian immigrants.

Hansen effect Definition: Sociological theory relating to the experiences of immigrants in the United States Immigration issue: Sociological theories Significance: In The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrants (1937), sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen found that immigrants have more similar experiences in adjusting to life in the United States within generations than across the generations. 303

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Hansen reported that the first generation of immigrants, often finding it difficult to learn English and seek gainful employment, remained oriented to the home country. The first generation tended to observe customs of the home country in matters of dress, food, language spoken at home, recreation, and cultural values. The second generation, whether born in the United States or brought to the new country at a very early age, attended school with nonimmigrant children and attempted to assimilate because of peer pressure, which often ridiculed old-fashioned habits and values. The second generation, thus, rejected an identification with the parents’ home country in order to be accepted and prosper in the new country. The third generation, in contrast, has been eager to rediscover the traditions of the root cultures from which they came. Cultural pride, in short, emerged as the third generation’s reaction to the efforts of the second generation to neglect its origins and cultural heritage. The Hansen effect was postulated primarily with reference to European Americans, however. The culture of African Americans was thoroughly suppressed, and the various generations of Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans have tended to retain the values of their ancestors. Michael Haas Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Zølner, Mette. Re-imagining the Nation: Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories. New York: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2000. See also Assimilation theories; Ethnic enclaves; Generational acculturation; Melting pot.

Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian islands of the South Pacific Immigration issues: Demographics; Native Americans Significance: The ethnically diverse peoples from the South Pacific maintain relatively harmonious relationships while negotiating inclusion in the U.S. labor market and European American and Asian American institutions and exploring their rights as indigenous peoples. 304


Hawaiian Americans are individuals with Hawaiian ancestry who are American citizens. Pacific islander Americans are American Samoans, Guamanians, and people of the Northern Mariana Islands and Pacific atolls who reside on their islands, in Hawaii, or on the mainland United States. Pre-1980 census publications did not differentiate Pacific islander groups except for Hawaiians. Pacific islanders sometimes move to the mainland United States because of the mainland’s better economic prospects and educational opportunities. Generally, they adapt more easily to suburban and rural areas than to large urban areas. During the 1990’s, Asian and Pacific islander Americans were the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, with the Hawaiian group being the largest. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands The territory of Guam and the U.S. commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are believed to have been inhabited as early as 2000 b.c.e. by ancient Chamorros of MayoPolynesian descent. Colonized by Spanish missionaries in 1668, Guam was annexed by the United States in 1898 and ceded to the United States in 1919. Guam was occupied by the Japanese during World War II and retaken by the United States in 1944. In 1950, Guam’s inhabitants were given U.S. citizenship. When the 1962 Naval Clearing Act allowed other ethnic groups to make Guam their home, Filipinos, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, Indians, and Pacific islanders moved there, joining the Carolinians and present-day Chamorros. Guam’s 1990 census recorded a population that was 47 percent Chamorro, 25 percent Filipino, and 10 percent European, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others making up the remaining 18 percent. Ninety percent are Roman Catholics. Guam is a self-governing, organized unincorporated territory, and policy relations between Guam and the United States are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of the Interior. A 1972 U.S. law gave Guam one nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. Guam remains a cosmopolitan community retaining customs and traditions from many cultures and has a flourishing tourist industry. Saipan, Tinian, and Rota, the principal islands of the Mariana Islands, have a long history of foreign occupation, by the Spanish from 1521 to 1899, the Germans from 1899 to 1914, and the Japanese from 1914 to 1944. From 1947 to 1978, the area was recognized as a trust territory of the United Nations with the United States as the administering authority. In 1978, the islands became self-governing in political union with the United States. When the United Nations Trusteeship Council concluded that the United States had discharged its obligations to the Mariana Islands, the United States conferred citizenship upon individuals who met the necessary qualifications. The Security Council of the United Nations voted to dissolve the trusteeship in 1990. American Samoa The Samoans’ heritage is Polynesian. European visitors, traders, and missionaries arrived in the eighteenth century. In 1872, Pago 305


Pago harbor was ceded to the United States as a naval station. An 1899 treaty among Great Britain, Germany, and the United States made Samoa neutral, but when kingship was abolished the following year, the Samoan islands east of 171 degrees were given to the United States. American Samoa remains an unincorporated territory administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The 57,366 people (as of 1995), who live mostly on Tutuila, are American nationals. Although unable to vote in federal elections, American Samoans can freely enter the United States and, after fulfilling the residency requirements, can become citizens. Their language is Samoan but many speak English. In 1995, it was estimated that 65,000 Samoans had migrated to the United States, living mainly in California, Washington, and Hawaii. In Hawaii, they have experienced “cultural discrimination” before a public housing eviction board and have been called a stigmatized ethnic group. Hawaii It is estimated that the final migration of Hawaiians from Polynesia occurred about 750 c.e. Hawaii’s early social system consisted of the ali’i (nobility), who imposed hierarchical control over the maka’ainana (commoners), whose labor supported a population that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had increased to at least 300,000. England’s Captain James Cook, who reached Kauai in 1778, named Hawaii the Sandwich Islands. King Kamehameha first unified the islands of Maui, Oahu, Hawaii, Lanai, and Molokai under a single political regime in 1795. Kauai and Niihau joined the union in 1810. The first Congregationalist missionaries arrived from New England in 1820, followed by European and American merchants and Yankee traders. With Western contact came diseases for which the Hawaiians had no immunity or treatment. By 1853, the native population had fallen to seventy-one thousand. Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese immigrants arrived to provide labor for the sugar plantations. Workers coming from Korea, Puerto Rico, Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and the Philippines considered themselves temporary immigrants. By 1890, Hawaii was a multiethnic society in which non-Hawaiians made up most of the population. Hawaii’s independence was recognized by the United States from 1826 until 1893, when American and European sugar plantation owners, descendants of missionaries, and financiers deposed the Hawaiian monarchy, established a provisional government, and proclaimed Hawaii a protectorate of the United States. Annexed by Congress in 1898, Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and the fiftieth state in 1959. During the 1970’s, a Hawaiian rights and sovereignty movement emerged. Viewed, at first, as a radical grassroots minority, the movement gained momentum after a series of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. In 1977, representatives from many organizations and individual Hawaiians met in Puwalu sessions to discuss Hawaiian issues. State Supreme Court justice William Richardson advised Hawaiians to use the courts to redress grievances, challenge laws, and assert gathering, access, and water rights. A consti306


tutional convention, primarily concerned by the state’s improper use of lands ceded to the United States after annexation and transferred to the state in 1959, reviewed and revised the functions and responsibilities of Hawaii’s government in 1978. The following year, the legislature created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) to provide and coordinate programs, advocate for Hawaiians, and serve as a receptacle for reparations. Throughout the succeeding ten years, sovereignty groups strongly criticized the OHA. In 1993, the U.S. Congress officially acknowledged and apologized for the actions a hundred years earlier (U.S. Public Law 103150). That same year, the sovereignty groups Ka Laahui and Hui Na’auao were awarded education grants, and Governor John Waihee formed the Hawaiian Sovereignty Advisory Com- Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch of the Hamission, which was renamed in 1996 waiian kingdom, around 1893. (Hawaii State as Ha Hawaii. The most radical sov- Archives) ereignty group, the Oahana Council, declared independence from the United States in January, 1994. In 1997, a number of workshops were conducted by kupuna (elders) who emphasized unity among the various factions. When Governor Benjamin Cayetano resolved in his 1998 state-of-the-state address “to advance a plan for Hawaiian sovereignty,” he echoed the words of former governor Waihee. Waihee had also ventured his concern that while establishing self-determination, Hawaiians would tear apart the “multicultural fabric” of contemporary Hawaiian society. Hawaii’s population, which had doubled after the islands gained statehood, fell during the 1990’s, partly because of the slow growth that resulted from an economic recession and the vast reduction of the military presence on the islands. Between 1990 and 1995, the state experienced a net loss of 376,752 residents to domestic migration, partly because of the high cost of living, which in 1994 was 35 percent to 39 percent greater than the average U.S. large city, while the median income was only about 10 percent higher. Hawaiians living on the mainland remain connected with their heritage and values through social, university, and cultural associations that promote cultural events and regularly publish newsletters. Hula halaus exist in many 307


states, and Hawaii’s music industry brings musicians to the mainland for live performances. Local Hawaiian newspapers are available on the Internet. Pacific islanders confront various integration difficulties after moving to the United States. Because federal and state statistics combine Pacific islanders and Asian Americans, it is impossible to obtain reliable demographics. Such statistical reporting complicates the interpretation of data on household configuration, earned income, and educational and professional attainment. The U.S. government’s Current Population Report (1992) noted that the Asian American and Pacific islander population was not homogeneous; a population analysis of the group as a whole masked the diversity present. Pacific islanders do not identify with Asian Americans but with other island peoples. This issue becomes pertinent when Pacific islanders request funding from the Administration for Native Americans. Unlike Asian Americans, Pacific islanders qualify as Native Americans. Newly arriving Asian Americans are often placed in migrant programs. They then create businesses and quickly move out of poverty. Research at the University of Utah showed that Pacific islanders largely work in the service sector and their family businesses mostly involve unskilled labor. Most Pacific islanders reside in the western states. The Pacific islanders’ Cultural Association, founded in 1995, is an umbrella organization whose aim is to meet the common needs of all Pacific islanders living in Northern California. Susan E. Hamilton Further Reading Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States, by demographers Herbert Barringer, Robert W. Gardner, and Michael J. Levin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), addresses the adaptation of immigrants into American society. In his essay “The Hawaiian Alternative to the One-Drop Rule,” in American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, edited by Naomi Zack (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), F. James Davis discusses the history of the one-drop rule and the mixed-race experience on the islands. Lawrence H. Fuchs’s Hawaii Pono: An Ethnic and Political History (Honolulu: Bess Press, 1961) is a classic study of the diverse cultural contributions to Hawaii and the impact of American settlement from 1893 to 1959. Michael Haas’s Institutional Racism: The Case of Hawaii (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992) is a well-researched inquiry into racism and ethnic relations. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993) is a collection of essays by Haunani-Kay Trask, a spokesperson for Hawaiian rights. See also Asian American stereotypes; Asian American women; Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance; Censuses, U.S.

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Head money cases

Head money cases The Cases: U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the taxing of immigrants Date: December 8, 1885 Immigration issues: Court cases; Economics; Laws and treaties Significance: The Supreme Court approved a statute allowing Congress to levy a head tax on immigrants, thereby establishing congressional power over immigration and taxes imposed for other purposes. Early immigration in the United States was handled by the individual states, some of which imposed head taxes on every immigrant whom shippers delivered to the United States. They used the revenue from those taxes to create funds to alleviate the financial distress of immigrants. In 1849, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down these state laws as an interference with congressional power in the Passenger Cases. To help the states deal with the financial burden of indigent immigrants, Congress passed a federal per capita tax on immigrants, which it collected and gave to the affected states. Litigants challenged the tax, claiming that Congress could not impose a tax unless it was for the common defense or general welfare of the people. Justice Samuel F. Miller wrote the unanimous opinion rejecting their claim. He maintained that immigration was a form of commerce over which Congress had broad authority, and the tax in this case was really a fee associated with regulating commerce. Richard L. Wilson Further Reading LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. See also Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; European immigrants, 1790-1892; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Page law.

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Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy

Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy The Event: Critical report of an international human rights organization on U.S. treatment of political refugees Date: June, 1989 Place: New York, New York Immigration issues: Government and politics; Laws and treaties; Refugees Significance: The Helsinki Watch report documented ways in which the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s treatment of asylum seekers violated laws and international conventions and made specific recommendations for correcting abuses. Wars, dictatorial regimes. and natural disasters generated large numbers of refugees during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Many of the refugees sought residence in the United States. Some groups of newcomers stood excellent chances of receiving political asylum and resettlement assistance. Others, particularly those fleeing Haiti, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Faced detention, deportation, and an uncertain future in their homelands. Concerned citizens responded by forming human rights groups such as Helsinki Watch. Helsinki Watch was founded in 1979, in the context of increased world concern for the status of refugees. New legal instruments and standards had been drafted. These included the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also called the Helsinki Declaration). Under its provisions, thirty-five countries pledged respect for security and human rights considerations. They also pledged that it would be their aim to “facilitate freer movement and contacts . . . among persons, institutions, and organizations of the participating States.” Helsinki groups in many of the member states (including notably the former Soviet Union) assumed responsibility for monitoring their governments’ compliance with the Helsinki Declaration and other humanitarian standards. Human rights increasingly came to be viewed as a global concern. The focus of rights activists was no longer solely on how their governments treated their own citizens. It was extended to any government’s policies which threatened the human dignity of any country’s nationals. In the United States, the Helsinki Watch Committee and Americas Watch were soon joined by Asia Watch, Africa Watch, and Middle East Watch, which all combined forces as Human Rights Watch. Human rights ideals were promoted in a pragmatic manner, with specific recommendations addressed to policy makers. Some human rights advocates were criticized for “solving” problems by issuing re310


ports and declarations for an undefined audience, but the Watch Committees’ reports were straightforward, compassionate, and subject to implementation in the near future. Helsinki Watch Helsinki Watch was founded in 1979 by a group of publishers, lawyers, and other activists to promote domestic and international compliance with the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki accords. The Watch Committees enlisted one of America’s leading civil liberties attorneys, Aryeh Neier, as Human Rights Watch executive director. Random House publisher Robert Bernstein served as Helsinki Watch chair. Human Rights Watch compiled reports on human rights conditions on every continent. In particular, it advocated “continuation of a generous and humane asylum and refugee policy . . . , toward all nationalities.” An exemplary report was Detained, Denied, Deported: Asylum Seekers in the United States, dated June, 1989. The report explores concepts that are well defined in international law. The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 define a “refugee” as one who is outside his or her country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Asylum is a protected status which may allow refugees into a foreign country. In the United States, refugees may apply for permanent residency after one year. Legislation in the United States provides that refugees may (not must) be granted asylum. It also provides that if there is a clear probability of persecution, an individual is not (with few exceptions) to be deported to his or her homeland. Detained, Denied, Deported was the work of lawyer and Human Rights Watch intern Karin König, among others. It drew on the work of leading experts on asylum law, including Arthur Helton of the Lawyers’ Committee on Human Rights. König’s introduction notes that poor countries, such as Malawi and Pakistan, have assumed the biggest burden in providing asylum to refugees from neighboring countries. In contrast, such wealthy countries as the United States assert that most of those seeking asylum are not refugees entitled to protection, but “economic migrants” subject to deportation. International standards are succinctly and accurately described in the report. The principle of nonrefoulement prohibits return of refugees to situations in which they would be imperiled because of their race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. It applies only to refugees already present in a country; it does not create a right of entry. Article 14 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides the right to seek and enjoy asylum. (An earlier draft included a right to seek and be granted asylum.) A United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) conference in 1977 sought a treaty containing an individual right to asylum. The conference was adjourned indefinitely for fear that protections would be reduced rather than enhanced. 311


U.S. Asylum Policies A history of U.S. asylum policies identifies a new group of “spontaneous” asylum seekers from Central America and the Caribbean. Their treatment has been less generous than that accorded refugees from southeast Asia. The Refugee Act of 1980 is associated with improvements—withholding of deportation where refugees would face a “clear probability” of persecution was declared mandatory, no longer left to the discretion of the attorney general. The report gradually shifts from dispassionate description of refugee policies to ardent advocacy of reform. It notes discrimination in treatment of refugees from different regions. Applicants for asylum from U.S. allies such as Guatemala and El Salvador had to provide more extensive evidence and establish a higher level of persecution. The claim is bolstered by citing statistics: In fiscal year 1988, Salvadorans’ and Guatemalans’ applications were approved at rates of only 3 and 5 percent respectively, compared to 75 percent for Iranians and 77 percent for Ethiopians. The U.S. Department of State claimed that Salvadorans and Guatemalans sought asylum in the United States for economic (and therefore illegitimate) reasons rather than because of persecution. The Watch Committee report includes telling case studies of government insensitivity to human feelings, drawn from immigration lawyers and nongovernmental organizations. The State Department is castigated for its analysis of asylum applicants’ petitions, which is often superficial and tailored to foreign policy objectives. Recommendations in the Report The report offered five recommendations for the executive branch of the U.S. government. First is an end to policies that deter asylum seekers from appealing negative decisions or from applying in the first place. Specific mention is made of the Haitian Interdiction Program and of practices whereby individuals who present no threat to society are detained. The next two recommendations address the role and training of immigration agents and judges. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents should receive special training so that they can properly follow national and international law. To eliminate political bias, independent organizations’ human rights reports should be given greater emphasis than State Department analyses. An agency independent from the State and Justice Departments should be involved in asylum adjudication. Although asylum seekers present in the United States receive the most extensive publicity, many more apply through the Overseas Admission Program (OAP). The Watch recommends that the OAP include a formal right of appeal, and that its activities ensure generous and nondiscriminatory admission from areas where the UNHCR determines a need. Finally, decisions of judicial and administrative bodies (many of which assure protection to the asylum applicant) need to he fully implemented. Congress is prodded as well. It is urged to take appropriate action and to enact legislation to control the attorney general’s discretion to ensure consis312


tent and impartial application. When immigration authorities are expected to enforce and adjudicate immigration laws, the former task overshadows and distorts the latter. Although not in the Recommendations section, the text includes a specific plea for granting extended voluntary departure status (or “safe haven”) to Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Detained, Denied, Deported is part of an ongoing research program. Helsinki Watch pays close attention to U.S. refugee issues, and Americas Watch monitors repression in El Salvador and Haiti. Human Rights Watch played a key role in another 1989 report. Forced Out: The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time, which sought to “awaken, alarm, shock, and horrify,” in order to counter “compassion fatigue” in addressing global dimensions of the refugee issue. Efforts such as the Helsinki Watch group’s encountered opposition. Wellfunded lobbies sought to limit immigration and would make exceptions for very few of those who feared persecution. It would be up to other nongovernmental groups, Congress, and the courts to promote reform. Aftermath The Helsinki Watch report did not produce immediate change in U.S. policies and received minimal press coverage. By acting in combination with other advocates for the refugee, however, the Watch Committee helped encourage steps to make American policy more humane. A diverse movement advocating refugee concerns hoped to ensure humane treatment through three channels. First are reforms instituted by the executive branch and Congress. The Immigration Act of 1990 contained important new provisions. Cognizance of the plight of Salvadoran refugees was reflected in “safe haven” provisions (they were eligible for an eighteen-month period of safe haven if they could prove their nationality and show that they had arrived in the United States prior to September 19, 1990). The justification is that during a civil war protection is justified, but not asylum. Safe haven is to be temporary; applicants are expected to return to El Salvador eventually. Immigration rights activists welcomed this step, but they criticized stiff fees for applicants, higher than for applicants under similar programs for Libyan, Liberian, and Kuwaiti refugees. They also noted other measures such as the “investor visas,” which provided special access for rich would-be immigrants. Second are court decisions and settlements. In Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese a federal district court concluded that INS practices constituted coercion of Salvadoran asylum applicants. The court noted that applicants’ access to counsel was often frustrated and ordered remedial steps. In another case, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a public-interest law firm, charged the United States with ideological bias in processing Guatemalan and Salvadoran asylum requests, contrary to the Refugee Act. The government agreed under a settlement to allocate $200,000 for a publicity campaign to notify refugees of their rights. The INS agreed to review 150,000 applications that it had denied in the last ten years. Another 1991 case broadened protection for children who were detained. A federal appellate court was persuaded that due 313


process was violated by refusing to release immigrant children to nonrelatives or social service agencies. A third area is growth of the lobby which promotes the rights of refugees. Activists are drawing connections between human rights of a country’s own citizens and rights of refugees. The American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International have determined that important aspects of asylum and refugee issues fall within their limited mandates. Refugee studies are drawing attention from scholars in law and the policy sciences. Many of their efforts provide data which can be used by advocates for the potential asylum applicant. Key figures in the media and entertainment industry also help call attention to the plight of refugees. Aliens view the United States as a land with an open door to the oppressed, but that door might more aptly he described as guarded. Nongovernmental organizations such as Helsinki Watch will continue to play a major role in opening America to the persecuted. A useful instrument in this effort will be the issuance of reports such as Detained, Denied, Deported, reports that describe U.S. obligations under national and international law and identify policies that advance human dignity. Arthur Blaser Further Reading Allport, Alan. Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Study of U.S. immigration and refugee policies written for young-adult readers. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration. Among the specific subjects covered are the economic contributions of immigrants, government obligations to address humanitarian problems, and enforcement of laws regulating undocumented workers. Blake, Nicholas J., and Razan Husain. Immigration, Asylum and Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Study of human rights issues relating to immigration throughout the world. Includes a postscript on the challenges of protecting human rights after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Detained, Denied, Deported: Asylum Seekers in the United States. New York: U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1989. Well-organized, readable description of asylum law, with application to U.S. practices. Includes a useful statistical appendix. Frelick, Bill. Refugees at Our Border: The U.S. Response to Asylum Seekers. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1989. Brief report on a factfinding trip which raises many of the same issues as the Helsinki Watch study. Urges improved access for asylum seekers to attorneys and nonprofit agencies. Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch Annual Report. New York: Author, 314


1987-. Summary of the Watch Committee’s work. It reports on the variety of studies which identify and analyze human rights violations. Also monitors each U.S. administration’s compliance with human rights standards. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Helsinki Watch. Mother of Exiles: Refugees Imprisoned in America. New York: Author, 1986. Readable description of the plight of eleven detainees, published to coincide with the centenary celebrations for the Statue of Liberty. Arthur Helton’s essay identifies violations of U.S. and international law. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. Loescher, Gil, and John A. Scanlan. Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present. New York: Free Press, 1986. An excellent review of the history and politics of U.S. refugee policies. Notes and explains patterns of discrimination and the “unprecedented harshness” of the Reagan administration. Draws on extensive interviews and archival research. MacEoin, Gary, and Nivita Riley. No Promised Land: American Refugee Policies and the Rule of Law. New York: OXFAM America, 1982. Thoughtful analysis conducted for a nongovernmental organization with an emphasis on refugees from Haiti, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Discussion of INS procedures concludes that the INS violates U.S. and international law. Silk, James. Despite a Generous Spirit: Denying Asylum in the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1986. Pamphlet describing the asylum process, with an analysis of growing restrictiveness of U.S. policies. It recommends that Congress play a greater role in ending programs designed to deter people from seeking asylum in the United States. Yarnold, Barbara M. Refugees Without Refuge: Formation and Failed Implementation of U.S. Political Asylum Policy in the 1980’s. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990. Scholarly analysis of U.S. policies which finds bias and a failure to implement the Refugee Act. Examines nongovernmental groups which have represented refugees. Concludes that nongovernmental groups have enjoyed success in widening availability of asylum. Tables and appendices report interesting data. Zolberg, Aristide R., and Peter M. Benda, eds. Global Migrants, Global Refugees: Problems and Solutions. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Collection of articles on international dimensions of refugee policies. See also Cuban refugee policy; Haitian boat people; Refugee fatigue; Refugee Relief Act of 1953; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

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History of U.S. immigration

History of U.S. immigration Definition: Survey of immigration in American history Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Demographics; European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: Immigration to the North American continent began during the early sixteenth century, when settlers from the British Isles established the dominant culture of what is now the United States. Immigrants who have arrived since then have faced conflict and discrimination before being accepted into American society. The movement of people from Europe to the Americas began at the end of the fifteenth century with the urge to explore new lands and to take their riches back to the Old World. The desire to settle permanently in the Americas was caused by upheavals in European society that saw a doubling of the population, battles over agricultural land, and the Industrial Revolution, which threw craftspeople and artisans out of work. While some immigrants came to escape religious persecution, most came with the hope of bettering their economic position. The labor of these immigrants made possible the development of the United States as an industrial nation. British Dominance The dominant culture of the early colonies in North America was established by immigrants from the British Isles, and this cultural tradition still prevails in American life. Nevertheless, it was the Spanish who achieved the first permanent settlement, founding St. Augustine (in what is now Florida) in 1565. Other early Spanish settlements included Santa Fe (now New Mexico) and the missions in California founded by Father Junípero Serra. The Spanish political role in early American life ended with the cession of part of Florida to the British in 1763, the return of Louisiana to the French in 1800, a treaty that ceded the remainder of Florida to the United States in 1819, and Mexican independence from Spain in 1821. Yet these early settlements, combined with twentieth century immigration from Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, continue to influence American culture. Spanish is the second most frequently spoken language in the United States. The Virginia colonies in 1607 were the first British settlements in North America. The British immediately saw the need for laborers to develop the new land. They considered American Indians (the Indian population in the seventeenth century has been estimated at from four to eight million) to be an inferior race. Whereas the Spanish colonists had attempted to integrate 316


the American Indians into the life of their settlements (while exploiting their labor), the British colonists first tried, unsuccessfully, to use them as slave labor, then forced them to move off whatever land the colonists wanted for themselves. Through the years, the Indian population was reduced by war and European diseases. A large number of immigrants in the seventeenth century came from the British Isles as indentured servants or convicts. These immigrants usually were assimilated into the general population after their servitude, often prospering in their own enterprises. African Immigrants Black explorers had accompanied the French and Spanish during early explorations of the North American continent. Landowners in the West Indies had been importing slaves from Africa to work on their plantations for many years before the first Africans were brought to the Virginia colony in 1619. Slavery quickly took hold in America as the solution to the insatiable demand for labor to develop the new land, especially in the South with its economy based on rice, indigo, and tobacco.

Immigration inspectors examining the eyes of European immigrants passing through Ellis Island during the early twentieth century. Between 1892 and 1954, most of the immigrants to the United States from Europe arrived by ship and passed through Ellis Island. The development of inexpensive transatlantic air traffic was one of the reasons Ellis Island was closed as a reception center. (Library of Congress)

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Estimates of the numbers of slaves who survived the brutal conditions of the Atlantic passage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries range from hundreds of thousands to millions. This forced migration constituted one of the largest population movements in the history of the world. Nineteenth Century Immigration Emigration from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was stimulated by political and economic forces that had been building for hundreds of years. Early settlers in addition to the British included significant numbers of Dutch and French people. The voyage by sailing ship, which could take from one to three months, was fraught with hardship—disease, overcrowding, and deprivation of food and water. Nevertheless, the population of the colonies was approximately 2.5 million by the beginning of the Revolutionary War. By the early eighteenth century, most Americans were native born. The greatest wave of immigrants, an estimated thirty million, came from Europe between 1815 and World War I. During the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish, victims of British land laws and several years’ failure of the potato crop, became the largest group of immigrants. The second-largest group, German middle-class artisans and landless peasants, came as a result of an increase in population and the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Others emigrated from Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. Ellis Island in New York was the port of entry for most immigrants from 1892 until 1954. On the West Coast, an estimated 100,000 Chinese laborers were imported. These immigrants, considered a threat by native workers, were often treated like slaves. Between 1890 and 1924, a wave of immigrants began coming from Italy, eastern and central Europe, and Russia. A number of European Jews also came to escape religious persecution. Smaller groups came from the Balkan countries and the Middle East. These people, with different appearances and cusBritish cartoon from about 1912 lampooning American toms, were not as easily assimhypocrisy in criticizing Russian exclusion of Jewish Ameri- ilated as had been the people can immigrants at the same time the United States had a of western or northern Europe. law excluding Chinese immigration. (Library of Congress) 318


Twentieth Century Immigration Until the early twentieth century, the United States government welcomed most newcomers. While some local and state laws restricted the entry of lunatics, the illiterate, anarchists, or people with communicable diseases, there was little regulation of immigration, apart from the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The late nineteenth century, however, saw an upsurge of demands for restrictive legislation born of the fear that the quality of American life was being eroded by the newcomers. During the early 1920’s, in response to this fear, the federal government began to regulate immigration. There was little immigration during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Following World War II, however, and in the years since, a new wave of immigrants has come to the United States, many of them from Asia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. According to one estimate, by 1990, 6 percent of the population of the United States had been born in a foreign country. The increasing entrance of unknown numbers of undocumented immigrants since the 1970’s had, by the late 1980’s, created a sentiment for new restrictive legislation. Ethnic and Racial Conflict The history of immigration to the United States is, in many ways, a record of ethnic and racial conflict. Almost all new immigrant groups have faced a degree of resistance, ranging from quiet disapproval to blatant discrimination and violence, before being accepted as part of the American population. History books have traditionally romanticized the idea of the American “melting pot” in which the cultures of all ethnic groups combine into a new, unique American culture. More recently, however, many scholars have argued that becoming an American essentially entails adopting the ways of a dominant culture that is strongly based on Anglo-Saxon traditions and ideals; this phenomenon of adaptation has been termed “Anglo-conformity.” Nevertheless, immigrant groups have affected the culture of the United States in many ways, great and small. As for the immigrants themselves, far from being the poor and oppressed people celebrated in myth and poetry, most were healthy, ambitious young men and women. The weak and hopeless did not have the necessary energy to pull up stakes and take the risks required to start again in a new land. Identifying with their national origins and seeking to protect their own traditions, these immigrant groups often struggled against one another and against the larger society to find a place in American society. Immigrants during the colonial period, faced with immediate threats to their survival on the frontier and the backbreaking labor needed to develop the land, apparently gave little heed to ethnic identification or cultural difference. These early settlers (disregarding the fact that people were already living there) believed that divine providence had given them this new land, and they achieved a political unity that welcomed newcomers. During the late eighteenth century, however, Congress, fearing foreign-born political dissidents, passed the short-lived Alien Act in 1798 to expel suspected foreign 319


President Lyndon B . Johnson signing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which substantially changed U.S . immigration policy toward non-Europeans. Johnson made a point of signing the legislation near the base of the Statue of Liberty, which has always stood as a symbol of welcome to immigrants. Lower Manhattan can be seen in the background. (LBJ Library Collection/ Yoichi R. Okamoto)

spies. Although local and state controls on immigration had attempted to prohibit “undesirables” from entering, the first major federal immigration legislation excluded prostitutes and convicts in 1875. Nativism, a political and social movement that pits native-born Americans (themselves descendants of earlier immigrants) against newer arrivals, has been a persistent theme in American history. The movement was particularly strong during the mid-nineteenth century during the massive influx of Irish Catholics escaping famine in Europe. These Irish immigrants were persecuted by native Protestants fearing political domination by the Roman Catholic pope. These religious quarrels often ended in violence. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834, a mob burned the Ursuline convent in the belief that the nuns had kidnapped young women and were forcing them into the Roman Catholic sisterhood. In 1844 a series of riots in Philadelphia between Catholic and Protestant workers left many dead and injured and resulted in extensive destruction of property. This xenophobia, directed against the Germans and other “foreigners” as well as the Irish, culminated in formation of the KnowNothing Party, a political organization that attempted to influence the elections of 1854 and 1855 but ultimately declined as the nation headed toward civil war. 320


Anti-Asian Discrimination On the West Coast, a similar pattern of persecution was directed against Asians. Chinese immigrants began coming during the gold rush of 1848. Unlike the Irish, who immigrated in family groups, most Chinese were men who did not plan to stay; they intended to make money and return to their homeland. Chinese workers were employed by the thousands in building the railroads, as well as on farms and in many menial occupations. Bigotry against the Chinese took many forms, including broad accusations of vice and idolatry. Considered inferior and a threat to nativeborn Americans, Asians became the target of increasing resentment and violence. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress; it remained in force until 1943. Japanese immigrants began to enter the United States during the early twentieth century and were blamed for taking away jobs by providing cheap labor. A “gentlemen’s agreement” between the governments of Japan and the United States in 1907 limited the number of Japanese immigrants. By 1924 all Asians were excluded from entering the United States. Discrimination against Asians after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 resulted in the unconstitutional internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, and the confiscation of their property. In 1988 Congress offered an apology and partial financial restitution to the families of these Japanese Americans. Late Twentieth Century Blacklash A new form of nativism intensified during the 1980’s and 1990’s, based on the realization that there was a large and increasing population of undocumented immigrants, most of whom had entered or were remaining in the United States illegally. The majority of these undocumented immigrants were from Mexico, but there were also many from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The problem, many people began to believe, was that these workers and their families were taking jobs away from American citizens and were placing a financial strain on government educational and welfare programs. The economic downturn of the late 1980’s deepened such concerns. Considerable debate occurred concerning the reality or fantasy of this “threat” and concerning the actual costs versus benefits of the undocumented population; it was noted, for example, that many do pay taxes and that many perform jobs that most native-born Americans do not want. Immigrant Adjustments Immigrants to the United States, despite their many cultural differences, have shared the common experience of being uprooted from their familiar ways of life and of having to adjust to the lifeways of a new culture. As these immigrants become assimilated, they begin to think of themselves as Americans; ironically, members of assimilated groups may then begin to distrust more recent immigrant groups as being threats to the “American way of life” to which the older immigrants feel they belong. The traditional pattern of assimilation is for first-generation immigrants to begin at the 321


bottom of the economic ladder and work their way upward. They often settle in ethnic neighborhoods and continue to speak their native language. The second generation, having been educated in the public schools, tends to reject the “foreign” language and customs of their parents. Members of the third generation often return to their heritage, seeking both to be acculturated Americans and to recover their roots. The most glaring exception to this pattern has been the lack of true assimilation of African Americans. Because they were brought involuntarily to the United States and because the vast majority lived in slavery for more than three hundred years, they have faced unique handicaps. Following the Civil War, African Americans in the South experienced a brief period of political power during Reconstruction, but the backlash of the white supremacy movement put an end to this hope. The rise of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, voting restrictions that kept African Americans from voting, Jim Crow segregation laws, and a Supreme Court decision that gave approval to segregated facilities (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) were among the factors that stood in the way of assimilation following slavery. Slavery has left a legacy that still haunts the social, political, and cultural life of the United States. Several social and political movements during the late nineteenth century created a national demand to restrict immigration. Nativism was strong; the Ku Klux Klan’s activities were directed against “foreigners” as well as against African Americans. The fact that the appearance and customs of eastern and southern Europeans were different from other European Americans made them easy to identify, and this made them easy targets for discrimination. Socalled scientific theories about race were prevalent among white Europeans and Americans at the time, and these theories assumed the superiority of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples. This belief led to the eugenics movement. Racial purity was believed to be desirable, and there was a fear that “inferior” races would breed with the native-born European Americans and would lead to a morally debased American population. In the Immigration Act of 1924, Congress established quotas for immigrants based on a complex set of rules about national origin, favoring northern Europeans. The first significant deviation from this policy came when President Harry S. Truman used his executive powers to grant asylum to European refugees fleeing World War II. The McCarran-Walter Act (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952) revised the quota system used to determine immigration; it maintained the exclusion of immigration from Asia. The Immigration Act of 1965 finally ended the system of quotas based on national origin. Marjorie J. Podolsky Further Reading Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations. 322


Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced during the peak era of immigration to the United States by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Houle, Michelle E., ed. Immigration. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Collection of speeches on U.S. immigration policies by such historical figures as Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Roleff, Tamara, ed. Immigration. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Collection of articles arguing opposing viewpoints on different aspects of immigration, such as quotas and restrictions, revolving around questions of whether immigrants have a positive or negative impact on the United States. Sandler, Martin W. Island of Hope: The Story of Ellis Island and the Journey to America. New York: Scholastic, 2004. History of the most important immigrant reception, from 1892 through 1954. Written for younger readers. Vought, Hans Peter. Redefining the “Melting Pot”: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897-1933. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 2001. Study of the role of U.S. presidents in American immigration policy through an era of heavy European immigration and fundamental changes in American immigration policy. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Various social, political, and legal viewpoints are given by experts and observers familiar with immigration into the United States. See also Demographics of immigration; European immigrants, 17901892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration “crisis”; Immigration law; Justice and immigration; Migration; Push and pull factors; Undocumented workers.

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Hmong immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from a minority community living in several Southeast Asian nations Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Refugees Significance: Laotian mountain tribespeople from a preliterate society experienced culture shock when they migrated to the United States as refugees, beginning in 1976. Their adjustment difficulties contradict the stereotype of Asian Americans as a highly educated, successful “model minority.” The Hmong (pronounced “mong”) people have a long history of escaping adversity. For centuries the Hmong were an ethnic group persecuted in China. During the early nineteenth century, they moved to Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. In Laos, the Hmong settled in the isolated highlands. During the political turmoil of the 1950’s and 1960’s, many Hmong fought for the anticommunist army under General Vang Pao. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly ran and financed this Vietnam War effort in which Laotian men served in rescue missions and guerrilla operations. When the communists took power in Laos in 1975 and the United States withdrew, there were reprisals against the Hmong. To escape persecution, many Hmong fled to United Nations refugee camps in Thailand. In Ban Vinai and other refugee camps, Hmong families waited to establish political refugee status so that they could emigrate to the United States. Refugees on the Move The first Hmong refugees arrived in the United States in 1976, assisted by world relief organizations and local organizations such as churches. Between 1976 and 1991, an estimated 100,000 Hmong came to the United States. Because of their high birthrate, the population increased substantially. The Hmong dispersed throughout the United States, settling wherever sponsors could be found. The Hmong later followed a secondary migration pattern within the United States, moving to concentrations in California, Minnesota, Montana, Wisconsin, Colorado, Washington, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Areas of second settlement were selected based on climate, cheap housing, job availability, state welfare programs, and family unification. During the early 1990’s, Fresno County, California, had the largest settlement, followed by the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The reception the Hmong received varied from hearty welcome to ethnic antagonism on the part of some Americans who were ignorant of Hmong bravery and sacrifices in the Vietnam War and who did not grasp the difficulty of Hmong adjustment to life in the United States. 324

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Culture Shock Three branches of the Hmong came to the United States: the Blue Hmong, the White Hmong, and the Striped Hmong. They spoke different dialects and wore distinct traditional clothing but shared many cultural traditions that made it difficult to adjust to life in a modern society. Most refugees had never experienced indoor plumbing, electricity, or automobiles. For many Hmong, their only work experience before coming to the United States was as soldiers and as farmers. The traditional crops of rice and corn were raised on fields so steep that sometimes farmers tethered themselves to a stump to keep from falling off their fields. For the Hmong who tried farming in the United States, adjustment was difficult. Their slash-and-burn method of clearing land was not permitted. They were unfamiliar with pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Refugees worked as migrant farmworkers and in many low-paid urban positions that did not require English proficiency. The unemployment rate was very high for many Hmong communities. In 1988, 70 percent of the Fresno Hmong depended on welfare and refugee assistance. Education was another area of difficult cultural adaptation. During the 1990’s, many Hmong children struggled in U.S. schools. Many attended English-as-a-second-language classes, and many were placed in vocational tracks. Hmong children often had low scores on standardized tests of vocabulary and reading comprehension. When large numbers of Hmong children entered certain school systems during the late 1970’s and 1980’s, administrators and teachers were completely unprepared. Learning English proved difficult, especially for the older Hmong who had never attended school in Laos. Special training programs first taught Hmong language literacy, then English. Hmong beliefs about religion and medicine are very different from common attitudes in the United States. Traditional Hmong religion is a form of animism, a belief that spirits dwell in all things, including the earth, the sky, and animals. Hmong attempted to plaImage Not Available cate these spirits in religious rituals that often included animal sacrifice. In medical ceremonies, a shaman or healer tried to locate and bring back the patient’s runaway soul. Many bereaved Hmong refused autopsies, believing they interfered with reincarnation. Hmong family traditions often put them at odds with U.S. cul325

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ture. The Laotian practice was to arrange marriages, usually interclan agreements in which a bride price was paid. Women married as teenagers, then derived their status from being a wife and mother of many children. Marriage by capture was part of Hmong tradition but led to U.S. criminal charges of kidnapping and rape. Divorce was discouraged but possible in Laos, and children could be kept by the husband’s family. Such practices conflict with many U.S. laws and folkways. Other conflicts arose over U.S. laws that the Hmong did not understand. Carrying concealed weapons was common in Laos but led to arrest in the United States. Zoning laws stipulating where to build a house or plant a field were unfamiliar to the Hmong. Disputes arose over Hmong poaching in wildlife refuges. Culture shock seems to have taken a toll on the Hmong. During the 1970’s and early 1980’s, many apparently healthy Hmong men died in their sleep in what was labeled Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome. Possible explanations were depression, “survivor guilt,” and the stress of a new environment in which the men lacked control of their lives. The peak years for the syndrome were 1981 and 1982. Strengths of the Hmong Not all aspects of Hmong tradition handicapped their adjustment to life in the United States. Some members possess fine-motor skills honed in their intricate needlework. Without sewing machines or patterns, Hmong women embroider and appliqué to produce marketable products that also preserve their cultural memories. Flower cloths are square designs with symmetrical patterns. Story cloths are sewn pictures depicting past events, including war brutality and refugee camp life. Hmong developed memorization skills as part of their oral tradition of elaborate folktales. Hmong women are credited with admirable parenting skills, especially in their sensitivity to their children’s needs. The Hmong typically possess a fierce independence and will to survive. The Hmong appear to be adjusting to the new culture in which they find themselves, especially the younger generation. Hmong youth typically adopt American ways, wearing Western dress and enjoying rock music and video games. The group shows resilience in adapting traditions to changed circumstances. The Hmong have devised a custom of group support as clans form communities for mutual aid. Seamstresses have adapted their needlework patterns to satisfy Western markets. Crowded city dwellers often plant impromptu gardens in the narrow spaces between buildings. Nancy Conn Terjesen Further Reading I Begin My Life All Over: The Hmong and the American Immigrant Experience, by Lillian Faderman with Ghia Xiong (Boston: Beacon, 1998), combines thirty-five narratives and emphasizes generational differences. Another collection of Hmong immigrant narratives is Sue Murphy Mote’s Hmong and American: Stories of Transition to a Strange Land (Jefferson, 326

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N.C.: McFarland, 2004). For a recent account of the plight of Hmong refugees, see Linda Barr’s Long Road to Freedom: Journey of the Hmong (Bloomington, Minn.: Red Brick Learning, 2004). Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) looks at how cultural differences affected the treatment of a young epileptic Hmong American girl. Wendy Walker-Moffat’s The Other Side of the Asian American Success Story (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995) is a research report explaining negative educational experiences. Spencer Sherman’s “The Hmong in America: Laotian Refugees in the Land of the Giants,” in National Geographic (October, 1988), describes communities in North Carolina and California. Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989) includes a chapter on post-1965 immigrants. Lan Cao and Himilce Novas use a question-answer format to describe seven nationalities in Everything You Need to Know About Asian American History (New York: Plume, 2004). Julie Keown-Bomar’s Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugees (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2004) is a sociological study of Hmong immigrants. See also Asian American education; Asian American stereotypes; Asian American women; Model minorities; Southeast Asian immigrants; Vietnamese immigrants.

Homeland Security Department Identification: Federal cabinet-level department that coordinates the work of twenty-two separate agencies, including those overseeing immigration law Date: Established on March 1, 2003 Immigration issues: Border control; Illegal immigration; Law enforcement Significance: Created in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on the United States, the Homeland Security Department encourages active communication and collaboration among its numerous agencies and organizations to meet the department’s primary goal of improving the security of the United States against possible terrorist attacks and natural disasters. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, a massive reorganization of 180,000 federal employees from twenty-two different agencies was proposed by President 327


Dust clouds enveloping Lower Manhattan after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. (www.bigfoto.com)

George W. Bush and authorized by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This controversial restructuring unified a sprawling federal network of institutions and organizations into the Homeland Security Department in order better to protect against terrorist threats, as well as natural and accidental disasters throughout the United States and its territories. The enormous consolidation merged major agencies such as the U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Transportation Security Administration under a single cabinet-level department on March 1, 2003. With a proposed budget in 2005 of more than $40 billion, the department was tasked with overseeing and managing the daily operations of protecting national targets, coordinating domestic intelligence, preparedness, and research initiatives, and monitoring the flow of trade and legal immigration across all U.S. ports of entry. Agencies in the Homeland Security Department are divided among four major divisions: Border and Transportation Security, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Science and Technology, and Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. Borders, Transportation, and Security The Homeland Security Department’s Border and Transportation directorate oversees security and management of immigration, borders, and transportation operations in the United States. Its U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services branch (USCIS) provides all services and benefits relating to immigration. Customs and Border 328


Protection (CBP) serves as the enforcement agency and oversees the legal entry of goods, services, and persons into and out of ports of entry. The Federal Protective Service is charged with protecting all federal buildings and installations. Another major responsibility of this directorate includes the monitoring of transportation systems by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). With an estimated 11 million trucks, 2 million road cars, and 55,000 calls on ports per year, the TSA has the enormous task of protecting and monitoring all forms of transit, including airports across the country. Also working closely with other agencies in this directorate are the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the Office of Domestic Preparedness, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC). The federal Emergency Preparedness and Response directorate combines agencies from the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services with FEMA. These agencies now collectively deal with emergency disaster planning and response. Through grants provided to state and local response personnel such as police, fire, rescue, and medical response teams, this division ensures adequate training, equipment, and planning for emergencies. A central component of preparedness planning involves coordinating large-scale hypothetical disaster drills across communities to test their readiness for nuclear, biological, and attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Other agencies under this directorate focus on the stockpiling of drugs to treat biochemical assaults and training medical workers on how to treat victims. Domestic Emergency Response Teams and the National Domestic Preparedness Office work with FEMA and other agencies to develop comprehensive strategies for planning, prevention, response and recovery from acts of terrorism and to assist when natural disasters strike. Scientific Advancement and Threat Assessment All available technological and scientific antiterrorism groups across the federal government were combined under the Science and Technology directorate of the Homeland Security Department. These organizations work together and provide states with federal guidelines regarding responses to weapons of mass destruction. By merging resources, labs, and scientific knowledge formerly scattered across the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Defense, the Homeland Security Department tries to assist local and state public safety officials develop sound plans to monitor and defend their communities. The final group included in the Homeland Security Department is that of the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection directorate. Its agencies gather and analyze information from many national agencies and then issue threat assessment warnings to U.S. citizens and targets. The Homeland Security Advisory System issues these warnings to specific and general targets and encourages continuous public vigilance. The Advisory System also provides information to local and state authorities, the private sector, and international partners as intelligence is received. A color-coded threat level system is used to communicate the perceived 329


danger to the public and has been activated when threats have been discovered. These warnings attempt to protect important infrastructure systems that are most prone to attack, including food, water, health, emergency, and telecommunications systems. Using a federal television campaign, the Homeland Security Department has also encouraged Americans to make family emergency plans in the case of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. Additional Agencies and Initiatives In addition to Homeland Security Department’s four directories, the U.S. Coast Guard and Secret Service are also part of the Homeland Security Department. The Coast Guard monitors the coastal and interstate waters of the U.S. and its territories, assists other agencies in the prevention of the illegal entry of aliens and contraband, and provides rescue missions and aid to vessels in distress. The Secret Service also remains intact under the Homeland Security Department and reports directly to the secretary of Homeland Security. First established in 1865, the Secret Service was initially created to protect against counterfeit currency. Perhaps the service’s most visible role includes its responsibility for protecting former, current, and elected presidents, vice presidents, and their immediate families. The service also protects major political candidates, visiting diplomats, and other high-ranking government officials. The Secret Service Uniformed Division has also guarded the grounds of the White House since 1922. Other initiatives of the department focus on potential threats to banking and finance systems, health and safety of citizens, and the monitoring of potential targets and intelligence across the world. In an attempt expand collaboration among federal, state, and local governments, as well as organizations in the private sector, the Homeland Security Department is building a coalition of organizations that are linked together by a computer-based counterterrorism communications network. In 2005, the Homeland Security Information Network linked agencies in more than fifty major cities, all fifty states, Washington, D.C. and five U.S. territories through a state-of-the-art computer communication system. This system relays sensitive, nonclassified information to more than one hundred different agencies and approximately one thousand users who share a joint counterterrorism mission. Future expansion of this project targets including smaller agencies at county levels and private businesses and sharing classified information among cleared parties. This system aims to offer real-time information across geographical regions and between public and private sectors in order better to identify, share, and respond to terrorist threats. Future Challenges With the massive integration of numerous agencies across departments, the transition of key personnel, services, and crossauthorized duties has not been accomplished without difficulties. Audits of the department’s financial statements are used to determine what corrective measures are necessary to streamline government spending and identify po330


tential wastes of taxpayer funds. Dramatic changes within the agencies consolidated into the department are expected to continue as the agencies are studied and redundant jobs and assignments are eliminated. Budgetary and human resource management has been a critical area of concern from the inception of the integration of so many independent agencies under one umbrella department. The changing of employee benefits, the cutting of automatic overtime pay for personnel, the elimination of seniority and rank for those persons being adopted into new agencies, and the potential loss of trained employees to the private sector are all challenging issues that the department will address in the years to come. With so many important responsibilities concerning national defense, homeland security, disaster preparedness, and transportation and border protections resting on the shoulders of the Homeland Security Department, this fledgling department is expected to remain in the public eye and front and center on the war on terrorism in post-September 11 America. Denise Paquette Boots Further Reading Brzezinski, Matthew. Fortress America: On the Frontline of Homeland Security—An Inside Look at the Coming Surveillance State. New York: Bantam Books, 2004. Offering both hypothetical and real stories about the war on terror since September 11, 2001, this book takes a critical look at the Department of Homeland Security, the sacrificing of civil liberties, and damage done to international alliances. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Critical analysis of the erosion of civil liberties in the United States since September 11, 2001, with attention to the impact of federal policies on immigrants and visiting aliens. Flynn, Stephen. America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. A former Coast Guard commander offers compelling evidence of the continued threats to soft and hard targets in the United States and argues that much more should be done by the government and private sector to fight against terrorists. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Broad discussion of modern federal government immigration policies that considers all sides of the debates about the rights of illegal aliens. Kettl, Donald F., ed. The Department of Homeland Security’s First Year: A Report Card. New York: Century Foundation Books, 2004. This directory offers job descriptions in depth that are available through Homeland Security. It also includes relevant Web sites, phone contacts, hiring information, and advice for interviewing and preparing for a variety of careers through the Homeland Security Department. 331

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Lynch, James P., and Rita J. Simon. Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. International perspectives on immigration, with particular attention to the immigration policies of the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. Mena, Jesus. Homeland Security: Techniques and Technologies. Hingham, Mass.: Charles River Media, 2004. Examination of the efforts related to cyberterrorism and what systems and artificial intelligence are used to aggregate, integrate, and assimilate data that is integral to business, government, and individuals. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. Up-to-date analysis of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States since the 1960’s, with particular attention to issues relating to deportation. White, Jonathan R. Defending the Homeland: Domestic Intelligence Law Enforcement and Security. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2003. Law-enforcement perspective that details how the criminal justice system has changed since September 11. See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Coast Guard, U.S.; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; September 11 terrorist attacks.

Hull-House Identification: Settlement house founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr Date: Established in September, 1889 Place: Chicago, Illinois Immigration issues: Families and marriage; Women Significance: Hull-House represented an attempt on behalf of middle-class American women to address the needs of Chicago’s inner city, many of whose residents were poor immigrants. Inspired by Toynbee House in London, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr purchased a dilapidated mansion on South Halsted in Chicago and created Hull-House. Addams and Starr believed that the urban poor, particularly immigrants, had been victimized by industrialization. Consequently, they tried to improve their lot by providing a variety of services, including English classes, a day nursery for working mothers, a kindergarten, an employment bureau, and a health class. Hull-House soon became the best-known settlement house in the United States. Addams also advocated specific legal re332

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Hull-House. (University of Illinois at Chicago, University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection)

forms, such as a juvenile court system, workers’ compensation laws, and child labor legislation. However, she ran afoul of machine politics and urban bosses who saw settlement house workers as a threat to their own power. From its inception, Hull-House was an endeavor geared primarily to meet women’s needs. Addams conformed to nineteenth century gender roles, in that she saw women as natural nurturers. Consequently, she shaped HullHouse’s outreach to reflect this perception. The settlement house attracted numerous individuals as volunteers, especially educated, middle-class women who were interested in helping slum dwellers. Likewise, Hull-House provided an outlet for their benevolent impulses and served as a harbinger for later Progressive Era reform and regulation. Keith Harper Further Reading Addams, Jane. The Jane Addams Reader. Edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Selection of writings by Jane Addams, the founder of Hull-House. ____________. Twenty Years at Hull House. Edited by Victoria Bissell Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Scholarly edition, with additional autobiographical materials, of a book that Addams first published in 1911. Provides detailed account of the establishment, operation, and philosophy of Hull-House. 333

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Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, and Allen Davis, eds. One Hundred Years at HullHouse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. A compendium of primary sources about Hull-House, including numerous photographs. Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. An extensively documented examination of the contribution of U.S. settlementhouse workers to the development of social welfare. Provides a historical and ideological context for the work of Hull-House. Deegan, Mary Jo. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience Against Ancient Evils. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Study of HullHouse, from 1892 to 1960, in the context of racial and ethnic issues. Glowacki, Peggy, and Julia Hendry. Hull-House. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2004. Well-illustrated study of Hull-House, which is discussed in the context of its surrounding community. See also grants.

Machine politics; Settlement house movement; Women immi-

Illegal aliens Definition: Colloquial term for foreign-born persons who enter the United States without legal authorization and those who enter legally but violate the terms of their admission or fail to acquire permanent residence status Immigration issues: Border control; Economics; Illegal immigration; Law enforcement; Mexican immigrants Significance: The steady increase in the population of undocumented aliens in the United States presents a variety of challenges to the American criminal justice system. In addition to the federal government’s monumental problem of enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, state and local lawenforcement agencies face a growing problem of criminal activities by illegal aliens. In 1994, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) produced the first detailed national estimates of the numbers of illegal aliens in the United States. The INS estimated that 3.4 million unauthorized residents were in the country in October, 1992. Later, the INS estimated the number to be about 7 million in the year 2000. The U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate for that same year 8 million. Since the early 1990’s, the annual growth rate of the illegal alien population has ranged between 350,000 and 500,000. At that rate, the number of illegal residents in the United States was about 9 million 334

Illegal aliens

in 2004. That figure is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of the eleven smallest U.S. states, and some researchers believe that the actual number of illegal aliens is even significantly higher. The southern neighbor of the United States, Mexico is the single largest source of illegal immigrants. Of the more than 8 million illegal aliens residing in the United States in 2004, about 5.3 million—well over half—came from Mexico. Undocumented Mexican workers in the United States are an important part of the Mexican national economy. They send home an estimated $20 to $30 billion a year. An additional 2 million illegal aliens were born in other parts of Latin America, primarily Central American nations. Taken together, Mexicans and other Latin Americans make up more than three-fourths of all illegal aliens in the United States. About 10 percent of illegal aliens originate in Asia, while Europe and Canada supply about 5 percent. The rest come from Africa and other parts of the world. The U.S. Criminal Justice System The standard American response to illegal immigration has been increased border enforcement through the authority of the federal government. Throughout the 1990’s, the numbers of both illegal border crossings and illegal aliens in the United States increased incrementally. Among the strategies to stem illegal immigration were Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, and Operation Safeguard in Arizona. All were attempts to deter illegal border crossings. The U.S. Department of Justice allocated unprecedented resources to these innovative strategies, including additional Border Patrol agents, advanced computer systems, and improved security fences, lighting, and support vehicles. As a result, by 1998, the numbers of attempted border crossings and apprehensions dropped to their lowest levels in almost twenty years. However, human rights activists and researchers criticized these efforts and argued that increased surveillance along the border were not preventing illegal entries but were instead forcing undocumented immigrants to seek riskier methods of entering the United States. In response to these charges, U.S. president George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox later pledged to pursue immigration reform policies to address border enforcement and human rights concerns. The fact that the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, were perpetrated by illegal aliens made countering illegal immigration a top priority of the Bush administration. After that date, new federal laws and policies were adopted, including the Patriot Act of 2001, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. In March, 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was divided into three bureaus within the newly created Department of Homeland Security: the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). 335

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Although the federal government is primarily responsible for securing the nation’s borders, the impact of illegal aliens on the criminal justice system reaches far beyond the federal system. Indeed, the problem and its required solutions may have an even deeper impact on state and local jurisdictions. At state and local levels, the costs of arresting, prosecuting, sentencing, and supervising illegal aliens who commit criminal offenses have become a major issue. Some states have filed suits to force the federal government to reimburse them for the costs of criminal justice actions against aliens for whom the federal government is responsible. The federal government does reimburse states for some costs associated with criminal acts by illegal aliens. Section 510 of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) authorizes the U.S. attorney general to reimburse states for the criminal justice costs attributable to undocumented persons. The Bureau of Justice Assistance, a branch of the Office of Justice Programs, administers the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), in conjunction with ICE of the Department of Homeland Security. SCAAP provides federal payments to states and localities that incur correctional officer salary costs for incarcerating undocumented aliens who have committed at least one felony or two misdemeanor convictions for violations of state or local law and are incarcerated for at least four consecutive days during a reporting period. During the fiscal year 2004, the total appropriation was approximately $297 million. SCAAP payments are calculated with a formula that provides pro rata shares of the funds to jurisdictions that apply, based on the total number of eligible criminal aliens as determined by ICE. Criminal illegal aliens pose considerable challenges to law-enforcement efforts in part due to the highly criticized stance of many cities and counties that have adopted “sanctuary laws.” Such laws are local ordinances adopted in attempts to reduce victimizations of aliens and to improve crime reporting rates among immigrant populations. The National Council of La Raza and other advocacy groups have defended sanctuary laws by arguing that they promote community-oriented policing efforts and protect against racial profiling, police misconduct, and civil rights violations. Critics against the policy contend that such laws allow illegal aliens who commit crimes to circumvent federal law and avoid identification and deportation. Future Trends The number of illegal aliens residing in the United States grew steadily throughout the 1990’s. More than half of all unauthorized visitors in the country were born in Mexico. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, about 9 percent of living people born in Mexico now reside in the United States. Additional resources to deter illegal border crossings as a result of laws implemented following the September 11, 2001, attacks have done little to slow the influx of illegal aliens and there is no evidence to suggest that current levels of illegal entry into the United States will decrease significantly. Barring major changes in the nation’s legal immigration policy or enforce336

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ment strategies it is likely that immigration will continue at roughly current levels. More and more people will continue to enter this country lawfully. At the same time, however, it can be expected that many will enter the United States illegally. Controlling the national borders, thwarting organized alien smuggling rings, and identifying and deporting people who are in the United States illegally, especially those who commit crimes, will be priorities. Wayne J. Pitts Further Reading Ahmed, Syed Refaat. Forlorn Migrants: An International Legal Regime for Undocumented Migrant Workers. Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press, 2000. An international perspective on the problem of illegal immigrants by a Bangladeshi scholar. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration, including laws regulating undocumented workers. Cull, Nicholas J., and David Carrasco, eds. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. Study of the impact of ignorance, partisan politics, and unintended consequences in immigration policy during the post-Nine-Eleven war on terrorism. Kretsedemas, Philip, and Ana Aparicio, eds. Immigrants, Welfare Reform, and the Poverty of Policy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Collection of articles on topics relating to the economic problems of new immigrants in the United States, with particular attention to Haitian, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian immigrants. Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. Critical history of federal efforts to control the influx of undocumented immigration across the border with Mexico. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Scholarly study of social and legal issues relating to illegal aliens in the United States during the twenty-first century. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. Informative study of immigration of illegal aliens to the United States and Canada since the 1960’s, with attention to changes in immigration law. Yoshida, Chisato, and Alan D. Woodland. The Economics of Illegal Immigration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Analysis of the economic impact of illegal immigration in the United States. 337

Immigrant advantage

See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Chinese detentions in New York; Coast Guard, U.S.; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Green cards; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration “crisis”; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Justice and immigration; Operation Wetback; Plyler v. Doe; Proposition 187; Undocumented workers.

Immigrant advantage Definition: Sociological term for a set of distinctions among minority groups that reside within a society and those peoples who immigrate to these societies voluntarily from other nations Immigration issue: Sociological theories Significance: Immigrant members of ethnic minorities often have advantages over already resident members of their ethnic groups. Resident minority groups are often “marginalized,” living on the fringe of society, often in poverty, lacking education, occupational skills, political power, or the means to integrate into the mainstream. These marginalized groups, like the immigrants, are frequently made up of ethnic and racial minorities. However, compared with marginalized groups, immigrants have numerous advantages and often become successful, productive members of a society. One of the primary advantages is that immigrants choose to move to a new country and are therefore motivated to succeed. Another advantage is that they often have the resources needed to relocate to a new country. National immigration services work hard at keeping out low-skilled and poorly educated immigrants. A third advantage is that immigrants to the United States tend to believe in the “great melting pot” ideal and want to join the mainstream society and learn the new language. To become citizens of the United States, for example, immigrants must speak, read, and write English and pass an exam on U.S. history and government. Therefore, although immigrants may start on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, they often move up quickly, unlike marginalized resident minorities. Rochelle L. Dalla Further Reading Barone, Michael. The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001. Cook, Terrence E. Separation, Assimilation, or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. 338

Immigration Act of 1917

Jacoby, Tamar, ed. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American. New York: Basic Books, 2004. See also Accent discrimination; Chicano movement; Generational acculturation; Hansen effect; Machine politics; Naturalization.

Immigration Act of 1917 The Law: Restrictive federal legislation on immigration Date: May 1, 1917 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Discrimination; Language; Laws and treaties; Nativism and racism Significance: In an effort to exclude as immigrants those of ethnic origin considered incompatible with the racial stock of the country’s founders, the U.S. Congress enacted this law to require literacy as a condition of admission to the United States. During the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government for the first time began to accept the responsibility for restricting immigration. As long as there had been no question that people were welcome to enter and to become citizens of the United States—as had been the case since the American Revolution—each state was at liberty to regulate the flow of foreign nationals within its borders. After 1830, however, because of a large increase in the numbers of immigrants, especially from Catholic Ireland, where famine had motivated huge numbers to emigrate, a somewhat different public attitude emerged. It became a matter of public anxiety, especially in the eastern United States, not only that the increased immigration was likely to create an oversupply of labor (a major concern of labor unions) but also that there were many entering the country who were deemed undesirable. Many people came to believe that laws should be made and enforced that would restrict the numbers and the kinds of people who would be allowed to enter the United States. In their party platforms, politicians of the period included promises to enact laws restricting immigration of criminals, paupers, and contract laborers—largely unskilled workers who were promised free transportation to America contingent upon repayment once admission was obtained and wages were earned. Others vowed themselves in favor of preventing the United States from becoming a place where European countries could conveniently rid themselves of their poor and of their criminal elements and stated their preference for what they would consider to be worthy and industrious Europeans—to the particular exclusion of laborers from China. 339


Beginning in 1875, numerous acts dealing with the problem of immigration were passed by Congress. Effective enforcement, however, was the problem with the earliest provisions for exclusion. Many began to believe that large numbers of those who were not wanted could be refused admission by virtue of the fact that they would be unlikely to pass a simple literacy test. A senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, was an early and influential advocate of a literacy test. In one of his congressional speeches, Senator Lodge proposed to exclude from admission any individual who could neither read nor write. (Literacy in any language was to be qualifying; knowledge of English was not to be required.) It was believed, according to the senator, that the test would prevent immigration of many Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asians, and that it would cause the exclusion of fewer of those who were Englishspeaking or who were Germans, Scandinavians, or French. Lodge insisted, in his argument, that the latter were more closely kin, racially, to those who had founded and developed the United States, and that therefore they would be more readily appreciated. (The senator made allowance for the Irish, even though he saw them as being of different racial stock, because they spoke English and had been associated with the English peoples for many centuries.) Lodge further argued that the northern European immigrants were the ones most likely to move on to the West and South, where population was needed, whereas the southern Europeans—those intended to be excluded by the test—tended to stay in the crowded cities of the North and East, creating slums and placing a disproportionate financial burden on local charitable institutions. He categorized as also unlikely to pass the test those who intended only temporary stays—those who came to earn money that would not be used to further the country’s development but whose purpose was to work and live in the poorest of conditions until their savings were adequate to return to and to make life better for a family in their country of origin. In 1896, a Senate bill that included provision for the literacy test was sponsored by Lodge. The same Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts bill was introduced in the House was one of the most outspoken advocates of liter- of Representatives. Congress passed the bill, but it was vetoed by Presiacy tests for immigrants. (Library of Congress) 340


dent Grover Cleveland. The House was able to override the veto, but the Senate took no action. In his veto message, President Cleveland indicated his extreme displeasure with the intent of the bill, reminding Congress of the fact that many of the country’s best citizens had been immigrants who may have been deemed inferior. His opinion of the literacy test was that it would be no true measure of the quality of an applicant for admission, and that illiteracy should not be used as a pretext for exclusion when the real reasons were obviously different. The controversy over the literacy test went on for approximately twenty-five years. Meanwhile, the President Woodrow Wilson, with his second wife, idea became more popular. In Edith, at his second inauguration in 1917. Wilson 1907, the Joint Commission on Im- twice vetoed the Immigration Act of 1917, only to migration was funded by Congress see Congress pass it over his objections. (Library of and charged to investigate U.S. im- Congress) migration policy. In 1911, the commission released its forty-one-volume report. The literacy test was adopted as a provision of the Comprehensive Immigration Act of 1917—which was based primarily on recommendations of the commission—but only after similar attempts had been vetoed by President William Howard Taft in 1913 and by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915. Wilson twice vetoed the act of 1917 as well, only to have Congress pass it over his objections after his second veto. President Wilson argued, in his first veto message to Congress, that the literacy test was an unprincipled departure from the nation’s policy toward immigrants. He expressed concern that the literacy test, rather than being a test of character or of fitness to immigrate, was instead a penalty for not having had the opportunity for education and would exclude those who sought that very opportunity in order to better their circumstances. The 1917 act provided that all persons seeking admission who were over sixteen years of age and who were physically capable of reading were to be tested. Those who were unable to read a few dozen words in some language were to be excluded from admission as immigrants. There were numerous exceptions, and in many cases illiteracy could be overlooked. Those seeking escape from religious persecution were excepted, as were those formerly admitted who had resided in the United States for five years and who had then 341


departed but had returned within six months. Illiterate relatives of those passing the test were admissible if otherwise qualified. Impact of Event The main objective of the literacy test—to exclude those of certain ethnic origins or traditions—failed to reduce immigration in general and from the countries of southern and eastern Europe in particular. Other provisions had effectively discouraged emigrant Asians from choosing the United States as their intended destination. Instead, immigration increased in the four fiscal years that followed enactment of the 1917 law; 1,487,000 applicants were admitted in that period. Of that number, only 6,142 aliens (less than 0.5 percent) were deported for having failed the literacy test. Most of these were from Mexico, French Canada, or Italy. Case studies of aliens who were unable to pass the literacy test indicate that humane attempts were made by immigration authorities to ensure that the 1917 law was not cruelly enforced. Admission for a limited period could be granted, under bond, for those who otherwise qualified but who were unable to pass the test. Applicants were given a chance to take classes in reading and writing a language of their choice, and more than one opportunity to pass the literacy test could be granted for those who appeared capable of sustaining themselves. Canadian immigration often was the alternative for those whose cases could justify no further extensions of time in which to pass the test and for whom deportation was no longer avoidable. The racist attitudes of leaders such as Lodge were to dominate U.S. immigration policies until much later in the twentieth century, after the United States had participated in two world wars and after there had been refutation of earlier studies that attributed superior intellect and character to the northern European stock. The fact that the Spanish had colonized the Southwest considerably before northern Europeans began populating the eastern seaboard seems not to have been considered. P. R. Lannert Further Reading Abbott, Edith. Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Contains extracts of immigration acts and relevant court decisions as well as social case histories from the files of Illinois immigration officials. Indexed. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with an emphasis on cultural and social trends, and with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. 342


LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration Act of 1921 The Law: Federal legislation on immigration that imposed a quota system Date: May 19, 1921 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Laws and treaties; Nativism and racism Significance: This restrictive legislation created a quota system that favored the nations of northern and western Europe and put an end to the ideal of the United States as a melting pot. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, immigration to the United States was open to anyone who wanted to enter. By the 1880’s, however, this unlimited freedom was beginning to disappear. The first law restricting immigration came in 1882, when Chinese were excluded from entering American territory. Hostility to Chinese workers in California sparked Congress to pass a bill amid warnings that Chinese worked for lower wages than whites and came from such a culturally inferior civilization that they would never make good Americans. The law became permanent in 1902. Five years later, under a gentlemen’s agreement with the Japanese government, citizens of that country were added to the excluded list. The only other people barred from entering the United States were prostitutes, insane persons, paupers, polygamists, and anyone suffering from a “loathsome or contagious disease.” Under these categories, compared to more than a million immigrants per year from 1890 to 1914, less than thirteen thousand were kept out annually. 343


The small number of those excluded troubled anti-immigrant groups, such as the American Protective Association, founded in 1887, and the Immigration Restriction League, created in Boston in 1894. Both organizations warned of the “immigrant invasion” which threatened the American way of life. These opponents of open immigration argued that since 1880, most new arrivals had come from different areas of Europe from that of the pre-1880 immigrants, who came largely from Germany, England, Ireland, and Scandinavia. The “new” immigrants—mainly Slavs, Poles, Italians, and Jews—came from poorer and more culturally “backward” areas of Europe. Many of these immigrants advocated radicalism, anarchism, socialism, or communism, and were unfamiliar with ideas of democracy and progress. Furthermore, they preferred to live in ghettos in cities, where they strengthened the power of political machines and corrupt bosses. Those who considered themselves guardians of traditional American values found support for their position among trade unionists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose president, Samuel Gompers, argued that the new immigrants provided employers with an endless supply of cheap labor, leading to lower wages for everyone. Advocates of restriction found their chief congressional spokesperson in Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a member of the Immigration Restriction League, who sponsored a bill calling for a literacy test. Such a law, which called upon immigrants to be able to read and write in their native language, was seen as an effective barrier to most “new” immigrants. Congress passed the bill in 1897, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed it, arguing that it was unnecessary and discriminatory. Cleveland believed that American borders should remain open to anyone who wanted to enter and that there were enough jobs and opportunities to allow anyone to fulfill a dream of economic success. Advocates of this vision of the American Dream, however, were lessening in number over time. The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 led to the exclusion of anarchists and those who advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. A more important step to a quota system, however, came in 1907, when the House and Senate established the U.S. Immigration Commission, under the leadership of Senator William P. Dillingham. The commission issued a forty-two-volume report in 1910, advocating a reduction in immigration because of the “racial inferiority” of new immigrant groups. Studies of immigrant populations, the commission concluded, showed that people from southern and eastern Europe had a higher potential for criminal activity, were more likely to end up poor and sick, and were less intelligent than other Americans. It called for passage of a literacy test to preserve American values. Congress passed legislation in 1912 calling for such a test, but President William Howard Taft vetoed it, saying that illiteracy resulted from lack of educational opportunity and had little to do with native intelligence. Open entrance to the United States was part of American history, and many of America’s wealthiest and hardest working citizens had come without 344


knowing how to read and write. If the United States barred such people, Taft argued, America would become weaker and less wealthy. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson became the third president to veto a literacy bill, denouncing its violation of the American ideal of an open door. Two years later, in the wake of American entrance into World War I and growing hostility against foreigners, Congress overrode Wilson’s second veto and the literacy test became law. Along with establishing a reading test for anyone over age sixteen, the law also created a “barred zone” which excluded immigrants from most of Asia, including China, India, and Japan, regardless of whether they could read. As it turned out, the President William Howard Taft around 1908. Taft test that asked adults to read a few was chief justice of the United States when the Immiwords in any recognized language gration Act of 1921 was enacted, but he vetoed legdid little to reduce immigration. islation making literacy a requirement for immigraBetween 1918 and 1920, less than tion while he was president. (Library of Congress) 1 percent of those who took it failed. Representative Albert Johnson, chair of the House Committee on Immigration, had been a longtime advocate of closing the borders of the United States. In 1919, he called for the suspension of all immigration. Johnson’s proposal was defeated in the House of Representatives. In 1920, however, immigration increased dramatically, as did fears that millions of refugees from war-torn Europe were waiting to flood into the United States. Much of the argument for restriction was based on ideas associated with scientific racism. The Republican candidate for the presidency, Warren G. Harding, advocated restriction in several speeches, warning of the dangers inherent in allowing open admission. He called for legislation that would permit entrance to the United States only to people whose background and racial characteristics showed that they could adopt American values and principles. The next year, Vice President Calvin Coolidge authored a magazine article claiming that laws of biology proved that “Nordics,” the preferred type, deteriorated intellectually and physically when allowed to intermarry with other races. These views reflected the growing influence of eugenics, the science of improving the human race by discouraging the birth of the “unfit.” Madison Grant, a lawyer and secretary of the New York Zoological Society, and later an adviser to Albert Johnson’s Immigration Committee, wrote 345


the most influential book advocating this racist way of thinking, The Passing of the Great Race in America (1916). In it, he described human society as a huge snake. Nordic races made up the head, while the inferior races formed the tail. It would be this type of scientific argument, more than any other, that would provide the major rationale for creation of the 1921 quota system. The tail could not be allowed to rule the head. Early in 1921, the House debated and passed Johnson’s bill calling for a two-year suspension of all immigration. The Senate Committee on Immigration, chaired by Senator LeBaron Colt, held hearings on a similar proposal but refused to support a total ban after hearing arguments from business groups fearful that complete exclusion would stop all access to European laborers. Representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers testified on the need to have access to inexpensive labor, even though some business leaders were beginning to fear that too many in the immigration pool were influenced by communism and socialism, especially after the communist victory in Russia in 1918. The possibility of thousands of radical workers with a greater tendency to strike coming into the country seemed too high a price to pay in return for lower wages. Unions, especially the AFL, continued to lobby for strict regulation of immigration. To keep wages high, Samuel Gompers told Congress, foreign workers had to be kept out. By 1921, the only widespread support for free and open immigration came from immigrant groups themselves. Although a few members of Congress supported their position, it was a distinctly minority view. Senator William Dillingham, whose report in 1910 had renewed efforts to restrict immigration, offered a quota plan which he hoped would satisfy business and labor. He called for a policy in which each nation would receive a quota of immigrants equal to 5 percent of that country’s total population in the United States according to the 1910 census. Dillingham’s suggestion passed the Senate with little opposition and gained favor in the House. Before its final approval, however, Johnson and his supporters of total suspension reduced the quota to 3 percent and set 350,000 as the maximum number of legal immigrants in any one year. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the bill shortly before leaving office, but it was passed with only one dissenting vote in the Senate during a special session called by President Harding on May 19, 1921. The House approved the Emergency Quota Act the same day without a recorded vote. The only opposition came from representatives with large numbers of immigrants in their districts. Adolph Sabath, a Democratic congressperson from Chicago, led the dissenters, arguing that the act was based on a “pseudoscientific proposition” that falsely glorified the Nordic nations. His comments had little effect on the result. One of the most important changes in American immigration history went into effect in June of 1921. Impact of Event The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 severely reduced immigration into the United States. In 1922, its first full year of operation, only 309,556 people legally entered the country, compared with 805,228 the previ346


ous year. Quotas for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were generally filled quickly, although economic depressions in England, Ireland, and Germany kept many potential immigrants at home. Less than half the legal number of immigrants came to America the first year; the southern and eastern Europeans filled almost 99 percent of their limit. No limits existed for Canada, Mexico, and other nations of the Western Hemisphere. To keep an adequate supply of cheap agricultural labor available to farmers in Texas and California, Congress refused to place a quota on immigration from these areas of the world. Japan and China were the only countries with a quota of zero, as Congress continued its policy of exclusion for most areas of Asia. The 1921 act provided for “special preferences” for relatives of U.S. citizens, including wives, children under eighteen, parents, brothers, and sisters. The commissioner of immigration was to make it a priority to maintain family unity; however, this was to be the only exception to the strict quota policy. Congress extended the “emergency” law in May, 1922, for two more years. This move, however, did not satisfy Representative Johnson and others supporting complete restriction. Johnson’s Immigration Committee continued to hold hearings and gather evidence supporting an end to all immigration. Johnson became increasingly interested in eugenics and remained in close contact with Madison Grant. In 1923, Johnson was elected president of the Eugenics Research Association of America, a group devoted to gathering statistics on the hereditary traits of Americans. He seemed especially interested in studies showing a large concentration of “new” immigrants in mental hospitals, prisons, and poorhouses. Such information led him to call for a change in the law. A reduction in the quota for “new” immigrants was necessary, he claimed, to save the United States from even larger numbers of paupers, mental patients, and criminals. The Immigration Committee voted to change the census base from 1910 to 1890, when there were far fewer southern and eastern Europeans in the country, and to reduce the quota from 3 percent to 2 percent. Congress would adopt those ideas in 1924. Under the 1921 law, boats filled with prospective immigrants were returned to their homelands. These actions, however, were only the beginning, and the guardians of racial purity in Congress were already moving toward even tighter controls. Restrictionists had gotten most of what they wanted. Leslie V. Tischauser Further Reading Bennett, Marion T. American Immigration Policies. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1963. Although written from a prorestriction point of view, this book contains useful information on all immigration laws up to 1962 and their effects on the numbers of people entering the United States. Contains a brief but useful summary of arguments for and against the 1921 act. 347


Divine, Robert. American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. Interesting and detailed account of the congressional movement toward restriction. Although mainly concerned with the 1924 law and its aftermath, there is a summary of attitudes in Congress and the rest of the United States that led to the 1921 act. Written from an antirestriction point of view. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Classic account of anti-immigrant hostility in the United States from the Civil War to the final victory for restriction during the 1920’s. Presents a full account of the arguments for and against quotas, and contains an extensive discussion of the 1921 bill and the congressional debate on the subject. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. Solomon, Barbara. Ancestors and Immigrants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. A study of the Immigration Restriction League of Boston. Asserts that restrictionists perceived their world as crumbling under the influx of vast numbers of immigrants who knew nothing of democracy and liberty and were inferior intellectually and physically. Most of the study looks at attitudes before 1921. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law.

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Immigration Act of 1924 The Law: Federal legislation on immigration that made the quota system more restrictive Date: May 26, 1924 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Laws and treaties; Nativism and racism Significance: Also known as the National Origins Act, the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration by means of a quota system that severely restricted immigration from central and eastern Europe. There was no clearly defined official U.S. policy toward immigration until the late nineteenth century. The United States was still a relatively young country, and there was a need for settlers in the West and for workers to build industry. Chinese immigrants flowed into California in 1849 and the early 1850’s, searching for fortune and staying as laborers who worked the mines and helped to build the transcontinental railroad. The earliest immigration restriction focused on Asians. In 1875, the federal government restricted the number of Chinese and Japanese coming into the country. The push for restriction of Asian immigrants was led by U.S. workers. After the depression of 1877, Denis Kearney, an Irish-born labor organizer, helped found the Workingman’s Trade and Labor Union of San Francisco, an anti-Chinese and anticapitalist group. Kearney and others believed that lower-paid Chinese workers took jobs away from white workers, and they agitated for expulsion of the Chinese and legal restrictions on future immigrants. Their efforts were successful in 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. The act exempted teachers, students, merchants, and pleasure travelers, and remained in effect until 1943. With the act of 1882, the federal government had, for the first time, placed restrictions on the immigration of persons from a specific country. More specific policy toward European immigration began during the 1880’s. In 1882, the federal government excluded convicts, paupers, and mentally impaired persons. Organized labor’s efforts also were successful in 1882, with the prohibition of employers’ recruiting workers in Europe and paying their passage to the United States. Restrictive Changes Federal law became more restrictive during the early twentieth century, with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1903, which excluded epileptics, beggars, and anarchists. In 1907, the U.S. Immigration Commission was formed. This group, also known as the Dillingham Commission, published a forty-two-volume survey of the impact of immigration on American life and called for a literacy test and further immigration restriction. Although several presidential vetoes had prevented a literacy re349


quirement, in 1917, the U.S. Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto and passed a law requiring a literacy test for newcomers. The test was designed to reduce the number of immigrants, particularly those from southeastern Europe, where the literacy rate was low. The marked change in official policy and in the view of a majority of people in the United States was caused by several factors. A strong nativist movement had begun after World War I with such groups as the American Protective Association, an organization that began in the midwest during the 1880’s and focused on prejudice against aliens and Roman Catholics. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge organized the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, indicating the addition of U.S. leaders and intellectuals to the restriction movement. The war had brought the United States into position as a major world power, with a resultant view that the United States should be a nation of conformity. Political and economic problems in Europe, including the war and a postwar economic depression, had led to fear of too many immigrants fleeing Europe. Changes in the U.S. economy reduced the need for manual labor, thus creating a fear of lack of job security. The push for restriction coincided with the most intensive era of immigration in United States history. From the late 1880’s until the 1920’s, the nation experienced wave after wave of immigration, with millions of persons coming into the country each decade. The growth of new physical and social sciences that emphasized heredity as a factor in intelligence led many people to be-

U.S . Health Service officers inspecting Japanese immigrants arriving on the West Coast of the United States several months before the U.S . Congress passed the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. (National Archives)

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Application for the readmission to the United States of a Brooklyn restaurateur who had returned to China for a visit. The letter cites the terms of the Immigration Act of 1924. (NARA)

lieve that persons such as Slavs or Italians were less intelligent than western Europeans such as the Norwegians or the English. The belief in genetic inferiority gave credence to the immigration restriction movement and helped sway the government. At the same time that millions of newcomers were entering the United States, a spirit of reform, the Progressive Era, had grown throughout the country. Americans who saw themselves as progressive and forward-looking pushed for change in politics, society, and education, particularly in the crowded urban areas of the Northeast. Europeans had emigrated in large numbers to the cities, and newer groups, such as Italians and Poles, were seen by many progressive-minded reformers as the root of urban problems. Thus it 351


was with the help of progressive leaders that a push was made at the federal level to restrict the number of immigrants. Quota System In 1921, Congress passed a temporary measure that was the first U.S. law specifically restricting European immigration. The act established a quota system that held the number of immigrants to 3 percent of each admissible nationality living in the United States in 1910. Quotas were established for persons from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Although only a temporary measure, the Immigration Act of 1921 marked the beginning of a permanent policy of restricting European immigration. It began a bitter three-year controversy that led to the Immigration Act of 1924. The U.S. Congress amended the 1921 act with a more restrictive permanent measure in May of 1924, the Johnson-Reid Act. This act, which became known as the National Origins Act, took effect on July 1, 1924. It limited the annual immigration to the United States to 2 percent of a country’s population in the United States as of the census of 1890. With the large numbers of northern and western Europeans who had immigrated to the country throughout the nation’s history, the act effectively restricted southern and eastern European immigrants to approximately 12 percent of the total immigrant population. Asian immigration was completely prohibited, but there was no restriction on immigration from independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. The new law also changed the processing system for aliens by moving the immigration inspection process to U.S. consulates in foreign countries and requiring immigrants to obtain visas in their home countries before emigrating to the United States. The number of visas was held to 10 percent in each country per month and thus reduced the number of people arriving at Ellis Island, leading to the eventual closing of the facility. The Immigration Act of 1924 reflected a change in the controversy that occurred in the three-year period after the act of 1921. By 1924, the major factor in immigration restriction was racial prejudice. By using the U.S. Census of 1890 as the basis for quotas, the government in effect sharply reduced the number of southern and eastern Europeans, who had not begun to arrive in large numbers until after that census year. The passage of the act codified an official policy of preventing further changes in the ethnic composition of U.S. society, and it was to remain in effect until passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Judith Boyce DeMark Further Reading Curran, Thomas J. Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Basic overview of the reasons for immigration restriction throughout U.S. history, focusing on nativism and such groups as the Ku Klux Klan. 352


Divine, Robert A. American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. One of the most comprehensive treatments of the history of immigration restriction from the 1924 act through the mid-1950’s. Hirobe, Izumi. Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Scholarly study of the impact of the Immigration Act of 1924 on Japanese immigrants. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Seller, Maxine S. “Historical Perspectives on American Immigration Policy: Case Studies and Current Implications.” In U.S. Immigration Policy, edited by Richard R. Hofstetter. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. Contains a chronology of the series of events leading up to the Immigration Act of 1924, with a discussion of how those events relate to recent immigration history. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration Act of 1943 The Law: Federal legislation on immigration that loosened restrictiions Date: December 17, 1943 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Laws and treaties 353


Significance: The Immigration Act of 1943 repealed Asian exclusion laws, opening the way for further immigration reforms. The passage by Congress of the Immigration Act, also known as the Magnuson Act, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing it into law ended the era of legal exclusion of Chinese immigrants to the United States and began an era during which sizable numbers of Chinese and other Asian immigrants came to the country. It helped bring about significant changes in race relations in the United States. The first wave of Chinese immigrants came from the Pearl River delta region in southern China. They began coming to California in 1849 during the gold rush and continued to come to the western states as miners, railroad builders, farmers, fishermen, and factory workers. Most were men. Many came as contract laborers and intended to return to China. Anti-Chinese feelings, begun during the gold rush and expressed in mob actions and local discriminatory laws, culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, barring the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. The act was renewed in 1892, applied to Hawaii when those islands were annexed by the United States in 1898, and made permanent in 1904. Another bill, passed in 1924, made Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship and disallowed Chinese wives of U.S. citizens to immigrate to the United States. As a result, the Chinese population in the United States declined from a peak of 107,475 in 1880 to 77,504 in 1940. The passage of the Magnuson Act of 1943, which repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, inaugurated profound changes in the status of ethnic Chinese who were citizens or residents of the United States. It made Chinese immigrants, many of whom had lived in the United States for years, eligible for citizenship. It also allotted a minuscule quota of 105 Chinese persons per year who could enter the United States as immigrants. The 1943 bill was a result of recognition of China’s growing international status after 1928 under the Nationalist government and growing U.S. sympathy for China’s heroic resistance to Japanese aggression after 1937. It also was intended to counter Japanese wartime propaganda aimed at discrediting the United States among Asians by portraying it as a racist nation. Post-World War II Changes World War II was a turning point for ChineseU.S. relations. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, China and the United States became allies against the Axis Powers. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of China’s wartime leader, won widespread respect and sympathy for China during her visit to the United States; she was the second female foreign leader to address a joint session of Congress. In 1943, the United States and Great Britain also signed new treaties with China that ended a century of international inequality for China. These events and the contributions of Chinese Americans in the war favorably affected the position and status of Chinese Americans. The 1943 act also opened the door for other 354


legislation that allowed more Chinese to immigrate to the United States. In the long run, these laws had a major impact on the formation of Chinese families in the United States. The War Brides Act of 1945, for example, permitted foreign-born wives of U.S. soldiers to enter the United States and become naturalized. Approximately six thousand Chinese women entered the United States during the next several years as wives of U.S. servicemen. An amendment to this act, passed in 1946, put the Chinese wives and children of U.S. citizens outside the quota, resulting in the reunion of many separated families and allowing ten thousand Chinese, mostly wives, and also children of U.S. citizens of Chinese ethnicity, to enter the country during the next eight years. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 granted permanent resident status, and eventually the right of citizenship, to 3,465 Chinese students, scholars, and others stranded in the United States by the widespread civil war that erupted between the Chinese Nationalists and communists after the end of World War II. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 allowed an additional 2,777 refugees to remain in the United States after the civil war ended in a communist victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Some Chinese students from the Republic of China on Taiwan, who came to study in the United States after 1950 and found employment and sponsors after the end of their studies, were also permitted to remain and were eligible for naturalization. The four immigration acts passed between 1943 and 1953 can be viewed as a result of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of China in World War II and U.S. involvement in the Chinese civil war that followed. In a wider context, they were also the result of changing views on race and race relations that World War II and related events brought about. Finally, they heralded the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which revolutionized U.S. immigration policy in ending racial quotas. Its most dramatic consequence was the significant increase of Asian immigrants in general, and Chinese immigrants in particular, into the United States. The new immigrants changed the makeup of Chinese American society and caused a change in the way the Chinese were perceived by the majority groups in the United States. Whereas most of the earlier immigrants tended to live in ghettoized Chinatowns, were poorly educated, and overwhelmingly worked in low-status jobs as laundrymen, miners, or railroad workers, the new immigrants were highly educated, cosmopolitan, and professional. They came from the middle class, traced their roots to all parts of China, had little difficulty acculturating and assimilating into the academic and professional milieu of peoples of European ethnicity in the United States, and tended not to live in Chinatowns. The latter group was mainly responsible for revolutionizing the way Chinese Americans were perceived in the United States. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur

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Further Reading Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Articles from nine scholars on different facets of Chinese immigration to the United States during the era of exclusion. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Min, Pyong Gap, ed. Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. Collection of essays that gives an overall picture of Asian American issues. A new edition was scheduled for 2006 publication. Riggs, Fred W. Pressure on Congress: A Study of the Repeal of Chinese Exclusion. 1950. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. Detailed account of the reasons for the repeal of the exclusion law. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration Act of 1990 The Law: Federal legislation on immigration that imposed new restrictions Date: November 29, 1990 Immigration issues: Discrimination; Laws and treaties Significance: Congress passed this legislation in response to a widespread belief among legislators and the general public that many of the economic 356


and social ills of the United States were caused by large populations of poor, non-English-speaking immigrants and in response to a growing need for skilled workers in technical fields in an increasingly international marketplace. One of many immigration laws passed during the twentieth century, the Immigration Act of 1990 set numerical limits for immigrants to the United States and established a system of preferences to determine which of the many applicants for admission should be accepted. Under the terms of the 1990 act, only 675,000 immigrants, not including political refugees, were to be admitted to the United States each year. These immigrants were eligible for preferential admission consideration if they fell into one of three groups: immigrants who had family members already legally in the country; employment-based immigrants who were able to prove that they had exceptional ability in certain professions with a high demand; and those from designated underrepresented nations, who were labeled “diversity immigrants.” Because the new law nearly tripled the annual allotment of employmentbased immigrants from 54,000 to 140,000, business and industry leaders heralded their increased opportunity to compete internationally for experienced and talented engineers, technicians, and multinational executives. Others believed that the preference for certain kinds of workers masked a preference for whites over nonwhites, and wealthier immigrants over poorer. Divisions over the law between racial and political groups intensified when successful lobbying led to refinements in the law making it easier for fashion models and musicians, especially from Europe, to gain visas, while efforts to gain admittance for more women fleeing genital mutilation in African and Arab nations failed. The act made it easier for certain people—contract workers, musicians and other artists, researchers and educators participating in exchange programs—to perform skilled work in the United States on a temporary basis, with no intention of seeking citizenship. At the same time, the new law made it more difficult for unskilled workers, such as domestic workers and laborers, to obtain immigrant visas. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1990 attempted to correct criticism of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act by increasing that act’s antidiscrimination provisions and increasing the penalties for discrimination. In a significant change in U.S. immigration law, the act revised the reasons a person might be refused immigrant status or be deported. After 1952, for example, communists were denied permission to enter the country on nonimmigrant work visas and were subject to deportment if identified, and potential political refugees from nations friendly to the United States were turned away as a matter of foreign policy. Under the new law, a wider range of political and ideological beliefs became acceptable. Cynthia A. Bily 357

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952

Further Reading Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 The Law: Federal law relaxing restrictions on immigration Date: June 27, 1952 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Laws and treaties; Refugees Significance: Also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eased restrictions on Asian immigration and consolidated federal immigration statutes. During the early 1950’s, as it had periodically throughout the twentieth century, immigration again became the subject of intense national debate, and a movement arose to reform immigration law. At the time, there were more than two hundred federal laws dealing with immigration, with little coordination among them. Reform Efforts The movement toward immigration reform actually began in 1947, with a U.S. Senate committee investigation on immigration laws, 358


resulting in a voluminous report in 1950 and a proposed bill. The ensuing debate was divided between a group who wanted to abandon the quota system and increase the numbers of immigrants admitted, and those who hoped to shape immigration law to enforce the status quo. Leaders of the latter camp were the architects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952: Patrick McCarran, senator from Nevada, Francis Walter, congressman from Pennsylvania, and Richard Arens, staff director of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Immigration and Naturalization. McCarran was the author of the Internal Security Act of 1951, which provided for registration of communist organizations and the internment of communists during national emergencies; Walter was an immigration specialist who had backed legislation to admit Europeans from camps for displaced persons; Arens had been staff director for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Each looked upon immigration control as an extension of his work to defend the United States against foreign and domestic enemies. McCarran was most outspoken in defending the concept of restrictions on the basis of national origin, stating in the Senate: There are hard-core indigestible blocs who have not become integrated into the American way of life, but who, on the contrary, are its deadly enemy. . . . this Nation is the last hope of Western civilization; and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated, or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished.

Arens branded critics of the proposed act as either communists, misguided liberals enraptured by communist propaganda, apologists for specific immigrant groups, or “professional vote solicitors who fawn on nationality groups, appealing to them not as Americans but as hyphenated Americans.” Among the bill’s critics, however, were Harry S. Truman, the U.S. president in 1952, and Hubert H. Humphrey, senator from Minnesota and future Democratic presidential nominee. One liberal senator, Herbert Lehman, attacked the national origins provisions of the existing immigration code as a racist measure that smacked of the ethnic purity policies of the recently defeated German Nazis. Truman vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden, 278 to 113 in the House, and 57 to 26 in the Senate. In several areas, the 1952 law made no significant changes: Quotas for European immigrants were little changed, no quotas were instituted for immigrants from North and South American countries, and the issue of illegal immigration was given scant attention. There were significant changes in some areas, however: reversal of the ban on Asian immigration, extension of naturalization to persons regardless of race or sex, and the first provision for refugees as a special class of immigrants. Provisions The Asiatic Barred Zone that had been established in 1917 was eliminated by providing for twenty-five hundred entries from the area—a mi359


nuscule number for the region, but the first recognition of Asian immigration rights in decades. This small concession for Asians was offset partially by the fact that anyone whose ancestry was at least half Asian would be counted under the quota for the Asian country of ancestry, even if the person was a resident of another country. This provision, which was unlike the system of counting quotas for European countries, was specifically and openly designed to prevent Asians living in North and South American countries, which had no quota restrictions, from flooding into the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 also ensured for the first time that the “right of a person to become a naturalized citizen of the United States shall not be denied or abridged because of race or sex.” The provision of not denying citizenship based on sex addressed the issue of women who had lost their U.S. citizenship by marrying foreign men of certain categories; men who had married women from those categories had never lost their citizenship. The issue of refugees was a new concern resulting from World War II. More than seven million persons had lost their homelands in the aftermath of the war, as a result of the conquering and reorganization of countries primarily in Eastern Europe. The 1952 act did not present a comprehensive solution to the problem of refugees but did give the attorney general special power, subject to congressional overview, to admit refugees into the United States under

President Harry S . Truman objected to some parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act but nevertheless signed it into law. (Library of Congress)

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a special status. Although this was expected to be a seldom-used provision of the law, regular upheavals throughout the world later made it an important avenue of immigration into the United States. Finally, the Immigration and Nationality Act also included stringent security procedures designed to prevent communist subversives from infiltrating the United States through immigration. Some of these harsh measures were specifically mentioned by Truman in his veto message, but the anticommunist Cold War climate made such measures hard to defeat. Over the objections of Congress, President Truman appointed a special commission to examine immigration in September, 1952. After hearings in several cities, it issued the report Whom Shall We Welcome?, which was critical of the McCarran-Walter Act. Some liberal Democrats attempted to make the 1952 presidential election a forum on immigration policy, but without success. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the victorious Republican nominee for president, made few specific statements on immigration policy during the campaign. After his election, however, he proposed a special provision for allowing almost a quarter of a million refugees from communism to immigrate to the United States over a two-year period, couching his proposal in terms of humanitarianism and foreign policy. The resulting Refugee Relief Act of 1953 allowed the admission of 214,000 refugees, but only if they had assurance of jobs and housing or were close relatives of U.S. citizens and could pass extensive screening procedures designed to deter subversives. Several similar exceptions in the following years managed to undercut the McCarran-Walter Act, which its many critics had been unable to overturn outright. Irene Struthers Rush Further Reading Dimmitt, Marius A. The Enactment of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971. Written as a doctoral dissertation, this study provides one of the most thorough analyses of the 1952 immigration bill. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C. From Open Door to Dutch Door: An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820. New York: Praeger, 1987. A comprehensive overview of the forces behind and results of changing U.S. immigration policy. Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of the Immigration Act of 1952. ____________, ed. The Gatekeepers: Comparative Immigration Policy. New York: Praeger, 1989. Compares immigration policy and politics in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Israel, and Venezuela. Helpful in understanding overall immigration issues. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Green361


wood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Reimers, David M. “Recent Immigration Policy: An Analysis.” In The Gateway: U.S. Immigration Issues and Policies, edited by Barry R. Chiswick. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982. Discusses immigration policies and laws from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. Includes information on Senator Patrick McCarran’s role in immigration law. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 The Law: Federal legislation that eased restrictions on Asian immigration Date: October 3, 1965 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Laws and treaties; Refugees Significance: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed restrictions on non-European immigration, significantly altering the ethnic makeup of U.S. immigrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 codified legislation that had developed haphazardly over the past century. Although it liberalized some areas, it was discriminatory in that quotas were allotted according to national origins. This resulted in western and northern European nations receiving no less than 85 percent of the total allotment. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed non-Europeans to enter the United States on an equal basis with Europeans. Before the 1965 legislation, U.S. immigration policies favored northern and western Europeans. 362


Ceremony under the Statue of Liberty at which President Lyndon B . Johnson (standing to the left of the chair) signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Ellis Island reception center is visible at the upper left corner of the picture, to the west of Manhattan Island. (Lyndon B . Johnson Library/ Yoichi R. Okamoto)

Reform Begins With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, circumstances for meaningful immigration reform came into being: Kennedy believed that immigration was a source of national strength, the Civil Rights movement had promoted an ideology to eliminate racist policies, and the U.S. position during the Cold War necessitated that immigration policies be just. Thus, Kennedy had Abba Schwartz, an expert on refugee and immigration matters, develop a plan to revise immigration policy. In July of 1963, Kennedy sent his proposal for immigration reform to Congress. His recommendations had three major provisions: the quota system should be phased out over a five-year period; no natives of any one country should receive more than 10 percent of the newly authorized quota numbers; and a seven-person immigration board should be set up to advise the president. Kennedy also advocated that family reunification remain a priority; the Asiatic Barred Zone be eliminated; and nonquota status be granted to residents of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as it was to other Western Hemisphere residents. Last, the preference structure was to be altered to liberalize requirements for skilled people. After the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause of immigration. Although immigration was not a major issue during the 1964 campaign, both sides had courted diverse ethnic communities, whose will now had to be considered. The Democratic Party’s land363


slide victory gave Johnson a strong mandate for his Great Society programs, of which immigration reform was a component. Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued the need for immigration reform to bolster U.S. foreign policy. Rusk, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and others criticized the current system for being discriminatory and argued that the proposed changes would be economically advantageous to the United States. Senator Edward Kennedy held hearings and concluded that “all recognized the unworkability of the national origins quota system.” Outside Congress, ethnic, voluntary, and religious organizations lobbied and provided testimony before Congress. They echoed the administration’s arguments about discrimination. A few southerners in Congress argued that the national origins concept was not discriminatory—it was a mirror reflecting the U.S. population, so those who would best assimilate into U.S. society would enter. However, the focus of the congressional debate was on how to alter the national origins system, not on whether it should be changed. The most disputed provisions concerned whether emphasis should be on needed skills, family reunification, or limits set on Western Hemisphere immigration. Family unification prevailed. Provisions The new law replaced the national origins system with hemispheric caps, 170,000 from the Old World and 120,000 from the New. Spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens were exempt from numerical quotas. Preferences were granted first to unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens (20 percent); next, to spouses and unmarried adult children of permanent resident aliens (20 percent). Professionals, scientists, and artists of exceptional ability were awarded third preference (10 percent) but required certification from the U.S. Department of Labor. Married children of U.S. citizens had fourth preference (10 percent). Next were those brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens who were older than twenty-one years of age (24 percent), followed by skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor was in short supply (10 percent). Refugees from communist or communist-dominated countries or the Middle East were seventh (6 percent). Nonpreference status was assigned to anyone not eligible under any of the above categories; there have been more preference applicants than can be accommodated, so nonpreference status has not been used. The law had unexpected consequences. The framers of the legislation expected that the Old World slots would be filled by Europeans. They assumed that family reunification would favor Europeans, because they dominated the U.S. population. However, those from Europe who wanted to come were in the lower preference categories, while well-trained Asians had been coming to the United States since 1943 and were well qualified for preference positions. Once they, or anyone else, became a permanent resident, a whole group of people became eligible to enter the country under the third preference category. After a five-year wait—the residential requirement for citizenship—more persons became eligible under the second preference category. 364


As a result, many immigrants were directly or indirectly responsible for twenty-five to fifty new immigrants. The law set forth a global ceiling of 290,000, but actual totals ranged from 398,089 in 1977 to 904,292 in 1993. Refugees and those exempt from numerical limitations were the two major categories that caused these variations. The refugee count had varied according to situations such as that of the “boat people” from Cuba in 1981. In 1991, refugees and those seeking asylum totaled 139,079; in 1993, they totaled 127,343. Persons in nonpreference categories increased from 113,083 in 1976 to 255,059 in 1993. Total immigration for 1991 was 827,167 and for 1993 was 904,292—well above the global ceiling. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 enabled some of the most able medical, scientific, engineering, skilled, and other professional talent to enter the United States. The medical profession illustrates this trend. In the ten years after the enactment of the 1965 act, seventy-five thousand foreign physicians entered the United States. By 1974, immigrant physicians made up one-fifth of the total number of physicians and one-third of the interns and residents in the United States. Each immigrant doctor represented more than a million dollars in education costs. In addition, they often took positions in the inner-city and rural areas, which prevented the collapse of the delivery of medical services to those locations. Arthur W. Helweg Further Reading Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Good general history of U.S. immigration. Analyzes the causes and consequences of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Glazer, Nathan, ed. Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1985. Superb evaluation of the “new immigration” that resulted from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on American immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Detailed historical study of the significant political and social events and personages leading to and implementing the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Survey of the history and economic and social conditions of Asian immigrants to the United States, both before and after the federal immigration reforms of 1965. 365

Immigration and Naturalization Service

Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration and Naturalization Service Identification: Former federal government agency that until 2003 administered laws relating to the admission, exclusion, and deportation of aliens and the naturalization of aliens lawfully residing in the United States Date: Established in 1891; functions transferred to Department of Homeland Security in 2003 Immigration issues: Border control; Citizenship and naturalization; Illegal immigration; Law enforcement Significance: The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is the most important agency in the enforcement of U.S. immigration law. On March 3, 1891, the U.S. Congress passed an immigration law that gave the federal government the sole responsibility for the enforcement of immigration policy and created a Bureau of Immigration as part of the Treasury Department. Soon afterward, the Bureau was transferred to the newly created Commerce Department and then, in 1913, to the Department of Labor. The Bureau expanded greatly during and after World War I, when the passport system was instituted and the Bureau placed agents at all major points of entry. In 1933 an executive order changed the name of the Bureau to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Seven years later, the INS was transferred from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. On March 1, 2003, the functions of the INS were transferred to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the newly created Department of Homeland Security. The INS had five primary duties. First, it inspected people who were not citizens of the United States, or aliens, to determine if they could be legally admitted into the country, either as residents or visitors. Second, it made 366


judgments regarding requests of aliens for benefits under American immigration law. Third, it guarded against illegal entry into the United States. Fourth, it investigated, apprehended, and deported aliens who were in the country illegally. Fifth, it examined noncitizens who wished to become citizens. Law Enforcement Since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was responsible for admitting those who were permitted legally to enter the United States and for excluding or deporting those who were not, it was the chief agency for enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. The enforcement missions of the INS were carried out by four divisions: the Border Patrol, Investigations, Intelligence, and Detention and Deportation. The Border Patrol was made up of uniformed officers who guarded the country’s borders in order to prevent illegal entry. Most of these officers patrolled the border between the United States and Mexico, where the greatest number of illegal entries occured. As popular concern over illegal immigration from Mexico grew during the 1980’s and 1990’s, Border Patrol officers found themselves under pressure to stem the flow. During the early 1990’s the entire Border Patrol consisted of only 3,700 agents. Although these agents caught over one million illegal immigrants per year, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 immigrants succeeded in crossing into the country annually. In addition, the Border Patrol faced the problem of distinguishing among noncitizens from Mexico and Central America and U.S. citizens of Hispanic ancestry. As a result of the pressures and unique challenges of its law-enforcement mission, the Border Patrol was in a position to receive a great deal of criticism. A study by the American Friends Service Committee, conducted during the early 1990’s, found nearly four hundred victims of abuse by the Border Patrol. Half of these victims were U.S. citizens. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act attempted to enhance the Border Patrol’s enforcement power by authorizing that additional border guards control the U.S.-Mexico border. It also provided funds for a fence along the border between California and Mexico. Nevertheless, controlling the border continued to be an overwhelming challenge. The Investigations Division of the INS was in charge of enforcing immigration laws in the interior of the United States. Investigation agents investigated places of employment where they suspected that illegal aliens were working. They attempted to apprehend aliens for deportation and prosecute employers who knowingly hired individuals who were in the country illegally. Investigations agents also worked with other law-enforcement agencies to arrest noncitizens who were involved in criminal activities such as drug trafficking and organized crime. A special Anti-Smuggling Branch of the Investigations Division concentrated on breaking up smuggling rings run by noncitizens. During the early 1990’s the INS employed about 1,600 investigations agents, and the 1996 law authorized the hiring of an additional 1,200 agents. 367


The Intelligence Division was in charge of gathering, analyzing, and communicating information relevant to all INS operations, and it directed the headquarters command center. The Detention and Deportation Division took custody of illegal aliens and aliens arrested for criminal activities in the United States. This division was in charge of setting deportation procedures in motion. When aliens could not be immediately deported, they could be placed in detention facilities run by this division of the INS in nine Service Processing Centers around the United States. The Detention and Deportation Division could also place its detainees in institutions run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In addition to enforcing immigration law, the INS also cooperated with other enforcement agencies in attempting to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. From 1988 until early 2003, the Border Patrol was the chief agency for intercepting illegal drugs coming from foreign countries. INS agents in the interior worked with other agencies attempting to stop drugtrafficking organizations. Inspections and Citizenship In addition to immigration law enforcement, the INS was responsible for examining people from other countries

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who want to come to the United States temporarily or permanently and for enabling qualified resident aliens to become U.S. citizens. These tasks were handled by three sections: Adjudication and Nationality, Inspections, and Legalization and Administrative Appeals. Adjudication and Nationality received applications for immigration benefits and petitions for citizenship. In 1995 the INS naturalized 500,000 new citizens, a staggering number considering that only 2,800 INS officers worked with both citizenship and immigration benefits cases that year. The Inspections office had the task of interviewing all travelers entering the United States by air, land, or sea. In 1996 the two thousand inspections agents processed about 484 million travelers. Legalization and Administrative Appeals is in charge of the petitions of immigrants whose applications for immigration have been refused. Other INS Activities The Immigration and Naturalization Service was the primary source of federal government information on migration and on procedures for acquiring citizenship. The service’s Information Resources Management prepares records and databases. The INS issued a wide variety of publications, including an annual Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and an INS Fact Book. As a part of its naturalization services, the service provided advice, information, and textbooks to those who wanted to prepare for citizenship examinations. Twenty-first Century Changes During the late twentieth century, changes in world migration patterns, the ease of international travel, and a growing emphasis on controlling illegal immigration fostered the growth of the INS. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the INS was one of several existing federal agencies that were incorporated into the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a cabinet department of the federal government that is concerned with protecting the American homeland and the safety of American citizens. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, most INS functions have been divided into two bureaus: the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Board of Immigration Appeals, which review decisions made by the USCIS, remain under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. Immigration officers now specialize in inspection, examination, adjudication, legalization, investigation, patrol, and refugee and asylum issues. The USCIS continues to enforce laws providing for selective immigration and controlled entry of temporary visitors such as tourists and business travelers. It does so by inspecting and admitting arrivals at land, sea, and airports of entry, administering benefits such as naturalization and permanent resident status, and apprehending and removing aliens who enter illegally or violate the requirements of their stay. Like its predecessor, the INS, the USCIS has been 369


criticized for downplaying its mission of social service and cultural assimilation while overemphasizing its law-enforcement role in ways that may produce human rights abuses. Carl L. Bankston III Updated by Theodore M. Vestal Further Reading Cohen, Steve. Deportation Is Freedom! The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2005. Critical analysis of the implementation of U.S. immigration laws, with particular attention to the work of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Critical analysis of the erosion of civil liberties in the United States since September 11, 2001, with attention to the impact of federal policies on immigrants and visiting aliens. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. Study of the impact of ignorance, partisan politics, and unintended consequences in immigration policy, including during the post-September 11, 2001, war on terror. Gomez, Iris D. Representing Non-citizens and INS Detainees: Resolving Problems in the Current Climate of Uncertainty. Boston: MCLE, 2003. Legal guide for attorneys who represent aliens facing legal problems with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on American immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. Up-to-date analysis of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States since the 1960’s, with particular attention to issues relating to deportation. Weissinger, George. Law Enforcement and the INS: A Participant Observation Study of Control Agents. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. A look inside the daily lives of INS officers. Welch, Michael. “The Role of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Prison-Industrial Complex.” Social Justice 27 (Fall, 2000): 73-89. Critical analysis of the INS in administering policies that produce human rights abuses rather than cultural assimilation. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Im370

IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE V. CHADHA

migration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE V. CHADHA The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a deportation case that had important political ramifications Date: June 23, 1983 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Court cases; Government and politics Significance: By overturning congressional use of the legislative veto, the Supreme Court, in this single decision, overturned more combined laws than it had in its entire history. During the 1960’s, Jagdish Chadha, a Kenyan of Asian Indian descent carrying a British passport, entered the United States on a student visa. When his student visa expired, he was denied reentry into either Great Britain or Kenya and applied for permanent residence in the United States. After lengthy deliberations, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) granted his application to stay, only to have the House of Representatives veto the INS decision, leaving Chadha to face deportation. Both liberals and conservatives saw the case as a chance to overcome the burgeoning practice of Congress passing laws containing legislative veto provisions. These enactments allowed one or both houses of Congress to act jointly or independently to cancel executive branch regulations made pursuant to some vague delegation of power. Liberal public interest groups played the more public role as Ralph Nader’s consumer advocate litigation group took over Chadha’s case in the Supreme Court. The liberal public interest group’s interest in the case stemmed from the explosion of congressional enactments of legislative vetoes. After having fought for the passage of regulatory legislation on the environment, consumer protection, worker safety, or similar causes, these liberal groups often were frustrated by the bureaucratic regulatory process. If they succeeded in the bureaucracy, they then were frustrated by the actions of their more wealthy opponents, who would persuade one or both houses of Congress to kill offending regulations with a legislative veto. Those conservatives who op371

Immigration “crisis”

posed both excessive delegations of power and legislative vetoes had no apparent vehicle for participation. Conservative chief justice Warren E. Burger wrote the Court’s 7-2 majority opinion, which cut across liberal and conservative opinion and ended the use of the congressional veto. A moderate Lewis F. Powell, Jr., concurred. Moderately conservative justice Byron R. White dissented, upholding the use of legislative vetoes, and conservative justice William H. Rehnquist also dissented. The diversity of opinion continues. The Court seemed willing to push further in the direction of Chadha in Bowsher v. Synar (1986), but seemed to withdraw from Chadha’s advanced stand in Morrison v. Olson (1988) and Mistretta v. United States (1989). Richard L. Wilson Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. See also Deportation; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Twice migrants; Zadvydas v. Davis.

Immigration “crisis” Definition: Popular fear that began developing in the late twentieth century that the United States was in peril of being overrun by immigrants Immigration issues: Demographics; Illegal immigration; Nativism and racism Significance: Immigration to the United States increased steadily after 1965, reaching record levels during the 1990’s and early twenty-first century. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, the U.S. Census reported a 57 percent increase in the number of foreign-born residents of the United States. Although earlier immigrants came chiefly from Europe, many of these more recent immigrants arrived from Latin America and Asia. This new trend in 372


immigration increased ethnic diversity in the United States, and both the large numbers and the non-European origins of the immigrants created perceptions of an immigration crisis. In 1965, the U.S. Congress passed an immigration act that did away with the European bias of the nation’s immigration policy and made family reunification, rather than national origin, the primary qualification for admission. At first, it was thought that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 would not greatly expand immigration. However, legal immigration increased from about 250,000 per year during the early 1960’s to 1,827,167 in 1991. Illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico, also appears to have increased from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. A backlash against immigration began to develop among many segments of the American population. A New Immigrant Population According to estimates of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the legal immigrant population in the spring of 1997 was 25.8 million people. Immigrants, then, made up nearly one out of every ten people in the United States by the end of the 1990’s. These were mostly relatively new immigrants: More than 80 percent had arrived since 1970, and more than 60 percent had arrived since 1980. In addition to these legal immigrants, approximately 300,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants entered the United States each year. Although many of these illegal immigrants were in the United States only for seasonal or other temporary employment, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has estimated that the illegal immigrant population of the United States was about 4 million people during the 1990’s. Not only were immigrants entering the United States in large numbers, but they also were coming from places that had sent relatively few immigrants to America in earlier years. Heavy immigration from Latin America and Asia, combined with comparatively large family sizes among Latin Americans and Asians, began to change the racial and ethnic makeup of the United States. For most of U.S. history, the overwhelming majority of Americans were white Europeans, with a large minority of African Americans. The new immigrants and their children, however, brought a new cultural and racial diversity to the United States. According to projections of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the white nonHispanic component of the population could be expected to decline from about 72 percent to only 53 percent from the year 2000 to 2050. Black nonHispanic Americans were expected to increase only slightly during this period, from 12.2 percent to 13.6 percent. Asians, who made up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1970 had increased to almost 3 percent by 1990 (“Asians and Others” constituted 3.8 percent). By 2050, it was predicted that 8.2 percent of all Americans would be of Asian heritage. Hispanics, who were less than 5 percent of the U.S. population in 1970, had grown to 9 percent in 1990. By the year 2050, if ethnic trends in immigration and fertility continued as expected, almost one out of every four Americans would be Hispanic. 373


Projected Changes in the Ethnic and Racial Composition of the United States, 2000-2050 (Percentage of total U.S. population) Year 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050

White, Black, non-Hispanic non-Hispanic 71.8 69.9 68.0 66.1 64.3 62.4 60.5 58.6 56.7 54.7 52.8

12.2 12.4 12.6 12.7 12.9 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.5 13.6

Asian & Pacific Islander Hispanic 3.9 4.4 4.8 5.3 5.7 6.2 6.6 7.1 7.5 7.9 8.2

11.4 12.6 13.8 15.1 16.3 17.6 18.9 20.3 21.7 23.1 24.5

Source: U.S . Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P25-1130, “Population Projections of the United States by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin, 1995 to 2050.” March, 1997. Washington, D.C .: U.S . Government Printing Office.

Although most Americans could not engage in the scientific projection of population trends, they were aware that large numbers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, were entering the country. They also were aware of the cultural changes brought about by immigration. In southern Florida, Texas, California, and other parts of the country, English-speaking Americans heard languages they could not understand and came into contact with unfamiliar cultures. Thus, both concern over the amount of immigration and reactions to cultural changes fueled the perception of an immigration crisis. Economic Concerns over Immigration Many of those who feel that the flow of immigrants into the United States constitutes a crisis maintain that immigration poses serious economic problems. Immigrants, they argue, compete for jobs with people already living in the United States. Under U.S. immigration policy, there are two primary reasons that people from other countries can receive an immigrant visa that gives them permission to settle in the United States. The first reason concerns family: People who have family members who are citizens of or residents in the United States are given priority in the granting of immigrant visas. The second reason concerns employment: People with special professional abilities or workers arriving to take jobs for which Americans are in short supply are eligible for visas. Roy Beck, a liberal activist and an advocate of limiting immigration, argued that those who receive permission to immigrate for purposes of employment do so at the expense of employees already in the United States. He 374


pointed out that immigration lawyers, who help people find ways to enter the United States, frequently work for businesses that wish to employ foreign labor. These lawyers, according to Beck, help employers draw up job descriptions that make it appear that no qualified American workers are available so that the employers can import cheaper foreign workers. George Borjas, an economist specializing in immigration issues, maintained that high levels of immigration pose a problem for low-income American workers. Borjas observed that most immigrants enter the United States to join family members, and these immigrants tend to have few job skills and little educational background. Therefore, immigrants were more likely than other people to rely on public assistance, making them a financial burden, and they competed for jobs with low-skilled, low-income natives. In 1996, Borjas estimated that immigration had been the source of about one-third of a recent decline in the wages of less-educated American workers. Cultural Concerns over Immigration Some of those alarmed over the influx of immigrants saw it as a cultural crisis. They claimed that immigrants were arriving in such large numbers, with cultures that were so foreign to the existing culture of the United States, that they could not be assimilated readily into American culture. Journalist Peter Brimelow maintained that immigration posed a crisis for American political culture. The arrival of masses of immigrants who did not speak English, according to Brimelow and others, threatened the position of English as a language understood everywhere around the country. Moreover, cultural critics of immigration argued that newly arrived Mexicans, Dominicans, and Chinese identified with their own cultural backgrounds rather than with mainstream American culture. Therefore, critics such as Brimelow claimed that immigration endangered national unity. Some of those who believe that massive immigration could create a crisis for U.S. political culture argue that immigration is especially dangerous for African Americans. They point out that African Americans were likely to be replaced as the nation’s largest minority and that this would decrease this group’s political power. Many opponents of immigration also maintained that new immigrants would have little commitment to overcoming the racial inequality created by the history of slavery and discrimination in the United States. Responses to Claims of Crisis Although no one denies that immigration increased greatly in the years following 1965, many political figures and scholars question whether this should be seen as an immigration “crisis.” Economist Julian Simon argued that immigrants were frequently energetic and industrious and could create, not simply compete for, jobs. The economy of southern Florida, for example, boomed as a result of the activities of Cuban immigrants. Many supporters of immigration, including 1996 vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, maintained that immigration was an economic 375

Immigration law

blessing, since immigrants often performed work in areas that were experiencing labor shortages. A number of observers believed that the influx of immigrants posed no threat to American culture. They pointed out that American culture had changed continually throughout its history. Moreover, the sociologist Alejandro Portes and other scholars cited evidence that the children of immigrants overwhelmingly became fluent in English and were often weaker in their parents’ languages than they were in English. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Roy Beck’s The Case Against Immigration (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) presents an economic argument for seeing immigration as a crisis. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004), edited by Mary E. Williams, presents a variety of social, political, and legal viewpoints of experts and observers familiar with immigration into the United States. Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995) provides a controversial but readable argument for drastically reducing immigration to the United States. The articles in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1997), edited by Juan F. Perea, examine the backlash against immigrants and place it in the context of U.S. history. Henry Bischoff’s Immigration Issues (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002) is a collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration. For a balanced discussion of the economic impact of illegal immigration on American society, see The Economics of Illegal Immigration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) by Chisato Yoshida and Alan D. Woodland. See also Demographics of immigration; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Justice and immigration; Migration.

Immigration law Definition: Branch of federal law dealing with the entry and settlement in the United States of noncitizens Immigration issues: Border control; Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Government and politics; Law enforcement; Laws and treaties; Refugees 376

Immigration law

Significance: U.S. immigration laws have changed dramatically since the nation was formed during the late eighteenth century. These laws have directly affected tens of millions of people and have indirectly affected even more people in such areas as civil rights, the distribution of wealth, employment, labor policy, foreign relations, and freedom of association. Immigration law is one of several areas of legal specialization, such as estate planning, domestic relations, tax law, or criminal law. Immigration lawyers serve two types of clients: individual immigrants and American businesses that have hired or wish to hire immigrants. They help their clients by providing advice on immigration law, by assisting them in choosing to apply for a particular immigration status, by providing appropriate forms, by helping clients complete and file immigration petitions, and by representing clients who must justify their claims to an immigrant status or appeal a decision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) or other agency. Although persons need not obtain professional legal assistance in order to migrate to the United States, American immigration laws are complicated and expert advice can sometimes be helpful. Those whose applications for migration have been refused and who file appeals are usually well advised to turn to a professional immigration attorney. People who face deportation hearings need expert legal advice. Laws regarding areas of lawyer specialization differ from state to state. Some states recognize specialization through self-designation. Under this system, attorneys who specialize in immigration law list themselves as experts in this area and can present themselves as such to the public. Generally, states that allow attorneys to designate themselves as specialists in a particular area require three years of practice and about thirty hours of legal education in the specific area before the designation can be recognized. Other states have certification systems. Under a certification system, an attorney who wishes to be recognized as an immigration lawyer must take an examination, similar to the bar examination, in this area of specialty. Basic Immigration Legislation All American immigration law is set by the United States government, not the separate states. Therefore, although immigration lawyers must pass state bar examinations to practice law and the states set the conditions and qualifications that lawyers must meet to specialize in immigration law, these lawyers are chiefly concerned with federal legislation. The main outlines of immigration and naturalization law in the United States after World War II were set by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act. The 1952 act continued the national origins system of granting visas that the U.S. Congress had adopted during the 1920’s. Under this system, legal immigration was largely restricted to people from western European countries. Provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act barred from immigration communists, subversives, or anyone judged by the INS to have advocated communist ideas. 377

Immigration law

The “immigration” part of this act was largely replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, which abolished the national origins system in favor of a preference system based on family reunification, job skills of migrants, and refugee status. The McCarran-Walter Act, however, continued to be the basis of American naturalization policy. Under the conditions set forth in that act, before noncitizens can apply for U.S. citizenship, they must be at least eighteen years of age and have been legal residents of the United States for at least five years. Persons applying for citizenship must have lived in the state in which they file a petition for at least six months before petitioning the court. In most cases, petitioners for American citizenship must be able to speak, read, and write English. Moreover, applicants must demonstrate knowledge of American history and government. The 1965 amendments greatly increased immigration law practice in the United States in several ways. First, they led to a wave of immigration to the United States, creating a large group of potential users of the services of immigration lawyers. Second, the complex system of preferences created a demand for experts who could provide advice on the best way to obtain permission to settle in the United States. Third, increasing the importance of job skills as an avenue for immigration created incentives for American businesses to seek out the services of immigration lawyers. Businesses wishing to hire noncitizens often find it useful to obtain professional advice on how to get visas for prospective employees. Concern over illegal immigration led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. This act established fines for employers who hire illegal aliens and offered legal status to aliens who had entered the country illegally before January 1, 1982. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was also primarily aimed at clamping down on illegal immigration. Among other provisions, the act streamlined deportation proceedings, making it easier and faster to deport foreigners who lacked proper documents. Persons seeking political asylum who arrived in the United States with falsified or borrowed documents could be held at the border and denied asylum unless they could demonstrate a “credible fear” of persecution in their homelands. Each new piece of legislation has created new conditions and complications surrounding immigration and has therefore contributed to the growth of immigration law as a specialty. Immigration attorneys contributing pro bono services have assisted those seeking asylum in the United States, such as refugees from Central America, who are under threat of immediate deportation. Essentials of American Immigration Law The basis of immigration law is a system of visa categories. A visa is a stamp placed in a passport by an American consulate outside the United States. In order to immigrate to the United States, persons’ passports must contain a stamp indicating to which legal category they belong. Immigration attorneys or other knowledgeable persons 378

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Work Performed by Immigration Lawyers Immigration lawyers, who work with immigrants and with businesses employing or desiring to hire immigrants:

• • • • • •

Analyze the facts in the case of someone desiring to immigrate Explain all benefits for which immigrants may be eligible Recommend the best way to obtain legal immigrant status Complete and file appropriate applications Keep up with new laws affecting their clients Speak for clients in discussions with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)

• Represent clients in court • File necessary appeals and waivers Adapted from: American Immigration and Lawyers Association, “A Guide to Consumer Protection and Authorized Representation,” Washington, D.C .: AILA, 1998.

can help immigrants identify the best category. There are two major classes of visas. The first class is the permanent residence visa. After entry into the United States, the INS issues alien registration cards, commonly known as “green cards,” to those who receive this type of visa. Noncitizens who have permanent resident status have the right to live permanently and work in the United States. Usually, only people who have immediate family members residing in the United States or who have job skills demanded by U.S. employers can obtain this type of visa. The second class of visa is the nonimmigrant visa. This type of visa is issued for vacations, study, or temporary employment. The U.S. government issues an unrestricted number of nonimmigrant visas, but permanent residence visas are limited by quotas established by Congress. Different groups of people have different chances of receiving permanent residence status in each annual quota. These groups are called preferences. The first preference consists of unmarried children, of any age, of U.S. citizens. Spouses of green card holders and unmarried children of green card holders fall into the second preference. This means that after the unmarried children of U.S. citizens who have applied for U.S. residence in a given year have been granted visas, quota slots begin to be filled by spouses and unmarried children of green card holders. The third preference goes to professionals and persons of exceptional ability in the arts and sciences who come to the United States to work for American employers. Married children, of any age, of U.S. citizens receive the fourth preference. The fifth preference goes to noncitizen sisters and brothers of U.S. citizens. Skilled and unskilled workers coming to take jobs for which American workers are in short supply are classified as the sixth preference. 379

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Husbands and wives of citizens do not fall under the quota system. This means that marrying a U.S. citizen is one of the easiest legal ways to settle permanently in the United States. The 1986 Immigration Marriage Fraud Act Amendments amended the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, because it was believed that marriage fraud was a serious problem. These amendments impose a two-year conditional residency requirement on alien spouses and children before they are eligible for permanent residency status on the basis of marriage. Couples must file a petition within the last ninety days of the conditional status period, after which the INS interviews them to establish that they have not divorced or had their marriages annulled and that they have not been married solely for the purpose of obtaining entry to the United States. Under the 1986 amendments, marriage fraud for the purpose of immigration may be punishable by up to five years imprisonment and up to $250,000 in fines. Marriage fraud can also be grounds for deportation and a bar to future immigration. Refugees and political asylum seekers also do not fall under the quota system. These are people who have been forced to flee their native countries because of political oppression. A refugee is someone who has been granted permission to enter the United States before arriving. Political asylum is granted to persons only after they have entered the country. Those entering as refugees may apply for green cards one year after they arrive. Those who do not enter as refugees and receive political asylum may become eligible two years after asylum is granted. Exclusion and Deportation Exclusion is the barring of noncitizens from entering the United States. Deportation is the prohibiting of noncitizens who have already entered the United States, either legally or illegally, from remaining and sending them back to their countries of origin. The United States government has decided that certain categories of people are undesirable and that these people should be excluded. Excludable aliens include those with tuberculosis, those with physical or mental disorders that may threaten others, those who have been convicted of committing certain crimes, those who are judged to be threats to national security, those who have previously violated immigration laws, those who practice polygamy, and those who engage in international child abduction. As waivers are available in many exclusion cases, immigration attorneys can apply for and help persons obtain waivers. The INS decides when an individual falls into an excludable category and it is responsible for issuing or refusing to issue waivers. If a waiver application is denied or if a potential immigrant claims that a judgment of exclusion was a mistake, the decision of the INS may be appealed in a U.S. district court. As in all appeals cases, persons appealing should seek the representation of a qualified immigration attorney. There are two broad categories of deportable aliens: those deportable for acts committed before or during entry to the United States and those deport380

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able for acts committed since their entry. American citizens cannot be deported. Some aliens, including ambassadors, diplomats, public ministers, and members of their families, are also exempt from deportation. Aliens may be deported because they were excludable to begin with and misrepresented themselves in order to enter the country. A 1978 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed the INS to deport aliens who participated in Nazi activities during World War II on the grounds that they committed acts before arriving in the United States that exclude them from remaining in the country. Immigrants who have entered the country illegally without inspection may be deported for illegal entry. Those deportable for conduct after entry include subversives, or people who advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and those who have committed serious crimes and have been sentenced to prison within five years after entry. Persons who have crossed the border into the United States without proper documents are frequently deported immediately. However, persons who can reasonably claim to be seeking political asylum or contest their deportation may be granted a deportation hearing. Deportation hearings begin officially with the issuance of an order to immigrants to show why they are not deportable. Such hearings generally involve a judge, a trial attorney, immigrants’ counsel, and sometimes an interpreter. Immigration judges are selected by the U.S. attorney general. The trial attorney has the job of showing why the immigrant should be deported and is therefore comparable to a prosecutor in criminal law. Immigrants’ counsel is not necessarily an attorney, although attorneys are often the individuals best qualified to aid defendants in deportation hearings. According to the United States Code of Federal Regulations, various types of persons may serve as counsel for aliens in a deportation hearing: attorneys who are members of the highest court of any state, law students and law graduates under some circumstances who have not yet been admitted to the bar, representatives of organizations recognized by the Board of Immigration Appeals, accredited officials of aliens’ own governments, certain persons who meet criteria established by legal statute, attorneys outside the United States licensed to practice law in their own countries, and amici curiae, friends of the court whom the court recognizes as providing useful information. Under the law, the immigration judge at a deportation hearing must advise aliens of the availability of free legal services. Major Organizations of Immigration Lawyers The largest and bestknown organization of immigration lawyers is the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Its more than 5,200 members are all lawyers specializing in immigration and nationality law. The AILA was founded in 1946 as the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers and changed its name in 1981. Based in Washington, D.C., the AILA publishes a newsletter, the AILA Monthly, which has a circulation of 3,800, and the annual Immigration and Nationality Law Handbook. The AILA has thirty-four local chapters in different regions of the country. 381

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It offers a mentor program, in which experienced immigration lawyers answer the questions of other members. Its Young Lawyers Division is open to all members aged thirty-six or younger or who have been members of the organization for less than three years. This division provides education and training for younger and newer members. The AILA holds an annual conference that offers panels, workshops, and professional education. Although the AILA exists primarily to promote the interests and professional development of its members, it also seeks to influence immigration policies. Staff and members at its Washington, D.C., headquarters maintain contact with the INS and other federal agencies involved in implementing immigration policies. With only about fifty members, the Association of Immigration Attorneys (AIA), based in New York, is a much smaller organization. It was founded in 1983, and all of its members are attorneys specializing in immigration. In addition to representing the interests of immigration lawyers, the AIA is an advocacy group that seeks to assert the legal rights of aliens, lobbies the U.S. Congress on behalf of noncitizens, and attempts to bring about legislation to improve the position of legal aliens in the United States. The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild (NIP/ NLG), based in Boston, is an organization of five hundred members. Founded in 1973, its members include lawyers, law students, and legal workers. It seeks to defend the civil liberties of foreign-born persons living in the United States and to help noncitizens who have legal problems with immigration. The Project also holds seminars to improve the legal skills of its members. Many local bar associations also sponsor volunteer legal services projects for immigrants. These provide legal representation to those facing deportation hearings or those who have other relevant legal needs. Bar associations often maintain referral services that provide the names of attorneys who do pro bono immigration work—that is, attorneys who provide their services free of charge. One of the most notable pro bono projects has been ProBAR in Texas. This is a project that provides free legal counsel, from lawyers and law students, to Central Americans in South Texas who are seeking political asylum. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Perhaps the best tool with which to begin any study of immigration law is a basic glossary, such as Bill Ong Hing’s Immigration and the Law: A Dictionary (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999). Guidebooks provide information on American immigration law in a fashion that can be easily understood by nonlawyers. U.S. Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete Guide (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 1997) by Allan Wernick, a top immigration lawyer, is one of the best guides for those interested in visiting or settling in the United States. Wernick explains the U.S. immigration system, details who can immigrate, and provides tips for dealing with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Aliza Becker’s Citizenship for Us: A Handbook on 382

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Naturalization and Citizenship (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Legal Immigration Network, 2002) is another practical guide to immigration law written for nonlawyers. Also useful is Carl R. Baldwin’s Immigration Questions and Answers (3d ed. New York: Allworth Press, 2002). A handbook for immigration attorneys that looks at immigration law in post-September 11, 2001, America is Iris D. Gomez’s Representing Non-citizens and INS Detainees: Resolving Problems in the Current Climate of Uncertainty (Boston: MCLE, 2003). Stephen H. Legomsky’s Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy (3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002) is an authoritative legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. Employment immigration, the other primary type of legal immigration, is handled in Bill Ong Hing’s Handling Immigration Cases (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), a guide for lawyers handling immigration cases related to employment. Gerald L. Neuman’s Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) is an academic consideration of the problems involved in applying U.S. constitutional law to noncitizens and a discussion of case-law interpretations of immigrant rights. For a general history of American immigration law, see U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), edited by Michael C. LeMay and Elliott Robert Barkan, which is supported by extensive extracts from documents. In Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), Cheryl Shanks examines changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 The Law: Federal legislation on illegal aliens Date: November 6, 1986 Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Cuban immigrants; Laws and treaties 383


Significance: The Immigration Reform and Control Act provided for the legalization of illegal aliens and established sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986. The act amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and was based in part on the findings and recommendations of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (1978-1981). In its 1981 report to Congress, this commission had proposed that the United States continue to accept large numbers of immigrants and enact a program of amnesty for undocumented aliens already in the United States. To deter migration of undocumented aliens to the United States, the commission also proposed to make the employment of illegal aliens a punishable offense. Development of the Bill These proposals were incorporated into the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, a first version of which was introduced in 1982. In the five years between its introduction and its enactment, the bill ran into opposition from a variety of quarters. Agricultural interests, especially growers of perishable commodities, were concerned that the proposed employer sanctions would jeopardize their labor supply. Mexican American advocacy groups also opposed employer sanctions, while organized labor and restrictionists who were concerned about the massive influx of foreign workers favored employer sanctions. Many liberals and humanitarians supported the notion of legalizing the status of undocumented aliens and expressed concerns over potential discrimination against them. During the 1980’s, the bill repeatedly was pronounced dead only to be revived again as various lawmakers, notably Representatives Leon Panetta, Charles Schumer, and Peter Rodino, introduced compromises and amendments to respond to their constituencies or to overcome opposition by congressional factions. Differences also developed between the House Democratic leadership and the Republican White House over funding the legalization program. On October 15, 1986, the House at last approved the bill, by a vote of 238 to 173; the Senate approved the bill on October 17, by a vote of 63 to 24. Provisions The major components of the Immigration Reform and Control Act provided for the control of illegal immigration (Title I), the legalization of undocumented aliens (Title II), and the reform of legal immigration (Title III). Other sections of the act provided for reports to Congress (Title IV), state assistance for the incarceration costs of illegal aliens and certain Cuban nationals (Title V), the creation of a commission for the study of international migration and cooperative economic development (Title VI), and federal responsibility for deportable and excludable aliens convicted of crimes (Title VII). 384


A major objective of the IRCA, the control of illegal immigration, was to be achieved by imposing sanctions on employers. The IRCA made it unlawful for any person knowingly to hire, recruit, or refer for a fee any alien not authorized to work in the United States. Before hiring new employees, employers would be required to examine certain specified documents to verify a job applicant’s identity and authority to work. The act established civil and criminal penalties, and employers could be fined up to two thousand dollars per unauthorized alien, even for a first offense. Employers who demonstrated a pattern of knowingly hiring undocumented aliens could face felony penalties of up to six months’ imprisonment and/or a three-thousand-dollar fine per violation. Employers also were required to keep appropriate records. Failure to do so could result in a civil fine of up to one thousand dollars. In order to allow time for a public education campaign to become effective, penalties against employers for hiring undocumented aliens were not phased in until June, 1987. The second major objective of the IRCA, the legalization of undocumented aliens, was to be realized by granting temporary residence status to aliens who had entered the United States illegally prior to January 1, 1982, and who had resided in the United States continuously since then. They could be granted permanent residence status after eighteen months if they could demonstrate a minimal understanding of English and some knowledge of the history and government of the United States. After a five-year period of permanent residence, they would become eligible for citizenship. The act also permitted the attorney general to grant legal status to aliens who could show that they had entered the United States prior to January, 1972, and lived in the country since then. Newly legalized aliens were barred from most forms of public assistance for five years, although exceptions could be made for emergency medical care, aid to the blind or disabled, or other assistance deemed to be in the interest of public health. To assure passage of the bill, support of the growers in the West and Southwest was essential. After protracted negotiations, the growers succeeded in getting the kind of legislation that assured them of a continued supply of temporary agricultural workers. The new program differed from earlier bracero programs by providing for the legalization of special agricultural workers who could work anywhere and who could become eligible for permanent resident status or for citizenship. The IRCA granted temporary residence status to aliens who had performed field labor in perishable agricultural commodities in the United States for at least ninety days during the twelve-month period ending May 1, 1986, as well as to persons who could demonstrate to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that they had performed appropriate agricultural field labor for ninety days in three successive previous years while residing in the United States for six months in each year. The act also revised and expanded an existing temporary foreign worker program known as H-2. In case of a shortage of seasonal farmworkers, employers could apply to the secretary of labor no more than sixty days in ad385


vance of needing workers. The employer also was required to try to recruit domestic workers for the jobs. H-2 also provided that during fiscal years 19901993, additional special agricultural workers could be admitted to temporary residence status as “replenishment workers.” Their admission was contingent upon certification of the need for such workers by the secretaries of labor and of agriculture. Replenishment workers who performed ninety days of field work in perishable agricultural commodities in each of the first three years would be eligible for permanent resident status. They were, however, disqualified from public assistance. In order to become eligible for citizenship, they would have to perform seasonal agricultural services for ninety days during five separate years. The IRCA also provided permanent resident status for a hundred thousand specified Cubans and Haitians who entered the United States prior to January 1, 1982. The law increased quotas from former colonies and dependencies from five hundred to six thousand and provided for the admission of five thousand immigrants annually for two years, to be chosen from nationals of thirty-six countries with low rates of immigration. Altogether, the Immigration Reform and Control Act led to the legalization of the status of three million aliens; however, IRCA was not as successful in curbing illegal immigration as had been anticipated. Mindful of the potential for discrimination, Congress established an Office of Special Counsel in the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute charges of discrimination connected with unlawful immigration practices. The act also required states to verify the status of noncitizens applying for public aid and provided that states be reimbursed for the implementation costs of this provision. To reimburse states for the public assistance, health, and education costs resulting from legalizing aliens, the act provided for the appropriation of one billion dollars in each of the four fiscal years following its enactment. Helmut J. Schmeller Further Reading Bean, Frank D., Georges Vernez, and Charles B. Keely. Opening and Closing the Doors: Evaluating Immigration Reform and Control. Washington, D.C.: Rand Corporation and the Urban Institute, 1989. Scholarly study of the IRCA of 1986, its implementation, and its impact on illegal immigration. Daniels, Roger. “The 1980s and Beyond.” In Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Brief, critical discussion of the IRCA, with special emphasis on the act’s amnesty provision. Fuchs, Lawrence H. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Concise, welldocumented discussion of the act by the executive director of the staff of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. 386

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Hing, Bill Ong. Immigration and the Law: A Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999. Useful general reference on immigration law. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Broad discussion of modern federal government immigration policies that considers all sides of the debates about the rights of illegal aliens. Includes discussions of the immigration laws of 1986 and 1996. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. Zolberg, Aristide R. “Reforming the Back Door: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 in Historical Perspective.” In Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, edited by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Comprehensive, well-documented account of the genesis of the IRCA, with particular emphasis on the legislative history. See also Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Naturalization Act of 1790; Page law; War Brides Act.

Indentured servitude Definition: System whereby immigrants contract to work for specified periods for persons who pay the costs of their travel expenses Immigration issues: Economics; European immigrants; Families and marriage; Labor; Slavery; Women Significance: During the American colonial period, tens of thousands of people—mostly Europeans—sold their future labor in return for passage 387


to the New World. Approximately 20 percent of these indentured servants were women. During the early decades of Great Britain’s North American colonization, the London Company needed workers to settle in its mid-Atlantic colony. At the same time, there were those in England who wanted to emigrate but did not have the funds. Meeting both needs, the system of indentured servitude brought tens of thousands of colonists to the New World, until the harsher system of slavery overtook it. The largest number of the indentured servants who came to North America came to the Chesapeake Bay Colony. Between the 1650’s and the start of the American Revolution, some twenty thousand such servants arrived; of these, about four thousand were women. Servants normally agreed to an indenture of three to seven years, with the average being four. Those with skills generally negotiated shorter periods, while the unskilled had to settle for the longest time. All indentured servants, regardless of skill, age, or gender, incurred the same debts emigrating to the colonies. To pay those obligations, they sold their future labor in the indenture contract. The majority of indentured servants were between the ages of ten and forty. Younger children would have been more of a liability than an asset, and given the life expectancy of the time, workers beyond forty may well have died before the indenture was completed, thus costing the master more than they were worth. The peak age for indentured servants was between fifteen and twenty-five. While the men were generally in their teens, the women tended to enter an indenture in their early twenties. Most were done with service before their thirtieth birthday. During the seventeenth century, most indentured servants came from England. In the eighteenth century, the majority came from Ireland or Europe as “redemptioners.” Ship captains paid their passage, and the immigrants hoped that friends or relatives would pay for their passage and “redeem” them in the New World. Failing that end, the captain would sell them into servitude. Whether they came from England or elsewhere, or whether they came in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, men were preferred as indentured servants over women. In the earlier time, as a result of the shortage of women in the colonies, a premium was paid for female servants, and perhaps as many as 25 percent of the servants were women; in the second century of colonialism, women made up only 10 percent of indentured servants. As the gender ratio equalized in the colonies, fewer women came as indentured servants. Most servants signed their indentures—agreements that spelled out their rights and obligations, terms of service, and what was due upon conclusion of the contract—before they sailed. Some indentured servants were convicts, and a few were kidnapped or shanghaied. In return for providing food, cloth388


ing, and shelter, the master received the labor of the servant for the specified time. The master was to avoid cruel and unusual punishment, although servants could be whipped, branded, or even hanged for infractions. Servants agreed to work, not to marry without their masters’ permission, and not to run away. The servants, their labor, and all their possessions belonged to the masters, who could trade, lend, auction, or sell their servants. Servants could be separated from their families. They had few rights, and while the contracts were enforced in the courts, judgments generally favored the masters. In fact, during the time of the contract, most servants had no more rights than slaves. Once freed, if they lived that long, servants might rise to the rank of small landholders. Upon freedom, masters provided servants with their freedom dues, including clothes, tools, guns, and perhaps as much as fifty acres of land. Indentured servants were cheaper for masters than hiring free labor. They performed all sorts of tasks, both skilled and unskilled. Most female indentured servants worked in their masters’ homes, in contrast to the men, who worked in the fields and shops of their masters. Because the women worked in close proximity to the families, masters generally paid more attention to their references and their character. Women generally had lower skill levels than men and were, therefore, restricted in the types of jobs that they were given. Most worked in domestic service, which included tasks ranging from emptying an overflowing chamber pot to starting the fire before the family arose to the more traditional feminine occupations of sewing, carding wool, and spinning. They also washed and ironed clothes and did other, similar types of domestic service. Child care occupied the largest amount of the female servant’s time. Women worked as nursemaids and nannies, caring for children and adults alike. Occasionally, female servants did field work, although most worked in the house, often sleeping on the floor at the foot of the mistress’ bed. Abuses Women faced abuses that were different, and often harsher, than those of their male counterparts. Running away was one of the more common methods of coping with an abusive situation. Masters generally complained that female servants ran away either to rejoin a lover or because they were pregnant. In addition to the general penalties accorded all indentured servants, women bore the additional burden of pregnancy. A pregnant servant had additional time added to her indenture to cover her “crime.” She then had to serve even more time to reimburse her master for time lost during her confinement and any expenses associated with the care and feeding of the infant, even though in many cases the master was the child’s father. A female servant’s best hope was marriage. Two servants who married combined their freedom dues; marrying a freeman, however, improved her position more. A higher percentage of seventeenth century servants were women whose indentures were bought at a premium, likely with the intention of marriage. 389


A minority of indentured servants, both male and female, were convicts whose choice was death or imprisonment in England or transportation as indentured servants to the colonies. While some colonies would accept female convicts as house servants, others would take them only as field hands and still others had laws forbidding their introduction completely. Though part of the reason for transportation was reformation, there is no evidence that the process had any positive effects. Upon conclusion of the indenture, success in the New World was far from guaranteed, and women had a harder time than men. During the late seventeenth century, two-thirds of Philadelphia’s poor house residents were women. Furthermore, the long-term residents were more likely to be female. Generally, women who completed their indenture had few opportunities to support themselves and nowhere to go, and they often were forced into the poor house. Duncan R. Jamieson Further Reading Galenson, David W. White Servitude in Colonial America. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Menard, Russell R. Migrants, Servants, and Slaves: Unfree Labor in Colonial British America. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001. Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001. Salinger, Sharon V. “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Van der Zee, John. Bound Over: Indentured Servitude and American Conscience. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. See also Asian Indian immigrants; British as dominant group; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese detentions in New York; History of U.S. immigration; Latinos; Racial and ethnic demographic trends; Women immigrants; Wong Kim Ark case.

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Indigenous superordination

Indigenous superordination Definition: Intergroup relationship in which members of a “native” dominant group within a geographical area subordinates members of incoming immigrant groups Immigration issues: Discrimination; Nativism and racism; Sociological theories Significance: The process of indigenous superordination results in a particular form of stratification within the society in which the resident dominant group enjoys a disproportionate share of the resources, prestige, and power. The differential among groups may be manifest in economic, political, or cultural realms, interactively. The power relationship is then justified by a system of beliefs that rationalizes the superiority of the indigenous group in relation to the incoming groups and that often scapegoats the immigrants by plac-

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Iranian immigrants

ing blame on them as the cause of various societal problems. This type of superordinate-subordinate group relationship is less overtly conflictual than migrant superordination. An example of indigenous superordination is found in the United States, where most voluntary immigrants occupy lower levels of the stratification system. M. Bahati Kuumba Further Reading Cook, Terrence E. Separation, Assimilation, or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Zølner, Mette. Re-imagining the Nation: Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories. New York: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2000. See also British as dominant group; Immigrant advantage; Migrant superordination.

Iranian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Middle Eastern nation of Iran Immigration issues: Demographics; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion Significance: Since November, 1979, when Iranian student militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held sixty-six Americans hostage while demanding the return of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi from his exile in the United States, most Americans have held strongly unfavorable opinions of Iranian Americans. Iranian Americans face a constant struggle to convince other groups in the United States that they personally are not terrorists and do not support the Islamic government in Iran. The trauma of the 1979 Iranian revolution and subsequent terror and economic deterioration, combined with the long war with Iraq, resulted in widespread dispersions of Iranians outside their homeland. It is estimated that between 1.2 million and 2 million Iranian Americans live in the United States. The majority of Iranian immigrants live in suburban areas such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Long Island, New York, and hold middle-class jobs. 392

Iranian immigrants

Iranian Immigration to the United States, 1925-2003 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution

12,000


11,000 10,000 9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000

1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War

5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1931-1940

1925-1930

Since the Iranian Revolution and the taking of the U.S. embassy, images of Iranians as unpredictable and wild anti-American fanatics and terrorists have dominated the minds of the American public, according to Ali Akbar Mahdi, an Iranian scholar at Ohio Wesleyan University. For example, when the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995, at first many Americans believed that Middle East terrorists were responsible. Living in such a negative environment is a difficult but conscious choice for most firstgeneration Iranian immigrants. Second-generation Iranians also suffer from the negative images associated with the national origins of their parents. Mahdi wrote that the presence of many Iranian immigrants in Western countries is partially due to the religionization of Iranian society. Most of the Iranian immigrants are secular people who do not want to mix religion with politics and education. He said that most of the Iranian immigrants in the United States consist of middle- and upper-class people who are highly educated and have a better-than-average standard of living. Many of those who came from more modest backgrounds have secured middle-class positions for themselves through education, dedication, and hard work. Relations with Other Groups Iranians who came to the United States before the hostage crisis received a generally positive reception. However, af393

Iranian immigrants

ter that crisis and the ensuing rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, the American perception of Iran changed from a country of peace to a country of turmoil and unpredictability. The U.S. State Department has labeled the Iranian government as a “rogue state.” The unfavorable portrayal of Iranians in the U.S. media helps breed prejudice and discrimination, placing a strain on Iranian Americans. Some researchers accuse the United States of using xenophobia and ungrounded fears to motivate its citizens to follow the views of American political, religious, and cultural leaders. They say that while the United States prides itself in its sociocultural diversity, it simultaneously denounces cultures it cannot understand. A survey of 157 Iranian Americans conducted by Laleh Khalili, a graduate student at Columbia University and published in The Iranian Times in April, 1998, showed that although 37 percent of respondents select mostly other Iranian Americans as friends, 63 percent do not. Khalili found that those who prefer friends who are not Iranian Americans associate with members of other transnational communities rather than typical white Americans. The most frequently mentioned areas of origin are Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. According to Khalili, a shared knowledge of what crossing borders entails and similarities in sociopolitical backgrounds provide a context in which Iranians in the United States can operate comfortably. Image Improvement In an effort to focus on the achievements of Iranian Americans and not dwell on the faults of the Iranian government, some U.S. governors in states such as New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Florida have officially declared March 21, the Iranian celebration of the new year, as the Day of Iranian Americans. In 1997, Governor Lawton Chiles of Florida said that Individuals of people of Iranian heritage have earned an esteemed place in the cultural, economic, and social structure of Florida and have proved themselves an asset to the community, with many of them holding positions in the fields of medicine, research, education, law, business, the arts, and public services.

Chiles went on to call for continued mutual understanding and friendship between established residents and those of Iranian descent. Manucher Shahidi of Long Island, New York, one of the organizers of the movement to make March 21 a special day in the United States, said that the celebration involves being recognized as an official ethnic minority group in the United States. This gives us lobbying power in Congress, gives us the right to institute our culture and history into that of America, and most importantly, it guarantees that the United States government will protect our cultural and historical integrity.

Marian Wynne Haber 394

Irish immigrants

Further Reading For comprehensive overviews of Iranians in the United States, see Mitra K. Shavarini’s Educating Immigrants: Experiences of SecondGeneration Iranians (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2004), Sandra Donovan’s Iranians in America (Minneapolis: Lerner, 2006), Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (New York: Villard, 2003), Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), and Maboud Ansari’s The Making of the Iranian Community in America (New York: Pardis Press, 1992). Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Iran. More general works on Middle Eastern immigrants include Aladdin Elaasar’s Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2004), Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004), and Amir B. Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney’s Middle Eastern Lives in America (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). See also Arab American stereotypes; Arab immigrants; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Muslims; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

Irish immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Ireland Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Religion; Stereotypes Significance: Irish Americans have been in the United States since the early colonial period and have played an active role in the development of industry, in labor and social reform, and in politics at all levels. They also profoundly influenced the development of many large cities and have had a lasting influence on educational practices. The Irish have been a vital component of American life since the days of colonialism. The early Irish immigrants were mainly Presbyterian Protestants from Ulster. Although some belonged to the Church of Ireland, most came in search of financial gains. The majority of the Ulster-born Irish were tenant farmers or skilled artisans of modest means. The Irish who would follow in the famine years would be vastly different in their beliefs, their financial sta395

Irish immigrants

Irish American children waiting for New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1951. An annual event, the parade has long been an important expression of Irish pride. (Library of Congress)

tus, and their social standing. Each new wave of Irish immigrants would add something to the fabric of American life. The “Famine Irish” Whereas the earliest Irish immigrants had come to the United States to better themselves, the “famine Irish” sought simple survival in an often hostile land. The Penal Laws in Ireland had long put native Irish Catholics at a serious disadvantage in their homeland. Irish farmers were uneducated, poor, and dependent upon their rocky plots of land for subsistence. Families were large. The lifestyle was one of intense social interaction. They had little, but they shared what they had and celebrated their beliefs with tradition, song, dance, and religious ritual. They were dependent upon the potato crop as their sole food source. When blight struck the potato crop between the years 1845 and 1854, the poor had nowhere to turn. Some had compassionate landlords. However, when Parliament passed the Poor Law Extension Act of 1847, landlords became responsible for the cost of care of their tenantry. Even well-meaning landowners could not cover such expense. Evictions became the rule. The 396

Irish immigrants

poor then had the option of going to disease-infested workhouses or starving on the road in search of food and shelter. They fled their native land strictly for survival. Between 1840 and 1860, more than 1.5 million Irish came to the shores of the United States. They settled in cities, concentrating in certain neighborhoods. A large contingent settled in New Orleans. Most of those who fled the famine stayed in eastern cities such as New York or Boston simply because they had no money and no marketable skills to move on. Some would move toward Chicago or join the movement westward in search of employment. Most of the famine Irish were poor and Catholic. They represented the first large wave of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in the history of the nation.

Irish Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 100,000

1845-1850 Great Irish Famine

95,000 90,000 85,000 80,000


75,000 70,000 65,000 60,000 55,000 50,000


45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000


25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

2001-2003

1981-1990

1991-2000

1971-1980

1951-1960

1961-1970

1931-1940

1941-1950

1921-1930

1901-1910

1911-1920

1891-1900

1871-1880

1881-1890

1851-1860

1861-1870

1841-1850

1821-1830

1831-1840


397

Irish immigrants

The Irish immigrants were uneducated, Catholic, and considered uncultured by the social elite in the United States. Many were unaccompanied women, a fact that set the Irish apart from previous immigrant groups. The young Irish girls took positions as domestic servants in the homes of the wealthy. They worked to save enough to rescue more relations in Ireland from starvation. These women and the unskilled Irish men who sought to make a living digging ditches or building canals or bridges were scorned by the nativists. However, from the lowest levels of society, these Irish Americans began to build their version of the American Dream. Religion The Irish Catholic poor, social by nature and custom and isolated by their religious beliefs, built their own comfortable enclaves within the cities where they settled. Irish neighborhoods in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere developed into parishes. The Catholic parishes evolved into social and educational centers within the communities. As the Irish developed a reputation for hard drinking and fighting, it was the parish priest who often served as counselor and role model. The church cared for the immigrants’ spiritual, social, educational, medical, and emotional needs. As the number of immigrants increased, parishes and religious orders built schools, hospitals, and orphanages to meet the needs of the communities. Politics and Social Reforms As the growing numbers of Irish immigrants began to frighten the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants already established in the cities and to threaten the status quo, the children of the famine generation began to see the possibilities that existed for them by virtue of their numbers and their ambition. Politics was a natural extension of the parish culture. Precinct by precinct, the Irish began to embrace the U.S. political system as a tool for personal advancement and a mechanism for social change. One individual who came up from the streets of New York was young Alfred E. “Al” Smith. Raised on the streets of Brooklyn as the Brooklyn Bridge was being built, he took advantage of the political patronage in Tammany Hall to gain a foothold in politics. Under the tutelage of Charles Murphy Alfred E. Smith (right) with future president Franklin D. and Jimmy Walker, Smith rose up Roosevelt in 1930. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library) 398

Irish immigrants

through the political ranks in New York and eventually became the governor of New York State. Similar political machines evolved in Kansas City and Chicago, as politicians sought to serve their constituencies. Smith initiated social reforms, including child labor laws, and improved safety requirements to protect workers. Elsewhere in the nation, labor unions were gaining support. With many successes to his credit in New York, Smith ran unsuccessfully for president in 1928. Many people still distrusted the Irish, and the nativists and many non-Catholics feared papal interference in U.S. politics should Smith be elected. The first Irish Catholic to claim the office of the president of the United States would be another descendant from Irish peasant stock, John F. Kennedy, in 1960. Kennedy would stand as a symbol of the Irish American Dream brought to fruition. Appreciation of Traditions During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Irish Americans no longer bore the stigma of most negative stereotypes. The Irish generally assimilated into U.S. society, often intermarrying with other ethnic groups, yet there continued to be a lingering appreciation of Irish history and traditions, with a renewed interested in traditional Irish music and dance that became a part of American popular culture, transcending ethnic origins and religious beliefs. Kathleen Schongar Further Reading Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Study of late twentieth century Irish immigrants in America’s largest city, which remains the first stop for many new immigrants. Fallows, Marjorie. Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Introduction to Irish American history, cultural experiences, and expectations. Religion, labor, politics, and family dynamics are considered within the context of American life. Golway, Terry. The Irish in America. Edited by Michael Coffey. New York: Disney Enterprises, 1997. Enlightened look at the development of Irish Americans, including personal essays by those who lived through the cultural assimilation process during the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups including the Irish. Griffin, William D. A Portrait of the Irish in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Comprehensive historical perspective on the struggles and successes of Irish assimilation into American culture. Many photographs complement the text. 399

Irish immigrants and African Americans

McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Diaspora in America. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984. Provides an overview of Irish immigration and explores significant religious, political, and economic factors in Ireland and in the United States that influenced ethnic relations among American immigrant groups. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Broad survey of Irish immigration written for younger readers. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Irish immigrants and African Americans Immigration issues: African Americans; European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: Conflict has existed between Irish Americans and African Americans since the first great waves of Irish immigration during the 1840’s. Before the Civil War of the 1860’s, Irish Catholics were confronted with harsh discrimination by Anglo-Protestant Americans. When dangerous work needed to be done, many employers opted to hire cheap Irish labor instead of using slaves, preferring to risk the life of an Irishman over one of their slaves, the latter being valuable property. Struggling to survive at the bottom of the economic ladder, the Irish feared that if slaves were set free, they would face even more competition for scarce jobs. Many also believed that they should focus their energies on improving their own plight before expending any of their resources helping African Americans. Irish Americans’ concern for their own survival and their view of African Americans as competition worked to sour relations between the two struggling groups. During the Civil War, Irish Americans, who were loyal to the Union generally, had no interest in fighting a war to free the slaves. During the war, when disproportionate numbers of poor Irish were drafted to serve in the Union forces, riots broke out in cities throughout the North. On July 13, 1863, antidraft rioting broke out in New York City, lasting until July 15. Irish Americans, who viewed the conflict as a rich man’s war fought by the poor, took out their 400

Irish immigrants and African Americans

anger at abolitionists and African Americans by burning, looting, and beating any African Americans in their path. New York militia were called out to stop the rioting. After the Civil War, the economic struggle between African Americans and Irish Americans continued. Irish Americans and other white immigrants took jobs in the booming industrial sector, and African Americans found themselves once again relegated to southern fields. Many African Americans, seeing immigrants usurp jobs they felt rightly belonged to them, began to engage in nativist rhetoric. Many African Americans vociferously supported the anti-immigration legislation of the 1920’s. As Irish Americans gained greater political and economic power in the twentieth century, they continued to do so at the expense of African Americans. Although literacy tests and other racist laws denied the majority of African Americans the vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Irish used their access to the ballot to gain control of local political machines and city halls. As they lost their brogues and became established in the mainstream of white America, the Irish used their political influence to monopolize civil service positions while excluding African Americans and new immigrants. During the 1990’s, Irish Americans exceeded the national average in education, income, and employment levels while African Americans consistently lagged behind in all three areas. Although approximately one-third of African Americans could be considered at least middle class, there were three times more poor African Americans than white Americans. Kathleen Odell Korgen Further Reading Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Reitz, Jeffrey G., ed. Host Societies and the Reception of Immigrants. La Jolla, Calif.: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2003. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes; Scotch-Irish immigrants.

401

Irish immigrants and discrimination

Irish immigrants and discrimination Immigration issues: Discrimination; European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: Discrimination against Irish immigrants to North America has its roots in earlier British history and Protestant prejudice against Roman Catholics. In the British Isles, the English used notions of a “savage race” in colonialized Ireland to justify systems that dominated and oppressed the Irish long before the American colonies existed. These systems, which placed Irish Catholics on the bottom of cultural hierarchies, became codified by religion. Labels were given substance by combining religious identity with “race.” The English also used immigrant groups of English and Scots for social control, according to scholar Roy Forester, in Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1989). Successive generations of English who were born in Ireland identified themselves as Irish Protestants rather than as English. Scottish people were brought to northern Ireland to serve as buffer groups against Irish kingdoms. These peoples—the Protestant Irish and Scotch-Irish—began identifying themselves as superior to the Irish Catholic “race.” These hierarchies were transferred to North America along with the waves of immigrants; however, cultural and “race” demarcations lost their sharpness in the new land. The Scotch-Irish, as they had in Ireland, acted as buffers in the American colonies until the American Revolution caused distinctions to largely disappear within southern racial slavery hierarchies. Later immigration by Irish Catholics, especially during the 1850’s potato famine, in the end contributed more to the enlargement of the “white race” than to the creation of another ethnicity, according to Noel Ignatiev, in How the Irish Became White (1995). In the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics faced heavy discrimination, and through this process, a notion of an Irish Catholic “race” developed among other Americans. James V. Fenelon Further Reading Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish stereotypes; Scotch-Irish immigrants. 402

Irish stereotypes

Irish stereotypes Definition: North American perceptions and misperceptions about Irish immigrants Immigration issues: Discrimination; European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Nativism and racism; Religion; Stereotypes Significance: Among the millions of western Europeans who have immigrated to the United States, the Irish have been subjected to an exceptional amount of negative stereotyping and discrimination. Between 1820 and 1920, approximately five million people emigrated from Ireland to the United States. Most of these immigrants were Irish Catholic farmers who were living in abject poverty in an Ireland dominated politically and economically by England. Until the late nineteenth century, Irish Catholics were not allowed to own farms in Ireland, and during the Potato Famine of 1845-1850, more than five hundred thousand Irish farmers were evicted from their farms. The only real choice for these displaced people was to leave Ireland for the United States; however, they were not well received by white Protestants, who then completely controlled the nation’s politics, business, and society. These Irish Catholic immigrants were viewed as a threat for several reasons. Many first-generation Irish immigrants spoke only Gaelic, and they became manual laborers who worked for low wages, creating competition for jobs. The new immigrants built their own Catholic churches and schools and made it very clear that they would not tolerate in the United States the religious discrimination that they and their ancestors had experienced in Ireland. As early as the 1840’s, extremely offensive representations of Irish immigrants began to appear in American newspapers and magazines. The magazine Harper’s Monthly published numerous drawings in which Irish Americans were depicted as apelike creatures with whom normal Americans would not want to associate. The same magazine printed in its April 6, 1867, issue a drawing by Thomas Nast entitled “The Day We Celebrate.” Nast suggested that Irish Americans celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by becoming drunk and then attacking police officers. Such stereotypical images of Irish immigrants as violent drunkards appeared in numerous magazines throughout the last six decades of the nineteenth century. Frequently, racist cartoons would simultaneously criticize Irish and Jewish immigrants. The fact that overt discrimination was directed against Jews and Irish Catholics at the same time may well explain why Jewish American and Irish American immigrants came to realize that they had a great deal in common. Other cartoons ridiculed Irish Americans because of their religious be403

Irish stereotypes

Editorial cartoon from a late nineteenth century California newspaper expressing the fear that the United States would be overwhelmed by foreign immigrants—particularly the Irish and Chinese immigrants caricatured in the cartoon. (Library of Congress)

liefs. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Bible was taught in many American public schools, but the translation used was the King James version, the official translation of Protestant churches. During the 1840’s, many Catholic leaders asked school boards to allow Catholic pupils to receive religious instruction based on the Douay translation, which was the approved Roman Catholic version. Numerous contemporary cartoons during the 1840’s and 1850’s suggested that Catholics were opposed to the reading of the Bible; however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although disparaging representations of Irish Americans continued to be published in U.S. magazines, most people came to realize that these stereotypical images distorted the truth and revealed more about the prejudices of those creating the images than about Irish Americans whom they attempted to ridicule. Edmund J. Campion 404

Israeli immigrants

Further Reading Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Scotch-Irish immigrants.

Israeli immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the modern Middle Eastern state of Israel Immigration issues: Demographics; Jewish immigrants; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion Significance: Israelis are an ethnically and religiously diverse group, but the term “Israeli Americans” is most often applied to Israeli Jews, both the Ashkenazim of central and eastern European heritage and the Sephardim of Iberian, Middle Eastern, and North African origins. As Jews, their religious observance ranges from a secular orientation to an orthodox one. Constituting only about 1 percent of the U.S. immigrant population, Israeli immigrants often perceive themselves to be sojourners, temporary residents of the host country. They maintain social, cultural, and economic ties to their country of origin, even while living abroad. Some retain dual citizenship. With the aid of technology and the global economy, their lifestyles seem to fit the new trend of transnationalism (allegiances and orientations that go beyond the boundaries of a single nation). Rather than forsake their homelands and become completely assimilated, new immigrants actively participate in both social worlds. Rates of Immigration Israeli immigration rates vary depending on how the term “Israeli” is defined and whether only legal immigrants are counted. At the time of the 1990 U.S. Census, approximately 90,000 Israelis lived in the United States. Most were settled in metropolitan areas, especially Los Angeles and New York City’s Queens and Brooklyn boroughs. Certain immigration trends are evident. First, the number of legal Israeli immigrants entering the United States has gradually increased since 1948. 405

Israeli immigrants

For example, data from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service indicate that the numbers increased from about 1,000 to 2,000 per year between 1967 and 1976 and from 3,000 to 4,000 per year from 1976 to 1986. During the 1990’s, an additional 39,397 immigrants came to the United States from Israel, and they continued to come at a rate of more than 4,000 persons per year during the first three years of the twenty-first century. Second, Israeli immigration was especially pronounced during the 1970’s, especially after 1975, when, as 1990 census figures reveal, rates of Israelis traveling to Los Angeles alone more than doubled from 8 percent (1970-1974) to 17 percent (1975-1979). Some have suggested the growth is due in part to increases following war, in this case, the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Third, in response to changing Israeli policy toward emigrants and economic conditions in Israel, the number of Israelis returning to Israel has risen during the 1990’s. According to Israeli government estimates, the average yearly number rose from about 5,500 during 1985-1991 to nearly 10,500 during 19921994. Motives for Emigration In contrast to previous Jewish immigrants, contemporary Israelis are not “pushed” to emigrate to the United States because of persecution or extreme economic hardship. Rather, the decision to emigrate is primarily motivated by “pull” factors. Many Israelis cite personal development, particularly greater educational and economic opportunity, as most important. They seek professional advancement, as well as a higher income and standard of living. Others desire to reunite with family members already in the United States or leave to fulfill a personal need for adventure and escape from the limited confines, both geographically and socially, of Israel. Some engage in chain migration, being assisted by Israelis who have already made the trip. Travel, especially among those completing required military service, often leads to extended stays. Certain features of Israeli society may be “push” factors: high inflation, bureaucratic red tape, burdensome taxes, housing shortages, the difficulty in developing capitalistic enterprises, and government regulations that intrude into personal life. As part of a country prone to societal violence and war, Israelis may mention the need to escape the siege mentality and the tensions permeating society, as well as reserve army duty. Interethnic tensions motivate some to flee from perceived discrimination waged by upper-class Ashkenazim against those of lower status. Relations with the American Jewish Community Israelis were not initially welcomed with open arms by the American Jewish community. Relations between the two groups have been strained because of historical and cultural factors. Historically, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 realized the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland. To emigrate to Israel, or to make Aliyah (“ascent”), was a firm demonstration of loyalty to the Zionist cause. To immigrate from Israel and return to the Jewish diaspora, however, 406

Israeli immigrants


has pejoratively been referred to Israeli Immigration as Yerida (“descent”). Hence, Olim, to the United States, “those who go up” to Israel, are 1949-2003 admired, in contrast to Yordim, 5,000 “those who go down,” who are dis1967 Six-Days paraged for emigrating. Israeli 4,500 War Americans accept this stigmatized 4,000 identity, often expressing guilt and 1956 shame for leaving. 3,500 Suez In classifying Israeli immigrants War as Yordim, American Jews were fol3,000 lowing the lead of Israelis. In 1976, 2,500 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin himself referred to Yordim as “the left2,000 overs of weaklings.” Israeli emi1,500 gration, coupled with rising Arab birthrates, is perceived as a threat 1,000 1948 to the future of the Jewish homeIsraeli 500 land. Israeli Americans, on the independence other hand, are often alienated 0 from American Jews, who, in their minds, have offered only monetary contributions, rather than real sacrifice, for Israel. American Jews often condemn Yordim, yet many would never consider emigrating Source: U.S . Census Bureau. to Israel themselves. Culturally, a gap exists between Israeli Americans and American Jews. They eat distinct foods and have different lifestyles, political ideologies, and entertainment preferences. Their language also differs; Israelis speak Hebrew as their primary language. Many Israeli Americans also follow the culture of their country of origin, be it Yemenite, Ethiopian, or Russian. An improved relationship between Israeli Americans and American Jews has been prompted by shifts in official Israeli policy toward Yordim enacted during the mid-1980’s. In an effort to promote the return of Israeli Americans, the Israeli government softened its position regarding emigration and offered enticements such as employment, housing assistance, and travel loans. At the same time, a number of American Jewish organizations initiated outreach programs for Israeli Americans. Previously, such organizations provided little, if any, assistance in an effort to discourage Israelis from staying in America. 2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1949-1950

The Sojourner Mentality and Self-Identity Stemming from the negative stereotype of Yordim, Israeli Americans label themselves sojourners, insisting, in the face of perhaps contrary evidence, that their stay in the United States is temporary. Lower-status Israelis frequently become settlers, integrat407

Israeli immigrants

ing into the host country. Higher-status Israelis often become permanent sojourners; they intend to return to Israel but have no serious plans to do so. As permanent sojourners, they practiced what Natan Uriely, in a 1994 article in International Sociology, has termed rhetorical ethnicity. Their identity is rooted in their ethnicity, and they have a strong symbolic commitment to Israel. This is evident in their repeated desires to go home. Israelis resist identifying themselves as Americans or Israeli Americans, preferring an Israeli identity. Many never fully assimilate. Demographic Profile S. J. Gold and B. A. Phillips, in the American Jewish Yearbook (1996), have provided a demographic profile of Israeli Americans. According to their report (and at the time of their report), Israelis were young, most under age forty-five, and more likely to be male, married, and relatively well educated. They had high rates of employment and earned substantial income that was generally higher than that of the average foreignborn person. Many were employed as managers, administrators, professionals, or technical specialists. Some were engaged in sales, and a significant number (second only to Koreans in America) were self-employed in industries such as real estate, jewelry and diamonds, retail sales, and construction. Women had less labor force participation in the United States than in Israel, perhaps indicative of their rising social status in the United States. Social Life in the United States Israelis tend to socialize with each other, often in ethnic nightclubs, at communal singing sessions, or at ethnic celebrations such as Israeli Independence Day. A few belong to ethnic organizations such as Tzofim, an Israeli group similar to the Boy Scouts. Some form ethnic subgroups based on their country of origin. Friends frequently substitute for family and are invited to holiday observances or children’s bar/bat mitzvahs. Many Israelis consider themselves to be secular Jews, linking religious observance with being Israeli rather than Jewish. However, many do participate in religious activities in the United States, by joining synagogues at a slightly higher rate than American Jews, providing their children with religious educations, and engaging in religious rituals to a greater extent in the United States than in Israel. Some of the Sephardim have found the orthodox Hasidic movement appealing. Perhaps this increased religiosity is a reaction to the transition from being a religious majority in Israel to being a religious minority in the United States. Rosann Bar Further Reading Sources of information on Israel and emigration include H. Greenberg’s Israel: Social Problems (Tel Aviv: Dekel, 1979), D. Kass and S. M. Lipset’s “Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1967 to the Present: Israelis and Others,” in Understanding American Jewry, edited by Marshall Sklare (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1982). Books and articles on the Israelis in the United States include D. Elizur’s “Israelis in the 408

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U.S.: Motives, Attitudes, and Intentions,” in American Jewish Yearbook (1979); James Feron’s “The Israelis of New York,” in The New York Times (January 16, 1977); S. J. Gold and B. A. Phillips’s “Israelis in the United States,” in American Jewish Yearbook (1996); P. Ritterbrand’s “Israelis in New York,” Contemporary Jewry (7, 1986); Moshe Shokeid’s Children of Circumstances: Israeli Immigrants in New York (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988); Zvi Sobel’s Migrants from the Promised Land (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1986); and Natan Uriely’s “Rhetorical Ethnicity of Permanent Sojourners: The Case of Israeli Immigrants in the Chicago Area,” in International Sociology (9, 1994). See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Soviet Jewish immigrants; Twice migrants.

Italian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Italy Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants Significance: Italian Americans played an integral role in the development of the United States. Although they have been subjected to ethnic stereotypes—ranging from illiterate peasant organ grinder or shiftless vegetable peddler to unskilled laborer or violent member of an organized crime family—they have achieved distinguished success. Contributions from countless Italian Americans in entertainment, politics, and business have directly shaped and influenced the nation’s social landscape. Italy sent few immigrants to the United States before the Civil War (18611865). The 1850 census, the first to record ethnic group populations, listed only 3,645 Italian Americans, and these individuals were primarily skilled artisans, merchants, musicians, actors, and entrepreneurs. However, these numbers do not reflect their overall significance. Sponsored by Spain, England, and France, Italian explorers helped chart the European pathway to the Americas. After Christopher Columbus navigated the Atlantic in 1492, several of his countrymen continued his pursuits. Giovanni Caboto, often referred to as John Cabot in popular history textbooks, obtained financial backing from England’s King Henry VII and organized a successful expedition to the New England coast in 1497. Amerigo Vespucci helped popularize interest in America following the publication of two pamphlets highlighting the potential rewards available to new settlers on the eastern seaboard. Giovanni da 409

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Verrazano was the first European to enter New York Harbor during the early sixteenth century. Although numerous adventurers from other countries also facilitated European migration to America, the efforts of several Italians were crucial for the success of many early colonial enterprises. Roman Catholic missionaries helped carve out the French Empire in the Mississippi Valley. Artisans developed glassware and silk industries in Jamestown, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson recruited Italian masons to help construct his home at Monticello and enlisted the aid of several musicians to form the U.S. Marine Corps Band. Italians also helped design and decoFlyer from an organization dedicated to protecting Ital- rate the interior of the early ian immigrants from being exploited upon their arrival in White House, and Italian opera emerged as one of the most America. (Center for Migration Studies) popular forms of entertainment among the upper classes in antebellum America. Although there were few Italian Americans in the nation, they had made a significant cultural impact. The Great Wave From 1880 to 1920, more than four million Italians entered the United States. Approximately 80 percent were men, and because 97 percent initially passed through New York City, the bulk of the Italian American community settled in major eastern cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City; however, a large community also emerged in Chicago. Following the unification of Italy during the 1860’s, southern Italians soon began to feel alienated from and experienced widespread disillusionment with northern leadership. Absentee landlords systematically exploited the peasants, and agricultural policies produced massive hunger among sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Others succumbed to outbreaks of malaria. Northern politicians enacted oppressive conscription laws forcing southerners to serve seven-year terms in the military. As Italy quickly evolved into a two-tiered system in which southerners were excluded from all facets of decision making, a large number of Italians voted with their feet and abandoned 410

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their traditional attachment to their villages, emigrating to the United States. Most Italians did not initially intend to remain in the United States. Estimates vary, but between 30 percent and 50 percent returned to the homeland. Strong familial ties and attachments to ancestral villages caused many to return despite the fact that few earned enough to reverse their impoverished status. The majority of Italian Americans became manual laborers. Ethnic labor contractors, or padroni, persuaded many to emigrate from Italy by promising them unlimited economic opportunities upon arrival in North America. The padroni secured employment for émigrés and arranged the financing for the transatlantic voyage. Italians helped build railroads and the New York City subway system. Others toiled in dangerous and precarious conditions in factories; several became miners. Some were able to procure opportunities in

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agricultural communities, but the majority of Italian Americans remained locked in ethnic urban enclaves and were subjected to the outburst of nativist xenophobic practices that accompanied the great wave of migration. Assimilation and Nativism Racial and ethnic relations in the United States have adhered to a complex hierarchical pecking order. Generally, each wave of immigrants has encountered a number of discriminatory practices designed to eradicate all remnants of ethnic identity. Because the dominant culture reflected a solid Anglo-Saxon bias following the Civil War, new groups from southeastern Europe were expected to embrace assimilationist policies and Americanize. Reformers demonstrated little sympathy for immigrant culture and introduced a variety of measures to diminish and weaken traditional ethnic ways. Italian American children were extremely susceptible to Anglo-Saxon assimilationists. They were forced into a form of cultural tug-of-war. Required either to abandon their native culture or to face social ostracization and the loss of economic opportunity, the second generation began to embrace Anglo-Saxon culture. This caused considerable psychological problems. For example, Italian American children were expected to find work and contribute to the household economy. This, however, resulted in a premature depar-

Confined to substandard tenement housing in major eastern cities and severely restricted in employment opportunities, many Italian immigrant families took garment work into their homes and employed their children. The mother and her three eldest children in this picture earned a total of about two dollars a week—when work was available—around 1913, while the father sought day work on the street. (Library of Congress)

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ture from school. If a child decided to stay in school and pursue a profession, that child risked the wrath of his or her family. Because most Italian Americans considered the family to be sacred, young Italian Americans faced a classic dilemma. As a result, rates of socioeconomic mobility were quite low among the first few generations. Other forms of nativism also surfaced. Public schools insisted that children speak only English, and officials often shortened and Americanized Italian family names. Some families experienced violence when they attempted to move outside the ethnic enclave. Many people were subjected to racial remarks such as dago, wop, and guinea. Although studies have shown that the rates of alcoholism and mental illness were lower compared with those of other groups, the suicide rate among Italian Americans tripled during the great wave of migration. Perhaps the greatest example of nativist xenophobic pressure occurred during the 1920’s during the trial of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Nativist sentiment, spurred by fears of communism, had been growing in the United States when Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested under questionable circumstances for murder and robbery in Massachusetts. Both men were judged as violent revolutionaries and subversive ethnic agents rather than on the merits of their case. Although their guilt remains debatable, both men were executed in 1927. Organized Crime The average Italian American suffered from the negative impression created by a select minority of Italians who attempted to construct vast empires in organized crime. As congressional committees cracked down on criminals, some Americans concluded that all Italian Americans were associated with a nationwide crime syndicate commonly referred to as La Cosa Nostra or the Mafia. These rumors received considerable credibility in 1963 when career criminal Joseph Valachi broke a code of silence and exposed his associates. As a result, the nation became obsessed with the Mafia. References to the Mafia in The New York Times increased from 2 in 1962 to 359 in 1969. Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather (1969) was made into an Academy Award-winning film, but his violent portrayal of Italian criminals negatively affected many law-abiding Italian Americans. Other gangsters such as John Gotti acquired national fame during the 1980’s, and once again Italian Americans were found guilty by association. Numerous popular authors flooded the market with books detailing how murder was used to settle disputes between Italians. Despite the fact that only a select few were involved in criminal activity, all Italian Americans were described as being sympathetic toward the Mafia. Famous Italians Not all Italian Americans were unskilled workers or common criminals. Many achieved considerable success in their fields. Joe DiMaggio established a major league baseball record for hitting in fifty-six consecutive games. Heavyweight boxer Rocky Marciano defeated several notable 413

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champions, including Joe Louis, Ezzard Charles, and Jersey Joe Wolcott, and retired as an undefeated champion. Frank Capra emerged as one of the nation’s finest filmmakers, and his 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is considered one of the country’s classic movies. Singer Frank Sinatra, who was often unjustly accused of being in the Mafia, entertained generations of Americans with his swagger and ballads. Politician Fiorello La Guardia served as a congressman, New York City mayor, and United Nations relief official. Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti provided much-needed support for and helped solidify the Beat generation’s place in American literature. Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to become a vice presidential candidate in 1984. Pop singer Madonna (Ciccone) evolved into a cultural icon during the 1980’s. Countless others also achieved prominent status in American life, thus proving that despite being victimized by ethnic stereotyping, Italian Americans have risen to the highest pinnacles of success in the United States. Robert D. Ubriaco, Jr. Further Reading Burgan, Michael. Italian Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. General survey of Italian immigration to the United States; part of a series of books on immigration written for younger readers. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Places the Italian American experience in its proper comparative framework with other ethnic groups. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups, including Italians. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Comprehensive source on the role of Italian Americans in the United States since the colonial era. Mormino, Gary Ross. Immigrants on the Hill: Italian Americans in St. Louis, 18821982. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Examines why the Italian immigrant community has been able to withstand the process of assimilation that typically undermines the solidarity of ethnic urban enclaves. Rolle, Andrew F. Westward the Immigrants: Italian Adventurers and Colonists in an Expanding America. Ninot: University Press of Colorado, 1999. Study of the role of Italian immigrants in America’s westward expansion. Sterba, Christopher M. The Melting Pot Goes to War: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in America’s Great Crusade, 1917-1919. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1999. Scholarly study of the role of Jewish and Italian immigrants in World War I. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. 414

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Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Family and Community—Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971. Revealing study of the early Italian immigrant ordeal in an eastern American city. See also European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 18921943; Garment industry; Immigration Act of 1924; Little Italies; Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Jamaican immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the West Indian island of Jamaica Immigration issues: African Americans; Demographics; Slavery; West Indian immigrants Significance: Jamaican immigrants come from a small, mostly black nation with different patterns of race relations and have had to adjust their expectations as they have dealt with native-born black and white Americans. As a

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consequence, they have often had to struggle with an uncertain racial and ethnic identity.


The movement of Jamaicans to the United States began during the early twentieth century and increased greatly after the 1965 relaxation of immigration restrictions. Jamaican immigrants clustered in metropolitan areas along the eastern seaboard and in California, where many attained success as leaders in politics, religion, education, and business. The Caribbean island of Jamaica was colonized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century. After most of the Arawak Indians died, the Spanish brought African slaves to work their sugar plantations. The British acquired Jamaica in 1670 and continued the practice of slavery. West Indian slavery did not encourage passivity, nor did it damage slaves’ self-confidence to the extent that United States slavery did. Jamaican slavery ended in 1838, a generation before slavery’s demise in the southern United States. Jamaica gained national independence in 1962. Centuries of slavery left the isJamaican Immigration land with a majority black poputo the United States, lation (many of whom were very 1953-2003 poor), a smaller mixed-race seg22,000 ment, and a small, prosperous white population. Jamaica, unlike 20,000 the United States, never developed Jim Crow laws, rigid color castes, 18,000 or a tradition of lynching. Race is 16,000 not a pressing issue in Jamaica, where blacks occupy positions at 14,000 all levels of society. Jamaican immigrants to the United States, most 12,000 of whom are of African ancestry, 10,000 often experience shock upon entering a society with a powerful 8,000 white majority and a long history of blatant and rigid color preju6,000 dice and discrimination. They de4,000 velop various strategies to deal 1962 with racism, such as confrontation, Jamaican 2,000 independence resignation, and development of heightened race consciousness. 0 2001-2003

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Twentieth Century Immigration Immigration from Jamaica to the United States occurred throughout the twentieth century. Many propertied and educated Ja-

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maicans had established themselves in New York City by the 1920’s. Other Jamaicans entered the country as temporary migrant farmworkers under special visas. During the World War II labor shortage, Jamaicans were encouraged to work on farms and in factories in the United States. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act reduced West Indian immigration; however Jamaican immigration surged following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened admission to nonwhite immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Jamaican newcomers settled mostly in the metropolitan areas of New York City and Miami. By 1990, 435,024 Jamaicans lived in the United States, about 80 percent of whom were foreignborn. The leading states of residence were New York, Florida, California, New Jersey, and Connecticut, according to 1990 U.S. Census figures. During the 1990’s, Jamaican immigration averaged about 17,000 people per year, and that figure dropped to about 14,000 immigrants per year during the first several years of the twenty-first century. Education, Business, and Leadership Jamaicans arriving in the first decades of the twentieth century became black community leaders in the areas of business, politics, and the arts. In New York City, many were business owners and professionals. Some, such as Marcus Garvey, became government, civil rights, or labor union leaders. Others, including Claude McKay, a prominent writer who helped found the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s, became cultural leaders. The 1965 Immigration Act established a preference for skilled migrants. Accordingly, Jamaican immigrants in the latter part of the twentieth century tended to be well educated. The departure of many technical, managerial, and professional workers badly needed for the island’s economic development has produced a “brain drain” in Jamaica. The value Jamaican immigrants place on education is reflected in the school performance of Jamaican American youth. Rubén Rumbaut’s 1992 survey found that the children of Jamaican immigrants tended to have high grade-point averages and to score high on standardized reading and math tests. The children reported spending a large amount of time doing homework (versus watching television) and had very high educational aspirations. Comparisons with African Americans Economic motivation underlies much Jamaican migration, and some transplanted islanders become business owners. Social scientists vary in their interpretations of West Indian entrepreneurship. Some, such as Thomas Sowell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, credit West Indians with habits of thrift and hard work that cause them to be more successful economically than U.S.-born African Americans. The implication is that African Americans should not blame race discrimination for their poverty. Others, including Reynolds Farley and Stephen Steinberg, argue that Jamaican immigrants constitute a select group, skilled and highly motivated before they leave the island. 417

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Farley and Steinberg also argue that the differences in economic success between immigrant and U.S.-born African Americans have been exaggerated. Farley cites statistics showing that while West Indians are more often self-employed than U.S.-born African Americans, the self-employment rate for whites is much larger than for either nonwhite group. Statistics for unemployment and income also place Jamaican Americans well below whites. Most Jamaican Americans are not self-employed. Many obtain advanced education and become lawyers, doctors, and teachers; others work in construction. Women have high labor force participation and many work in domestic service and nursing. Questions of Identity As Jamaican Americans attempt to arrive at a sense of racial or ethnic identity, they encounter opposing forces. On one hand, they tend to retain their ethnic identity, thinking of themselves as Jamaican Americans, because of the constant influx of new immigrants who revitalize distinct cultural elements of folklore, food preferences, religion, and speech. This separateness is enforced by the attitudes of African Americans, who sometimes resent the islanders because of their foreignness, their entrepreneurial success, and because some white employers apparently prefer foreign-born workers. On the other hand, Jamaican Americans may adopt an assimilated label, calling themselves black or African American, prompted by daily experiences with racism. Because of the conflicting pressures of living in the United States, second-generation islanders sometimes vacillate, at times identifying with African Americans and other times attempting to distance themselves from them. Nancy Conn Terjesen Further Reading Farley, Reynolds, and Walter R. Allen. The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987. Includes a chapter on the economic status of West Indians. Heron, Melonie P. The Occupational Attainment of Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, Canada, and England. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2001. Economic study of West Indian immigrants. Parrillo, Vincent. Strangers to These Shores. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997. General treatment of race and ethnic relations with sections on both Jamaicans and Rastafarians. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes chapters on West Indians. Vickerman, Milton. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Study of the West Indian immigrant experience that contains interviews with Jamaicans in New York City who tell of contending forces of racism and equal treatment in the United States. 418

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Waters, Mary C. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Examines the Jamaican immigrant experience in the United States. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Dominican immigrants; Haitian immigrants; Santería; Universal Negro Improvement Association; West Indian immigrants.

Jamestown colony The Event: Foundation of the earliest British settlement in North America Date: Founded on May 14, 1607 Place: Jamestown, Virginia Immigration issues: European immigrants; Native Americans Significance: The first successful British settlement in North America and the beginning of the Virginia Colony, Jamestown has become a historical symbol of British immigration to North America. In the year 1605, England and Spain had finally made peace, and in England capital was accumulating and commerce flourishing. Captain George Waymouth had returned from a voyage to Nantucket and Maine to explore a possible refuge for Roman Catholics. Five Abenaki Indians whom Waymouth had brought with him and a glowing account of the expedition by Catholic scholar James Rosier had attracted much attention. Origins After their interest was aroused, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, both powerful members of the mercantile community, petitioned the Crown in the name of a group of adventurers for a charter incorporating two companies, one based in London and the other based in Plymouth. The patent issued on April 10, 1606, granted them the territory known as Virginia, located between latitudes 34 degrees and 41 degrees north. The London Company was authorized to settle between latitudes 34 degrees and 41 degrees north, and the Plymouth Company, between latitudes 45 degrees and 38 degrees north, but neither was to settle within one hundred miles of the other. Because of Sir Walter Raleigh’s explorations in the Chesapeake Bay area and Waymouth’s investigations in Maine, the adventurers knew exactly what to request. The absence, before 1618, of the official minutes of the Virginia Company, as the two companies were jointly called, has forced historians to turn to fragmentary and often biased sources, including the sometimes conflicting ac419

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counts of Captain John Smith in his memoirs and some settlers’ incomplete journal entries. However, enough facts have been ascertained that a basic chronology can be reconstructed. On December 20, 1606, the Virginia Company of London dispatched for America three ships, the Godspeed, the Discovery, and the Susan Constant, carrying 144 men and boys. Captain Christopher Newport was to be in charge until the expedition reached land. After making landfall on the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607, and following a brief skirmish with local members of the Powhatan Confederacy, the 105 survivors turned up the Powhatan (renamed the James) River to search for a favorable site to settle. On May 14, they disembarked on a peninsula extending from the north shore, where they would begin to build James Fort, later called “James Towne.” Although the area was low and marshy, it was beautiful, seemed defensible, and provided anchorage for deepwater vessels. The great James River offered the possibility of penetration into the interior for exploring and trading with native communities. Settlement Only after the settlers had landed and opened the sealed box containing their instructions did they learn the names of their council, the governing body that had been appointed by the Virginia Company. This council would prove an inferior mode of governance: Its seven members quickly disagreed with one another (there had been contention, for example, over their settlement site), and a considerable number of the other settlers were headstrong adventurers. This lack of concentrated authority in Virginia resulted in bickering and the formation of factions. The strong if near-dictatorial leadership of Smith, the second president of the council, held the settlement together after fear and suspicion led to the ousting of the council’s weaker first president, Edward Maria Wingfield. More pressing than matters of government was the necessity of providing for the settlers’ physical needs. Upon their arrival in America, they had divided themselves into three groups: the first was to concentrate on construction and fortifications; the second was to plant crops and keep watch downriver; and the third was to explore the surrounding area. Although the company hoped to find a water route through the continent to the South Sea and encouraged search for minerals, there was little time for such activity. Establishment of a settlement and development of trade were more urgent. Relations with Native Americans The accomplishment of both these aims depended on the amicable relations with local native peoples, members of the great Powhatan Confederacy of about thirty tribes. The Powhatans occupied most of Tidewater Virginia south of the Potomac River. The naïve settlers, rather than meeting the simple-minded “lovable savages” touted by the London promoters, soon realized that these people were both sophisticated and highly wary of the English intrusion into their domain. 420

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Late nineteenth century painting providing a romantic depiction of Pocahontas’s alleged rescue of Captain John Smith. (Library of Congress)

James Towne (not yet even a half-moon bunker) lay in the middle of Paspehege hunting grounds. On May 26 approximately two hundred Powhatans attacked the infant settlement, killing one or two and wounding more than a dozen—the first of many such skirmishes that would occur over the next several years. In mid-June, the confederacy’s leader Wahunsonacock (known as Powhatan) sent envoys from upriver to make peace and provide food for the now-starving travelers. In the fall, Smith undertook a reconnaissance trip and was detained by Powhatan’s half brother Opechancanough, who delivered Smith to Powhatan. The famous story of Powhatan’s mercy at the behest of his young daughter Pocahontas was Smith’s fabrication some two decades after this episode; Powhatan more likely expected to bargain with the Europeans, knowing well that he had the upper hand in being able to supply them with food and hoping to strike a deal for weapons in return. Smith agreed but tricked the Indians who escorted him back to Jamestown into accepting trinkets in exchange for valuable corn. It was also during this time that the Indians had their first taste of aqua vitae, or 100-proof alcohol. Powhatan would continue to supply food (at times by force), punctuated by minor attacks on the settlers, during the settlement’s early years until, in 1622, after repeated abuse at the hands of the English, he would mount a major uprising. 421

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Rebuilding After returning to the settlement, Smith found disease, death, and dissension. The settlers had made little headway in building the storehouse and adequate shelter, and although the river was full of sturgeon and they knew that they must boil the water to make it potable, they were eating barley soaked in slimy, brackish water and dying of influenza, typhoid, and starvation. Although the strict discipline of Smith’s council presidency and the addition of more immigrants improved conditions at the settlement, the first two years must be judged as disappointing. Not only had the settlers failed in the basics of healthy survival; they had also failed to return commercially valuable resources to England. The backers in London therefore embarked upon a more ambitious program to be financed on a joint-stock basis. Having negotiated a new charter, the Virginia Company, under the leadership of Sir Thomas Smythe, launched a campaign for financial support. Sixteen hundred persons were to emigrate to Virginia on two great expeditions in the summer of 1609. The joint-stock arrangement would allow a pooling of labor with common stock, since each person’s migration to America was counted as equal to one share of stock. By this means a community of interest was developed between the adventurer in England and the colonist. The new charter of 1609 abolished the royal council and placed control in the hands of the council of the company. A governor with absolute authority was to replace the local council in the colony. The first great contingent of settlers set out on May 15, 1609, with Sir George Somers in command. Ironically, the ship carrying the leaders was blown away from the others in a hurricane and foundered in Bermuda, its passengers not arriving in Jamestown until nearly a year after they had set out. When the other ships arrived in Virginia, Smith refused to give up his post as council president, though he yielded leadership after a famous accident (some have speculated conspiracy) in which he was injured when his gunpowder pouch ignited and exploded. The departure of Smith for England and the arrival of almost four hundred new settlers in weakened condition placed considerable strain on the economy of the colony. When the leaders of the expedition arrived the following summer, they found only sixty settlers still living, with the settlement in ruins about them. Famine, disease, and attacks by Indians had left even the few survivors on the brink of death or reduced to a subhuman existence that sometimes involved cannibalism. Since the new arrivals were without sufficient provisions, the settlers abandoned hope of maintaining the colony and prepared to leave for England by way of Newfoundland. As the disheartened colonists were sailing down the James River, miraculously they met Thomas West (Lord De La Warr), their new governor, coming upriver with a year’s provisions. Lord De La Warr ordered the colonists to return and reestablish the settlement. The new leadership, with additional supplies and manpower, gave the colonists courage to continue. In 1612, John Rolfe, who would eventually marry Pocahontas, discovered Virginia’s “gold” when he planted the first West Indies tobacco in its soil. 422

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Used initially for medicinal purposes, the new American commodity was soon being smoked “for fun” by Europeans—an “aqua vitae” made of smoke. Warren M. Billings Christina J. Moose Further Reading Bridenbaugh, Carl. Jamestown, 1544-1699. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Brief history that emphasizes the “people—red, white, and black— who lived on or near Jamestown Island.” Hume, Ivor Noël. The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to James Towne. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Historical archaeologist Hume provides an extremely detailed account of the settling of Virginia, comparing primary documents as well as physical evidence and deftly teasing out fact from legend. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of the North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Powhatan and Smith are covered in chapter 4 of this lavishly illustrated history of North America from its original occupants’ viewpoint. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Early chapters include an excellent description of the difficulties faced by Smith and the other settlers. Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001. Brief survey of labor in Britain’s North American colonies. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Written by an ethnohistorian and anthropologist, this is one of the best studies of Jamestown and the settlement’s relationship to the Powhatan Confederacy. Vaughan, Alden T. American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. A short, balanced biography of Smith combined with a detailed history of Virginia from Smith’s departure in 1609 until his death in 1631. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. See also Anglo-conformity; British as dominant group; History of U.S. immigration; Jewish settlement of New York.

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Japanese American Citizens League Identification: Japanese American advocacy organization Date: Founded on August 29, 1930 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties; Japanese immigrants Significance: The largest and most influential Japanese American political organization, the Japanese American Citizens League promotes assimilation as the most effective response to racism. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) was founded in 1930 in respose to widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the United States. The JACL promoted assimilation and Americanization as the most effective way for the nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) to gain the approval of the general public. Initially a loose federation of loyalty leagues, the JACL’s influence was minimal until 1941, when it cooperated with the federal government in carrying out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered the internment of Japanese Americans in restricted camps during World War II. Because of that cooperation, it lost the respect of many Japanese Americans. After World War II, the JACL achieved a positive public profile as it lobbied for civil rights legislation. However, it has remained controversial for its insistence on accommodation rather than confrontation in the political arena. Now the largest and most influential Japanese American political organization, the JACL must deal with conflicts within its own ranks regarding its basic goals. Formation of the JACL The roots of the JACL can be traced to 1918 in San Francisco, when Thomas Y. Yatabe and a small group of his collegeeducated friends met to discuss the future of the nisei in America. Calling themselves the American Loyalty League, they were well aware of the racism blocking the economic progress of Asian immigrants and their families at that time. The issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) hoped their children, the nisei, would have opportunities for economic and social advancement. However, as Ronald Takaki has documented in Strangers from a Different Shore (1989), widespread discrimination made it difficult for them to find employment other than manual or menial labor. Yatabe and his friends were among the fortunate few who had achieved professional success; a recent dental school graduate, Yatabe drew into his circle another dentist, a doctor, and an attorney. They realized that nisei in general still faced an uncertain future. In their view, the best way to gain acceptance by the general public was 424


to define themselves first and foremost as loyal Americans dedicated to advancement of democratic ideals. Individual enterprise, fair play, and respect for law and order were cornerstones of this philosophy. In 1922, James “Jimmie” Yoshinori Sakamoto founded a similar group, the Seattle Progressive Citizens League. In 1923, Yatabe established the Fresno American Loyalty League, the first statewide league. In 1928, he and Saburo Kido founded the San Francisco New American Citizens League. All of these groups shared a commitment to being “100 percent American” in their outlook. Realizing how much more effective they would be if they joined together, Clarence Takeya Arai, who was elected president of the Seattle group in 1928, proposed a national meeting of delegates. He envisioned the formation of a national council of Japanese American citizens leagues which would present a positive public profile. This four-day meeting, called to order by Arai on August 29, 1930, in Seattle, Washington, became the founding convention of the JACL: the first national political organization of Japanese Americans. The nisei leadership at the convention represented a special group of college-educated professionals with economically secure, middle-class, urban backgrounds. Mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, they were strikingly unlike the majority of nisei in America at that time, who were younger (with an average age of seventeen) and from rural, working-class backgrounds. Moreover, they were distinctly different from the issei, who still held political, economic, and social power in local Japanese American communities through the Japanese Associations, which provided legal aid and other services for immigrants. The issei usually chose (or were forced by racism) to remain within their own communities; their English skills often were minimal, and their direct interactions with outsiders were limited. Through Japanese Associations and other local organizations—such as prefectural associations, merchants’ and farmers’ mutual aid societies, vernacular newspapers, and Japanese language schools—the issei maintained their communities as best they could within the larger American society. The nisei leadership of the JACL, however, insisted on a completely different approach to finding a secure place for Japanese Americans in the United States. Above all, they stressed assimilation, not ethnicity, underscoring their American aspirations rather than their Japanese heritage. Therefore, one of the first items of business at the founding convention was to remove the hyphen in “Japanese-Americans,” on the basis that any Japanese aspect of nisei identity had to be subordinated to their American destiny. More than one hundred delegates from five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, and New York) and the territory of Hawaii approved resolutions asking that Congress address two timely issues: the constitutionality of the 1922 Cable Act and the eligibility of issei World War I veterans for citizenship. Suma Sugi became their lobbyist for amendment of the Cable Act, which stripped citizenship from any American woman who married an “alien ineligible to citizenship”; through Sugi’s efforts and those of the League of 425


Women Voters, Congress changed the law in 1931, so that citizenship could not be revoked by marriage. Tokutaro “Tokie” Nishimura Slocum became their lobbyist for veteran citizenship, which finally was secured by the Nye-Lea Bill in 1935. JACL’s Work During its first decade of existence, however, the JACL had little direct effect on the Japanese American community. This situation changed dramatically in 1941, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The federal government imprisoned virtually all issei leaders of businesses, schools, and churches on the West Coast. The JACL then took over, directing Japanese Americans not to resist relocation. In fact, the JACL cooperated with the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in identifying community members who might be subversives. Dillon S. Myer, WRA director, worked closely with Mike Masaoka, a JACL official, in administering the camps—a relationship intensely resented by the majority of Japanese Americans. Attorney Wayne Mortimer Collins, who stood against popular opinion to defend Japanese American civil rights during and after World War II, went so far as to blame the JACL for much of the suffering that internees endured. The JACL succeeded in building a positive public profile after the war by lobbying for civil rights legislation such as amendment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, thereby guaranteeing the right of all issei to naturalized citizenship. To this day, however, it has remained a controversial organization, especially because of its conservative political stance. The JACL must deal with interfactional conflicts between its “old guard” and younger members who question its basic goals. Mary Louise Buley-Meissner Further Reading Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Carefully researched investigation of Asian American socioeconomic, political, educational, and cultural realities. Provides contexts for assessing JACL achievements. Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. Useful reference work on Asian American political activism. Drinnon, Richard. Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Painstakingly researched revisionist history of Myer’s administration of the War Relocation Authority, including his collaboration with Mike Masaoka and the JACL. Hosokawa, Bill. JACL in Quest of Justice. New York: William Morrow, 1982. History book commissioned by the JACL to record its accomplishments. Mainly covers the 1930’s and 1940’s, emphasizing the organization’s patriotic nature. 426

Japanese American internment

Ng, Wendy L. Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Comprehensive reference source on all aspects of the internment of Japanese people during World War II. Niiya, Brian, ed. Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present. New York: Japanese American National Museum and Facts On File, 1993. Invaluable resource including a narrative historical overview, a chronology of Japanese American history, and dictionary entries for that history. Scholarly research accessible to a general audience. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Survey of the history and economic and social conditions of Asian immigrants to the United States, both before and after the federal immigration reforms of 1965. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Groundbreaking investigation of Asian American contributions to U.S. socioeconomic and political development. Provides contexts for assessing JACL achievements. See also Alien land laws; Gentlemen’s Agreement; Japanese American internment; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Japanese American internment The Event: Forcible removal of Japanese and Japanese American residents of Western states to isolated internment camps during World War II Date: 1942-1945 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Families and marriage; Japanese immigrants Significance: During World War II, the U.S. government’s war powers were used to deny due process of the law for aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, to the disapproval of the postwar generation. Historically in the continental United States there were severe restrictions on Japanese immigration and naturalization, and in 1941 there were only about 40,000 foreign-born Japanese people (issei) plus about 87,000 Americanborn citizens (nisei). Many were tenant farmers who lived under West Coast state and local restrictions on land ownership, housing, employment, and education; Japanese Americans were a semisegregated community. 427


Evacuation Following the December, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 2,192 Japanese security risks, followed by German and Italian counterparts. False reports of Japanese American espionage at Pearl Harbor, Japanese victories in the Pacific, and radio and press rumors combined to create unfounded fears that traitors and saboteurs might assist a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. On February 14, 1942, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, with War Department encouragement, and misrepresenting rumors as security threats, recommended removing persons of the Japanese “enemy race,” including American citizens, from his West Coast command area. The Justice Department acquiesced, and on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the army to create restricted zones excluding “any or all persons.” On March 21, 1942, Congressional Law 503 provided criminal penalties for noncompliance. Internment DeWitt put more than 100,000 West Coast Japanese Americans under curfew, exclusion, removal, collection, and evacuation orders, which resulted in permanent job and property losses. Their ten relocation

Japanese Americans reporting at the assembly center at Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California, in April, 1942. Given less than two months to prepare for relocation after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, tens of thousands of loyal American citizens, as well as recent immigrants, had to abandon their homes and businesses before entering the uncertainties of internment. (National Archives)

428


Internees eating a meal at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California’s eastern Sierras. (NARA)

camps in the Western United States were isolated, barren, crowded, and crude, with barbed-wire fences and armed guards. Liberals and conservatives alike generally seemed to approve this mass imprisonment, conspicuously limited to the Japanese race. Internees who hoped that compliance would demonstrate their loyalty to the United States became demoralized by camp conditions and popular hostility. In 1943, Japanese American soldiers changed the situation. Aside from their Pacific theater intelligence service, nisei already in uniform plus volunteers from the internment camps formed the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Regimental Combat Team. Their European combat and casualty records earned public respect for the nisei soldiers and a more positive policy for the internees. By early 1944, 15,000 nisei civilians were on restricted camp leave; finally, on December 17, 1944, the West Coast exclusion order was lifted. Following Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945, detention and exclusion were phased out; the last camp closed March 20, 1946. The 1948 Evacuation Claims Act offered meager compensations—about $340 per case—for those renouncing all other claims against the government. Court Cases Four significant wartime appeals by nisei reached the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 21, 1943, in Hirabayashi v. United States and Yasui v. 429


United States, the Court upheld convictions for curfew violations, ruling the curfews constitutional and the emergency real, and found that Japanese Americans “may be a greater source of danger than those of a different ancestry.” The Court held that winning the war must prevail over judicial review, implicitly reversing Ex parte Milligan (1866). On December 18, 1944, the Court granted habeas corpus in Ex parte Endo, ruling that Congress had not authorized long-term detention for a “concededly loyal” American citizen; the Court avoided broader questions of internment. On the same day, however, in Korematsu v. United States, the Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction, on the Hirabayashi precedent. Although three dissenting justices argued that the exclusion order was part of a detention process, that Korematsu’s offense of being in his own home was not normally a criminal act, and that only his race made it a crime under the exclusion orders, the Court majority upheld the government’s wartime powers. Redress America’s postwar generation developed different priorities. The Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests emphasized racial justice and deemphasized “national security.” In 1980 Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to review facts and recommend remedies. Their 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied, exposed General DeWitt’s misrepresentations, finding that “not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry,” that Executive Order 9066 resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership,” and that “a grave injustice was done,” deserving compensation. Of the Supreme Court, the report contended that “the decision in Korematsu lies overruled in the court of history.” The commission’s work enabled Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu to file motions to vacate their convictions in the original courts on writ of coram nobis, alleging prosecutorial misrepresentation and impropriety. Yasui died while his case was in progress. On April 19, 1984, U.S. district court judge Marilyn Patel granted Korematsu’s petition, acknowledging the 1944 Supreme Court decision as “the law of this case” but terming it an anachronism, “now recognized as having very limited application.” On this precedent, Hirabayashi’s convictions were overturned in 1987. In 1988, a congressional act signed by President Ronald Reagan accepted the findings of the 1980 commission, provided $1.2 billion in redress for 60,000 internees, and added, “for these fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these citizens of Japanese ancestry, the Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation.” The history of Japanese American internment illustrates both the difficulty of limiting emergency powers during a popular war and the abuses caused by failing to do so. K. Fred Gillum 430

Japanese immigrants

Further Reading Broek, Jacobus Ten, Edward Barnhart, and Floyd Matson. Prejudice, War, and the Constitution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Examination of the federal government’s decision to intern Japanese people from a legal and constitutional perspective. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Personal Justice Denied. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982. Federal government report on the internment years. Irons, Peter. Justice Delayed. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Study of the postwar legal struggle leading up to reparations during the 1980’s. Ng, Wendy L. Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Comprehensive reference source on the internment years. See also Alien land laws; Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Gentlemen’s Agreement; Japanese American Citizens League; Japanese immigrants; Japanese Peruvians; Japanese segregation in California schools; Little Tokyos; Model minorities; Ozawa v. United States; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Japanese immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the East Asia nation of Japan Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Japanese immigrants Significance: Although people of Japanese descent have been one of the most discriminated against groups in U.S. history, they have also become some of the highest-achieving and most successful immigrant groups in the United States. During the 1890’s, a few of the Japanese who had moved to Hawaii during the 1880’s migrated to California, but large-scale Japanese immigration did not take place until 1900. From 1900 to 1910, more than 100,000 Japanese moved to the West Coast, first and primarily to California but eventually as far north as Vancouver, British Columbia. By 1930, about 275,000 people living in the United States were of Japanese origin or descent. By the end of the twentieth century, this number had reached about 1.8 million. Before World War II, Japanese immigrants were barred from becoming U.S. citizens and owning land on the West Coast. During World War II, more 431

Japanese immigrants

than 100,000 Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps in the Western United States and in Canada. However, the fighting spirit of the nisei (second-generation Japanese American) army unit during World War II contributed to a greater acceptance of Japanese Americans by other racial and ethnic groups in the postwar period. By the end of the twentieth century, Japanese Americans had received an official apology and reparations for the internment. Early Reaction to Japanese Immigration In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, primarily at the insistence of Californians who claimed that the Chinese could not be assimilated into American culture. Many Californians, therefore, were outraged when after Chinese immigration was virtually stopped by the 1882 act, Japanese immigration began. These citizens simply could see no difference between Chinese and Japanese immigrants, although, in fact, the Japanese, who had been carefully screened by the Japanese government, were generally better educated than the earlier Chinese immigrants. Soon after 1900, politicians and journalists agitated to stop Japanese immigration, speaking of the “yellow peril.” They maintained that the Japanese could not be assimilated into American culture and represented an outside group that would attempt to control the United States. In 1905, the public

Japanese laborers undergoing health inspection at the Angel Island reception center in San Francisco Bay during the 1920’s. (National Archives)

432

Japanese immigrants

Japanese Immigration to the United States, 1861-2003 15,000 14,000 13,000


12,000 1930’s Rise of Japanese militarism

11,000 10,000 9,000 8,000

1941-1945 War with United States

7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1951-1960

1941-1950

1931-1940

1921-1930

1911-1920

1901-1910

1891-1900

1881-1890

1871-1880

1861-1870


schools of San Francisco banned Japanese children from attending school with white children, causing the Japanese government to become very angry. The issue of San Francisco’s school segregation was resolved in 1907 when President Theodore Roosevelt signed a Gentlemen’s Agreement with the Japanese government, requiring that it not issue any more visas for workers to come to the United States. The San Francisco school board then allowed Japanese children to attend school with whites. California and other states continued to harass Japanese immigrants. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, which stipulated that Asians who were ineligible for citizenship could not own land. This meant that the Japanese immigrants, who were mostly agricultural workers, could work only as tenant farmers and could not own the land on which they worked. Miscegenation laws, making marriages between people of different races illegal, were also enforced against the early Japanese immigrants, most of whom were men. Unable to find wives in the United States, these men turned to matchmakers in Japan. Often the immigrants would marry brides whom they had seen, before the wedding, only in a photograph. White Californians 433

Japanese immigrants

Japanese immigrants awaiting a government health inspection off Angel Island in San Francisco Bay in 1931. (National Archives)

were angered by the Japanese practice of marrying “picture brides.” They pointed to this behavior as further evidence that the Japanese could not be assimilated into American culture. Japanese Americans During World War II By the start of World War II, two generations of Japanese Americans (issei, or first-generation Japanese Americans, and nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans) lived in the United States and Canada. In 1942, members of the American and Canadian governments felt that the Japanese Americans posed a threat to security. Therefore, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, requiring people of Japanese origin or descent living in the western part of the United States (California, Oregon, Washington, and the southern part of Arizona) to be placed in internment camps; this order affected more than 100,000 people. The Japanese Americans were given very little time to gather their property or to take care of businesses before they were interned. Property that actually belonged to nisei (who were American citizens) was seized. Areas such as Japantown (Nihonmachi) in the Fillmore district of San Francisco and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles became nearly deserted. What is more, within twenty-four hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States government detained one thousand Japanese American community leaders and teachers. 434

Japanese immigrants

In Canada, the 1942 War Measures Act placed Japanese aliens and Japanese Canadians in camps and required them to pay for their housing. Those who objected to having to live in these camps were placed in prisoner-of-war camps along with captured German soldiers in northern Ontario. In the United States, various court cases were brought to challenge the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans, but this treatment was deemed to be legal in decisions such as Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Hirabayashi v. United States (1943). In the decision handed down in Hirabayashi, the Court suggested that because Japanese Americans had chosen to live together as a group and had not assimilated well into the mainstream culture, the U.S. government was justified in being suspicious of them. In January, 1945, Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps. Unable to live in the Western United States, these people and their families settled in the East. Soon after the United States released the detainees from camps, the Canadians followed suit. After World War II For a variety of reasons, life for Japanese Americans improved after World War II. The bravery of the nisei soldiers during World War II had impressed upon many other Americans how loyal Japanese Americans actually were. Having seen firsthand the racial hatred practiced by the Nazis, Americans and Canadians did not want this sort of prejudice practiced in their home countries. Finally, much of the original prejudice and hatred against the Japanese and Asians as a whole stemmed from white Americans’ fears of economic competition. The strength of the postwar U.S. economy lessened these fears and created advancement possibilities for many racial and ethnic groups. In 1952, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act), it became possible for Japanese immigrants to become naturalized citizens. Although many Japanese citizens had entered the United States as wives of U.S. servicemen under the 1945 War Brides Act, many more entered under the 1952 act. From 1947 through 1975, 67,000 Japanese women entered as wives of U.S. servicemen, thus, becoming Japanese Americans. These new Japanese Americans encountered a very different United States from the one experienced by earlier immigrants. After 1952, it was much less likely that Japanese Americans would isolate themselves in areas where only people of Japanese heritage lived. In 1956, California, by popular vote, largely through a campaign orchestrated by Japanese American Sei Fujii, repealed its Alien Land Law, making it possible for people born in Japan to own land in California. The Mid- to Late Twentieth Century In the latter part of the twentieth century, Americans became interested in all things Japanese. Japanese influences could be found in American music, fashion, architecture, philosophy, and religion. Japanese Americans were able to lead the way in introducing other ethnic and racial groups to Japanese culture and philosophy. During 435

Japanese immigrants

the 1960’s, recognizing that expressions of cultural heritage were becoming popular, the Japanese Americans in the Fillmore district of San Francisco organized the first annual San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival to share Japanese philosophy and culture associated with the cherry blossom with other Americans. Other cities such as Seattle, Washington, also organized cherry blossom festivals. One of the better-known festivals is the National Cherry Blossom Festival, held in Washington, D.C., each spring to celebrate the donation of more than three thousand Japanese cherry trees to the American people by the mayor of Tokyo in 1912. Led by Japanese American citizens’ groups, Japanese Americans for many decades attempted to obtain justice from the U.S. government for its treatment of them during World War II. Finally, in 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act. The American government acknowledged that an injustice had been done, apologized for that injustice, and agreed to pay reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each eligible Japanese American. In 1990, President George Bush began the reparations process. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading Chalfen, Richard. Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collection of Two Japanese Families. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. Hirobe, Izumi. Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Hoobler, Dorothy, Thomas Hoobler, and George Takei. The Japanese American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Iida, Deborah. Middle Son. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1996. Kitano, Harry. The Japanese Americans. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Ng, Franklin, ed. Asian American Encyclopedia. 6 vols. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Yanogisako, Sylvia Junko. Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship Among Japanese Americans. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985. See also Alien land laws; Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Gentlemen’s Agreement; Japanese American Citizens League; Japanese American internment; Japanese Peruvians; Japanese segregation in California schools; Little Tokyos; Model minorities; Ozawa v. United States; “Yellow peril” campaign.

436

Japanese Peruvians

Japanese Peruvians Identification: Japanese immigrants to the United States by way of Peru Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Japanese immigrants; Refugees Significance: Victims of prejudice and distrust in both their Peruvian homeland and the United States, a small number of Japanese Peruvians became unwilling pawns in World War II rivalries. In 1940, about thirty thousand people of Japanese descent lived in Peru. It was a time when an already existing anti-Japanese movement was expanding, and about 650 Japanese houses were targeted for assault in Lima. The following year, after Japan brought World War II to the Americas, the Peruvian government seized the property of all Japanese immigrants. An official at the U.S. embassy in Lima, John K. Emmerson, reported to the U.S. State Department that the Japanese community in Peru was led by wellorganized nationalists who constituted a threat to U.S. national security. He suggested that the leaders of the Japanese Peruvian community be brought to the United States to be exchanged for American prisoners of war held in Japan. As a result, this proposal—as well as strong anti-Japanese sentiment from the Peruvian government—caused more than seventeen hundred Japanese Peruvians to be deported at gunpoint and transported to internment camps in the United States between 1942 and 1945. After World War II ended, the Japanese Peruvians who were detained in the United States were not allowed to return to Peru or to have their belongings returned to them by the Peruvian government. More than three decades later, in 1988, the 112,000 Japanese Americans who were placed in internment camps during the war received an official apology from the U.S. government and $20,000 per person for being incarcerated. However, those Japanese Peruvians who were also interned were denied the apology and compensation. This was because when they were deported from Peru, their passports were taken away by the Peruvian government and they were considered technically to be “illegal aliens” upon their arrival in the United States. Because they were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents at that time, they failed to qualify for the reparations even though a majority eventually became American citizens after the war. Finally in June, 1998, American-interned Latin Americans received an official apology from the U.S. government; however, their compensation was only $5,000 per person. Moreover, they were allowed only two months to make their applications for the payments. Ironically, by that time, Peruvian attitudes toward the Japanese had changed so much that Peruvians had elected a Japanese Peruvian, Albert Fujimori, the president of their country. Nobuko Adachi 437

Japanese segregation in California schools

Further Reading Kitano, Harry. The Japanese Americans. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Ng, Franklin, ed. Asian American Encyclopedia. 6 vols. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995. Ng, Wendy L. Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. See also Japanese American internment; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; Latinos; Twice migrants.

Japanese segregation in California schools The Event: Government-ordered segregation of Japanese students in San Francisco’s public schools Date: 1906 Place: San Francisco, California Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Education; Japanese immigrants Significance: San Francisco’s decision to segregate the small number of Japanese students in its public schools provoked a major international dispute between Japan and the United States that led to the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, which limited Japanese immigration to the United States. On October 11, 1906, scarcely six months after Japan had magnanimously donated more than $246,000 in aid (exceeding the combined donations of the rest of the world) to help alleviate the suffering caused by the San Francisco earthquake, the San Francisco Board of Education repaid Japan’s kindness by voting to segregate Japanese children from “white” children in its public schools. The Japanese government was at first stunned by this blatant expression of racial bigotry. The Japanese hoped that cooler and wiser heads would prevail in California and that the order would be quickly rescinded. After waiting for two weeks, Japanese prime minister Kinmochi Saionji instructed his ambassador, Shuzo Aoki, to deliver a note of protest into the hands of U.S. secretary of state Elihu Root on October 25, in which the government of the United States was reminded that Japanese citizens were guaranteed equal rights by treaty and that the “equal right of education is one of the highest and most valuable 438


rights. . . .” Saionji went on to say that even if the “oriental schools” provided for Asian children were to be equal to other schools, the segregation of Japanese children “constitutes an act of discrimination carrying with it a stigma and odium which it is impossible to overlook.” The Japanese government cautioned its citizens against any anti-American retribution in Japan and counseled the Japanese in San Francisco to bear the insults and discrimination “with equanimity and dignity.” Japanese newspapers, although outraged at this blatant racial insult, generally suggested that the wisest course for Japan to take was to appeal to the American sense of honor and fair play. President Theodore Roosevelt was both embarrassed and outraged at the San Francisco action and promised Aoki and the Japanese government that the matter soon would be resolved. As was his wont, Roosevelt began a propaganda campaign in the press to try to marshal national pressure against San Francisco and to give the Japanese the impression that he was actively engaged in resolving the issue. Much to his horror, several southern congressmen sprang to the defense of their fellow racists in California. They interpreted the issue as being one of states’ rights and reminded Roosevelt that the recent Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court ruling allowed the individual states to maintain “separate but equal” public education facilities. For its part, the San Francisco School Board failed to understand the extent and importance of the international crisis that it had caused. For nearly thirty years Chinese people had been excluded as immigrants to the United States and those Chinese who happened to be residents of California had been denied virtually all political and civil rights as a matter of course. Native American, African American, Mexican, Chinese, Korean, “Hindoo,” and other children routinely had been segregated from “white” children. Why now this sudden uproar? Background to Bigotry The anti-Japanese bigotry was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidences. First, Japanese immigration to California previously had been but a minor irritant compared to the problems posed by the influx of Chinese laborers during the 1870’s and 1880’s. Fewer than ten thousand Japanese had come to California before 1900, and perhaps only half of them remained as residents. California labor contractors, however, discovered the industrious Japanese laboring in Hawaiian cane fields after the Hawaiian Revolution of 1894. Thousands were lured to California by these contractors and found ready employment in the developing agricultural sector. As their numbers increased, so did their economic influence at nearly every level. By 1905, organized labor in California had mounted a campaign against Japanese immigration based on the fact that Japanese undercut American workers by working longer hours for less money. The 1906 earthquake had contributed to the general malaise and sense of anomie in San Francisco in much the same irrational way that citizens of Tokyo would turn against helpless innocent Koreans in the earthquake of 1923. 439


“White” San Franciscans who lost their homes in the earthquake quite irrationally were outraged that a handful of Japanese had survived with their homes and businesses intact. Even worse, a few enterprising Japanese set up thriving cheap restaurants that catered to the workers involved in the urban recovery. In the eyes of the bigots, then, the Japanese seemed to be prospering at the expense of the suffering “whites.” Third, the San Francisco Chronicle, perhaps in an attempt to out-sensationalize William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Herald, chose that time to mount a provocative campaign against Japanese immigration. It published unsubstantiated and patently absurd charges that Japanese were spying on American coastal defenses for Japan and that they were acquiring huge tracts of land in the Central Valley, not only for its rich farmland but also for strategic military purposes. Without question the worst fear that they dredged up was the horror of racial miscegenation. They claimed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of adult Japanese men were routinely placed side-by-side with young, innocent “white maidens” in the city’s schools. Actually, some twenty-three Japanese boys, none older than sixteen years of age, were dispersed throughout the city schools, placed temporarily in lower grades until their English language skills improved. In response, during the late summer of 1906, a Japanese Exclusion League blossomed, ironically led by four recent European immigrants to the city. Pickets in front of Japanese restaurants handed out printed boxes of matches that read, “White people, patronize your own race.” Gangs of thugs assaulted lone Japanese in the streets and threw stones at the windows of Japanese residents. Petitions were circulated urging the exclusion of Japanese immigrants. A final factor in the bigotry directed against the Japanese was the rabidly racist campaign of the mayor of the city. Eugene Schmitz was facing an imminent indictment for bribery and corruption by a reformist movement and hoped to use the growing anti-Japanese hysteria to gain political support. Schmitz joined the Japanese Exclusion League in a series of outdoor public meetings. Before long, this unprincipled political opportunist had further inflamed the already irrational bigots. The result was that the school board yielded to the demands of the rabble and voted to establish a separate school for all “orientals,” including the Japanese. After a few months, the more responsible citizens of the city managed to bolster enough support to force another vote in the school board, but not before many Japanese children were denied the right to an education in their neighborhood schools and not before many Japanese adults were assaulted, threatened, and coerced to pay “protection money” by the local police. Efforts to Negotiate a Settlement Roosevelt met several times with city and state leaders and reached a tacit agreement that the school segregation crisis could be resolved if some agreement could be reached to further restrict the immigration of Japanese laborers. Ambassador Aoki was receptive to Roosevelt’s invitation to discuss the issue but reminded him that Japan al440


ready restricted the number of passports granted to persons wishing to immigrate to the United States. He suggested that it would be better if the United States would restrict immigration from Hawaii and Mexico, since apparently most Japanese who came to California arrived from those countries. After months of discussion, Roosevelt and the Japanese arrived at what has been called the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which severely limited the number of Japanese immigrants. For the time being, ninety-three Japanese children returned to their neighborhood schools and San Francisco and California settled down to await nervously the next wave of xenophobic hysteria. However, they did not have long to wait. Impact of Event The effect of the San Francisco school segregation incident was most directly felt by the ninety-three children who had their education interrupted for a year. To have required them to travel, in some cases, across the whole city to the “oriental school” was at least inconvenient and in some cases dangerous. The greatest impact was the denial of their human and civil rights. To be singled out for discrimination on the basis of race was, and always will be, a demeaning insult. The only thing that ameliorated and stopped the discrimination was the fact that Japan, by 1906, had become a powerful military world power. Japan could not be insulted with impunity. However, the children of Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Mexican, Native American, African American, and other “nonwhite” origins did not have a strong and proud nation to enforce their rights. Those unfortunate students were forced to endure the insult and degradation of “separate but equal” schools. The Japanese Exclusion League did not simply evaporate with the hysteria. Like the irrational xenophobia that fed the crisis, the League continued on, nurtured by the fear and hatred of ignorant and bigoted people. It was to surface again in 1913, when the California legislature passed an Alien Land Act which denied landowning to people (such as the Japanese) who could not become citizens. It would flourish again in 1921 and 1924, when the U.S. Congress passed immigration acts favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe and restricting the number of Japanese immigrants to less than one hundred per year. One might argue that the racial bigotry evident in the San Francisco school segregation crisis of 1906 was precisely the same virulent strain of xenophobia that would sanction the incarceration of loyal Americans of Japanese ancestry in 1942. Curiously, within the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement that resolved the school segregation crisis was the basis for a somewhat different but perhaps more dangerous problem. That agreement allowed for those Japanese already resident in the United States to bring their families to join them. The citizens of California were startled to discover that Japanese residents in California used this rule to bring their parents and sometimes women whom they had married “by proxy” to live with them. The children born to Japanese in the United States were natural-born citizens. The state of California could 441


deny the political and civil rights of aliens but could not do so to their citizen children with the same impunity. Therefore, the Gentlemen’s Agreement was but a puny bandage over the cancer of racial bigotry. It covered an unsightly wound, but the problem continued to eat at the American body politic. It can be argued also that the San Francisco school segregation crisis of 1906 helped to breed a resentment and self-fulfilling paranoia in Japan. Japan bitterly resented the insult perpetrated against its citizens. This anger and resentment, along with the latent American suspicions bred by racial bigotry, would contribute to much of the malice that would lead the two nations into a senseless and horrible war a generation later. Louis G. Perez Further Reading Bailey, Thomas A. Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese-American Crisis: An Account of the International Complications Arising from the Race Problem on the Pacific Coast. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1934. Solid but somewhat dated. Integrates the crisis into the greater history of Japanese American foreign relations. Places Roosevelt squarely in the imbroglio. Indexed, but the bibliography is dated. Boddy, E. Manchester. Japanese in America. Los Angeles: E. M. Boddy, 1921. A curious short monograph written to counter the arguments of the Japanese Exclusion League. It examines and refutes each argument with California and federal census and immigration statistics. Still valuable for its glimpse of the visceral quality of the debate. No index or bibliography, but contains a list (with addresses) of the California Japanese residents’ associations. Daniels, Roger. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Masterful treatment of the politics of racial bigotry. Together with Penrose, depicts the leaders of the “nativist” movement in California with chilling clarity. Valuable bibliography of primary sources. Gulick, Sidney L. The American-Japanese Problem: A Study of the Racial Relations of the East and West. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. Despite being dated, it is an interesting attempt by Christian ministers to refute the arguments of the Japanese Exclusion League. Forms the basis of the work by Boddy. Gulick had been a missionary to Asia. Iriye, Akira. Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897-1911. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. A brilliantly written examination of the mutual animosities between two imperialist states. Masterful incorporation of recent scholarship in both languages. Chapters 5 and 6, “Confrontation: The Japanese View” and “Confrontation: The American View,” are excellent. Source notation and bibliography in both Japanese and English languages is impressive. Neu, Charles E. An Uncertain Friendship: Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, 19061909. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. A solid revisionist 442

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interpretation. Uses Roosevelt’s extensive personal correspondence to portray him as a shrewd politician whose own racial prejudices made him more sympathetic to the Japanese Exclusion League bigots than to the Japanese. Good use of primary documents. Penrose, Eldon R. California Nativism: Organized Opposition to the Japanese, 1890-1913. San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1973. Despite an annoying lack of organization, this is a surprisingly sophisticated examination of the exclusionist movement. Uses newspapers and correspondence of the principal participants to examine the politics of the movement and the background of its leaders. No index, but appendices include the various anti-Asian exclusion acts. Ruiz de Velasco, Jorge, and Michael Fix. Overlooked and Underserved: Immigrant Students in U.S. Secondary Schools. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2000. Broad study of the treatment of immigrants in American public schools. See also Alien land laws; Asian American education; Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Gentlemen’s Agreement; Japanese American Citizens League; Japanese American internment; Japanese immigrants; Japanese Peruvians; Little Tokyos; Model minorities; Ozawa v. United States; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Jewish immigrants Identification: Jewish immigrants to North America from Europe Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Demographics; European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion Significance: From their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews were the most important non-Christian group in an overwhelmingly Christian America. Their experiences tested and helped define the meaning of religious freedom and the nature of ethnic relations in the United States. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees, who had fled Brazil when it was retaken by the Portuguese from the Dutch, arrived in New Amsterdam seeking asylum. They were not welcomed by Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who put them in jail and requested permission from the Dutch West India Company to ban all Jews from the colony. The company, which had several substantial Jewish shareholders, refused, and Stuyvesant had to permit the newcomers to remain. Despite facing prejudice, the Jews were able to worship undisturbed. The congregation grew slowly after the British conquered the colony in 1664 and renamed it New York. Other small Jewish settlements emerged in the 443

Jewish immigrants

port cities of Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah. Most newcomers were descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who used Sephardic rituals in their synagogues and spoke a dialect of Spanish in their homes. By 1776, the Jewish population in the British mainland colonies reached between 1,500 and 2,500. The Jews were accepted by their neighbors and could practice their religion unmolested, but they occasionally faced overt prejudice and legal disabilities. Jews could be, but were not always, barred from voting in colonial elections or holding political office because they were unable to take required oaths as a Christian. Jewish merchants and craftspeople participated fully in the commercial life of Newport, Rhode Island. However, even after the London Parliament passed a naturalization act providing special oaths for Jews in the American colonies, Rhode Island courts refused to naturalize Jews, claiming this would violate the purpose for which the colony was founded. The state and federal constitutions established after the American Revolution shifted Jewish-Gentile relations from sometimes uneasy toleration toward civil and political equality. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights provided federal protection for freedom of conscience, and the new state constitutions began to remove test oaths and disestablish religion. The movement was steady if uneven. Rhode Island did not grant Jews the right to vote or hold office until 1842; North Carolina did not do so until 1868. German Jews Until significant numbers of Jews from German-speaking areas of Europe arrived in the United States during the 1840’s, the Jewish population remained small. In 1840, probably fewer than 15,000 Jews were in the United States; when Jewish immigration from Slavic lands began to increase in 1880, there were an estimated 250,000. Unlike their Sephardic predecessors, these Jews used Ashkenazic rituals and many spoke Yiddish. The vast majority of migrants were young men and women reacting to economic and political changes that worsened the position of Jews in their home countries. The German Jewish immigrants flourished in the New World and greatly valued the political and economic freedoms they enjoyed in the United States. As the nation expanded, the young men moved west, some beginning as peddlers serving the scattered farmsteads, then opening mercantile establishments in the towns; a few very successful merchants established major department stores in the new cities. Their services were appreciated by their fellow townspeople; the first settlers in a town often became respected political and social leaders. During the early years of this migration, a small, thinly scattered Jewish population made finding Jewish marriage partners difficult, and a significant percentage married Gentiles. As they became economically successful, they founded families and brought young relatives to join them. Increased population meant Jews could create their own communal organizations, first a synagogue and a cemetery, then clubs that eased social isolation, and also philanthropic organizations to care for the poor and the elderly. Often unable to observe the Sabbath as commanded by orthodox 444

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Jewish law, they were particularly receptive to the relaxed requirements of the Reform movement, designed to modernize Judaism, that had already begun in Germany. During the nineteenth century, a number of anti-Semitic incidents occurred in the United States. Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant issued an order calling for the expulsion of all Jews from his army department on December 17, 1862, after hearing that some were trading with the enemy. President Abraham Lincoln reversed the order shortly thereafter. When financially successful German Jews began to arrive in resorts that had been the preserve of the highest-ranking social groups of the United States, they experienced prejudice and discrimination. Famous resorts near New York such as Saratoga, Newport, and Long Branch began to turn away Jews, even wealthy New York City investment bankers. Lesser hotels began to use code words such as “restricted clientele” or “discriminating families only” in their advertisements. Eastern European Jews Between 1881 and 1924, approximately 2.5 million Jews, about one-third of the Jewish population of eastern Europe, left their homelands; nearly 2 million came to the United States. The modernization of agriculture in eastern Europe had eliminated many of the petty merchant and artisan occupations on which Jews depended. The major reason for the timing and scale of the migration, however, was the impact of governmentsponsored anti-Semitism, especially the pogroms (anti-Jewish massacres) encouraged by the Russian government after the assassination of Czar Alexan-

Early twentieth century scene in a section of New York City that was so predominantly Jewish that it was known as “Little Jerusalem.” (Library of Congress)

445

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der II in 1881. Unlike the German Jews who had preceded them, these Jews concentrated in major cities, especially on the East Coast. Unlike other European groups of the period, few would return to their countries of origin. Theirs was a migration of families, with an almost even sex ratio. Lacking financial resources, they crowded into the poorest sections of the cities. The German Jews did not welcome them. Class and cultural arrogance, anxiety that they would be burdened by masses of poor, and fear that the huge influx would exacerbate the already increasing anti-Semitism in the United States led to negative reactions toward the newcomers. Only slowly did the prosperous German Jews overcome their dislike and provide philanthropic support for those needing help. Not until the lynching of murder defendant Leo Frank in Georgia in 1913, amid violent anti-Jewish attacks, did they organize the Anti-Defamation League to combat anti-Semitism. The reaction of the non-Jewish community was even more negative. Oldline Yankees viewed the Jewish areas of cities as a foreign intrusion corrupting the fabric of American society. Psychologists, using intelligence tests to rank ethnic groups, placed these Jews at the bottom, calling them genetically defective and ineducable. Immigration restrictionists claimed the eastern European Jews proved the need to close the United States to new immigrants. Anti-Jewish Prejudice and Discrimination Dislike and fear of the newly arriving Jews helped spur the drive to restrict immigration, which took the form of legislation in 1924. It also provoked an outburst of overt prejudice and discrimination in the years from 1920 to 1940. As the children of the massive eastern European Jewish immigration began to enter colleges and professional schools, they faced direct discrimination. Columbia College established quotas limiting admission of Jewish candidates, and other prestigious colleges and medical schools followed its example during the 1920’s. Economic opportunities narrowed as few manufacturing companies, corporate law firms, major banks and insurance companies, or government bureaucracies such as the State Department were willing to employ Jews. Restrictive covenants, which barred homeowners from selling their houses to Jewish Americans or members of other “undesirable” groups, proliferated. In 1922, Henry Ford began to publish a seven-year-long series of antiJewish articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, propagating older European stereotypes of Jews as both international bankers conspiring to control the country and communist conspirators determined to undermine capitalism. During the 1930’s, the rise of Adolf Hitler inspired right-wing orators to preach ideological anti-Semitism. They defended Hitler, blaming Jews for the Great Depression and the international crises in Europe. More than one hundred anti-Semitic organizations appeared across the nation. In New York City, the Christian Front held street-corner rallies that often ended in fistfights between adherents of the movement and Jewish passersby. The reluctance to respond effectively to the plight of German Jews during the 1930’s reflected the impact of prejudice against Jews. No agency enforced 446

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Milestones in Jewish Immigration History Year

Event

1654

Arrival of twenty-three Jews, the first in North America, in New Amsterdam

1820-1880 Major years of German Jewish immigration 1880-1924 Major years of Eastern European Jewish immigration 1881-1883 Anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia after the assassination of Alexander II 1892

Foundation of American Jewish Historical Society

1906

American Jewish Committee founded to aid Jews abroad

1913

Leo Frank is lynched; raises fears of persecution in Jewish community

1913

Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith founded to combat prejudice

1922

Henry Ford begins publishing anti-Semitic propaganda in his newspaper

1924

Restrictive immigration law passes, ending large-scale immigration

1933

Adolf Hitler elected chancellor of Germany

1939

United Jewish Appeal organized to coordinate relief for Hitler’s victims

1939-1945 Holocaust kills about six million Jews 1948

Israel proclaims independence

1984

Anti-Semitic slurs made during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign worry Jews

1991

Conflict erupts between Jews and blacks in Crown Heights in Brooklyn

immigration restriction rules more rigidly than the United States consular service in Germany, which insisted on absolute proof of the ability of prospective immigrants to be self-supporting. As a result, despite the desperate need of German Jews to escape, between 1933 to 1940 some 30 percent of the visas available for Germans were never issued. Post-World War II American revulsion at the sight of photographs of Hitler’s death camps changed attitudes toward Jews. Overt anti-Semitism was no longer acceptable, and relations of Jews with other ethnic groups eased. 447

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When the courts refused to enforce restrictive covenants, the movement of Jews out of cities and into suburbs increased. Restrictions on college entry and job opportunities began to disappear. New York City home offices of major insurance companies, embarrassed by the revelation that they did not employ any Jewish stenographers in a city with a huge Jewish population, hastened to change their practices. The founding of the state of Israel and its survival under attack increased Jewish pride and improved American perceptions of Jews; they now appeared a normal ethnic group, not greatly different in its support of Old World nationalism from American Poles or Irish Americans. Although pre-World War II anti-Semitism had surfaced predominantly among members of the Right, during the radical upheaval of the 1960’s, Jews began to experience overt expressions of prejudice from members of the Left. Support of Israel when it was attacked by its Arab neighbors was a rallying point for all branches of the Jewish community. To Jewish ears, advocacy of Palestinian rights by radicals too often sounded like attacks on Jews, rather than simply criticisms of Israeli policy. Even more disturbing was the open expression of anti-Jewish prejudices by African Americans. The long-term alliance of the two groups in the fight for civil rights seemed a thing of the past. Verbal attacks by Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam followers and the slur against New York Jews uttered by Jesse Jackson in his 1984 presidential campaign were particularly worrisome because African Americans seemed the only major group believing it acceptable to express such prejudices publicly. Verbal and physical violence against Jewish shopkeepers in Harlem and the riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood intensified the feelings of antagonism between African Americans and Jews. Greater acceptance by other Americans helped raise the rate of outmarriage by Jews to more than 30 percent, which, combined with a birthrate that dropped below replacement level, led to fears that the American Jewish population would decline and ultimately disappear. Others were more optimistic, believing that many of the children of outmarriages would remain Jews. Immigration from Israel and the Soviet Union increased the Jewish community. Estimates in 1996 indicated that the Jewish population was stable at almost 6 million people who made up just more than 2 percent of the total American population. Milton Berman Further Reading Agosin, Marjorie. Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America. Edited by Mary G. Berg. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999. Fascinating collection of firsthand stories related by Jewish immigrants. Cohen, Naomi Werner. Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830-1914. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer448

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ica, 1984. Scholarly study of the reaction of this group to legal equality and citizenship. Gerber, David, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Collection of thirteen scholarly articles exploring American attitudes toward Jews. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups, including eastern European Jews. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Well-written description of the life of eastern European Jews in New York City. Lohuis, Elisabeth ten. Towards a Winning of the West: Novels by East European Jewish Immigrants to America and Their American Offspring. [Leiden: s.n., 2003]. Insightful examination of the literature of immigrant Jews. Marcus, Jacob R. The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776. 3 vols. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Definitive study of Jewish immigrants during America’s long colonial era. Sola Pool, David de, and Tamara de Sola Pool. An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654-1954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. Describes the experience of the Sephardic Jewish community through the history of the oldest synagogue in the United States. Sterba, Christopher M. The Melting Pot Goes to War: Italian and Jewish Immigrants in America’s Great Crusade, 1917-1919. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1999. Scholarly study of the role of immigrants in American fighting forces during World War I. See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Jewish settlement of New York The Event: Settlement of the first Jewish immigrants in North America Date: August-September, 1654 Place: Manhattan Island Immigration issues: European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Refugees; Religion 449


Significance: The right of Jewish immigrants to live and work in New Netherland, despite intense opposition, laid the groundwork for greater religious toleration. The first Jewish settlers of record in New Amsterdam were Jacob Barsimon and Solomon Pieterson, both of whom came from Holland in the summer of 1654. The next month, twenty-three other Jews arrived, both old and young, refugees from the Portuguese conquest of Dutch Brazil (New Holland), which had been the richest property of the Dutch West India Company in America. After leaving Recife, Brazil, their ship had been captured by Spanish pirates, from whom they were saved by a French privateer, the St. Charles, captained by Jacques de La Motthe. Having little more than the clothes on their backs, the Jewish migrants convinced La Motthe to carry them to New Amsterdam for twenty-five hundred guilders, which they hoped to borrow in that Dutch port. They shortly discovered, however, what Barsimon and Pieterson were already learning: There was much opposition to Jews settling in New Netherland. Their poverty made the Dutch Jews from Brazil especially vulnerable. Unable to borrow the money, they asked La Motthe for extra time to contact friends and receive money from Amsterdam. Rather than waiting, La Motthe brought suit in the City Court of New Amsterdam, which ordered that their meager belongings should be sold at public auction. Even after all that was

Modern depiction of Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant (with wooden leg) at the time of the British occupation of New Amsterdam in 1664. (Library of Congress)

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worth selling had been sold, the unfortunate exiles still owed almost five hundred guilders. The City Court then ordered that two of the Jews—David Israel and Moses Ambroisius—should be held under civil arrest until the total debt was paid. In October, the matter finally was resolved after the crew of the St. Charles, holding title to the remainder of the Jewish debt, agreed to wait until additional funds could be sent from Amsterdam. The ordeal of the Jewish refugees was far from over. They wanted to remain in New Amsterdam, Director General Peter Stuyvesant complained to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company. Stuyvesant was against their staying, as were the city magistrates, who resented “their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians,” and the deacons of the Reformed Church, who feared that in “their present indigence they might become a charge in the coming winter.” Indicating that the colonists generally shared his anti-Semitic views, Stuyvesant informed the Amsterdam directors that “we have for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart.” As for the future, he urged that the deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony, to the detraction of your Worships and the dissatisfaction of your Worships’ most affectionate subjects.

Despite his vehemence against the Jews, Stuyvesant delayed his expulsion order, waiting instead for guidance from the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, to whom the unwanted refugees were also appealing. The Jewish community in Amsterdam took up their cause. During the early sixteenth century, the embattled United Provinces—and especially the city of Amsterdam—had become a haven for persecuted European Jews, whose many contributions to Dutch economic and cultural life had brought them considerable religious freedom, political and legal rights, and economic privileges. Not only did Jewish investors own approximately 4 percent of the Dutch West India Company’s stock, but also, more than six hundred Dutch Jews had participated in colonizing Dutch Brazil. Virtually all of them left Pernambuco in 1654 with other Dutch nationals, losing practically everything, although the conquering Portuguese had urged them to remain and promised to protect their property. Their loyalty to the Dutch republic could hardly be questioned. Moreover, thinly populated New Netherland desperately needed settlers. On the other hand, Dominie Johannes Megapolensis, one of the leading Dutch Reformed preachers in New Netherland, was especially disturbed because a few additional Jewish families recently had migrated from Amsterdam. He called upon the Amsterdam Classis of the Reformed Church to use its influence to have the Jews expelled from the American colony. “These people have no other God than the Mammon of unrighteousness,” warned 451


Megapolensis, “and no other aim than to get possession of Christian property, and to overcome all other merchants by drawing all trade toward themselves.” Surely, Megapolensis pleaded, these “godless rascals” should be expelled. Expressing some sympathy for Stuyvesant’s anti-Jewish prejudice, the Amsterdam Chamber nevertheless announced in early 1655 that Jews could travel, trade, and live in New Netherland, provided they cared for their own poor. Over the next few years, while not directly defying the company’s directive, Stuyvesant and other civil officials delayed, obstructed, and otherwise made life more difficult for the Jews of New Amsterdam. In March, 1655, for example, Abraham de Lucena was arrested for selling goods on Sunday. In July, de Lucena and others petitioned to purchase land for a Jewish cemetery, but were denied. Indeed, Jews were not allowed to purchase land in New Amsterdam. They also were exempted from the city militia, on grounds that other colonists would not serve with them, but were required to pay a heavy tax each month in lieu of service. The Jews of New Amsterdam resented and resisted such treatment. In November, when Asser Levy and Jacob Barsimon, two young Jews with little money, protested the tax and asked to do service with the militia instead, the town council dismissed their protest and noted that the petitioners could choose to go elsewhere. The same message was conveyed by the heavy rates imposed upon Jews in the general levy to raise funds for rebuilding the city’s defense wall. Most discouraging were the restrictions placed on Jews who wished to trade to Albany and Delaware Bay. In 1656, the Amsterdam Chamber chastised Stuyvesant and insisted that Jews in New Netherland were to have the same rights and privileges as Jews in old Amsterdam. They could trade wholesale, rent and buy property, and enjoy the protection of the law as other Dutch citizens did. However, their religious freedom did not extend to public worship, and they were not allowed to sell retail, work as mechanics, or live and work outside a designated area of town. Despite the opposition of the Burgomasters and Schepens, Stuyvesant, ever the faithful servant of the Dutch West India Company, insisted that Levy be admitted to the burgher right, which allowed him to run a business, vote in town elections, and even hold office. New Amsterdam Jews were not ghettoized, and they could work as mechanics and tradesmen as well as shopkeepers and merchants. Levy became the first Jewish landowner and was one of two Jews licensed as butchers in 1660. Prejudice remained, but social and economic acceptance came to the Jewish community in New Amsterdam. They were allowed their separate burial ground, and their right to observe the Sabbath on Saturday was respected. They never established a synagogue and may not have had enough people to maintain a congregation, but regular religious services apparently were held. Levy owned a Torah, and others had prayer books and shawls. Most of the Jews in New Amsterdam were Sephardim, descended from Portuguese Jews, although a few were Ashkenazim Jews from Germany, France, and eastern Eu452


rope. Their numbers remained quite small, never more than a handful of families, and there seems to have been a good deal of migration in and out. However, the Jews of New Amsterdam were pioneers who prepared the way for the more extensive Jewish community that would emerge in early New York. Ronald W. Howard Further Reading Hershkowitz, Leo. “Judaism.” In The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, edited by Jacob Ernest Cook. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993. Brief but incisive summary of colonial Judaism. Kessler, Henry H., and Eugene Rachlis. Peter Stuyvesant and His New York. New York: Random House, 1959. Gives insight into the anti-Semitism of Dutch Calvinism and the cooperative efforts of Stuyvesant and the Dutch Reformed preachers against the Jews. Marcus, Jacob R. The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776. 3 vols. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Presents a detailed survey of the Jewish experience in early America, relating connections between the various Jewish communities. Oppenheim, Samuel. The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654-1664. New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1909. Basic source for details on early Jewish settlers and their trials, tribulations, and successes. Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. An account that relates the Jewish migration to larger economic and social developments in New Netherland. Smith, George L. Religion and Trade in New Netherland: Dutch Origins and American Development. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. An analysis of religious toleration that emerged in the northern Netherlands and its transference to New Netherland. Wepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File, 2002. History of immigration to the United States from the earliest European settlements of the colonial era through the mid-1950’s, with liberal extracts from contemporary documents. See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jamestown colony; Jewish immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

453

Jews and Arab Americans

Jews and Arab Americans Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion; Stereotypes Significance: Jewish Americans and Arab Americans conflict in their views of Israel, Palestinians, and the Middle East. Although some members of both groups take inflexible stances in their opposition to each other, other members are trying to bridge the gaps between the cultures. Some scholars estimate that as many as three million Arabs and Arab Americans live in the United States, a significantly larger number than the 1.2 million Arab Americans counted in the 2000 U.S. Census. An accurate count is difficult to obtain because many Arab Americans are reluctant to reveal their origin for fear of discrimination or even violence from those Americans who, perhaps influenced by negative press coverage of Arabs and events in the Middle East, stereotype Arab Americans as terrorists or as anti-American. U.S. government figures in 1994 place the number of Jewish Americans at 6 million—4 million religious and 2 million secular Jews. However, because some Jews, like Arab Americans, are reluctant to reveal their religious and ethnic identity for fear of discrimination, their actual numbers must be assumed to be greater. Of the 6 million American Jews, about 250,000 are Sephardic Jews. Of those Sephardic Jews, about 85,000 are Arab Jews, that is, Jews from Arab nations. Arab Jews in the United States are largely from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco. If Arab Jewish Americans are included in the Arab American population, the total number of Arab Americans is significantly increased. The largest population of Arab Jews in the United States is in Brooklyn, New York. This community of Syrian Jews is stable and affluent. Origins and Demographics Arab Americans and Jewish Americans come from very diverse backgrounds and subcultures that sometimes seriously conflict. However, they are very much alike in terms of being better educated and more affluent than the average American. Arab Americans trace their origins to the twenty-one countries of the Arab League (established on March 22, 1945): Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The earliest Arab immigrants, who arrived between 1900 and World War II, were predominantly Christians from Syria and Lebanon. Most had little formal education and were predominantly illiterate. Their success in running small family businesses, mostly in poor neighborhoods, made it possible for their children to become well educated and enter the 454


professions or obtain high-level, white-collar jobs. Following World War II and especially after 1965, when quota restrictions were lifted, Arab immigration increased significantly. These newer immigrants were more affluent, better educated, largely Muslim professionals and businesspeople. Arab Americans, affluent and well educated, are one of the most successful ethnic groups in the United States. About half of all Arab Americans live in large metropolitan areas, and around 20 percent in three urban areas: Detroit, Michigan, New York, and Los Angeles-Long Beach. Detroit has the largest Arab American population, which is divided roughly equally between Christians and Muslims. The 1990 U.S. Census obtained the national origins of Arab Americans in the state of Michigan. Of the 77,070 people reporting Arab ancestry, 39,673 had Lebanese roots, 7,656 Syrian, 6,668 Iraqi, 2,695 Palestinian, 1,785 Egyptian, 1,441 Jordanian, 14,842 unspecified Arab or Arabic, and 2,310 other Arab. The census also counted 14,724 persons of Assyrian (Chaldean) ancestry. Assyrians were not included with other Arabs because most members of this group do not consider themselves Arabs. Jews have been in North America for almost four hundred years. The earliest immigrants were Sephardic Jews in the seventeenth century in New York. The nineteenth century saw the arrival of Ashkenazic Jews from Germany and the surrounding areas. They often worked as merchants and soon became prosperous. During the late nineteenth century, eastern European Jews, many of them lacking resources, migrated in great numbers to the United States, often settling in cities. These late arrivals faced prejudice from both non-Jewish Americans and the earlier German Jews. After World War II and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism diminished greatly, and all Jewish groups found greater acceptance in the United States. Most Jews came to the United States from Europe to escape religious persecution and poverty and, like Arab Americans, have prospered in their adopted country. Both groups are predominantly urban dwellers. Arab and Jewish American Relations Ironically, the conflicts in the Middle East have brought Arab Americans and Jewish Americans closer. Most of the efforts to improve intergroup relations have centered on events not in the United States but in the Middle East, where Israel and many members of the Arab League have been at war or in conflict since the establishment of the Arab League in 1945 and of the state of Israel in 1948. The Arab Americans and Jewish Americans most opposed to a just and equitable settlement of the plight of the Palestinians have been the religiously orthodox and fundamentalistic members of the two groups. Those most willing to talk about peace and justice have been the more liberal Jews (Reform and secular Jews) and progressive Arabs. Most of the initiatives toward bringing Arabs and Jews together have generally originated with Jewish Americans and been supported enthusiastically by Arab Americans. A big impediment to improving Arab-Jewish relations has been the conservative and orthodox newspapers published exclusively for Arabs and Jews. Their biases and preju455


Cities with the Largest Arab and Jewish Populations Arab Americans

Jewish Americans

1. Detroit, Mich. (metropolitan area) 2. New York (metropolitan area) 3. Los Angeles, Calif. 4. Washington, D.C. 5. Chicago, Ill. 6. Boston, Mass. 7. Anaheim-Santa Ana, Calif. 8. Bergen-Passaic, N.J. 9. Houston, Texas 10. Cleveland, Ohio

1. New York (metropolitan area) 2. Los Angeles, Calif. 3. Miami, Fla. 4. Philadelphia, Pa. 5. Chicago, Ill. 6. Boston, Mass. 7. San Francisco, Calif. 8. Washington, D.C. 9. W. Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla. 10. Baltimore, Md.

Sources: Samia El-Badry, “The Arab-American Market,” American Demographics, Vol.16, January, 1994, pages 22-30; David Singer, ed., American Jewish Year Book, 1997. New York: American Jewish Committee, 1997.

dices—and sometimes blatant hatred— often stand in the way of improving intergroup relations. The politics of the Middle East and their effect on American Arabs and Jews have been the focus of social-action organizations in both communities. Organizations Working for Togetherness On the national level, few organizations have been as active and effective in bringing Arabs and Jews together as the New Jewish Agenda (NJA). Founded during the late 1970’s, at its height it had twenty-eight chapters, most of which were in the large urban areas where Jewish Americans and Arab Americans live and work. NJA was started by Jews who felt that conservatives had dominated Jewish life in the United States and who yearned to create a strong progressive voice in the Jewish community. One of its major goals has been to have ongoing JewishArab dialogues on crucial matters of mutual concern to Jews and Arabs in the United States and the Middle East, especially resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian question. Los Angeles, which has one of the largest concentrations of Jews and Arabs in the United States, has a dialogue group organized much like an NJA group. However, the Los Angeles group concentrates on Arab-Jewish issues and does not discuss issues such as racism, anti-Semitism, and nuclear disarmament, which are covered by NJA groups. American Arab and Jewish Friends (AAJF) was founded in 1981 by George Bashara (an Arab American) and Arnold Michlin (a Jewish American) in metropolitan Detroit. It is a program of the Greater Detroit Interfaith Round Table of the National Conference for Community and Justice (formerly known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews). The AAJF’s purpose is to improve mutual understanding and friendship between the Arab 456


and Jewish communities by coming together informally through luncheons, dinners, forums, and its sponsorship of an annual essay scholarship contest for graduating seniors in area high schools. The essays, which describe innovative and meaningful approaches toward the realization of the AAJF goal, are the joint effort of two students, one Jewish and one Arab American. In large cities such as Washington, D.C., where there are sizable Arab American and Jewish American populations, the two groups often meet at friendly gatherings held by organizations such as the Washington Area Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-Friendship. For several decades, this organization has regularly held dinners where Arabs and Jews can become friends, discuss the issues that divide them, and make efforts to influence policymakers who may be in a position to initiate positive changes in the bitter conflicts that separate Israelis and Palestinians. The Seeds of Peace summer camp was started by former newspaper editor John Wallach during the early 1990’s. The Otisfield, Maine, camp brings together more than 160 teenagers from the Middle East—Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis as well as American Jewish and Arab youngsters—for a month of good, healthy fun as well as serious discussions. Participants are selected by their governments after writing essays on making peace. To run the camp costs about $1.2 million per year, which Wallach receives in private donations. All the campers come on scholarships, each worth around $2,000. The camp has been so successful that other such camps are being organized elsewhere in the United States. The Middle East Friendship League was established by Professor Robert Frumkin and his colleagues at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, following the killing of Israeli wrestlers by Arabs at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, in 1972. Kent State had a large number of students and faculty from Arab League nations and Israel as well as a sizable number of American Arab and Jewish students and faculty, making it an ideal setting for an experiment in improving Arab and Jewish relations. Although the main purpose of the organization was to promote friendships between Arabs and Jews, its members discussed Middle East issues and engaged in social activism aimed at enhancing the peace process and addressing issues such as Palestinian rights and terrorism. The league met monthly for several years, during which real friendships developed and remained strong even after it disbanded. Right-Wing Organizations No discussion of Arab-Jewish relations in the United States is complete without a mention of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) and Jewish Defense Organization (JDO), two right-wing organizations that are the antithesis of all the previously discussed organizations. The JDL and the JDO are pathologically anti-Arab. The JDL, founded by the late Meir Kahane, was not only involved in defamation of Arab Americans but also the destruction of Arab American property and even murder, including the Arab American leader Alex Odeh. Although, according to the Encyclopedia of Associations (published by Gale Research), the JDL is no longer functioning in the 457

Justice and immigration

United States, its sister organization, the JDO, is. The JDO has almost four thousand members in ten states. Like the JDL, the JDO states that it will defend Jews by any means necessary and advocates the use of violence. Although the JDL frequently took credit for violent and destructive acts against Arab Americans and their property, the JDO, thus far, has not. R. M. Frumkin Further Reading Ashabranner, Brent. An Ancient Heritage: The Arab-American Minority. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Well-balanced book that deals fairly with American Arab and Jewish relations. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004. Study of the special problems faced by Arab and other Muslim Americans in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that turned many Americans against Arab immigrants. Levy, Mordecai. By Any Means Necessary. New York: Jewish Defense Organization, 1998. Publication of the Jewish Defense Organization that provides insights into the organization’s philosophy. McCarus, Ernest, ed. The Development of Arab-American Identity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Excellent anthology that covers every important aspect of the Arab American experience. Murphy, Caryle. “There’s Mideast Peace in the Wilds of Maine.” Washington Post, August 16, 1997. Discussion of the Seeds of Peace program. Stroberg, Gerald S. American Jews. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Study of Jewish Americans’ struggle with identity issues. See also American Jewish Committee; Arab American intergroup relations; Arab immigrants; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Middle Eastern immigrant families; Muslims; Sephardic Jews; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Justice and immigration Definition: Issues of fairness, legality, and justice relating to immigration Immigration issues: Border control; Illegal immigration; Laws and treaties; Mexican immigrants Significance: Immigration constitutes a major source of population growth in the United States; it affects national and regional economic health, eth458


nic and cultural diversity, utilization of governmental services, and other domestic conditions and raises many issues that pose questions of justice and fair play. For much of the twentieth century, the United States has absorbed more legal immigrants than the other countries of the world combined. In addition to legal immigration, each year several hundred thousand persons enter the country to reside illegally. During the 1990’s, about one in four foreigners settling in the United States did so in violation of immigration laws. Immigration affects American society in fundamental ways, but the costs, benefits, and moral obligations surrounding immigration are matters of dispute. The debate over immigration is fraught with conflicting statistics and conflicting values and centers on three primary topics: humanitarianism, economics, and nationhood. Humanitarianism A large part of the rationale for accepting immigrants into the United States stems from humanitarian concerns. In theory, U.S. policies seek to assist people of other nations who experience political oppression, discrimination, famine, civil war, or any number of other tribulations. In this context, allowing individuals to try to escape the worst of their problems by immigrating to the United States can be seen as a form of international aid. The United States, like most Western democratic countries, offers asylum to refugees of political repression. The United States distinguishes between political refugees fleeing persecution and economic refugees seeking a better standard of living. The system, however, is subject to inefficiency and abuse. Ascertaining whether a person is a political or economic refugee is a difficult and time-consuming task. Typically, there is a large backlog of asylum cases awaiting official action, and while the government is processing a case, the applicant may become “lost” within the general population. Such cases constitute one source of illegal immigration. Government efforts to locate and repatriate these illegal refugees are often ineffective. Moreover, many such enforcement actions raise justice issues of their own. Some groups in the United States have dedicated themselves to shielding illegal immigrants from immigration authorities and laws. Such efforts reached a peak during the 1980’s, when a number of churches and even cities declared themselves “sanctuaries” for aliens who did not have official refugee status. American public sentiment for political refugees has fluctuated widely over time. The anticommunist and anti-Soviet feelings prevalent during the Cold War made dissidents and defectors from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union especially welcome. Unusually brutal governmental crackdowns, such as those by the Chinese government at Tiananmen Square in 1989, raise public sympathy for political refugees, particularly for activists fighting for democracy. Poignant examples of human tragedy, such as ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the warehousing of orphans in postcommunist Romania, can spur Amer459


icans to adopt foreign children and to sponsor the immigration of adults and families. Some international crises, such as the fall of South Vietnam during the mid-1970’s, dramatically increase the number of political refugees coming to the United States. These large waves of refugees can fatigue American public support for immigration. Further, incidents of international terrorism inflicted upon Americans can reduce public acceptance of foreign immigrants (particularly when they belong to groups associated with terrorism, rightly or wrongly, in the public consciousness). Economics Persons without any claim of experiencing political repression can also apply to immigrate to the United States. Many are motivated by economic and societal opportunities. Traditionally, immigration of this sort has contributed significantly to the growth of the U.S. population and economy. A rapid influx of immigrants, however, may overwhelm the country’s ability to assimilate them, burdening social services and housing stocks, absorbing employment opportunities, and heightening racial and ethnic tensions. The net economic effects of the presence of immigrants is a matter of debate. Proponents claim that immigrants tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in social services, that they perform jobs American citizens prefer not to take, and that they tend to have a strong work ethic. Yet to the extent that immigrants have lower levels of education and lower wage demands—both are particularly true of illegal immigrants—their presence may skew the economy toward more service-oriented, labor-intensive jobs. The presence of a surplus of cheap labor may reduce incentives to invest in greater mechanization. Some critics charge that large numbers of immigrants make finding employment more difficult for poor Americans, particularly for poor members of minority groups. To regulate those effects, the federal government controls immigration through eligibility requirements and numerical limits. Deciding who will and will not be permitted to immigrate raises obvious justice issues. Until the mid1960’s, government established immigration quotas on the basis of nationality, at times excluding some national and racial groups entirely. Since the mid-1960’s, permission to immigrate to the United States has been awarded largely by lottery. Persons who are unable to secure legal resident status may resort to illegal means for entering the country. In response, the U.S. government has taken steps to block illegal border crossings. In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was established to police the country’s borders. The Mexican border is more heavily policed than the Canadian and has been fortified with surveillance devices and metal fencing. These measures have led some critics to identify the U.S.-Mexico border with the infamous Berlin Wall, although others argue that the imprisonment of people within a country and the exclusion of people from a country concern different questions of morality. U.S. efforts to limit immigration involve economic and market forces in a number of ways. The perceived promise of economic opportunity in the 460


United States, coupled with immigration restrictions, has given rise to human smuggling operations, particularly in Mexico. During the early 1990’s, about half the aliens illegally entering the United States were assisted in some way by smugglers. In addition to taking police measures, the U.S. government has tried to stem illegal immigration by reducing the incentives for it. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was touted in part for its projected role in improving economic opportunities in Mexico, thus reducing the incentive to emigrate. At the same time, governmental benefits to illegal aliens were restricted, partly in the hope that such limitations will make the prospect of living illegally in the United States less attractive. Federal welfare payments, food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other federal benefits are available to legal, but not to illegal, immigrants; however, primary education and medical services cannot be withheld from illegal aliens. In ruling on such issues, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not depend on citizenship status. The Border States Border states have been especially sensitive to the economic and social costs of illegal immigration. These states often bear the brunt of service provision, infrastructure maintenance, law enforcement, and other social costs of illegal immigration. In 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, a referendum that sought to deny state benefits, including health care, welfare, and education, to illegal aliens. (The referendum was immediately challenged as unconstitutional.) Some states have sued the federal government for the costs of supporting illegal aliens, asserting that the federal government was negligent in not stopping such aliens at the country’s borders. Border states have also challenged federal census figures, arguing that the allocation of federal benefits (including apportionment of congressional seats) should account for illegal aliens. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood Although the humanitarian motives that ostensibly underlie many U.S. immigration laws seldom are defined in terms of race and ethnicity, the federal government frequently has controlled immigration on the basis of national origin. Beginning during the 1920’s, the United States established immigration quotas defined by national origin. Immigrants from European countries historically have been favored. Immigration patterns have shifted dramatically over time, however, and not always as a result of changes to U.S. immigration policy. During the 1950’s, most immigrants came from Europe and Canada. By the 1970’s, partly as a result of international events, the majority of immigrants were coming from Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. The effects of different immigration patterns are compounded by higher birthrates among some immigrant groups; such effects are further accentuated by the disproportionate number of young adults among persons immigrating to the United States. Consideration of immigration in terms of race and nationality raises the 461


One of the most discriminatory pieces of immigration legislation in U.S . history was the aptly named Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This early twentieth century illustration from Puck suggests five ways in which a Chinese immigrant (“John”) might enter the United States in violation of the act: as an anarchist, as an Irishman, as an English wife-hunter, as a yacht racer, or as a Sicilian. A joke underlying this cartoon was the fact that all five alternative immigrant types that it depicts were also unpopular in the United States. (Library of Congress)

question of how the American people should be defined as a nation. The sense of American nationhood stems more from shared morals, values, and norms than from ethnic, racial, or even cultural characteristics. Yet the traditional conception of the United States as a “melting pot” of various ethnic and racial groups was challenged during the 1980’s and 1990’s by critics who claimed that such a concept unfairly pressures immigrants and racial minorities to conform to a largely white, middle-class culture. In its place, such critics offered a “salad bowl” metaphor of the United States, envisioning the various cultures of America’s citizens as retained in a diverse mosaic. In this view, assimilation, including perhaps even the mastery of English language, is unnecessary and perhaps undesirable. Nevertheless, immigrant groups themselves overwhelmingly desire to adopt American mores and culture, believe that people who come to the United States should learn to speak English, and sense that the country suffers from excessive immigration. Immigration policies thus cut to the heart of the U.S. sense of nationhood. By defining who can live in the country, who can receive services, and what is required to become a citizen, the government defines what it means to be an American. These policies also describe the nation’s sense of its moral obligations to foreign persons in need, and the enforcement of these policies helps to direct the future makeup of the American population. 462


Government Policies American immigration policy has shifted widely over time. Although much of the country’s early growth was fed by immigration, the United States has periodically restricted immigration in general or the entry of certain groups in particular. An example of the latter is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was repealed in 1943. The first broad immigration control laws were established during the 1920’s with the National Origins Act, which attempted to limit the inflow of immigrants and to fix the ethnic proportions of the U.S. population via national quotas. World War II, the Holocaust, and the political dislocations that followed the war prompted the United States to revise its immigration laws. After a series of ad hoc alterations, in 1952 the Immigration and Nationality Act codified the disparate immigration laws and ended immigration and naturalization prohibitions by race. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 expanded the 1952 law, ending national origin quotas entirely. In addition, this act established the reuniting of families as a goal of U.S. immigration policy. In a further move away from group- and nationality-based admissions policies, the Refugee Act of 1980 required that decisions to admit refugees be made on a case-by-case basis. By the 1980’s, the growing number of illegal immigrants had once again pushed immigration reform into the public spotlight. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, an attempt to balance the interests of anti-immigrant and immigrant-rights groups, took two approaches to the problem. To reduce illegal immigration, the act imposed sanctions on employers hiring illegal aliens and strengthened the country’s border enforcement. At the same time, the IRCA granted amnesty to illegal aliens who had resided in the country since at least 1982. Further modifications to immigration and refugee laws and policies continued throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s, prompted partly by the end of the Cold War and the increase in civil wars around the world. In 1990, for example, the Immigration Act raised immigration quotas by 40 percent, their highest level since 1914. Steve D. Boilard Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration. Among the specific subjects covered are government obligations to address humanitarian problems, the impact of cultural diversity on American society, and enforcement of laws regulating undocumented workers. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Critical analysis of the erosion of civil liberties in the United States since September 11, 2001, with attention to the impact of federal policies on immigrants and visiting aliens. 463


Deveaux, Monique. Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Thoughtful study of the ethical and legal problems arising in a pluralistic society such as that of the United States. Houle, Michelle E., ed. Immigration. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Collection of speeches on U.S. immigration policies by such historical figures as Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Broad discussion of modern federal government immigration policies that considers all sides of the debates about the rights of illegal aliens. Kondo, Atsushi, ed. Citizenship in a Global World: Comparing Citizenship Rights for Aliens. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Collection of essays on citizenship and immigrants in ten different nations, including the United States and Canada. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Lynch, James P., and Rita J. Simon. Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. International perspectives on immigration, with particular attention to the immigration policies of the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Presents a variety of social, political, and legal viewpoints of experts and observers familiar with immigration into the United States. See also Demographics of immigration; European immigrants, 1790-1892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; History of U.S. immigration; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration “crisis”; Immigration law; Migration; Undocumented workers.

464

Know-Nothing Party

Know-Nothing Party Identification: Nativist political party Date: 1852-1856 Immigration issues: Government and politics; Nativism and racism Significance: During its brief ascendancy in the decade before the Civil War, the Know-Nothing Party appealed to voters by campaigning for the interests of native-born Americans over those of immigrants. The Know-Nothing Party was a political organization that prospered in the United States between 1852 and 1856. During that period, the antiforeign and anti-Catholic feelings of Americans concerned about the large numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States, especially from Ireland, led to the creation of political organizations grounded in prejudice. The secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, informally known as the Know-Nothings because the phrase “I know nothing” was the response of members queried regarding the organization, emerged as the most prominent of the nativist organizations. The Know-Nothings eventually dropped their secrecy to become a force in U.S. politics. Under a new name, the American Party, the Know-Nothings surprised the nation with electoral victories in 1854 and 1855. The new party successfully shifted attention away from the issue of slavery in many parts of the country by playing on unrealistic fears of foreign and papal plots to control the United States. The American Party platform called for reforming immigration laws by limiting the number of immigrants and extending the time requirement for naturalization. Former president Millard Fillmore, the American Party candidate for president in 1856, received 21 percent of the popular vote but carried only the state of Maryland. Unable to emerge as a dominant force in national politics, the American Party split into factions over the issue of slavery. Donald C. Simmons, Jr. Further Reading Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Holt, Michael. The Political Crisis of the 1850’s. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; History of U.S. immigration; Nativism; Xenophobia. 465

Korean immigrants

Korean immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the East Asia Korean peninsula Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics Significance: Korean Americans are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States. Korean American businesses and churches have become increasingly common, and members of other American ethnic groups frequently come into contact with Koreans. Koreans first began settling in the United States during the 1950’s, when American servicemen serving in Korea returned home with brides and war orphans. Korean migration to the United States continued at very low levels, however, until the U.S. Congress changed immigration laws in 1965, giving Asians the same opportunity as Europeans to settle in the United States. This triggered an almost immediate increase in Korean migration: Although only 10,179 Koreans immigrated from 1961 to 1965, the number jumped to 25,618 in the next half-decade, from 1966 to 1970. As more Koreans made their homes in the United States, more followed. During the period from 1986

Residents of Los Angeles’s Koreatown watching a parade with floats supporting political candidates in South Korea’s presidential elections during the late 1980’s. (Korea Society/Los Angeles)

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to 1990, 172,851 Koreans immiKorean Immigration grated. By 1990, according to the to the United States, U.S. Census of Population and 1948-2003 Housing, the Korean American 35,000 population had reached 750,000. Between 1991 and 2003, Koreans 1950-1953 30,000 entered the United States at a rate Korean of about 16,600 immigrants per War year. 25,000 After the 1965 change in immigration law, Korean immigrants 20,000 were not only more numerous but also more likely to come as entire 15,000 family groups. With large numbers of Koreans in the United States, 10,000 they began to form Korean American communities instead of set5,000 tling as isolated individuals. Korean businesses and Korean churches began to appear in American cit0 ies and suburbs. California, with a 1990 Korean American population of 259,941, is home to the largest portion of Koreans in the United States. California is followed by New York, Source: U.S . Census Bureau. which had a Korean American population of 95,648 in 1990. Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington also had large Korean populations. 2001-2003

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Korean Businesses As new immigrants, Koreans often have few job opportunities in the United States. However, Koreans do have a strong tradition of helping one another, and this has contributed to the growth of Koreanowned businesses in the United States. In the rotating credit system known as the kye, groups of Koreans pool money to make interest-free loans to group members. Changes in the U.S. economy also encouraged the development of Korean businesses. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, as poverty became increasingly concentrated in American inner-city areas, many small business owners began closing or selling stores in these areas. New Korean immigrants, who had limited English-language abilities and few contacts to find jobs in established U.S. corporations, moved into ownership of small businesses. By the 1990’s, Korean Americans had the highest rate of business ownership of any ethnic or racial group, and more than half of all first-generation Korean immigrants were self-employed. 467

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Korean businesses have become the basis for many local and national Korean organizations. The Korean American Grocers’ Association is one of the most important of the national business-based organizations, with local groups in most areas that have substantial Korean populations. The Korean Dry Cleaning and Laundry Association is another national Korean American organization based on small-business ownership. The Korean pattern of employment has had consequences for the relations between Korean Americans and members of other groups. Koreans are often highly dependent on one another for financial and social support, sometimes creating the impression that they isolate themselves from the rest of American society. They tend not to live in the inner-city neighborhoods where they own their businesses, leading to cultural misunderstandings and conflicts between Korean business owners and their customers, many of whom are African American. Korean Churches Although Korean culture is traditionally Confucian and Buddhist, numerous Christian congregations, mostly Protestant, exist in South Korea. It is estimated that about 70 percent of Korean Americans are Christians and that the overwhelming majority of them are members of Korean churches. By the 1990’s, there were more than two thousand Korean churches in the United States. Churches have become social centers for many Korean Americans, places where they can come together with others who speak their language and share their culture. Korean American churches are places of worship, but they fulfill many other needs as well. Church members provide one another with information on available employment and housing. Language classes at churches teach English to new immigrants and Korean to U.S.-born children. The churches help to pass Korean culture on to children who may never have visited the home country of their parents. Koreans and American Society Korean businesses and churches both help to maintain Korean Americans as a separate group in American society. However, when U.S.-born Korean Americans become a larger proportion of the population, the separateness of Korean Americans is likely to diminish. Many Korean American business owners do not pass on their businesses to their U.S.-born children. Instead, these children are typically encouraged to achieve high educational levels and obtain professional jobs in U.S. corporations. Over time, then, the distinctive employment patterns of Korean Americans are likely to disappear. Korean Americans have also shown increasing rates of marriage with members of other racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that members of this Asian ethnic group will gradually assimilate or blend into the larger American society. Carl L. Bankston III 468

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Further Reading Comprehensive overviews of Korean immigration include Korean-Americans: Past, Present, and Future (Elizabeth, N.J.: Hollym International, 2004), edited by Ilpyong J. Kim; Sheila Smith Noonan’s Korean Immigration (Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004); and Stacy Taus-Bolstad’s Koreans in America (Minneapolis: Lerner, 2005). From the Land of Morning Calm: The Koreans in America (New York: Chelsea House, 1994), by Ronald Takaki, uses documents on Korean immigration and oral histories of individual Korean Americans to help readers understand the background of this group. It is illustrated with photographs and contains a chronology of Koreans in the United States. Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), by Pyong Gap Min, looks at the situation of Korean businessmen in urban neighborhoods and how they are affected by racial and ethnic inequality in the United States. Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, is a detailed examination of the impact of the 1992 riots on Korean Americans. Other useful studies include Moon H. Jo’s Korean Immigrants and the Challenge of Adjustment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), Nazli Kibria’s Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and Wayne Patterson’s The Ilsei: FirstGeneration Korean Immigrants in Hawai’i, 1903-1973 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). Ellen Alexander Conley’s The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) is a collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including two from Korea. See also Amerasians; Asian American education; Asian American stereotypes; Korean immigrants and African Americans; Korean immigrants and family customs; War brides; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Korean immigrants and African Americans Immigration issues: African Americans; Asian immigrants; Economics Significance: Korean immigrants to the United States have tended to open small businesses, such as groceries, in central areas of American cities, where many of their customers have been African Americans. As a consequence, sometimes culture clashes and conflicts occur between members of these two minority groups. 469


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Ownership of a small business is the most common job for people of Korean ancestry in the United States. Assisted by rotating credit associations (organizations that Koreans form to grant each other interest-free business loans requiring little collateral), Korean Americans have specialized in self-employment in small stores. The majority of Korean businesses in the United States are located in California and New York. In 1990, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 44 percent of all Korean business owners lived in California and 12 percent of Korean business owners lived in New York. Within these states, they were concentrated in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area and in New York City. Korean businesses are most often located in central areas of cities. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, owners of inner-city businesses began to leave, and Koreans, having access to business loans from their rotating loan associations but few job opportunities in established American businesses, began buying small urban shops. Although their businesses were in the city, the Koreans tended to settle in the suburbs. The people who do live in central urban areas and make up the majority of the customers in Korean businesses are African Americans. Korean shop owners are often looked upon by their inner-city customers as exploiters who come into neighborhoods to make a profit on the people and then take the money elsewhere. These customers complain 470


about high prices, poor merchandise, and discourteous treatment. As new arrivals to the United States, Korean merchants sometimes have trouble with English and do not communicate well with those who come into their shops. Korean businesspeople tend to hire other Koreans to work in their shops. Most of these shops are family enterprises, so family members frequently provide labor. As a result, Koreans not only live outside the communities where their stores are located but also hire few people who live in those communities. African Americans complain that Korean merchants do not hire black employees, do not buy from black suppliers of goods, and do not invest in the black neighborhoods in which they have located their businesses. Although African American shoppers frequently view Koreans as outsiders and exploiters, the Koreans sometimes look with suspicion on those living in the neighborhoods where their businesses are located. Having little understanding of the history of U.S. racial inequality, Korean business owners may see low-income urban residents as irresponsible and untrustworthy. The high crime rates in these neighborhoods can lead them to see all members of the communities, even the most honest, as potential shoplifters or robbers. Mistrust and Culture Clash The cultural gap between African Americans and the Korean Americans who often own stores in black neighborhoods has resulted in a number of well-publicized clashes. In the spring of 1990, African Americans in Brooklyn began a nine-month boycott of Korean stores after a Korean greengrocer allegedly harassed an African American shopper. In 1992, trouble flared up again in the same neighborhood when an African American customer in a Korean grocery was allegedly harassed and struck by the owner and an employee. During 1995, an African American man was arrested while attempting to burn down a Korean-owned store, and both white and Korean store owners in Harlem received racial threats. California, home to the nation’s greatest number of Korean businesses, has seen some of the most serious conflicts between Koreans and African Americans. In April of 1992, a judge gave a sentence of probation to a Korean shopkeeper convicted in the shooting death of a fifteen-year-old African American girl, Latasha Harlins. Two weeks after that, on April 29, riots broke out in South Central Los Angeles after the acquittal of police officers who had been videotaped beating an African American motorist, Rodney King. Although none of the police officers was Korean, Korean groceries and liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles became targets of the riots. The riots destroyed more than one thousand Korean businesses and an estimated twentythree hundred Korean-owned businesses were looted. Korean shop owners began leaving South Central Los Angeles in the years after the riots. Those who remained became even more wary of the local population than they were previously. Efforts at Improving Relations Korean and African American leaders have made efforts to improve relations between the two groups. In the days 471


following the riots in Los Angeles, some African American and Korean leaders formed the Black-Korean Alliance to improve communication and find common ground. In New York, the Korean-American Grocer’s Association has tried to find ways of bringing African Americans and Koreans together. These have included sending African American community leaders on tours of South Korea and providing African American students with scholarships to Korean universities. It may be difficult to resolve the problems between Korean merchants and their African American customers as long as American central cities continue to be places of concentrated unemployment and poverty. Investment in lowincome communities and the creation of economic opportunities for their residents are probably necessary in order to overcome the suspicion and resentment between members of these two minority groups. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Up-to-date discussions of a variety of aspects of KoreanAfrican American relations can be found in Blacks and Asians in America: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2004), edited by Hazel M. McFerson. Claire Jean Kim’s Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000) examines the boycott of Korean stores in New York. In Patrick D. Joyce’s No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America’s Cities (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), edited by Kwang Chung Kim and Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America’s Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), by sociologist Pyong Gap Min the situation of Korean businesspeople in U.S. cities is examined. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie discuss the consequences for Koreans of the 1992 Los Angeles riots in Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich give a history of Korean American business in Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Lauren Lee’s Korean Americans (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995) provides a readable, in-depth description of this ethnic group. See also African immigrants; Asian American education; Asian American stereotypes; Ethnic enclaves; Indigenous superordination; Korean immigrants; Korean immigrants and family customs; War brides; “Yellow peril” campaign.

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Korean immigrants and family customs Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Families and marriage Significance: Korean American families have faced the challenges of balancing the conservative, traditional principles of their ancestral homeland, Korea, with the more liberal, egalitarian beliefs of the American family. Most Korean Americans have strong family ties to South Korea. Confucian principles influence social and familial behavior. A patrilineal system dominates the traditional Korean family, which means that husbands are the commanders of their wives and families. Wives are expected to obey their husband and serve their husbands’ parents and families. Wives’ must bear children to perpetuate their husband’s family lineage. According to Confucian philosophy and centuries of tradition, Korean women obey their fathers until their marriage, at which time they must obey their husbands. After their husbands die, they must obey their sons. These strong patrilineal beliefs have posed difficulties when Koreans emigrate to the United States and attempt to adapt to mainstream American culture, which often tends to encourage gender equality. However, such unique traditional values as found among Korean immigrants in the United States help Korean Americans maintain their cultural identity and focus on the rich traditions of their native country. Historical Overview Koreans traveled to America after 1882, when the Korean American trade and travel treaty was signed. American missionaries traveled to Korea to convert Korean Buddhists to Christianity. Sheltered and submissive Korean women found that church work offered them some freedom and was socially rewarding. From 1903 to 1905 seven thousand Koreans emigrated to the United States for political and financial reasons. Some of the first Korean immigrants were men working on Hawaiian sugar plantations. Emigrating to the mainland, they searched for better conditions in agricultural areas and for opportunities in the professions they learned in their native Korea. Some Americans resented the fact that Korean immigrants took jobs in the United States and excluded them from participating in the professions. As a result, Koreans often started their own businesses in city districts where Korean families clustered. The influx of Koreans to America slowly grew. By 1940 there were 8,568 Korean Americans. The Korean War, which ended in 1953, increased Korean immigration. Many U.S. servicemen returned home from the Korean War 473


with Korean brides, while Korean students enrolled in U.S. colleges and American families adopted Korean infants. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act also contributed to the increase in Korean Americans by easing immigration restrictions. The 1990 U.S. Census Bureau reported that there were almost 800,000 Koreans in the United States. The Canadian Employment Equity Act of 1986 classified Korean Canadians as a “visible minority.” This act allowed the Canadian government to collect data on Korean Canadians as well as on other minorities and ethnic immigrants in Canada during the 1980’s. About one third of Korean Canadians emigrated to Canada during the 1980’s. Demographics Korean Americans and Canadians live primarily in urban areas. In the United States, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York are important cities with substantial Korean populations. In some cities geographic areas have developed which have come to be known as Koreatowns. Approximately 50 percent of Korean Canadians lived in the Toronto vicinity in 1991. Education of men, which is valued in Korean culture, stems from historical Confucian beliefs. Koreans believe that success, power, and respect are attainable with education.

Members of a Los Angeles Korean church on Easter Sunday in 1950. Christian churches play an important role in promoting fellowship among Korean immigrants and their families. (University of Southern California, East Asian Library)

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Some 57 percent of Korean Canadians had university degrees during the late 1990’s, more than any other visible minority group. The high educational levels that Koreans have attained are evidenced by the large percentages of Korean professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs. In the United States, 40 percent of Korean men own businesses, such as grocery stores or dry cleaners. Many Korean medical professionals are forced to work in high-crime, inner-city areas because of the difficulties they face in finding jobs. In spite of such problems, unemployment rates among Koreans are low. They accept difficult working conditions and set themselves the goal of acquiring enough capital to improve their situation. The success of Korean-owned businesses has been attributed to the fact that Koreans work long hours, have strong work ethics, and make sacrifices for their families. Family Interaction with Mainstream Society The business success of Korean immigrants has caused resentment among other ethnic groups. In some cities African American and Korean relations have suffered because of cultural differences. The 1992 Los Angeles upheaval seriously affected local Korean businesses. Many were vandalized, looted, or burned. Korean Americans have better relations with Latinos. Both are entrepreneurial ethnic groups, and many Korean Americans speak Spanish as a second language. Some Korean youth feel that they play dual roles as immigrants. They believe that being Korean American is a high-maintenance ethnic status. Even Korean children born in the United States are often expected to speak Korean and English, know Korean geography, and marry other Koreans. The majority of Korean Americans speak the Korean language at home. Korean American teenagers face some difficulties at school because of the language barrier that isolates their parents. The limited English proficiency of many parents is a cause for concern among both parents and children. Traditional Korean culture is significantly different from American culture. Traditional Koreans place high value on filial piety. This devotion to older family members and particularly to husbands’ families is lacking in American culture. Aging Korean parents expect that their children will respect them, and parents are frustrated when their children do not. Korean American wives are burdened by double roles, while husbands are frustrated by the Americanization of their wives. Women must balance the role of traditional Korean wives, whose goal is to serve their husbands’ families, with the role of employed American wives, whose goals are gender equality, personal satisfaction, and independence. Korean American husbands, influenced by filial piety, may fear their wives’ challenge to male dominance at home. They feel that the gradual lessening of their wives’ obedience is a problem that stems from American culture. Maintaining Cultural Identity In fulfilling social and religious roles, Korean churches adhere closely to traditional Korean beliefs. They encourage fellowship among Korean immigrants; provide social services for their 475


congregations and the community, such as helping immigrants adjust to the new culture; and provide their members opportunities for leadership and status among Korean Americans. Sundays are often filled with activities sponsored by Korean churches. After Sunday services, congregations may have Love Feasts, at which traditional Korean foods are served. Churches teach children Korean culture in Sunday afternoon workshops or summer camps. Korean American churches preserve and promote traditional customs and festivals, as well as adapt customs to American ways. The Korean Lunar New Year’s Day festival, called Sol-Nal, occurs in January or February. Like New Year’s Day in the West, Lunar New Year’s Day is a time to celebrate and make resolutions. Korean families gather for memorial services honoring ancestors or visit living elders. New clothes, special foods, candles, and incense are important to this festival. The Harvest Moon Festival is celebrated in September or October on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. Its purpose is to give thanks for successful harvests and is thus similar to Thanksgiving in the United States. Ancestors are honored during the Harvest Moon Festival. Festive foods, such as fruits, vegetables, zucchini pancakes, meat, rice, and wine are served. Crescentshaped rice cakes filled with sweet sesame seeds or bean paste are the highlight of the Harvest Moon Festival. Moon-viewing is important to the festival and has inspired Korean poetry. In Korea, traditional weddings were arranged by brides’ and groom’s parents. Often, brides and grooms met for the first time at their wedding. During the late twentieth century, western traditions of dating, love, engagements, and white wedding gowns have become the cultural norm among Korean Americans. Some Korean Americans have two wedding ceremonies, a Christian and a Buddhist one. Wedding feasts may be held in honor of brides and grooms, because food is an important part of such ceremonies. Tables are laden with traditional Korean foods such as Kimchi, or spicy preserved cabbage; pulgolgi, or spicy beef; fish; rice; noodles; and vegetables. Korean American families have managed to retain some of the cultural norms of traditional Korea while adapting to their current life conditions in the United States and Canada. They have found ways to synthesize Korean and American values by adapting both. Unique values will eventually emerge, allowing Korean Americans to balance change with continuity. Celia Stall-Meadows Further Reading Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Jo, Moon H. Korean Immigrants and the Challenge of Adjustment. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Kibria, Nazli. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 476

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Koh, Frances. Korean Holidays and Festivals. Minneapolis: EastWest Press, 1990. Kwon, Okyun. Buddhist and Protestant Korean Immigrants: Religious Beliefs and Socioeconomic Aspects of Life. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2003. Patterson, Wayne. The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawai’i, 19031973. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000. See also Amerasians; Asian American education; Asian American stereotypes; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Filipino immigrants and family customs; Korean immigrants; Korean immigrants and African Americans; Southeast Asian immigrants; Vietnamese immigrants; War brides; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Ku Klux Klan Identification: White supremacist organization Date: Founded in 1866 Place: Pulaski, Tennessee Immigration issues: African Americans; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination Significance: After the Civil War, a group of white supremacists, disaffected by the war’s outcome, grew into an organization of institutionalized race hatred and anti-immigrant sentiment that has survived into the twenty-first century. With the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of African American slaves in the South, tension arose between old-order Southern whites and Radical Republicans devoted to a strict plan of Reconstruction that required southern states to repeal their black codes and guarantee voting and other civil rights to African Americans. Federal instruments for ensuring African American rights included the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union Leagues. In reaction to the activities of these organizations, white supremacist organizations sprouted in the years immediately following the Civil War: the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, the Invisible Circle, the Pale Faces, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Beginnings The last of these would eventually lend its name to a confederation of such organizations, but in 1866 it was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a fraternal order for white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants joined by their opposition to Radical Reconstructionism and an agenda to promote white, Southern dominance. This incarnation of the Klan established many of the 477

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Hooded Klansmen marching in Virginia in early 1922. Much of the power of the Klan to intimidate immigrants and members of minority groups was based on its secretiveness and the spookiness of its members hooded outfits. (Library of Congress)

weird rituals and violent activities for which the KKK became known throughout its history. They named the South the “invisible empire,” with “realms” consisting of the southern states. A “grand dragon” headed each realm, and the entire “empire” was led by Grand Wizard General Nathan B. Forrest. Positions of leadership were dubbed “giant,” “cyclops,” “geni,” “hydra,” and “goblin.” The white robes and pointed cowls stem from this era; these were donned in the belief that African Americans were superstitious and would be intimidated by the menacing, ghostlike appearance of their oppressors, who thus also maintained anonymity while conducting their activities. Soon the Klan was perpetrating acts of violence, including whippings, house-burnings, kidnappings, and lynchings. As the violence escalated, Forrest disbanded the Klan in 1869, and on May 31, 1870, and April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts, or Force Acts, designed to break up the white supremacist groups. Second Rise of the Klan The next rise of the Klan presaged the period of the Red Scare (1919-1920) and the Immigration Act of 1921, the first such legislation in the United States to establish immigration quotas on the basis of national origin. In November, 1915, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a second Ku Klux Klan was founded by preacher William J. Simmons, proclaiming it a “high-class, mystic, social, patriotic” society devoted to defending womanhood, white Protestant values, and “native-born, white, gentile Americans.” Such an image of the Klan was perpetrated by the popular 1915 film Birth of a Nation, in which a lustful African American is shown attempting to attack a white woman, and the Klan, in robes and cowls, rides to the rescue. 478

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The new Klan cloaked itself as a patriotic organization devoted to preserving traditional American values against enemies in the nation’s midst. An upsurge of nationalist fervor swelled the ranks of the Klan, this time far beyond the borders of the South. This second Klan adopted the rituals and regalia of its predecessor as well as the same anti-black ideology, to which it added anti-Roman Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-birth-control, antiDarwinist, and anti-Prohibition stances. Promoted by ad-man Edward Y. Clarke, its membership reached approximately 100,000 by 1921 and over the next five years, by some estimates, grew to 5 million, including even members of Congress. The second Klan perpetrated more than five hundred hangings and burnings of African Americans. In 1924, forty thousand Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., sending a message to the federal government that there should be a white, Protestant United States. Finally, the Klan’s growing wave of violence alienated many of its members, whose numbers dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. Klan activities increased again prior to World War II, and membership rose toward the 100,000 mark, but in 1944 Congress assessed the organization more than a half million dollars in back taxes, and the Klan dissolved itself to escape. Two years later, however, Atlanta physician Samuel Green united smaller Klan groups into the Association of Georgia Klans and was soon joined by other reincarnations, such as the Federated Ku Klux Klans, the Original Southern Klans, and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These groups revived the agenda of previous Klans and were responsible for hundreds of criminal acts. Of equal concern was the Klan’s political influence: A governor of Texas was elected with the support of the Klan, as was a senator from Maine. Even a Supreme Court justice, Hugo L. Black, revealed in 1937 that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Challenges During the 1940’s, many states passed laws that revoked Klan charters, and many southern communities issued regulations against masks. The U.S. Justice Department placed the Klan on its list of subversive elements, and in 1952 the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the Lindbergh law (one of the 1934 Crime Control Acts) against the Klan. Another direct challenge to the principles of the KKK came during the 1960’s with the advent of the Civil Rights movement and civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King, Jr., prophesied early in the decade that it would be a “season of suffering.” On September 15, 1963, a Klan bomb tore apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young children. Despite the outrage of much of the nation, the violence continued, led by members of the Klan who made a mockery of the courts and the laws that they had broken. Less than a year after the bombing, three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, including one African American and two whites from the North involved in voter registration. This infamous event was later docu479

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mented in the motion picture Mississippi Burning. Viola Lee Liuzzo was killed for driving freedom marchers from site to site. Such acts prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a televised speech in March, 1965, to denounce the Klan as he announced the arrest of four Klansmen for murder. After the conviction of many of its members during the 1960’s, the organization became somewhat dormant, and its roster of members reflected low numbers. Nevertheless, as it had in previous periods of dormancy, the Klan refused to die. Busing for integration of public schools during the 1970’s engendered Klan opposition in the South and the North. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Klan members killed several members of the Communist Party in a daylight battle on an open street. Klan members have patrolled the Mexican border, armed with weapons and citizen-band radios, trying to send illegal aliens back to Mexico. The Klan has been active in suburban California, at times driving out African Americans who attempted to move there. On the Gulf Coast, many boats fly the infamous AKIA flag, an acronym for “A Klansman I Am,” a motto that dates back to the 1920’s. Klan members have tried to discourage or run out Vietnamese fishers. Klan leaders active since 1970 include James Venable, for whom the Klan became little more than a hobby, and Bill Wilkinson, a former disciple of David Duke. Robert Shelton, long a grand dragon, helped elect two Alabama governors. Duke, a Klan leader until the late 1980’s, decided to run for political office and was elected a congressman from Louisiana despite his well-publicized past associations; in 1991, he ran for governor, almost winning. During the 1980’s the Klan stepped up its anti-Semitic activities, planning multiple bombings in Nashville, Tennessee. Klan leaders during the 1990’s have trained their members and their children for what they believe is an imminent race war, learning survival skills and weaponry at remote camps throughout the country. A major blow was struck against the Klan by the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama, when, in 1984, attorney Morris Dees began pressing civil suits against several Klan members, effectively removing their personal assets, funds received from members, and even buildings owned by the Klan. Further Reading Chalmers, David. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Study of the Klan’s contributions to focusing public attention on the justness of the aims of the Civil Rights movement. ____________. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: F. Watts, 1981. Considered the bible of books about the Klan, this study has seen numerous editions and updatings. Ezekiel, Raphael. The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen. New York: Viking Press, 1995. Explores conditions of childhood, education, and other factors in an attempt to explain racist behavior. 480

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Quarles, Chester L. The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. General overview of the history of white racist organizations. Randel, William. The Ku Klux Klan: A Century of Infamy. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965. Excellent history of origins and events that also uses a moral perspective. Stanton, Bill. Klanwatch: Bringing the Ku Klux Klan to Justice. New York: Weidenfeld, 1991. A former Klanwatch director explains new initiatives to disable the Klan, most of which have been effective. Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Wade recounts the Klan’s history and episodes of violence, revealing its legacy of race hatred. See also African immigrants; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Discrimination; History of U.S. immigration.

Latinos Identification: Immigrants to the United States and their descendants of Latin American origin Immigration issues: Border control; Cuban immigrants; Demographics; Labor; Latino immigrants; West Indian immigrants Significance: According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more than 16 million residents of the United States were born in Latin American nations; this number represented 52 percent of all foreign-born residents of the country. The large and growing Latino minority has had a significant impact on the United States, both culturally and economically. Although linked by language, Latinos are a diverse group, consisting of many different races and nations of origin. The Latino minority, also often referred to as the Hispanic American sector of United States society, continues to increase proportionately to the total population with each succeeding decade. In 1996, some 25 million (9.7 percent) of residents of the United States traced their cultural, racial, or ethnic origins to some Spanish or Portuguese antecedents. Included in this group are recent immigrants, those who have arrived from Latin American nations both legally and illegally, and U.S. citizens whose families have been residents of the United States for many generations. The combination of this group’s high birthrate coupled with the constant influx of immigrants into the United States has led to the prediction that by the year 2020 the total Latino popula481

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tion of the United States will exceed 51 million, representing 15.7 percent of an estimated total U.S. population of 326 million. Although Latinos share a common cultural heritage, and most of them share a common linguistic heritage, the Latino population of the United States is far from a homogeneous cultural group. Its members can be characterized better by their diversity than by their similarity. Strong nationalistic identification with their countries or regions of origin serves to divide Mexican Americans from Cuban Americans from Puerto Ricans—and a host of other nationals—and to mitigate against their acting in concert politically, economically, or socially. For example, the large Cuban American colony in greater Miami, Florida, tends to be highly conservative politically, while the Puerto Ricans of New York state and the Mexican Americans of California generally are Democratic or liberal in political affiliation.

Latin American Migration to the United States Year

Event

Impact

1910-1920

Mexican Revolution

Ten years of political and economic chaos force a quarter million Mexicans to resettle north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

1942-1964

Bracero program

Wartime labor shortages create a need for farmworkers that is filled by a Mexican and U.S. program that brings Mexicans to the United States to work the fields. The program establishes a pattern of migration of farmworkers.

1945-1950

Puerto Rican Following World War II, seventy-five-dollar immigration economy air flights permit thousands of Puerto Ricans to resettle in the New York area. Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, no official entry papers are required.

1957-1960

Cuban Revolution

The takeover by the leftist Fidel Castro sends more than one million Cuban businesspeople and professionals to Miami.

1980-1990

Central American conflicts

Civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala send more than one million political and economic refugees north, mostly to California and the East Coast.

1981-1990’s Mexican economic crises

The continuing erratic behavior of the Mexican economy, in addition to the inability of the country to provide employment for those entering the workforce each year, sends a constant wave of Mexican immigrants north to find work.

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Race and Ethnicity Members of the Latino community run the gamut of virtually every racial and ethnic group found in the world. The initial voyages of exploration and discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans from Spain, England, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands led quickly to a racial amalgamation of these primarily light-skinned European immigrants with the bronze-skinned indigenous peoples mistakenly called “Indians” (under the false belief that they occupied the Asian continent). This admixture of races resulted in what has been referred to as the mestizo, soon to become the predominant racial entity throughout much of Central and South America, as well as what would ultimately become the U.S. Southwest. When the European settlers in Mexico, Central America, and South America found that they could not successfully exploit the indigenous peoples in mining and agriculture, they turned to the importation of Africans, initially as indentured servants but ultimately as slaves. England, France, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands entered into an extensive and lucrative transhipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere, where they were sold as labor for the mining of precious metals and the manufacture of sugar, cotton, rice, and a wide variety of other marketable crops. Owners of black slaves bred their human chattels with other slaves as part of the existing economic system, and soon African Americans—now typed as mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, and other racial mixtures—became part of a gene pool already containing a mixture of European and American Indian strains. In the course of the centuries that followed, Asians joined the heterogeneous racial population that spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. Chinese settled in substantial numbers along the borders of Mexico’s northernmost states. Faced with persecution by warring factions during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, they migrated to the United States in large numbers. Religion When Europeans landed in what became Mexico in the sixteenth century, they encountered a highly civilized society that was in many ways more advanced than that of Europe at the time. Spaniards, however, did not perceive or value the cultural sophistication of the newly discovered civilization—considering it their responsibility, on the contrary, to replace what they perceived as a heretic religion (in which the Aztec emperor was revered as a demigod) with Roman Catholicism. The Europeans therefore adopted a program of ruthless destruction of what they considered idolatry. Similarly, in other parts of the continent, Portuguese, French, and English forced their own brands of Christianity on the native peoples whom they conquered and exploited. In the initial four centuries following the opening of the hemisphere, Catholicism and Protestantism became the dominant religions throughout North, South, and Central America. Nevertheless, some indigenous peoples attempted to retain their identification with their old gods. Often this took the form of hiding their ancient sacred images behind the altars of European places of worship. Today, in more tolerant times, native and European religions are often practiced side by side, 483

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venerating gods and saints together, although by different names, as can be seen in modern Guatemala. African slaves, seized and transported from their native lands to the Western Hemisphere, often brought their native religions with them, a source of comfort and hope under truly trying conditions. These African religions, sometimes modified by exposure to Christian sects, have open, active communicants in countries such as Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. Immigrants to the United States from these nations often bring these ancestral religious practices with them. These religious societies play an active role in the daily lives of their followers in the United States. Language Most second- and third-generation Latinos in the United States have a good command of English. Newcomers, however—like most immigrants from non-English-speaking nations—often lack basic English-language skills, severely limiting their ability to progress economically, politically, and socially. In a few areas, there are neighborhoods large and insular enough in their organization, where Spanish is so widely spoken among commercial establishments that English is unnecessary to carry on daily activities. Opportunities exist in most areas for newcomers to acquire basic English skills necessary to move into the mainstream of U.S. culture. Nevertheless, immigrants from isolated communities to the south, often still committed to tribal mores and language, find it difficult to blend into the larger culture. Some do not even speak Spanish but depend on their native languages, such as Mayan, Quechua, and Nahuatl, for communication. Lacking either English or Spanish, quite often these small, essentially tribal, groups are subject to exploitation by unscrupulous business interests and often are forced to work for miserably low wages and threatened with being turned into U.S. immigration authorities if they seek redress under the law. Mexico Mexico leads all other nations both in the number of foreign-born living in the United States and in the quantity of new arrivals each year. With a population approaching 100 million, Mexico cannot provide enough jobs for those entering its workforce every year. This pool of surplus labor, combined with the availability of unskilled or entry-level jobs in the United States, has accounted for Mexico’s primary position in terms of immigrant influx. Included in this wave of new arrivals are members of Mexico’s Indian communities, who speak a variety of tribal tongues as their first language. Primarily from rural areas and with a minimum of education, they are subject to economic exploitation to a greater degree than are other immigrants. Mexicans have lived in areas in what is now the United States before they were incorporated into the union. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were under the Mexican flag until the Mexican War of 1846-1848. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed in 1848 between the two countries ceded this territory to the United States for $15 million—a cheap price for the Americans. 484

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Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 250,000 240,000 230,000 220,000 210,000 200,000 190,000 180,000 170,000 160,000 150,000 140,000 130,000 120,000 110,000 100,000 90,000 80,000 70,000 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

1942-1964 Bracero program 1930’s U.S. deportations of Mexican workers 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution

2001-2003

1981-1990

1991-2000

1961-1970

1971-1980

1951-1960

1931-1940

1941-1950

1911-1920

1921-1930

1901-1910

1881-1890

1891-1900

1861-1870

1871-1880

1841-1850

1851-1860

1831-1840

1821-1830


Puerto Rico The United States defeated Spain in the brief SpanishAmerican War in 1898. In the ensuing Treaty of Paris, Spain gave up Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and Guam to the victorious Americans. The United States also reluctantly agreed to the island of Cuba’s independence under that treaty. However, the Americans retained sovereignty over Puerto Rico, viewing it as critical to U.S. defenses in the event of an attack from the Caribbean. In 1953, Puerto Rico achieved Commonwealth status, becoming a self-governing territory. Following World War II, thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to the conti485

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nental United States. In the immediate postwar period, airplane fares to the mainland sold for as little as seventy-five dollars. Almost three million Latin American citizens now live in the Northeast, mostly in the New York area. Because they are by law U.S. citizens, immigrants from the island are required only to demonstrate proof of birth in Puerto Rico before entering the continental United States. Cuba The takeover in 1959 of the island of Cuba by Fidel Castro and his supporters resulted in a mass exodus of much of the country’s upper-class and middle-class professional and business interests, who did not agree with the imposition of what eventually became a socialist, communist-supported, regime. Numbering close to one million, most of these refugees established themselves initially in the greater Miami area. In the spring of 1980, a second wave of refugees, called Marielitos and numbering perhaps one hundred thousand, managed to immigrate, with the permission of both the Castro regime and the administration of President Jimmy Carter, to the United States. The Cuban community, still centered in southern Florida, developed into a powerful economic and political force. During the 1990’s, desperate Cubans continued to attempt to escape to the United States utilizing primitive boats, rafts, and even inner tubes. Central America Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were plagued by civil wars. As a consequence of those unsettled political times, between one million and one and a half million Central American refugees had easy access, since the United States compared the leftist government of Daniel Ortega to Castro’s regime in Cuba. U.S. supporters of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees insisted on the same opportunity for victims of political oppression in those countries as well. Most of these three groups have continued to remain in this country through one form of amnesty or another, concentrating in California, Florida, and communities on the eastern seaboard. Dominican Republic As has been the case with so many of the small Caribbean island nations, the Dominican Republic cannot furnish enough job opportunities for all its citizens. Depending primarily on the export of sugar, some mining, and the attraction of cruise ships to its ports, this country, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, exports a substantial number of its working-class citizenry as well. Many Dominican immigrants seeking illegal entry into the United States have used Puerto Rico as a staging area. False documents are obtained to establish a Puerto Rican identity. Most Dominicans have gravitated to the New York area after arriving in the United States. The little island nation ranked fourteenth in recent figures on immigration to the United States. 486

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Other Latin Americans The balance of the Western Hemisphere’s Latin American countries have contributed immigrants as well, although generally as smaller percentages of their total populations. For example, the drug trade and the resulting political unrest has caused Bolivians, Peruvians, and Colombians to seek asylum in the United States, which continues to represent a beacon of hope to citizens of those countries where political disorder or economic deprivation threaten the lives of their citizens. Diversity vs. Unity Despite the formidable growth of the Latino element in U.S. society, its diversity has prevented this group from reaching its potential as a unitary political force. Instead, the members of each particular ethnic entity have shown a preference to confine their organizational efforts to members of their own particular community—to establish themselves as Mexican American, Cuban American, or Puerto Rican political associations, with membership confined to their own ethnic group. Nevertheless, should there come a time when diverse organizations such as these come to realize the potential strength that their combined numbers represent, the fast-growing Latino contingent could become a major factor in determining the course of the future of the United States. In the interim, the Latino sons of immigrants have followed the paths of other racial and ethnic minorities in U.S. society in past decades. Many, showing a high degree of individual initiative, have worked their way into positions of greater responsibility in business and the professions. Carl Henry Marcoux Further Reading Bohon, Stephanie. Latinos in Ethnic Enclaves: Immigrant Workers and the Competition for Jobs. New York: Garland, 2000. Examination of Latino employment in major urban centers. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Bolivia, Cuba, and Mexico. Crosthwaite, Luis Humberto, John William Byrd, and Bobby Byrd, eds. Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Graffiti from La Frontera. El Paso, Tex.: Cinco Puntos Press, 2003. Collage of illustrations and writings that attempts to portray the various cultural and geographical considerations of those people who live on the line. Cull, Nicholas J., and David Carrasco, eds. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. Fox, Geoffrey. Hispanic Nation. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. Argues that the old political and cultural differences that divided various Latino groups have already begun to diminish and that Latinos in the 487

Latinos and employment

twenty-first century will become the largest and most influential minority in the United States. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Reexamination of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States that looks at the subject in the context of American dominance over Mexico. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups, including Mexicans, through the early twentieth century. López, David, and Andrés Jiménez, eds. Latinos and Public Policy in California: An Agenda for Opportunity. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003. Collection of essays on the condition and government treatment of Latinos in California. Nevin, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002. Details the federal government’s Operation Gatekeeper, which in the 1990’s targeted the San Diego-Tijuana border in efforts to stop illegal immigration. The author argues that this assault on immigration did not effectively reduce unauthorized immigration and served to inflame anti-Hispanic racism in the United States. Rodriguez, Clara E. Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Study of the demographics of the Latino population of the United States. See also Censuses, U.S.; Chicano movement; Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Dominican immigrants; Immigration “crisis”; Japanese Peruvians; Latinos and employment; Latinos and family customs; League of United Latin American Citizens; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Proposition 227; Undocumented workers.

Latinos and employment Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Economics; Labor; Latino immigrants Significance: Latinos occupied a comparatively disadvantaged position in the U.S. labor market relative to the white population and to other minorities throughout the twentieth century. This overall trend, however, varied over time in response to changes in the economy. 488


Latinos were the fastest-growing minority group in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In 1980, they made up 6.5 percent of the civilian population, and by 1996, they had increased to 10.6 percent. The Bureau of the Census projected that this group would reach 14 percent of the total U.S. population by the year 2010. Empirical research on their employment situation has lagged behind such rapid changes, and it is difficult to discern patterns and trends when the available statistical information is not broken down into national-origin subgroups. Historical Background During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Mexican laborers (mainly displaced peasants) began to cross the border into the American Southwest to find work. Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. immigration policy alternatively encouraged and restricted the entry of Mexicans, but the net result has been essentially a steady stream of immigrants. Their numbers, along with the descendants of earlier Mexican immigrants, have made Mexicans the largest subgroup of Latinos in the United States. During World War I, Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship to ease U.S. labor shortages. By 1920, nearly 12,000 Puerto Ricans had left their home for the United States, settling mostly in New York City and finding employment mainly in manufacturing and services. Their numbers have grown, making them the second largest Latino subgroup. Cubans constitute the third most numerous subgroup. From 1959, the year when Fidel Castro assumed power following the Cuban Revolution, to 1990, the Cuban population in the United States—which had previously numbered only about 30,000—grew to 1,044,000 people. The Latino Labor Force The Latino share in the civilian labor force was 5.7 percent of the total in 1980, but it had almost doubled by 1996, to 9.6 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected further growth to 11 percent by the year 2005. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the labor force participation rates (that is, the percentage of persons who are employed) for the Latino population age sixteen and older approximated those of the non-Latino white population in the same age group (66.5 percent for Latinos and 67.2 percent for nonLatino whites in 1996). However, the rate for Latino men (79.6 percent) was higher than that for non-Latino white men (75.8 percent) in the same year, while Latinas had a lower rate (53.4 percent) than non-Latino white women (59.1 percent). The occupational distribution of the Latino population reflects both the traditional background of the subgroups and the economic changes of later decades. According to the Statistical Abstract, in 1996, Mexicans were mostly operators, fabricators, and laborers (24.5 percent); they also had the highest percentage of workers in farming, forestry, and fishing among all the other subgroups (8.4 percent). Cubans had the highest proportion in managerial 489


and professional occupations (21.7 percent) as well as in technical, sales, and administrative support positions (32.7 percent). The advances made by Puerto Ricans were evidenced by the fact that their concentration in the latter positions (32.1 percent) and in managerial and professional occupations (19 percent) closely approximated those of the Cubans. However, this advance may be more apparent than real because of changes in the occupational structure that have reduced the availability of lower-level, high-paying blue-collar occupations in favor of low-paying white-collar occupations. Comparison with Non-Latino Whites A comparison of the occupational distribution of Latinos with that of non-Latino whites reveals that the former are concentrated in lower-level occupations and that white men are concentrated in managerial and professional occupations. During the late 1980’s, Mexican American men were concentrated in skilled and semiskilled blue-collar jobs, although they were advancing to better jobs; Puerto Rican men were in service and lower-level white-collar jobs. Latinas were more likely than white or black women to be semiskilled manual workers. Regarding the evolution of Latino earnings and incomes, Gregory DeFreitas reports that in 1949, U.S.-born men of Mexican and Puerto Rican ancestry had incomes that were 55 percent and 76 percent, respectively, of the white non-Latino level. During the 1960’s, both groups improved relative to whites; but during the 1970’s, the Puerto Ricans experienced a decline and the Mexicans remained at the same level. Latinos generally suffered de-

A Cuban architect working in Miami during the mid-1960’s. Among Latino immigrants, Cubans have had a disproportionately strong representation in the professions. (Library of Congress)

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creases in income during the 1970’s. Median Latino incomes declined in absolute and relative terms after the 1970’s. By 1987, Latino income was still almost 9 percent lower in real terms than it had been in 1973 and, when compared with the income of non-Latino whites, even lower than it had been fifteen years earlier. According to U.S. government statistics, the median income of Latino households, at constant 1995 dollars, was $25,278 in 1980; it rose later to $26,037 in 1990 but fell to $22,860 in 1995. It was 64 percent of the white nonLatino median income, which in 1995 was $35,766, and practically equal to that of African Americans, which stood that year at $22,393. Since the 1950’s, Latinos have made progress in occupational mobility and earning levels, especially during periods of economic expansion. Cuban Americans are nearly equal with non-Latino whites in educational and economic achievement; Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, however, are still the most disadvantaged. Unemployment Unemployment has been a long-term problem for Latinos. Their actual unemployment rates reflect structural factors such as businesscycle fluctuations, industrial restructuring, and changes in demand as well as individual characteristics such as educational level and previous work experience. As indicated in the Statistical Abstract of the United States (1997), in 1980, the total unemployment rate was 7.1 percent, while it was 10.1 percent for Latinos. By 1992, these rates had risen to 7.5 and 11.6 percent, respectively. In 1996, both had decreased; the total rate stood at 5.4 percent and the Latino rate at 8.9 percent. The rates, however, vary among the national-origin subgroups. Cuban Americans’ unemployment rates have been almost as low as those of nonLatino whites, largely because of their above-average educational levels and accumulated work experience. By contrast, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans have generally experienced above-average unemployment. Puerto Ricans’ unemployment rates are usually twice as high as those of Cuban Americans. Some scholars claim that Puerto Ricans’ history of “circular migration” (their frequent returns to the island) tends to destabilize their employment. Factors That Influence the Latino Labor Market Education is one of the main factors that affect the labor market situation for Latinos. DeFreitas, after analyzing the trends in earnings of Latinos and non-Latinos from 1949 to 1979, found that those Latinos who were better educated were able to approximate the earnings of non-Latino whites during the 1960’s. Limited English ability is another relevant factor. Several empirical studies carried out during the 1980’s found that language limitations could account for up to one-third of wage differentials between Latino and non-Latino white men. Other research has established that Puerto Rican and Cuban American men, who are concentrated in urban areas, tend to have lower participation rates in the labor force than men from the same national-origin 491


Mexican migrant worker harvesting sugar beets. (Library of Congress)

subgroups with better English language skills. Mexican Americans, who are mainly operators, fabricators, laborers, and agricultural workers, have higher participation rates because those occupations do not require a good command of English. Empirical studies have tried to establish the extent of discrimination suffered by Latinos in the labor market. According to the findings of a major study undertaken by the General Accounting Office (1990) to evaluate the effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, discrimination in hiring is practiced against “foreign-looking” or “foreign-sounding” applicants. In particular, an audit carried out as part of the study found that Hispanic job seekers were more likely than similarly qualified Anglos to be unfavorably treated and less likely to receive interviews and job offers. Consequently, discrimination could partially account for the higher Latino unemployment rates. Self-employment may be a way to escape unemployment, low wages, and obstacles to promotion. However, capital is required to start a business, and many poorer Latinos find it difficult to accumulate savings and are not likely to receive loans from credit institutions. Cuban Americans, who have a higher status background, have opened many small businesses, creating an “ethnic enclave” of Latino businesses in Miami. The benefits of this type of social and economic arrangement have been highly debated. Some contend that it is an avenue of economic mobility for new immigrants; others argue that it may 492


hinder their assimilation into the larger society. However, given the small proportion of self-employed Latinos and the level of their earnings, it is not likely that this type of employment will soon become a prevalent means to reduce inequality for Latinos in the labor market. Graciela Bardallo-Vivero Further Reading Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. Bohon, Stephanie. Latinos in Ethnic Enclaves: Immigrant Workers and the Competition for Jobs. New York: Garland, 2000. Examination of Latino employment in major urban centers. Briggs, Vernon M. Immigration and American Unionism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Scholarly survey of the dynamic interaction between unionism and immigration. Covers the entire sweep of U.S. national history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Reexamination of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States that looks at the subject in the context of American dominance over Mexico. Karas, Jennifer. Bridges and Barriers: Earnings and Occupational Attainment Among Immigrants. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2002. Knouse, Stephen B., P. Rosenfeld, and A. L. Culbertson, eds. Hispanics in the Workplace. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992. Collection of scholarly studies of Latino employment issues. Kretsedemas, Philip, and Ana Aparicio, eds. Immigrants, Welfare Reform, and the Poverty of Policy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Collection of articles on topics relating to the economic problems of new immigrants in the United States, with particular attention to Haitian, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian immigrants. Sarmiento, Socorro Torres. Making Ends Meet: Income-Generating Strategies Among Mexican Immigrants. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Study of Latino employment issues. Waldinger, Roger, ed. Strangers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of essays on urban aspects of immigration in the United States, particularly race relations and employment. See also Bracero program; Chicano movement; Latinos; Latinos and family customs; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Operation Wetback; Undocumented workers. 493

Latinos and family customs

Latinos and family customs Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Families and marriage; Labor; Latino immigrants Significance: Although new roles and traditions are emerging within Latino families, many Latinos continue to find satisfaction in following traditional practices, viewing the family as a source of stability, protection, and support throughout persons’ lifetimes. Because the historical and cultural experiences of the various groups known collectively as “Latinos” differ widely, it is impossible to discuss a monolithic tradition. There are no universal customs or lifestyles that can fully reflect Latino family life. Nevertheless, there is a strong tradition among Latinos of emphasizing the importance of family, kin, and neighborhood ties. As with other ethnic and cultural groups, the Latino family functions as a conduit for transmitting social skills and cultural values from one generation to the next. It is important to remember that cultural traditions based on ancestral customs and national origins exert long-lasting influence on Latino family structure and behavior. Family life among Mexican Americans is not identical to that found among Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, or Dominican Americans, in part because of such factors as variations in economic and social status; persons’ urban versus rural origins; distinctions between professionals, skilled laborers, and unskilled laborers; and differences between persons with high literacy skills and levels of education and those with limited literacy and education. Although members within a particular Latino extended family may share the same cultural origins, the length of time each member has lived in the United States is often very different. Individual family members may not share the same beliefs about what is important in life. Latino families often find themselves forging delicate compromises when their traditional values clash with mainstream American attitudes. L A FAMILIA There are probably more similarities than differences between the various Latino groups when it comes to basic family characteristics and values. The concept of la familia is central to Latino identity, since individuals are considered to be representatives or symbols of the families who raise them. The actions of family members are commonly viewed as bringing honor or shame to the entire family, not solely to individual members. The extended Latino family includes all the members of the nuclear family plus aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and even godparents. Whether extended family members are related by blood, marriage, or close friendship, they play an important role in improving the economic status of the family. The ability to call upon extended family members for assistance allows for greater flexibility in sharing caregiving responsibilities, giving mothers and 494


younger women the opportunity to add to their families’ economic resources by working outside the home. Eating together is an activity that gives family members an opportunity to strengthen their ties to one another, to share news, and to discuss important family decisions. In preparing family meals, many Latinos include traditional foods and use recipes that have been handed down from generation to generation. Extended family members often participate in these family meals. Family Loyalty and Size Because Latinos have traditionally defined themselves in terms of their obligations to their families, they are willing to set aside other demands in order to fulfill such obligations. If a close family member or relative needs assistance of some kind—whether financial, physical, or emotional—most Latinos consider that such needs outweigh their own personal desires and plans. It is not uncommon for Latinos to take time off from work or school if another family member needs help when visiting a doctor, registering a car, or consulting a lawyer. Especially among immigrant families, Latino children are expected to serve as translators for their Spanish-speaking elders and facilitate families’ contact with the broader English-speaking society. Although large Latino families are not as common as they once were, Latinos continue to outpace other American ethnic groups in terms of birth rates and family size. Although changing attitudes toward divorce and family planning methods have had some effect on family size, Latinos have historically

Latino family on the porch of their Los Angeles home during the early 1970’s. The father in this family had to work two jobs to support his large family. (Library of Congress)

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placed great value on having large families. Their reverence for traditional ways has made many Latinos reluctant to have smaller families with fewer children. Many Latinos face a conflict of cultural values when making the decision to have children, since their cultural tradition of placing family responsibilities first contradicts the tradition of individualism that is encouraged by mainstream American society. Even the most enduring reasons given for having children, such as a desire to carry on the family name or to ensure that family members will be cared for in old age, reflect a mixture of selflessness and self-interest. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, nearly 70 percent of all Hispanic families were headed by married couples. While 76 percent of Cuban American and 73 percent of Mexican American and South American families were headed by married couples, this was the case for only 56 percent of Puerto Rican and 50 percent of Dominican American families. Central American families had the highest percentage of families headed by fathers whose wives were absent (14 percent), while families headed by women were highest among Dominican Americans (41 percent) and Puerto Ricans (36 percent). Figures from 1990 show that 65 percent of Hispanic families had children under the age of eighteen as compared to 48 percent for all American families. The Bureau of the Census has estimated that the Hispanic population will increase to 88 million (a fourfold increase over the 1990 population) and will represent 60 percent of the U.S. population by the middle of the twenty-first century. Such growth is expected to occur because of a natural increase within Hispanic families already living in the United States rather than because of a rise in immigration. This projected growth will widen the median age gap between the Hispanic and non-Hispanic white populations. According to the 1990 census, the median age of Hispanics was 25.4 years, whereas non-Hispanic whites’ median age was 34.8 years. By the middle of the twentyfirst century the median ages are projected to reach 32.1 years and 54.2 years, respectively. Traditional Family Roles Certain cultural expectations persist among Latinos regarding appropriate roles for family members. It is expected that Latino parents will make whatever personal sacrifices are necessary to improve the welfare of and opportunities available to their children. Such demands are intergenerational, since young adults are expected to make similar sacrifices to assist their elderly relatives and parents, as well as younger siblings. The demand for self-sacrifice is accompanied by an expectation that family members will maintain their pride and dignity. Among Latinos, persons’ self-worth and self-respect are defined in terms of how their behavior reflects their upbringing and reinforces the community’s regard for their family. It is often considered disrespectful and ungrateful to place individual needs above the welfare of the family as a whole, and betraying the family’s esteem and public image is considered more shameful than to bring shame upon oneself. 496


Historically, Latinos have vested men with ultimate authority to make family decisions. The patriarchal structure that resulted was based on the assumed superiority of men, producing a cultural tradition known as machismo. While defining desired traits and behaviors for Latino men as providing leadership, protection, and economic security for the family, machismo also dictated reciprocal traits and behaviors for Latina women. Women were expected to respect male authority, to take responsibility for domestic duties, and to honor the family reputation by seeking social relationships and recreation among friends and extended family members. Despite the negative characteristics often associated with the concept of machismo, it arose from the expectation that men earned respect within the Latino community by exercising their authority in the family in a just and fair manner. As traditional stereotypes have given way to a more accurate view of family structure and relationships, Latinos have acknowledged the equally important role that women have played in shaping family life and making important decisions. Latino families encourage children to have respect for authority. Children are expected to express reverence toward their elders, including grandparents and other aging relatives. Obedience is valued, yet discipline within the family is increasingly affected by parental absence. Although they can call upon members of their extended family, many Latino parents who work multiple jobs to earn enough money to support their children find it difficult to ensure that their children are always under adult supervision. Family Naming Customs and Celebrations Many Latino families maintain the custom of recognizing persons’ heritage by using the surnames of both parents. In Spanish, this combination of surnames is called el nombre completo, or “full name.” Persons’ first and middle names are followed by their father’s and mother’s first surnames. Although most Latino families have assimilated the mainstream American custom of adopting one surname for legal purposes, many Latinos identify themselves to each other by their full names as a sign of respect for their kinship ties and cultural origins. Baptism is an important event in many Latino families. Among Roman Catholic Latinos, this ceremony celebrates the birth of infants and welcomes them as part of the church family. Godparents, or padrinos, are chosen from among parents’ close relatives or family friends to help care for children and serve as role models in guiding them to adulthood. Other family events with religious dimensions include childrens’ first Communion and young girls’ quinceañera (part of the fifteenth birthday celebration marking the end of childhood and the beginning of womanhood). Special family traditions mark the observance of saints’ and holy days, including Semana Santa (Holy Week before Easter) and Navidad (Christmas). The Christmas procession known as Las Posadas revolves around the family theme of Joseph and Mary’s search for lodging in Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus. Some Latinos observe other family-related holidays or celebrations. Mexi497


can Americans observe Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) to honor deceased relatives. There are also family traditions associated with patriotic holidays celebrated in Latinos’ countries of origin—particularly Dieciseis for Mexican Americans, Día de la Raza for Puerto Ricans and Dominican Americans, and Independence Day for Cuban Americans. Blending the Old and the New Although the child-centered focus of la familia persists, many Latino parents share family responsibilities instead of holding tightly to their traditional family roles. Latino men and Latina women take advantage of educational and career opportunities, choosing to postpone marriage until later in life. When they marry, many husbands and wives find it easier to share family responsibilities that were formerly defined either as male or female. While families acknowledge that their members have individual goals, many Latinos find comfort in honoring their attachment to their families as a positive cultural attribute and reaffirm the tradition of pulling together to provide mutual assistance in times of need. While such values are hardly unique to Latino families, they do serve to reaffirm cultural roots and ties within the Latino community. Wendy Sacket Further Reading Acosta-Belén, Edna, and Barbara R. Sjostrom, eds. The Hispanic Experience in the United States: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives. New York: Praeger, 1988. Collection of essays reflecting the research interests of sociologists and cultural anthropologists who have explored issues relating to Latino family life. Carrasquillo, Angela L. Hispanic Children and Youth in the United States: A Resource Guide. New York: Garland, 1991. In addition to directing readers to resource material on family life, language, education, health care, justice, and other social issues, Carrasquillo offers a useful introduction to the history, culture, and diversity of Latino children. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Bolivia, Cuba, and Mexico who relate poignant tales of adjusting to life in the United States. Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. The Mexican American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Focusing on the experiences of Mexican Americans, the Hooblers have gathered a broad range of firstperson accounts—including personal recollections, diary entries, and letters—to accompany the photographs that comprise this chronicle of family life. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants. Includes chapters on Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans. 498

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Shorris, Earl. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Drawing on extensive primary research as well as life portraits of his own family and friends, Shorris offers a lively social history of various Latino groups and their experiences in the United States. Zambrana, Ruth E., ed. Understanding Latino Families: Scholarship, Policy and Practice. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. Among the most useful essays in this collection are “Variations, Combinations, and Evolutions: Latino Families in the United States,” by Aida Hurtado; “The Study of Latino Families,” by William A. Vega; and “Contemporary Issues in Latino Families,” by Douglas S. Massey, Ruth E. Zambrana, and Sally Alonzo Bell. See also Chicano movement; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Mexican deportations during the Depression.

LAU V. NICHOLS The Case: U.S. Supreme Court decision on bilingual education Date: January 21, 1974 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Civil rights and liberties; Court cases; Education Significance: In this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that public school systems must provide bilingual education to limited-English-speaking students. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade school systems from segregating students into separate schools for only whites or African Americans. The decision effectively overturned a previous Court ruling, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that such facilities could be “separate but equal.” Instead of desegregating, however, Southern school systems engaged in massive resistance to the Court’s order during the next decade. Congress then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited many types of discrimination. Title VI of the law banned discrimination by recipients of federal financial assistance, including school systems. Chinese-Speaking Students In 1965, Congress adopted the Immigration and Nationality Act, under which larger numbers of Asian immigrants arrived in the United States than ever before. Their non-English-speaking 499

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children were enrolled in public schools. In the San Francisco Unified School District, students were required to attend school until sixteen years of age, but in 1967, 2,856 students could not adequately comprehend instruction in English. Although 433 students were given supplemental courses in English on a full-time basis and 633 on a part-time basis, the remaining 1,790 students received no additional language instruction. Nevertheless, the state of California required all students to graduate with proficiency in English and permitted school districts to provide bilingual education, if needed. Except for the 433 students in the full-time bilingual education program, Chinesespeaking students were integrated in the same classrooms with Englishspeaking students but lacked sufficient language ability to derive benefit from the instruction. Of the 1,066 students taking bilingual courses, only 260 had bilingual teachers. Some parents of the Chinese-speaking children, concerned that their children would drop out of school and experience pressure to join criminal youth gangs, launched protests. Various organizations formed in the Chinese American community, which in turn conducted studies, issued proposals, circulated leaflets, and tried to negotiate with the San Francisco Board of Education. When the board refused to respond adequately, a suit was filed in federal district court in San Francisco on March 25, 1970. The plaintiffs were Kinney Kinmon Lau and eleven other non-English-speaking students, mostly U.S. citizens born of Chinese parents. The defendants were Alan H. Nichols, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, the rest of the Board of Education, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Findings and Rulings On May 25, 1970, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued the following regulation pursuant to its responsibility to monitor Title VI compliance: Where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes nationalorigin minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency in order to open its instructional program to these students.

OCR had sided with the Chinese-speaking students. One day later, the court ruled that the school system was violating neither Title VI nor the Fourteenth Amendment; instead, the plaintiffs were characterized as asking for “special rights above those granted other children.” Lawyers representing the Chinese Americans then appealed, this time supported by a friend-of-thecourt brief filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. On January 8, 1973, the Court of Appeals also ruled adversely, stating that there was no duty “to rectify appellants’ special deficiencies, as long as they provided these students with access to the same educational system made available to all other students.” The appeals court claimed that the children’s problems were “not the result 500

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of law enacted by the state . . . but the result of deficiency created by themselves in failing to learn the English language.” On June 12, 1973, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Oral argument was heard on December 10, 1973. On January 21, 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the lower courts. Justice William O. Douglas delivered the majority opinion, which included the memorable statement that There is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.

The Supreme Court returned the case to the district court so that the school system could design a plan of language-needs assessments and programs for addressing those needs. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Justice Harry A. Blackmun observed that the number of underserved non-English-speaking, particularly Chinese-speaking, students was substantial in this case, but they would not order bilingual education for “just a single child who speaks only German or Polish or Spanish or any language other than English.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Lau ultimately resulted in changes to enable Chinese-speaking students to obtain equal educational opportunity in San Francisco’s public schools, although it was more than a year before such changes began to be implemented. The greatest impact, however, has been among Spanish-speaking students, members of the largest language minority group in the United States. Recognition of Bilingualism Subsequently, Congress passed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act in 1974, a provision of which superseded Lau by requiring “appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation,” which a federal district court later applied to the need for new methods to deal with speakers of “Black English” in Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary School Children v. Michigan Board of Education (1979). Also in 1974, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was amended to provide more federal funds for second-language instruction so that school districts could be brought into compliance with Lau. Bilingualism was further recognized when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1975, which established guidelines for providing ballots in the languages of certain minority groups. In 1975, OCR established informal guidelines for four bilingual programs that would enable school districts to come into compliance with the Supreme Court ruling. The main requirement was first to test students to determine language proficiency. Students with no English proficiency at all were to be exposed to bilingual/bicultural programs or transitional bilingual education programs; secondary schools also had the option of providing “English as a second language” or “high intensive language training” programs. If a stu501

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dent had some familiarity with English, these four programs would be required only if testing revealed that the student had low achievement test scores. Because the OCR guidelines were not published in the Federal Register for public comment and later modification, they were challenged on September 29, 1978, in the federal district court of Alaska (Northwest Arctic School District v. Califano). The case was settled by a consent decree in 1980, when the federal agency agreed to publish a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking”; however, soon after Ronald Reagan took office as president, that notice was withdrawn. By 1985, a manual to identify types of language discrimination was compiled to supersede the 1975 guidelines, but it also was not published in the Federal Register for public comment. Meanwhile, methods for educating limited-Englishspeaking students evolved beyond the OCR’s original conceptions, and further litigation followed. In 1981, a U.S. circuit court ruled in Castañeda v. Pickard that bilingual educational programs are lawful when they satisfy three tests: (1) the program is recognized by professionals as sound in educational theory; (2) the program is designed to implement that theory; and (3) the program actually results in overcoming language barriers. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, civil rights monitoring focused more on “reverse discrimination” than on violations of equal educational opportunities. Congressional hearings were held to goad OCR into action. Although in 1991 OCR’s top priority was equal educational opportunities for national-origin minority and Native American students with limited-English proficiency (LEP) or non-English proficiency (NEP), results were difficult to discern, and a movement to make English the official language of the United States (the “English-only” movement) threatened to overturn Lau and related legislation. Moreover, by the late 1990’s the controversy over bilingual education had revived, as many teachers, parents, policymakers, and legislators—including a significant number of Latinos—acknowledged the disappointing results of bilingual programs and sought solutions through legislation. In 1998, for example, California voted to curtail bilingual education by passing Proposition 227. Such measures were perceived as appropriate means of forcing quick English-language acquisition by some, but as simplistic and counterproductive by others. Michael Haas Further Reading Biegel, Stuart. “The Parameters of the Bilingual Education Debate in California Twenty Years After Lau v. Nichols.” Chicano-Latino Law Review 14 (Winter, 1994): 48-60. The status of Lau in light of the 1990’s English-only movement. Brittain, Carmina. Transnational Messages: Experiences of Chinese and Mexican Immigrants in American Schools. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Broad study of the special problems faced by immigrants in American public schools. 502

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Bull, Barry L., Royal T. Fruehling, and Virgie Chattergy. The Ethics of Multicultural and Bilingual Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992. Contrasts how liberal, democratic, and communitarian approaches to education relate to bilingual and multicultural education. Lee, Stacey J. Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. New York: Teachers College Press, 2005. Study of cultural biases in education that focuses on the special problems of immigrant schoolchildren. Newman, Terri Lunn. “Proposal: Bilingual Education Guidelines for the Courts and the Schools.” Emory Law Journal 33 (Spring, 1984): 577-629. Legal requirements of Lau presented as guidelines for school systems in establishing bilingual programs. Orlando, Carlos J., and Virginia P. Collier. Bilingual and ESL Classrooms: Teaching in Multicultural Contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Discusses the need for bilingual education, alternative approaches available, and resources required. United States Commission on Civil Rights. A Better Chance to Learn: BilingualBicultural Education. Washington, D.C.: Author, 1975. Assesses the national impact of Lau; contains the text of the Supreme Court decision and related documents. Wang, L. Ling-chi. “Lau v. Nichols: History of Struggle for Equal and Quality Education.” In Asian-Americans: Social and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Russell Endo, Stanley Sue, and Nathaniel N. Wagner. Palo Alto, Calif.: Science & Behavior Books, 1980. Describes how the Lau case was pursued, especially the resistance to implementation. See also Bilingual education; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Englishonly and official English movements; Proposition 227.

League of United Latin American Citizens Identification: Latino advocacy organization Date: Founded in 1929 Place: Corpus Christi, Texas Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Latino immigrants; Mexican immigrants Significance: One of the oldest Hispanic advocacy organizations in the United States, the League of United Latin American Citizens has always concerned itself with the rights of Mexican immigrants. 503


The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was formed in order to unite all Latin American organizations under one title. In 1927, the main Latin American groups were the Sons of America, the Knights of America, and the League of Latin American Citizens, and there were other less well-known groups. The Sons of America had councils in Sommerset, Pearsall, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio, Texas; the Knights of America had a council in San Antonio; the League of Latin American Citizens had councils in Harlingen, Brownsville, Laredo, Peñitas, La Grulla, McAllen, and Gulf, Texas. As more Anglo-Americans moved into Texas during the early nineteenth century, persons of Spanish or Mexican descent experienced open discrimination and segregation that placed them in the position of second-class citizens. They had been under the rule of six different countries before Texas entered the union in 1845. Most continued to live and work as they always had, without being assertive about their rights. As time progressed, many Hispanics found that prejudice and discrimination were becoming less tolerable. Groups began to form to give more impact to requests that these practices cease. The Sons of America Council No. 4 in Corpus Christi, led by Ben Garza, originated a unification plan, believing that if all Hispanic organizations would regroup into one strong, unified, and vocal organization, more attention would be brought to the plight of those who were being discriminated against. On August 14, 1927, delegates from the Sons of America, the Knights of America, and smaller groups met in Harlingen, Texas, to form LULAC. The resolution that was presented was adopted by those in the meeting. It was expected that the leaders of the major groups—Alonso Perales, Luz Saenz, José Canales, and Juan Lozano of the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas— would be invited by the president general of the Sons of America to begin the unification process. In response to concerns about the merger expressed by some members, Council No. 4 of the Sons of America drafted an agreement between itself and the Knights of America to unite. These two groups waited a year for the merger to be completed. Perales, president general of the Latin American League, stayed in close contact with Garza to maintain interest in the merger among the three main groups. However, the president general of the Sons of America never called the convention. After the long wait, Council No. 4 withdrew from the Sons of America on February 7, 1929. Participants at this meeting again voted to have a general convention for the purpose of unification. On February 17, 1929, invitations were sent to all the groups to meet in Corpus Christi, Texas, to vote on the merger. Along with interested members of the Hispanic groups, Douglas Weeks, a professor at the University of Texas, attended not only to study the merger but also to open the convention as a nonaligned attendee. Garza was elected chairman pro tem. His popularity as an energetic and fair civic leader made him a good spokesperson for the new group. The assembly had to choose a chairman, plan a single constitution, and select a name that would encom504


pass the goals of the previously separate groups. The committee chosen to select a name included Juan Solis and Mauro Machado of the Knights of America, Perales and Canales of the Latin American League, E. N. Marin and A. de Luna of Corpus Christi, and Fortunio Treviño of Alice, Texas. Machado, of the Knights of America, proposed “United Latin American Citizens.” This was amended to read “League of United Latin American Citizens,” which was seconded by Canales. On February 17, 1929, LULAC formally came into being at Corpus Christi, Texas. The naming committee undertook other proposals before coming back to the general convention. Canales proposed a motto, “All for One and One for All,” as a reminder of their purpose in uniting and as a basis for their future activities. They set some basic rules to guide the league until the constitutional convention could be held. This meeting was called for May 18 and 19, 1929, with an executive committee made up of Garza, M. C. González as secretary, and Canales and Saenz as members at large. On May 18, the first meeting under the new title was called. The constitution proposed by Canales was adopted, and new officers were elected. The officers were Garza, president general; González, vice president general; de Luna, secretary general; and Louis C. Wilmot of Corpus Christi, treasurer general. George Washington’s prayer was adopted from the ritual of the Sons of America, and the U.S. flag was adopted as the group’s official flag. Now, in union, the new group could work to remove the injustices that had been building for many years. LULAC was chartered in 1931 under the laws of the state of Texas and later in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado, as other councils were formed. LULAC began issuing LULAC Notes, but in August, 1931, the first issue of LULAC News was published. During the 1990’s, this magazine carried the subtitle The Magazine for Today’s Latino. Evolution In the formative years, auxiliaries were started by women whose husbands were active LULAC members. In August, 1987, LULAC amended its constitution to admit women into the organization. Between 1937 and 1938, junior LULAC councils were formed under the sponsorship of adult councils. In 1940, LULAC councils peaked, but with the beginning of World War II, the councils weakened with the departure of the men to military service. In 1945 and 1946, LULAC began to make great strides as educated, trained men returned from the service. Prestigious positions were filled by Hispanics and discrimination lessened. Non-Hispanics were joining, and LULAC was moving toward its objectives. When the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s began, other Hispanic groups with a more militant response to discrimination began to form. Leaders such as the charismatic preacher, Reies López Tijerina in New Mexico and Rodolfo Gonzáles in Denver marched in protest of the treatment Hispanics were receiving. César Chávez led farm groups in California on peaceful marches, which frequently erupted into violent confrontations as the number of militant members rose. LULAC did not totally support all these 505


movements. It preferred mediation to resolve serious disagreements and education for all Hispanics as better ways of blending peacefully into the U.S. mainstream. LULAC has evolved to stress education. Parents are encouraged to prepare their children well to enter school. English is encouraged as the primary language, Spanish as the second language. As students mature, they are encouraged to finish high school and enter college. For those who aspire to higher learning, LULAC sponsors many scholarships; it also offers other forms of financial aid and counseling. LULAC Education Centers are located in sixty cities in seventeen states to provide this help. With corporate and federal aid, these centers have made it possible for disadvantaged Hispanic American youth to become productive members of their American communities. Among its other pursuits, LULAC has used the courts to advance the rights of Hispanics. In 1987, for example, LULAC filed a class-action suit against the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to force the INS to process amnesty applicants of immigrants more expeditiously. When League of United Latin American Citizens v. Immigration and Naturalization Service was settled in the organization’s favor in 2003, more than 100,000 immigrants were able to become permanent legal residents in the United States. Norma Crews Further Reading De la Garza, Rodolfo O., ed. Ignored Voices: Public Opinion Polls and the Latino Community. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin Press, 1987. Argues that the opinions of Hispanic people were virtually ignored, politically and otherwise, except in heavily Hispanic communities. Garcia, F. Chris, ed. Latinos and the Political System. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Discusses some of the political problems that prompted the formation of organizations such as LULAC. Garcia, Mario T. Mexican-Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 19301960. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. A thorough treatise on Hispanic assimilation into the mainstream of U.S. business and community. Jonas, Susanne, and Suzanne Dod Thomas, eds. Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. General study of civil rights issues arising in immigrant communities. Mirande, Alfredo. The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985. A view into the life of the less accepted Hispanic, the Chicano. Gives information on La Raza, a more militant group representing Hispanics of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Shorris, Earl. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. A collection of information on Hispanics in the United States, and a general overview of those Hispanics who immigrated and settled during the twentieth century. 506

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See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Bracero program; Chicano movement; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Undocumented workers.

Literature Immigration issues: African Americans; European immigrants; Literature Significance: Much North American literature has been written by or about immigrants. Additionally, a significant number of North American authors have emigrated to other continents and written about their adopted homes. Native Americans constitute only a small percentage of the population of North America, so it can be argued that virtually all North American literature has been written by immigrants from other continents. Chroniclers of the founding of the English colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were John White, John Smith, and William Bradford. The best collection is that of Richard Hakluyt, titled Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America (1582). The Puritans Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor came in the seventeenth century from England to New England, where both wrote poetry. Another poet, Phillis Wheatley, was taken as a slave to Boston from Africa in the eighteenth century. England was denounced before the Revolutionary War by native son Thomas Paine, an immigrant to Virginia. There were some voyage narratives written in French also. Jesuit missionaries to North America in the seventeenth century wrote reports in French that have come to be known as the Jesuit relations. These missionaries were great scholars and produced dictionaries and religious literature in various Native American languages. In addition, the seventeenth century produced voyage narratives in Dutch and Swedish. Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecœur left Normandy for New York, where as J. Hector St. John he wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782) about the metamorphosis of a Frenchman into an American. Although Crèvecœur contrasted favorably freedom in America with oppression in Europe, his experience of that reality differed greatly from the American Dream. During the Revolutionary War, for refusing to take sides, he lost his farm, was imprisoned, and fled for England. On his return, he found that his farm was ruined, his wife dead, and his children missing. His book, however, recounts the promise of a nation in which such disturbances would not be the norm. The book remains as the tale of what America has always meant to immigrants. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle (1906) about Polish immigrants working in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. With its depiction of the immigrants’ 507

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Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle. (Library of Congress)

squalid living and working conditions, Sinclair’s novel fits squarely into the tradition of naturalism. Willa Cather wrote about Swedish immigrants in Nebraska in O Pioneers! (1913) and about Bohemian immigrants to the same prairie in My Ántonia (1918). She also wrote about French missionaries in New Mexico in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). O. E. Rölvaag’s I de dage (1924) and Riket grundlœgges (1925, translated together as Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, 1927) are about Norwegian immigrants to the Dakotas. Kate Chopin wrote about the Creole culture in New Orleans in her novel The Awakening (1899) and in her short stories.

Internal Migrations Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s long poem Evangeline (1847) is about the migration of the French Canadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana after they were expelled from their homeland, Acadia, by the British in the eighteenth century. The Harlem Renaissance was a literary and musical movement instigated by African Americans who had migrated from the southern United States to New York to find employment during and after World War I. The Harlem Renaissance also attracted many immigrants of African heritage from the West Indies. One such immigrant was the poet Claude McKay, whose British education in his native Jamaica resulted in a formal poetic style that was distinctive from the innovative jazz rhythms of Langston Hughes, an African American poet who migrated to New York during the Harlem Renaissance. Another Jamaican who went to New York during the Harlem Renaissance was Marcus Garvey, who became leader of a movement that proposed to take all black people in North America and the West Indies back to Africa. Garvey is fictionalized in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is about people who are made to feel like immigrants within their own country during the Great Depression. When drought results in agricultural disaster and widespread foreclosure in Oklahoma, the farmers must leave to find work as migrant workers in California. After the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1960’s, American literature became an amalgam of books by and about immigrants from continents other than Europe. Many of the authors of these books were born in the United States, but their parents’ or grandparents’ 508

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tales of immigration form the basis for much of this literature. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) are classics of Asian American literature. Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo are notable voices of Latin American culture, as are Rudolfo Anaya and Rolando Hinojosa. Emigrants from North America Many North American writers have, for various reasons, felt compelled to venture abroad. Some have traveled to seek adventure and cultures different from that of North America. Many have traveled to Europe in order to experience the culture that has most influenced North American literature. Others have traveled to escape prejudice and lack of opportunity. During the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving was the first U.S. diplomatic officer stationed in Spain. The Alhambra (1832) is a collection of stories inspired by his life in Spain. Irving also wrote A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) about Dutch immigrants in New York. Longfellow traveled in Europe, where his study of languages and literature was preparation for his position as the first professor of Romance languages at Harvard.

John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was inspired by the large-scale internal migrations of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when Dust Bowl conditions in Oklahoma drove many people west in search of work. (Library of Congress)

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In 1867, Mark Twain toured Europe and the Holy Land and sent back journalistic accounts of his travels to a California newspaper. Later incorporated into The Innocents Abroad (1869)—the best-selling travel book of the nineteenth century—these accounts reflect Twain’s opinion that Europe’s artistic traditions were stifling. In the work, Twain states his preference for the artistic freedom afforded him in North America, where there was no preexisting tradition to which he must conform. Other North American authors have differed with Twain. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Henry James wrote many of his novels and short stories about Great Britain and Europe; James found the tensions of Europe’s class system engrossing. Also during the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound, who was born in Idaho, found Europe a necessary aesthetic stimulus for writing poetry. Pound was particularly fond of Italian culture, especially opera, as is evident in his Cantos (1970). Pound aligned himself politically with Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, for which he was charged with treason at the end of World War II. T. S. Eliot was another North American poet whose attraction for the Old World was aesthetic and political. Born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard, Eliot became a British subject, as the novelist Henry James had done earlier. Pound and Eliot were part of the “lost generation,” a group of American writers who, in the aftermath of World War I, found themselves emotionally and culturally adrift. The group included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, for one, set most of his greatest novels in Europe, with American protagonists who find themselves unmoored in events large and small. Fitzgerald was less influenced artistically by his time abroad than the other members of the lost generation, although his novel Tender Is the Night (1934) has a French setting. The Canadian writer Morley Callaghan was one of the lost generation. He and Hemingway met while both wrote for the Toronto Star, and they were in Paris together. Many African Americans have emigrated to Europe in order to enjoy greater personal and artistic freedom than they experienced in the United States. James Baldwin and Richard Wright are best known for their works about the oppression suffered by African Americans in the United States, but both lived in France for extended periods. Other African American writers felt thwarted artistically in their own country because, as African Americans, they were expected to write about racial issues and they could not be appreciated on strictly aesthetic grounds. Chester Himes, who had great difficulty getting published in the United States, emigrated to France to write detective novels, and Frank Yerby left for Europe to write historical novels. Douglas Edward LaPrade Further Reading Alba, Richard D. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Cites the decline of national origin 510

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as a basis for social division among European Americans and the maintenance of the line between European and non-European Americans in social division. Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Collection of essays on identity issues among immigrants. Boelhower, William Q. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Adopts the stance that literature by minorities and immigrants should be assimilated into mainstream American literature. Cheung, King-Kok, and Stan Yogi, comps. Asian American Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. Focuses mostly on primary sources, which are divided into Chinese American, Japanese American, Filipino American, and so on. Cull, Nicholas J., and David Carrasco, eds. Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Collection of essays on dramatic works, films, and music about Mexicans who cross the border illegally into the United States. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Debunks many widely held myths about the immigrant experience. Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 18401980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Includes discussions of many notable African American writers. Fender, Stephen. Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Analyzes reasons for British emigration to America from colonial times until World War II. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Distinguishes between Asian and Asian American identities, and between first and second generation immigrants. Lohuis, Elisabeth ten. Towards a Winning of the West: Novels by East European Jewish Immigrants to America and Their American Offspring. [Leiden: s.n., 2003]. Difficult to find but potentially useful study of Jewish immigrant literature. Lowery, Ruth McKoy. Immigrants in Children’s Literature. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Examination of the depictions of immigrants in children’s fiction that focuses on seventeen novels. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Discusses works by José Antonio Villarreal, Anaya, Hinojosa, and others. Simone, Roberta. The Immigrant Experience in American Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Arranges primary and secondary sources alphabetically according to immigrant group, from Armenian to Yugoslavian. 511

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Sollors, Werner, and Maria Diedrich, eds. The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. A collection of essays, most of which focus on the diaspora as the defining moment in African American identity. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Cites literary sources to describe the Asian immigrant experience. Wilentz, Gay. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Discusses three novels by African women and three by African American women. See also Asian American literature; Chinese immigrants; European immigrant literature; Melting pot.

Little Havana Identification: Cuban residential enclave Place: Miami, Florida Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Ethnic enclaves; Latino immigrants Significance: Originally a lightly populated enclave of Miami, Little Havana grew into the largest center of Cuban immigrants in the United States, and its residents became a major force in both Miami and Florida politics. In 2000, the U.S. Census found that nearly 60 percent of the residents of Miami were foreign born, with the overwhelming part of these people of Cuban origin. The term “Little Havana” was originally coined by the English-speaking community in Miami during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s to describe the small enclave of Cubans that lived in the Eighth Street and Flagler Avenue area. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959 led by Fidel Castro, a large number of Cuban refugees arrived in Miami. They, and more than a half million Cubans who arrived during the 1960’s, settled in the Little Havana area of Miami. Though many Cuban immigrants have dispersed to other U.S. cities, the enclave of Little Havana has remained. Little Havana encompasses an area of about four square miles. It is located in the southwest portion of Miami, hence the Cuban name for the area, Souwesera. Upon the arrival of the immigrants during the 1960’s, the area took on a distinct Cuban flavor. Cuban businesses sprang up everywhere, especially on Eighth Street (also known as Calle Ocho). Most store signs were in Spanish; later signs reading “English spoken here” were placed in many store512

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Cuban immigrants playing chess in a public park in Little Havana. (Cuban Archives, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami)

fronts in an attempt to avoid alienating other Miami residents. However, anyone living and doing business in Little Havana did not need to speak English. The first wave of Cubans fleeing the 1959 revolution arrived with nothing except the clothes on their backs and nearly empty suitcases. Because they were often unfamiliar with the language or the culture, they tended to congregate with fellow Cuban Americans, much as the Irish, Swedish, Norwegians, and Italians had done during their mass migrations in the final third of the nineteenth century. The Cubans accepted almost any employment they could find, which created racial conflict with other economically challenged groups in Miami, especially the African American community. The African American community felt that the Cuban refugees were taking many of the jobs and positions to which they aspired. Tensions ran high and finally boiled over with the Miami riots of 1980. Although these riots were the direct result of a Hispanic police officer being acquitted in the shooting of an African American, the underlying cause was all the years of tension between the two communities. As time passed, many of the residents of Little Havana, some of whom had become prosperous, moved to suburbs such as Hialeah and Coral Gables and other Florida cities. Though this lessened the tensions between Cuban Americans and other ethnic and racial groups in Miami, it created problems between the Cuban Americans and the white, European American populace. The tensions were largely cultural: The white community resented the Cubans’ use of Spanish, even among themselves, and attempted to legislate that they use only English. Though the “English only” proponents failed, they are 513

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likely to try again. Unlike other minorities or ethnic groups that migrated to the United States, the Cuban community has sought to preserve its cultural heritage more vigorously and openly. This in itself has created tensions with the U.S. population as a whole. Peter E. Carr Further Reading Bardach, Ann Louise. Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. New York: Random House, 2002. Bohon, Stephanie. Latinos in Ethnic Enclaves: Immigrant Workers and the Competition for Jobs. New York: Garland, 2000. Levine, Robert M., and Moisés Asís. Cuban Miami. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Zebich-Knos, Michele, and Heather Nicol. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. See also Chinatowns; Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Cuban refugee policy; Ethnic enclaves; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Generational acculturation; Little Italies; Little Tokyos.

Little Italies Definition: Predominantly Italian ethnic enclaves in major cities Immigration issues: Ethnic enclaves; European immigrants Significance: The “Little Italies” that arose in major eastern cities during the late nineteenth century tended to separate Italian immigrants from mainstream American society, while allowing them to maintain their ways of life, eating familiar foods, speaking their native language, and maintaining their close-knit family organization and religious practices. Millions of people from 1880 to 1930 came to the United States with the hope of finding a life better than the one they had left in their country of origin. The U.S. Census indicates that during this fifty-year period more than four million Italians (mostly from poor backgrounds) migrated to U.S. cities such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In these cities, the Italian immigrants moved to areas that contained other Italians, specifically their paesani, or people from the same village in Italy. Italian communities known as Little Italies developed as an outcome of this migration. In The Italian Americans (1970), Joseph Lopreato shows how Little Italies shielded Italian immigrants from the ways and demands of American society. 514

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Clam seller in New York City’s Little Italy around 1900. (Library of Congress)

He points out that these immigrants, having distanced themselves from the old culture in Italy, needed a certain amount of time to understand and participate in the social organizations of the new society in the United States. The Little Italies acted as bridges between the old life in Italy and the new life in the United States. Works such as Italian Americans into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985), by Richard Alba, and The Italians (1976), by Patricia Snyder Weibust, Gennaro Capobianco, and Sally Innis Gould, describe the growth and decay that Little Italies have undergone in U.S. cities. Between the 1880’s and early 1940’s, the Little Italies flourished, giving birth to many Italian American-owned businesses (including restaurants, bakeries, groceries, clothing shops, butcher shops, and pasta shops), Italian-language newspapers, and mutual benefit societies (organizations involved in helping Italian immigrants deal with sickness, death, and loneliness). Moreover, these communities were host to celebrations of festa (Italian religious festivals) and other religious activities. Before World War II, Little Italies reached their peak in development and activities. However, after the 1940’s, these communities began to shrink, partly because second- and third-generation Italian Americans were becoming wealthier and leaving the Little Italies for the suburbs. In addition, few Italians were immigrating to the United States. Since the 1970’s, the bulk of Italian Americans have lived outside the Little Italies, where only a semblance remains of the old order. The number of Italian American-owned businesses, 515

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Italian-language newspapers, and mutual benefit societies in these communities has decreased tremendously. Certain activities, such as the festas, have continued to be held in Little Italies, some as simple appearances and others to keep the memories alive of an earlier time. Louis Gesualdi Further Reading Burgan, Michael. Italian Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Mormino, Gary Ross. Immigrants on the Hill: Italian Americans in St. Louis, 18821982. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Family and Community—Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971. See also Chinatowns; Ethnic enclaves; Generational acculturation; Italian immigrants; Little Havana; Little Tokyos.

Little Tokyos Definition: Predominantly Japanese enclaves in western U.S. cities Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Ethnic enclaves; Japanese immigrants Significance: Slower to develop in American cities than Chinatowns, most of the “Little Tokyos” of western U.S. cities disappeared during World War II and afterward took on much different forms. The first “Little Tokyo” arose in Southern California during the late nineteenth century. Around 1885, Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles gradually populated a small section of the city that became known as Little Tokyo. By 1910, Japanese shops, restaurants, language schools, and shrines were established, and Little Tokyo became the home of nearly 37,000 Japanese. Before World War II, Little Tokyos were also established in Seattle (almost 11,700 Japanese immigrants) and in San Francisco, where the Japanese ethnic community was the third largest in the United States, at about 5,000. Other Little Tokyos of more than 1,000 were in Sacramento and Stockton, California, Portland, Oregon, and New York City. Although Japanese people began immigrating to the United States as early as the mid-1850’s, Little Tokyos took much longer to be established than 516

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Chinatowns, probably because of the cultural differences between the two groups. The Japanese traditionally believed that agriculture was the most virtuous occupation and that people who made their living as merchants were less respectable. As a result, the majority of the early Japanese immigrants gravitated to rural areas to be farmers, as opposed to the Chinese immigrants, who were usually merchants in the city. In Canada, before World War II, more than 97 percent of Japanese immigrants resided in the province of British Columbia. By 1931, nearly one-third of the Japanese population (about 8,300) lived in Vancouver, and more than half of them were in the district known as Little Tokyo. This was the only Japanese ethnic community in Canada in those days. However, no physical structures or symbolic Sign at the entrance of a Japanese-owned shop in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo in April, 1942. Along with buildings such as shrines were built virtually all persons of Japanese ancestry living on because of severe anti-Asian senti- the West Coast, the proprietor of the shop was ment. about to be “relocated” to an internment camp for During World War II, Little To- the duration of World War II, and he wished to kyos practically disappeared from serve notice that he would not be taking his busiNorth America following the in- ness with him. (Library of Congress) carceration of people of Japanese descent in internment camps. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, when the political and economic relationships between the United States and Japan flourished, Japanese Americans began to revitalize Little Tokyos. However, by then, Little Tokyos had become more tourist attractions than residential areas. Today new generations of Japanese Americans tend to live in all parts of the city and suburbs. In Canada, after World War II, Japanese internees were not allowed to return to their homes in British Columbia. They had to choose between going to Japan or relocating to other provinces east of the Rocky Mountains. In 1949, Japanese Canadians were finally permitted to return to British Columbia. Some people returned and reestablished Little Tokyo in Vancouver. However, new generations of Japanese Canadians, like Japanese Americans, tend to live in the suburbs. Although Vancouver’s Little Tokyo still maintains 517

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shops and restaurants along with cultural activities, people who work there do not live in that area. Since the 1970’s, Japanese corporations have sent many nationals to work in the United States and Canada. These workers are often encouraged to live among North Americans in order to become more proficient at speaking English and to avoid creating a threatening Japanese “ghetto.” Japanese supermarkets, bookstores, and restaurants have sprung up in various cities where many Japanese nationals work, including Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York City, and Vancouver. These new “Little Tokyos,” which are smaller in size than the prewar Little Tokyos and may not be as concentrated, are usually just shopping centers. Nobuko Adachi Further Reading Hoobler, Dorothy, Thomas Hoobler, and George Takei. The Japanese American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kitano, Harry. The Japanese Americans. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Laguerre, Michel S. The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. See also Alien land laws; Chinatowns; Ethnic enclaves; Generational acculturation; Japanese immigrants; Little Havana; Little Italies.

Machine politics Definition: Largely nonideological form of politics dominated by a small elite, usually corrupt, based on the exchange of material benefits for political support Immigration issue: Government and politics Significance: Machine politics was at its peak during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the needs of a growing urban population, which included many immigrants. The excesses of machine politics generated numerous political reform measures that remain part of contemporary politics. Machine politics is characterized by a tightly organized political structure dominated by an individual “boss” or a small cadre of leaders who stay in power by brokering a variety of benefits such as jobs, contracts, protection, and other privileges in exchange for political support. This exchange fre518

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quently takes the form of benefits for money in the form of campaign contributions, kickbacks, and outright bribery. The prototype of the political machine is as old as the American nation. The New York Society of Tammany was founded in 1785 as a social club named after a Delaware Indian chief. It rapidly evolved into a partisan organization that supported candidates for public office and remained a force in politics through the early twentieth century. Like other such organizations during the early nineteenth century, its strength increased with the expansion of voting during the Jacksonian era. The power of political machines further increased with “Boss” William Marcy Tweed (1823-1878) was the growth of immigration. By or- one of the most crooked politicians in U.S . history ganizing the newly arrived voters but in his drive to buy and solicit votes, he did much through strict party discipline, Tam- to help immigrants in New York City. (Library of many Hall was able to control the Congress) political “spoils.” It rapidly became a widely copied model of graft-ridden politics. When immigration increased after the Civil War, the political machine reached its zenith. In the case of Tammany, this period marked the rise of one of history’s most famous bosses, William Marcy Tweed, or “Boss Tweed.” Tweed became a Tammany leader or “sachem” in 1857. He was soon elected, with Tammany support, to the New York Board of Supervisors and from there expanded his base by controlling patronage and public contracts. By 1868, he was a state senator and a dominant force in politics. It has been estimated that his corrupt “ring” had stolen nearly two hundred million dollars from public funds and other sources. Tweed was eventually arrested and died in jail, but machine politics continued to prosper through the early twentieth century. Most cities had some degree of machine politics. Some of the most famous machine bosses include Frank Hague of Jersey City, James Curley of Boston, Ed Crump of Memphis, Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, Huey Long of Louisiana, and Richard J. Daley of Chicago. The growth of machines paralleled the rise of large cities. Though there were “courthouse gangs” or rural versions of the machine, the typical structure was a well-controlled urban population organized by a political party that cared primarily for staying in office for reasons of power and money rather than ideology. 519

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Functions of the Machine Though the corruption of machine politics cannot be minimized, scholars have found that the rise of machines can be explained by the unique set of social and economic conditions associated with immigration. As the United States became more urban, new tasks had to be performed to meet changing conditions. The political machine filled this vacuum. Most important, the machine performed a much-needed welfare function. It helped families and individuals find jobs through political patronage, obtain housing, and deal with personal crises such as fire or illness by providing financial and even emotional support. It also helped to socialize the newly arriving immigrants into both American culture and political life. It facilitated the assimilation of newcomers because it needed balanced tickets in which various ethnic voting blocks were included. This fact provided upward mobility and helped to lower the level of ethnic conflict. Machines also centralized power, which generated a measure of support from business and commercial interests. Centralization had become necessary, because a legacy of the Jacksonian era was the “long ballot” and the multiplying of elected offices. By centralizing decision making, the machine increased the efficiency of a fragmented system and helped to personalize government. Decline of Machines Although machine politics persists in American politics, the classic machine organization had declined by the mid-twentieth century for a number of reasons. Primarily, a large-scale reform movement motivated by the corruption and waste of the machines was successful in passing a number of “good government” measures. Among these were civil service and merit system reforms which undermined the machine’s patronage base, the short ballot, nonpartisan elections, city manager forms of government, direct primaries, and at-large elections. These structural reforms contributed greatly to the demise of the machine. Just as important, a growing middle class became far less tolerant of the scandals and corruption associated with the machine. Coupled with the rise of new management theories which aimed at removing politics from government in order to model it on a businesslike paradigm, the culture which supported the traditional machine disappeared. Finally, the growth of welfare programs initiated by the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression eliminated the functional basis of the machine. New agencies and programs took over the welfare activities of the machine. Although the classical machine was undermined by reform efforts as well as changing social circumstances, machine politics continues in one form or another. Some would argue that machine politics, stripped of its corruption, represents a form of responsive politics in action. Nevertheless, the ultimate legacy of machine politics is the structural and social reforms that marked the end of the machine era. While some would argue that the reform legacy has weakened political parties too much and that the bureaucratic structures that accompanied reform have created their own set of problems, the positive 520

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functions of machines did not outweigh their corruption and the cynicism they caused, which served to undermine public faith in democratic institutions. Melvin Kulbicki Further Reading Informative views of Tammany Hall include Seymour Mandelbaum’s Boss Tweed’s New York (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965) and William Riordon’s Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (New York: Dutton, 1963). The Daley machine of Chicago is the subject of Milton L. Rakove’s Don’t Make No Waves—Don’t Back No Losers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). Broader perspectives are taken in Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), Alfred Steinberg’s The Bosses (New York: Macmillan, 1972), Susan Welch and Timothy Bledsoe’s Urban Reform and Its Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s City Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). A classic novel about machine politics is Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956). See also Discrimination; Ethnic enclaves; European immigrants, 17901892; Hull-House; Irish immigrants; Know-Nothing Party; Nativism.

Mail-order brides Definition: Women who immigrate to other countries to marry local citizens whom they meet through supervised introduction services conducted through correspondence Immigration issues: Families and marriage; Women Significance: Thousands of marriages in the United States and other countries are arranged by mail, typically through international dating and introduction services. The system of arranging marriages with “mail-order brides” is an old part of the North American social landscape. During the nineteenth century, there were so few women in the Canadian and U.S. frontiers that newspapers in those regions routinely carried advertisements for wives placed by lonely farmers or ranchers. While little is known about how many marriages were formed through the mail or how successful they were, this was apparently a fairly common form of courtship. 521

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Modern Mail-Order Brides During the twentieth century, finding mates by mail became a comparatively rare occurrence in North America. After mass transportation and the automobile became common, dating became the primary form of courtship. American cultural values placed heavy emphasis on romantic love as a motivation for marrying. The ideal of romantic love required that men and women develop intense emotional intimacy before marriage, and intimacy can rarely be created at a distance. Despite the cultural emphasis on dating and romantic love, mail-order marriages began to become more common in the period following World War II. Sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have often noted that men and women tend to look for different characteristics in mates. Men are more likely to look for youth and physical attractiveness. Women are more likely to look for mates who are financially secure. As worldwide transportation and communications have improved, men in relatively prosperous countries could make contact with younger women in comparatively low-income countries. Between 1968 and 1981, for example, more than seven hundred women emigrated to France from the island of Mauritius as mail-order brides for lonely middle-aged French farmers. During the 1970’s, Asia, and especially the Philippines, became an important source of mail-order brides for men in the United States. Because the Philippines was an American colony from 1898 to 1945, Filipinas are often able to speak English and are typically more familiar with American culture than other Asian women. Filipino and American entrepreneurs set up introduction services to put American men searching for wives in contact with Filipinas searching for financially stable husbands. Most often, international introduction services put potential spouses in contact with one another by marketing catalogs containing the photographs of women with their addresses and personal information. By the late 1990’s several of these catalogs were available through the Internet as well as by regular mail. It has been estimated that by the 1990’s approximately nineteen thousand mail-order brides left the Philippines each year to join husbands and fiancés abroad, with the United States as their primary destination. In 1997 the social scientist Concepcion Montoya identified Filipina mail-order brides, who often established social networks among themselves, as a rapidly emerging American community. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and eastern Europe became major sources of mail-order brides for the Americas and Western Europe. The difficulties of the Russian economy during the 1990’s caused many young Russian women to seek more prosperous lives abroad. As in the Philippines, catalogs served as the primary way in which men initially made contact with potential brides. One of the best-known of these catalogs was European Connections, a quarterly containing photographs of women in Russia and eastern Europe. For $8.00 to $15.00, American men could order the addresses of women in the catalog. European Connections and other introduction services also arranged expeditions to Russia for American and western European men. 522

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Stereotypes and Negative Views Many Americans hold unfavorable views of men who marry foreign women whom they have met through the mail. Popular opinion often holds that men who seek brides abroad are looking for obedient wives whom they can easily dominate. Many people see husbands of mail-order brides as such undesirable mates that they cannot find mates by more conventional means. Women who become mail-order brides are often seen either as exploited victims or as opportunists selling themselves for comfortable lives. A number of widely publicized incidents have reinforced the negative views many people hold about introductions and marriages by mail. Some mail-order brides have indeed suffered at the hands of their husbands. According to news reports, for example, sixteen Filipina mail-order brides between 1980 and 1995 were murdered by husbands in Australia. In the United States a similar occurrence received national attention in 1995. A man in Seattle, Washington, had brought a Filipina wife he had met through the mail to the United States. The marriage did not work out and the wife sought a divorce. In response, the husband contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service, claiming that his estranged wife no longer qualified for residence in the United States and should be deported back to the Philippines. The woman, who had become pregnant with another man’s child, was sitting in a Seattle courthouse waiting for a hearing on her residency status when her husband drew a gun and killed her and several of her friends. There is no doubt that mail-order brides are sometimes exploited by their husbands and that women in a new country can be vulnerable. Cultural conflicts and conflicts of expectations can also trouble international marriages. Women from the Philippines, for example, often expect to have full control over matters pertaining to the household and do not see themselves as imported servants. While there is little information on the success rates of mailorder marriages, available evidence suggests that the horror stories of wife abuse are the exception rather than the rule and that many of these marriages work out to the satisfaction of both parties. Research on Mail-Order Marriages The sociologists William M. Kephart and Davor Jedlicka have conducted extensive research on the mail-order marriage process. Kephart and Jedlicka conducted interviews with agents and clients of international introduction services and studied the advertisements in their catalogs. These researchers found that the process began when men selected photographs of women and sent the women photographs of themselves. Selection on the basis of appearance, however, was only a first step. Next, prospective partners began exchanging letters. Usually these letters were quite long and detailed and contained extensive information on the tastes, interests, values, and plans of both parties. By necessity, the exchange of letters meant that the women had good, if not excellent, English-language skills. Once couples decided to marry, the American men usually went abroad to meet their future wives. This step became a necessity after January 523

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1987, when the marriage-fraud provision of the 1986 Immigration Act prohibited foreigners from coming to the United States to marry people whom they had never met. Kephart and Jedlicka found that the majority of American men who became involved in mail-order marriages had had some unfortunate experience with courtship and marriage in the United States. Over half of them had been divorced and 75 percent had been through some kind of traumatic experience with women in the United States. Most were at least thirty-seven years old. The men earned above-average incomes and were above average in educational attainment and occupational level. Most of the women involved in mail-order marriages were twenty-five years old or younger. Contrary to popular stereotypes, fewer than 10 percent came from the countryside or held menial jobs in their home countries. The majority were college students and about 30 percent held professional, managerial, or clerical jobs requiring fairly high levels of education. Marrying foreign men did not seem to be the choice of peasant women, but of middle-class women with aspirations that could not be easily satisfied in their native countries. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Kephart, William M., and Davor Jedlicka. The Family, Society, and the Individual. 7th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Larsen, Wanwadee. Confessions of a Mail Order Bride: American Life Through Thai Eyes. Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 1989. Montoya, Concepcion. “Mail Order Brides: An Emerging Community.” In Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity, edited by Maria P. P. Root. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997. See also Filipino immigrants and family customs; Japanese immigrants; Korean immigrants and family customs; Picture brides; Russian immigrants; War brides; Women immigrants.

Mariel boatlift The Event: Massive influx of Cuban refugees into the United States Date: May-September, 1980 Place: Cuba, Florida, and waters between Immigration issues: Cuban immigrants; Refugees Significance: This sudden increase in Cuban refugees provoked an agonizing reappraisal of U.S. refugee policy. 524

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After Fidel Castro became ruler of Cuba in January, 1959, relations between the United States and Cuba steadily deteriorated, as Castro turned his country into a communist state allied with the Soviet Union, the main U.S. rival during the Cold War. Diplomatic relations with Cuba were broken, and an economic embargo was imposed upon the country. The communization of Cuba alienated Cubans as well. From 1959 to 1962 (when Castro halted all further airplane flights from the island), about 200,000 Cubans fled their homeland, most of them settling in Miami. In late 1965, special freedom flights of refugees were organized with the cooperation of the Castro government; although registration for these flights was closed off in 1966, the flights themselves continued until 1973. The early refugees were disproportionately from Cuba’s professional and white-collar classes; with extensive financial assistance from the U.S. government, and their own hard work, they achieved a remarkable level of prosperity in the United States in a short time. Hopes for rapprochement with Castro rose in 1977, when Jimmy Carter became president of the United States. A United States Interests section of the Swiss embassy was established in Havana, under a State Department official, Wayne Smith, to handle relations between Cuba and the United States. When Castro persisted in his military intervention in the African nation of Angola, however, plans for lifting the U.S. embargo were shelved indefinitely. In October, 1979, relations with Castro deteriorated when Washington, D.C., welcomed the hijacker of a Cuban boat as a freedom fighter. Between January and March, 1979, Castro, to polish his image abroad and to gain badly needed foreign currency, allowed more than 115,000 Cuban Americans to visit their relatives in Cuba. The apparent prosperity of the Cuban Americans caused discontent among Cubans on the island because of the austerity and lack of consumer choices in the island’s socialist economy. Mariel Refugees On April 1, 1980, six Cubans commandeered a Havana city bus and drove it through the gate of the Peruvian embassy, demanding asylum; in the ensuing melee, one Cuban guard was killed. Castro responded by removing the police guards from the embassy. By April 9, 1980, about ten thousand more Cubans had crowded into the embassy, demanding the right of political asylum. On April 16, with Castro’s permission, airplane flights began to take asylum-seekers to Costa Rica; on April 18, however, Castro, embarrassed by the blow to his image abroad, suddenly canceled these flights. On April 20, he opened the port of Mariel to all those who wished to leave the island and to anyone who wished to ferry discontented Cubans to Florida. Persons sympathetic to the plight of the would-be emigrants chartered boats to sail to Mariel, pick up those who wanted to leave, and bring them to Key West, Florida. Once in Mariel, the boats’ skippers were forced to accept everyone whom Cuban authorities wanted to be rid of, including criminals, the mentally ill, and homosexuals. Because some of the boats were not sea525

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worthy, a tragic accident was always a possibility; and the U.S. Coast Guard sometimes had to rescue refugees from boats in danger of sinking. President Carter, distracted by the Iranian hostage crisis and the worsening of relations with the Soviet Union after the latter’s occupation of Afghanistan, vacillated in regard to the boatlift. In a speech given on May 5, Carter urged the people of the United States to welcome the refugees with open arms. On May 14, however, he threatened criminal penalties for those who used boats to pick up Cubans, and ordered the Coast Guard to stop the boatlift by arresting and fining the skippers and seizing the boats. Without cooperation from Castro, this order was largely ineffective. It was not until September 25, after hard bargaining between Castro and State Department negotiators Smith and Peter Tarnoff, that Castro ended the boatlift; several hundred would-be refugees who had missed the boatlift were allowed to take air flights out of Cuba in November. Between April and September, 1980, south Florida bore the brunt of the tidal wave of refugees, which is estimated to have reached as many as 125,000. In the Miami area, social services, health services, schools, and law enforcement authorities found their resources strained to the breaking point by the sudden influx. Housing was suddenly in short supply; quite a few Mariel refugees in Florida had to sleep in the Orange Bowl, underneath a highway overpass, or in tent cities. On May 6, Carter, in response to pleas from Florida governor Bob Graham, declared Florida a disaster area and authorized ten million dollars in relief for that state to help defray the cost of the refugee influx; U.S. Marines were sent to Florida to help process the refugees. Camps and Discrimination In June, 1980, President Carter ordered all those refugees who had not found relatives or others willing to sponsor them placed in detention camps in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas. In Pennsylvania and Arkansas, the refugees, bored and fearful about their future, rioted. By October, the majority of the Marielitos had been released into various communities, and the detention camps were closed. News of the riots fueled a growing backlash in U.S. public opinion against the Mariel refugees. The much-publicized presence of criminals among the refugees also helped generate a feeling of revulsion against the entire group: Marielitos were blamed for the upsurge in violent crime in Miami in 1981. In 1980, a year of economic downturn, many people in the United States feared that more Cuban refugees would mean higher unemployment. Once released from custody, Marielitos faced a difficult adjustment. Unlike earlier Cuban refugees, the Marielitos did not arrive in the midst of general prosperity; they came when the twin plagues of inflation and recession were besetting a U.S. economy still struggling to absorb refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Hence, Marielitos did not receive as much financial assistance from the federal government as earlier Cuban refugees. In addition, more of the Marielitos were poorly educated people from blue-collar backgrounds; more of them were single men without family ties; and a larger 526

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percentage of them were black or mulatto. Marielitos of all colors faced prejudice and discrimination, not merely from Euro-Americans but also from longersettled Cuban Americans, who saw the Marielitos as insufficiently hardworking and feared that popular U.S. resentment of the Marielitos might rub off on them. In 1983, Marielitos in Miami had an unemployment rate of 27 percent; although the rate had been cut to 13 percent by 1986, they still lagged behind longer-settled Cuban Americans in employment and income. Marielitos who ran afoul of the law quickly discovered that, however minor their offenses, they had fewer rights than native-born U.S. criminals. Marielitos who had criminal records in Cuba or who committed crimes in the United States faced incarceration for an indefinite term in federal prisons. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan secured a promise from Castro to take back Marielito criminals; only a few hundred had been deported when Castro, enraged by U.S. sponsorship of Radio Martí—an anti-Castro radio broadcast— canceled the agreement. In November, 1987, a new agreement provided for the deportation to Cuba of Marielito criminals in return for the acceptance by the United States of Cuban political prisoners; upon hearing of the agreement, Marielitos held in federal prisons in Oakdale, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia, rioted, taking hostages. The riots ended only when the Reagan administration promised that no prisoner would be sent back to Cuba without individual consideration on his or her case, and that some of those whose offenses were relatively minor would be released into the community. As late as 1995, however, eighteen hundred Marielitos were still incarcerated in federal prisons, and hundreds of them were still being held a decade later. The American Reaction When the Mariel boatlift began, Islamic militants in Iran had already publicly humiliated the United States government by seizing and holding captive U.S. diplomatic personnel. The seemingly uncontrollable Cuban refugee influx came to be seen as a symbol, not of the bankruptcy of communism, but of Carter’s alleged ineptitude in conducting U.S. foreign policy. U.S. voters’ anger over the refugee influx, together with widespread frustration over the economic recession and the Iranian hostage crisis, helped doom Carter’s bid for reelection in November, 1980. The Mariel boatlift of 1980 revived xenophobia among people in the United States. Until 1980, much of the U.S. public had seen Cuban refugees as courageous freedom fighters, comparable to Czechs or Hungarians fleeing Soviet tanks rather than to Puerto Ricans or Mexicans fleeing poverty. However, the presence of criminals and misfits among the Marielitos shattered the benign Cuban stereotype. After 1980, sentiment built steadily for reducing the number of immigrants and refugees admitted into the United States. The ultimate consequence of the Mariel boatlift of 1980 was President Bill Clinton’s decision in August, 1994, when faced with a new exodus from Cuba, to eliminate the privileged status of Cuban asylum-seekers. Paul D. Mageli 527

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Further Reading Hamm, Mark S. The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. One of the best studies to date of the Marielito prison riots of 1987; also contains much information on the 1980 boatlift itself. Argues that federal policy denied the prisoners basic human rights. Larzelere, Alex. Castro’s Ploy, America’s Dilemma: The 1980 Cuban Boat Lift. Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988. Detailed study of the boatlift, especially valuable for its look at the decision-making process within the Carter administration. Relies heavily on interviews conducted in 1986 with Carter-era officials. Loescher, Gil, and John A. Scanlan. Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945-Present. New York: Free Press, 1986. Chapter nine examines the effect of the Mariel boatlift on the shaping of U.S. refugee policy in general. Criticizes Carter’s response to the boatlift as indecisive. Pedraza-Bailey, Silvia. Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Chapter two compares the demographic portrait of the Marielitos with that of earlier Cuban refugees. Explains why the proportion of Afro-Cubans among the Marielitos was greater than in previous refugee flows. Portes, Alejandro, and Alex Stepick. City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Chapter two shows that Miami’s English-speaking whites and better-established Cuban Americans were both guilty of prejudice and discrimination against Marielitos. One of the few deep studies of the Marielitos’ adjustment problems; regional focus, however, limits the book’s usefulness for those interested in the Marielito experience throughout the United States. Smith, Wayne S. The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic History of the Castro Years. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. Chapter eight provides a firsthand account of the intergovernmental talks that ended the boatlift. One must be skeptical, however, of the author’s tendency to blame U.S. policy failures on his superiors’ refusal to follow his advice. Zebich-Knos, Michele, and Heather Nicol. Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement? Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Broad study of American immigration and refugee policy as it pertains to Cuba. See also Coast Guard, U.S.; Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Cuban refugee policy; González rescue; Haitian boat people; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

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Melting pot

Melting pot Definition: Metaphor equating a cooking vessel in which diverse ingredients are blended to the United States, in which diverse immigrants are assimilated and blended into a single society Immigration issues: Language; Native Americans; Religion; Sociological theories Significance: This two-century-old metaphor has long been applied to the United States, but by the late twentieth century, as members of ethnic and racial minorities increasingly asserted their distinctiveness and autonomy, the aptness of the metaphor was called into question. In the melting pot metaphor, the melting together of diverse nationalities and races creates one entity, a new American identity. In 1782, French immigrant Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecœur, using the more Americansounding pen name J. Hector St. John, published a collection of essays titled Letters from an American Farmer. These essays praised the quality of rural life in colonial America. In one essay titled “What Is an American?” he wrote, “Here, individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” European immigrants left oppression, hunger, ignorance, and poverty behind to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in North America. From Crèvecœur’s perspective, they blended their cultures into a new identity, dedicated to the goals of freedom and equality. History Crèvecœur came to Canada in 1754 during the French and Indian War as a soldier. After the war, he roamed the country and surveyed land around the Great Lakes. In 1765, he became a citizen of New York, married, and became a gentleman farmer. During the Revolution, he refused to take sides against British loyalists, so American patriots arrested and jailed him as a spy. When he was released, he fled, in fear for his life, to France, leaving his wife and children behind. French citizens found his essay collections interesting, and he became a minor celebrity. Benjamin Franklin helped Crèvecœur secure an appointment as French consul to New York. When he returned in 1783, he found his wife dead, his farmhouse burned, and his children living in foster homes. In later essays, Crèvecœur revised his idealistic theory of a homogenous American society. He observed that the first wave of immigrants on the frontier lived in isolation with weak ties to government, religion, or morality. Their communities and farms symbolized hard work and self-reliance, and they were reluctant to make room for succeeding waves of immigrants. Some were assimilated, but debtors, speculators, traders, and castoffs of society moved on. Many of these people created problems with the Native American population. 529

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In 1908, Israel Zangwill saw his Broadway play The Melting Pot performed. The four-act play dramatizes and resolves the conflict of Jewish separatism and Russian antiSemitism. Walker Whiteside, star of the play, spoke the lines, “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races are melting and reforming.” Although critics gave the play bad reviews, audiences kept it running for 136 performances. The metaphor of the melting pot entered the American vocabulary. Ironically, Zangwill became an ardent Zionist only eight years afEnglish author and playwright Israel Zangwill (1864- ter the opening of The Melting Pot 1926), who coined the term “melting pot,” wrote and repudiated the theme of his mostly about Jewish life and culture. (Library of Con- play. He declared that a character’s statement that there should gress) be neither Jew nor Greek was wrong. According to Zangwill, different races and religions could not mix, or at least not do so easily; a person’s natural ethnicity would return. At Issue The theory that American society is homogenous assumes that people from different ethnic backgrounds will resolve their differences in an environment of freedom and opportunity. The process of “melting” the origins, religions, languages, and traditions of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans into a unique American identity is demonstrably incomplete. Whether the melting of various ethnicities into a new whole is a worthy or a possible goal is a source of controversy. Many immigrants have been unwilling or unable to abandon their past identity for a new one. Strangers in a strange land naturally cling to what is familiar; assimilation has often been slow and difficult. Established groups, in turn, have set up legal, economic, and religious barriers to prevent assimilation of different races. In 1660, eighteen languages were spoken on Manhattan Island. In that heavily populated area during the 1990’s, at least that many are spoken, probably many more. Those who criticize the metaphor of the melting pot point out that the United States has always been and continues to be multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural, and that therefore the melting pot is more of a misguided ideal than an accurate representation of the acculturation process in the United States. The ideal, critics of the melting pot may argue, often covers morally questionable motives that are based on hatred of difference. 530

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On the other hand, the melting pot metaphor still seems apt for Americans whose ancestors represent multiple ethnic groups, for example, someone with a German-Scotch-Cherokee heritage. To many others, however, the term “multicultural” applies to American society more realistically. Many Americans with distinct ethnicity like to use the metaphor of a bowl of tossed salad, in which each culture is represented as a separate entity. Martha E. Rhynes Further Reading Barone, Michael. The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001. Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Crèvecœur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de. “What Is an American?” In Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904. Jacoby, Tamar, ed. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Vought, Hans Peter. Redefining the “Melting Pot”: American Presidents and the Immigrant, 1897-1933. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 2001. Zølner, Mette. Re-imagining the Nation: Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories. New York: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2000. See also Assimilation theories; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Cultural pluralism; European immigrant literature; Generational acculturation; History of U.S. immigration; Immigrant advantage; Immigration Act of 1921; Justice and immigration; Migration.

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund Identification: National nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect and to promote the civil rights of Latinos in the United States Date: Founded in 1968 Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Education; Latino immigrants; Mexican immigrants 531

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Significance: Also known as MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has been one of the most active and influential rights organizations to look after the interests of immigrants in the United States. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) was founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968 as a legal aid society after decades of discrimination and the violation of the civil rights of Mexican Americans. It was established by a group of Hispanic attorneys who wanted to protect by “legal actions and legal education” the constitutional rights of Mexican Americans. Although Mexican Americans are still its most important constituency, MALDEF now represents the broader Hispanic community, including both documented and undocumented aliens. From its first office in San Antonio, MALDEF established its national headquarters in Los Angeles, four regional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C., and a program office in Sacramento, California. The organization is administered by a thirty-six-member board of directors, composed mostly of Hispanics, and its membership includes attorneys, businessmen, educators, judges, law school professors, and public officials. MALDEF has attorneys in each of its regional offices, but a national network of referral lawyers from private law firms, corporations, and businesses also provides pro bono services. Its activities are funded by foundations, such as Walt Disney, Kaiser, and General Electric; private corporations, such as Allstate Insurance, AT&T, AMOCO, Anheuser-Busch, Coca Cola, and IBM; labor unions; and individual contributions. With these resources MALDEF assists its clients in obtaining employment, education, immigration, political access, and job training. It achieves these goals through litigation, advocacy, educational outreach, law school scholarships, and leadership development. The organization’s most important strategy is litigation, which is used to implement legal action to eliminate discriminatory practices. MALDEF initiates “class action” suits with one or more Mexican Americans representing a larger group, pursues cases that reverse previous discriminatory practices, such as in hiring and promotion practices, and establishes new precedents. It has engaged in various lawsuits involving voting rights violations and discriminatory election systems and utilizes many of its resources on the equitable enforcement of immigration legislation. Its top priority is the elimination of barriers to the political process. Since MALDEF has long been opposed to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, it fights discrimination by employers against “foreign looking” legal immigrants and Hispanic American citizens. MALDEF continually monitors and lobbies for policies that directly benefit Hispanics. Most prominent has been its efforts to defeat English-only proposals in Congress and in various states, such as its challenge to the California “Unz initiative” (Proposition 227) in 1997, which called for the virtual abolition of bilingual development programs that served over one million school 532

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students with limited English proficiency. In other recent initiatives, MALDEF challenged the Texas high school “graduation” test requirement and supported the extension of a family-based visa program. It offers law school scholarships to qualified students and sponsors efforts for more effective census data that better represent the Hispanic population. It is probably the most important modern Hispanic organization in that it has addressed the problems, needs, and concerns of its clients more than any other Hispanic organization. Its sponsorship of litigation and its lobbying activities have markedly helped the Hispanic community in areas such as education, employment, and political activism, all crucial to the future of Hispanics in U.S. society. Martin J. Manning Further Reading Brittain, Carmina. Transnational Messages: Experiences of Chinese and Mexican Immigrants in American Schools. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880-1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Jonas, Susanne, and Suzanne Dod Thomas, eds. Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. See also Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Bracero program; Chicano movement; Farmworkers’ union; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Operation Wetback; Undocumented workers.

Mexican deportations during the Depression The Event: Federal government initiative to deport Mexican laborers from the United States Date: Early 1930’s Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Government and politics; Illegal immigration; Labor; Latino immigrants; Law enforcement; Mexican immigrants Significance: Massive unemployment during the Depression prompted deportation of immigrant workers in order to redistribute their jobs to U.S. citizens. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the immigration of Mexican nationals into the United States was a growing phenomenon. It was not 533


viewed as a problem because the cheap labor they provided was welcomed, particularly on farms and ranches. U.S. immigration laws generally were enforced selectively with regard to Mexicans. During World War I, at the request of U.S. businesses, the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1917 that required immigrants to pay an eight-dollar “head tax” and prove their literacy were waived for Mexican laborers. This special order legitimized U.S. dependence on cheap Mexican labor and institutionalized Mexico’s special status. At the end of World War I, the order was not rescinded; in fact, U.S. companies intensified their recruitment of Mexican farmworkers. Industrial companies in the Northeast and Midwest, such as steel mills and automobile manufacturers, also began recruiting Mexicans from the Southwest, resulting in an expanding migration in terms of both numbers of immigrants and their geographic spread. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins

Mexican farm workers harvesting carrots in California’s Imperial Valley during the late 1930’s. Because of the abundance of cheap labor, these workers were paid only eleven cents for each crate of forty bunches of carrots that they picked, cleaned, tied, and crated. At that rate, each worker was lucky to earn one dollar for a full day’s work. (Library of Congress)

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Act (Immigration Act of 1924) had each limited immigration from Europe, but no restrictions were imposed on the number of immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus, a large and growing population of Mexican immigrants had established itself in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. A Change in Attitude During the 1920’s, the U.S. government’s attitude toward Mexican immigrants gradually changed from lax enforcement to severe restrictions. As social and economic conditions deteriorated on a global scale, the great pool of cheap Mexican labor was increasingly resented by unemployed U.S. citizens. Despite pressure from businesses, laws restricting entry—that is, the head tax and literacy test—began to be strictly enforced against Mexicans by immigration authorities. Two new laws also were passed that had a further chilling effect on Mexican immigration to the United States: the Deportation Act of March 4, 1929, which made illegally entering the United States a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison or a fine of as much as one thousand dollars, followed by the May 4, 1929, law making it a felony for a deported alien to reenter the United States illegally. These laws, followed by the October, 1929, stock market crash that marked the onset of the Great Depression in the United States, set the stage for a period of repressive measures against Mexican nationals in the United States. As the Depression caused more unemployment, the caseloads of social welfare agencies increased. By 1931, as the pool of unemployed immigrants requiring assistance grew, local agencies intensified their efforts to force repatriation; on the federal level, calls to deport immigrants increased also. President Herbert Hoover endorsed the aggressive efforts to expel aliens, restrict legal immigration, and curtail illegal entry. William N. Doak, who took office as Hoover’s secretary of labor in December, 1930, proposed that any alien holding a job be deported. The Bureau of Immigration, at that time a part of the Department of Labor, began an aggressive campaign of rooting out illegal aliens, with the objective of reducing unemployment and thus hastening the end of the Great Depression. Many of the aliens deported under this program, however, were already unemployed. Although Mexicans were not specifically targeted by the immigration authorities, they were numerically the most affected as a group. The response of the Mexican government to the problem varied: At times, land reform programs were established for repatriating Mexican citizens; at other times, Mexico feared the addition of more unemployed citizens to its labor surplus. Opportunities for Mexican Americans to obtain land in Mexico usually required money to be invested, although occasionally there were programs that offered land to destitute repatriates. California’s Response In the southwestern states, particularly, immigration officials aggressively sought deportable Mexicans, and social service agencies encouraged Mexicans to volunteer for repatriation. The most ambitious 535


of these programs was undertaken in Los Angeles County, California, but cities such as Chicago and Detroit, where Mexicans had been recruited by industry during the early 1920’s, also were actively attempting to get even legal Mexican residents to leave during the 1930’s. The Los Angeles Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief, headed by Charles P. Visel, had been charged with assisting the unemployed residents of the city, especially through creation of jobs, for which longtime local residents would be given preference. Inspired by Labor Secretary Doak’s earlier pronouncements that some 400,000 deportable aliens were believed to be in the country, Visel set out to identify and deport as many illegal aliens as possible from the city of Los Angeles. Visel contacted Doak and requested that a sufficient number of immigration agents be deployed in Los Angeles to create a hostile environment, from which he hoped aliens would flee voluntarily. Visel planned to open his campaign with press releases and a few well-publicized arrests. Although the plan was not aimed specifically at Mexicans, some statements made by Visel did mention Mexicans as a group to be targeted. The Spanishlanguage newspapers in Southern California stirred up the Mexican community, both in Los Angeles and in Mexico, by publishing inaccurate stories that virtually all Mexicans were being targeted for deportation. In the first three weeks of February, 1931, immigration agents had investigated several thousand people, 225 of whom were determined to be subject to deportation. Figures released by Visel’s committee in March, 1931, indicated that 70 percent of the persons deported up to that time in the Los Angeles campaign were Mexicans. According to the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, an estimated 10,000 of the more than 200,000 Mexicans thought to be living in Los Angeles prior to 1931 had left; many of these repatriates owned businesses and homes in Southern California. It should be noted, however, that the Chamber of Commerce would be more likely to have contact with the more prosperous members of the population than with the unemployed or laborers. Concurrent with the federal and local campaigns to deport illegal aliens, Los Angeles County officials began attempting to repatriate destitute Mexicans. Many Mexican nationals had entered the United States at a time when penalties for illegal entry were nonexistent or seldom enforced against Mexicans; thus, their legal status was uncertain. With chances of unemployed Mexicans finding employment in the United States slim, welfare officials were beginning to put pressure on alien relief recipients to return to Mexico, at times leading them to believe that if they did not leave voluntarily, they would be cut off from aid immediately. Frank Shaw, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was the first area official to propose paying the cost of transporting families back to Mexico by train. In March, 1931, 350 Mexicans signed up for the first trip. Many more trips were made, but statistics on the numbers who were repatriated under the county program are clouded by the fact that the same trains that carried county-aided Mexicans also carried deportees and Mexi536


cans who had made their own arrangements to leave, and accurate records were not kept. Overall, the various efforts to reduce the number of immigrants in Southern California during the early 1930’s caused a noticeable, but temporary, reduction of the Mexican population in the area. Irene Struthers Rush Further Reading Byrd, Bobby, and Susannah Mississippi Byrd, eds. The Late Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line. El Paso, Tex.: Cinco Puntos Press, 1996. Sixteen essays that chronicle life on the U.S./Mexico border and the issues and influences that are part of this landscape. Cardoso, Lawrence A. “The Great Depression: Emigration Halts and Repatriation Begins.” In Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897-1931. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980. Brief discussion of federal deportation efforts and local repatriation efforts during the early 1930’s. Includes ballads (corridos) written by returning Mexicans lamenting their plight. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Reexamination of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States that looks at the subject in the context of American dominance over Mexico. Hoffman, Abraham. Unwanted Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressure, 1929-1939. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974. Well-researched, comprehensive look at the deportation and repatriation of Mexicans, particularly from Los Angeles County, during the 1930’s. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Meier, Matt S., and Feliciano Ribera. Mexican Americans and American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos. Rev. ed. of The Chicanos, 1972. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. Comprehensive history of the Mexican presence in the United States. Pages 153-157 discuss deportation and repatriation during the 1930’s. Samora, Julian. “Los Mojados”: The Wetback Story. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Discusses illegal immigration from Mexico in the twentieth century, including a chapter by a graduate student assisting the author, who attempted to enter the country illegally. See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Bracero program; Deportation; Immigration law; Latinos and employment; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Operation Wetback; Undocumented workers.

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Middle Eastern immigrant families

Middle Eastern immigrant families Identification: Immigrants to North America from the predominantly Muslim nations of the Middle East Immigration issues: Families and marriage; Jewish immigrants; Middle Eastern immigrants Significance: In a tradition-bound region such as the Middle East, the family, despite the evolving social, economic, and political context, continues to be an important, all-pervasive institution. Notwithstanding differences between the approximately two dozen Arab and non-Arab countries in the Middle East, the family’s impact is still great on classes, income and educational levels, members of different faiths, and among rural and urban inhabitants. Generally, family life is shaped for the younger generation by the older generation, and relations between the sexes are still governed considerably by strict family codes. Middle Eastern family members place greater value on the integrity, pride, and prestige of the family than is true of family members in the West. Thus, there is more respect for parents by children, and family ties are stronger. Sex roles of family members are more clearly defined, and greater stress is placed on both premarital chastity for girls and postmarital fidelity for women. Premarital sex among girls is seen as dishonoring girls’ families, while marital infidelity is seen as dishonoring husbands’ as well as wives’ families. Traditionally, it has behooved girls’ fathers or older brothers to sanction female family members whom they believe to be wayward—in extreme cases, by killing them. Such immutable family tradition is often reinforced by a strict interpretation of Qur$anic law, as is done by Muslim fundamentalists. The fact that marriage in Middle Eastern countries is a union of two families rather than of two individuals, as in the West, is demonstrated at every step: in the selection of brides, which is often performed by parents to maintain families’ status; in the determination of the bride price; in betrothal and wedding ceremonies; and in the raising of children, sickness, and funerals. Obviously, these traditional family attitudes and rituals have weakened among modernized, often Westernized, well-educated, upper-income, urban families and their emancipated women family members. Kinship and Genealogy As in the West, descent among Middle Eastern families is patrilineal—that is, it is determined through the male line. Middle Eastern societies are both patrimonial and distinctly male dominated. Especially in rural areas, they are also patrilocal—that is, married couples tradi538


tionally go to live in husbands’ fathers’ households. In such an extended family arrangement, households often consist of a man, his wife, his unmarried sons and daughters, and his married sons with their wives and children. In more evolved city environments, the nuclear family, as in the West, has become more commonplace. While the extended family satisfies some of the economic, security, and emotional needs of its members, it also creates occasions for intergenerational conflict. Despite the fact that Islam tolerates polygamy, cases of polygamy had become rare by the twenty-first century, eliminating this potential additional source of tension. As the outer world impinges increasingly on traditional family values, young people try to elude the stifling patriarchal grip by migrating to a distant, anonymous, and more liberal urban environment and, in many cases, abroad. The birth of male children is marked by elaborate celebrations, because they are expected to perpetuate family tradition and are considered greater and more secure economic assets than girls. Despite some changes, women are still generally subordinate to men. Family judgment, especially in the villages, is severe, and deeds considered improper often weigh more heavily than meritorious acts. The Evolving Family Under the impact of some industrialization, urbanization, conscription and army life, improved communications, and the provision of some kind of social security by governments or other organizations—no matter how rudimentary—individuals are no longer as willing to be subordinated to parents, uncles, aunts, and other older family members as they were previously. Moreover, with the centralization of governmental power, persons are beginning to show greater loyalties to the nation and perhaps less to families. Mobility, the demands of revolution and war, and the emergence of the modern interdependent world are increasingly propelling individuals in this direction. Finally, the changing status of Middle Eastern women, who are now better educated and more likely to work outside the home and participate in economic and even political life than in earlier times, also helps to explain the changes in traditional family values. Thus, more women now have a say in the choice of their spouses, as parents’ unilateral early determination of spouses for their children has become less common. Divorce, which has become widespread, is no longer the exclusively male prerogative that it once was. In short, the Middle Eastern family is in a state of transition. Family Values Changes in the Middle Eastern family should not be exaggerated. Generally speaking, the family is still the premier institution in society. Consequently, family values continue to involve the frequently unquestioned authority of male heads of households as well as the lingering practice of endogamous marriage—that is, marriage within the extended family. Even the payment of a bride price by grooms or their families, while less frequent, 539


is still practiced. Most importantly, while fundamental values of North Americans include individualism, freedom, equal rights and equal opportunities, and the chance to realize individual goals, Middle Easterners focus on the importance of the group and hierarchy. Respect for elders, the separateness of sex roles, the complementariness of social roles, and the ethic of sacrifice to the family are still strong. Such cohesive kinship relations have often given Middle Eastern communities a relatively unified view of the outside world. In this scheme of things, Islam has contributed to the strengthening of family institutions through its detailed guidance of family practice and its legal and moral authority. Islam and the family have, in fact, helped to stabilize Middle Eastern societies, which have witnessed much turmoil since World War II. In the United States, with over two million immigrant families from the Middle East, and Canada, with over a hundred thousand, family values continue to be strong among the first resettled generation. However, as the second and subsequent generations have become more assimilated as they learn English in the schools and experience other socializing factors, original family values have tended to become diluted among Middle Easterners. Thus, the younger generation, whose members are more “Americanized” than their parents and who are concerned with their individuality and rights, no longer tend to return to the Middle East to marry spouses selected for them by their families. Moreover, they often marry spouses from outside their ethnic groups. Among the younger generation, the nuclear family has become the norm. Young people are also not as wont to send remittances to family members in the Middle East as earlier generations of immigrants have been. Such fund transfers, whether their purpose is to buy land, build a home, purchase appliances, or cover the bride price, have in some cases been a significant source of revenue for recipient local economies. A somewhat analogous impact of environment on family may be found among the fifty thousand or so Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) who were airlifted to Israel during the 1980’s. The changes that have taken place among the Falashas are twofold. The internal structure of the family has been reorganized, as parental authority, age, and gender have all acquired new contexts and meaning, and the family’s external borders have been redrawn, as many of its functions have been taken over by other religious and secular institutions. The predominance of Muslim families among Middle Eastern immigrants in North America is essentially a post-World War II phenomenon. Earlier groups of immigrants, which included large groups of people who belonged to an array of Middle Eastern Christian sects and a few Jews who came to North America during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, tended to be more Westernized than today’s emigrants, bilingual from the start, and subject to less stringent family rules. They therefore found it less difficult to assimilate than the later waves of Muslim immigrants. Peter B. Heller 540


Further Reading Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, ed. Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Collection of interviews with Muslim immigrants to North America. Dumas, Firoozeh. Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America. New York: Villard, 2003. Lighthearted reflections of life in the United States by a young Iranian immigrant. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004. Study of the special problems faced by Arab and other Muslim Americans in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that turned many Americans against Arab immigrants. Hassoun, Rosina J. Arab Americans in Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003. Study of one of the largest concentrations of Arab immigrants in North America. Kaldas, Pauline, and Khaled Mattawa, eds. Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Collection of short stories focusing on themes of great interest to immigrant Arab children. Marvasti, Amir B., and Karyn D. McKinney. Middle Eastern Lives in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Study of Middle Eastern families living in the United States. Moaveni, Azadeh. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Autobiography of an Iranian immigrant. Nordquist, Joan, comp. Arab and Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern Origin: Social and Political Aspects—A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Reference and Research Services, 2003. Comprehensive bibliography of diverse aspects of Middle Eastern immigrants. Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A Quest for Their History and Culture. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Study of the special challenges faced by Arab immigrants in the United States. Westheimer, Ruth, and Steven Kaplan. Surviving Salvation: The Ethiopian Jewish Family in Transition. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Study of Falasha Jews. See also Arab American intergroup relations; Arab American stereotypes; Arab immigrants; Iranian immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Muslims.

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Migrant superordination

Migrant superordination Definition: Process whereby immigrant groups of outsiders subdue the native peoples of territories Immigration issues: Native Americans; Sociological theories Significance: The classical form of migrant superordination is colonization, in which an immigrant group uses force to dispossess the indigenous group of land, resources, or work. The superordinate/subordinate relationships that result from migrant superordination processes can take economic, political, and cultural forms. Such relationships are characterized by the institutionalization of dominant-minority relations in which the migrants enjoy disproportionate power, resources, and prestige. The power relationship is then justified by a system of beliefs that rationalizes the superiority of the immigrant group in relation to the indigenous people. Reactions to migrant superordination on the part of the indigenous peoples may range from physical resistance and rebellion to accommodation and assimilation. Historical examples of migrant superordination include the European conquest of Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere and of Africans in South Africa. M. Bahati Kuumba Further Reading Cook, Terrence E. Separation, Assimilation, or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Zølner, Mette. Re-imagining the Nation: Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories. New York: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2000. See also British as dominant group; Immigrant advantage; Indigenous superordination.

Migration Definition: Movement of peoples from one region to another Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; European immigrants; Refugees; Sociological theories Significance: Immigration—inward migration—and emigration—outward migration—are two of the primary processes (alongside fertility and mor542

Migration

tality) that influence a population’s ethnic and racial composition and that create shifts in intergroup relations. The reasons why peoples migrate vary from region to region and era to era. Migration simply consists of the movement of people from one place to another. Migration can be internal (within a country) or international, and both types can have significant impacts. Immigration (the movement into a new country) and emigration (movement from a country) are forms of international migration. Net migration rate is the difference between the rate of immigration and the rate of emigration. It is expressed as the number of people per 1,000 who enter or leave an area during one year. Migration may have a number of important effects, such as relieving population pressure in crowded areas, spreading culture from one area to another, and bringing groups into contact—and possible conflict. Sociologists also study the experiences of immigrants in relation to prejudice, discrimination, and social stratification and mobility. They explore the differing experiences of immigrants of differing ethnicities and races; such studies have revealed much about the nature of prejudice and about the disparity between the ideology and the reality of American life. A look at various aspects of immigration to the United States allows an examination of these processes at work in the real world. Since the sixteenth century, most immigrants to North America have come for similar reasons: to escape persecution, to find economic opportunities, and to enjoy the freedoms available in the United States. Yet despite the traditional emphasis on the forces that pushed people out of their countries of origin and the separate forces that pulled them toward the United States, a number of studies, such as David M. Reimers’s Still the Golden Door (1985), emphasize structural forces—economic and political—that have influenced population movements. Immigration Patterns Many studies of immigration to the United States identify two massive waves of immigration between 1820 and 1914. The first decades of the nineteenth century brought increasing numbers of immigrants; 151,000 arrived during the 1820’s, nearly 600,000 during the 1830’s, more than 1 million during the 1840’s, and 2.3 million during the 1850’s. Many were Irish Catholics escaping political persecution and famine and Germans fleeing political upheavals. These “old immigrants” came to cities on the East Coast; some moved inland to the farmlands of the Great Plains. “New immigrants” were those from eastern and southern Europe who arrived between the 1880’s and World War I. This second period of immigration far surpassed the earlier waves in numbers, rising from 788,000 in 1872 to 1,285,000 in 1907. By 1914 nearly 15 million immigrants had arrived in the United States, many from Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Greece, Romania, and Turkey. The federal Dillingham Commission (1907) regarded this group as poor, unskilled, and mostly male, and its report reinforced prejudices 543

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about eastern and southern Europeans. It concluded that these immigrants would be more difficult to assimilate into American society. As the children or grandchildren of immigrants became indistinguishable from other Americans, however, the concept of American society as a “melting pot” into which many nationalities merged into one, took hold. Often invisible in early immigration studies were the numbers of Africans and Latin Americans who had not come voluntarily to the United States. Africans were forcibly brought to the United States as slaves. Many Mexicans did not technically immigrate but were absorbed into the United States when lands from Texas to California were conquered in the Mexican War (18461848). These groups needed to adapt to a new nation and a new culture, as did European immigrants, but they faced both discrimination and a lack of understanding about their circumstances. Asian immigrants formed another group that was long invisible in immigration histories. Chinese men were imported as cheap labor to build the railroads during the mid-nineteenth century, and they were expected to leave when their job was done. Many Japanese, Filipino, and Korean immigrants came first to Hawaii as agricultural laborers, and some moved on to California. Reasons for Migration Some structural reasons for emigration and immigration have not changed greatly over the last three hundred years. Many individuals have come to North America to escape religious or political persecution. Early refugees in this category included the English Pilgrims and French Huguenots. Later religious groups came from Norway, Holland, and

European immigrants arriving at the federal government’s immigrant reception center on Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, around 1912. (Library of Congress)

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Russia, among them Jews and Mennonites. From the early nineteenth century to the present, immigrants have come because of economic changes in their native lands and opportunities in the United States. The enclosure movement in England and western Europe, which began in the eighteenth century, forced many peasants off the land. They sought new land in America. Factories brought ruin to skilled artisans, who came to the United States hoping to open workshops. Many Europeans and Asians also came to escape political turmoil. Revolutions in 1830 and 1848 in Europe, and the Taiping Rebellion in China in 1848, led refugees to seek safety in the United States. Twentieth century upheavals such as World War II, the Cuban Revolution, repression in Southeast Asia, and civil wars in Lebanon and El Salvador have continued to bring refugees to the United States. Immigrants and U.S.-Born Americans Immigrants and refugees have not settled equally in all regions of the United States. Large immigrant communities in California, New York, and Florida have led to the need for government services in many languages. Students in schools speak Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean, Ethiopia’s Amharic, Haitian Creole, and a number of Chinese dialects. Many require courses in English as a second language. Courts need to provide translators, and social service agencies struggle to communicate with many immigrant groups. Some Americans have responded to foreigners with resentment. Some states and localities have passed laws declaring English to be the only official language. Sociologists studying immigration, however, have found that the large number of immigrants has led to a gradual shift in the population of the United States and its culture. Television stations around the country broadcast programs in many languages. Spanish-speaking markets in particular represent many new business opportunities, and large American companies are beginning to offer advertisements in Spanish. Americans have been proud of their heritage of immigration yet ambivalent about immigrant groups who have come to the United States. Federal legislation has expressed the varying reactions of Americans toward immigrants and immigration over time. Before 1820 there were no laws requiring lists of passengers arriving in the United States. Immigrants brought skills and talents that were needed by the new country, and they were welcomed. Non-British immigrants during the early nineteenth century, however, did experience discrimination. Irish Catholics and German immigrants, whose religion or language was different from that of the majority, faced ridicule and were stereotyped as drunkards or dullards. Asian immigrants faced racial prejudice, and Chinese people were eventually barred from immigrating to the United States. Despite mixed reaction to foreigners, the first federal immigration law was not passed until 1875. In that year prostitutes and convicts were prohibited from entering as immigrants. Additional exclusions for lunatics and idiots were added later. 545

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Japanese immigrants awaiting processing at the federal government’s immigrant reception center on San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island during the 1920’s. (National Archives)

By the 1880’s, increasing immigration from areas outside northern Europe, the closing of the frontier, and increasing urbanization led to attempts to control immigration. Some Americans claimed that southern and eastern Europeans were replacing American stock and that immigration produced a declining birthrate among Americans. Others were more worried about Asian immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 specifically denied entry to Chinese people, while the Forant Act (1885) made it unlawful for employers to import aliens to perform labor in the United States. This law was aimed at large companies who were importing eastern Europeans to fill lowwage jobs instead of hiring American labor, and it reflected suspicion that immigration caused wages to decline. The Immigration Act of 1917 barred Asians not by nationality, but by excluding geographically any immigrants from East or South Asia. 546

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Immigration to the United States was regulated for most of the twentieth century by the Immigration Act of 1924, which reflected the nation’s desire to encourage European immigration and discourage non-Western immigrants. This law established a series of quotas for immigrants from all countries except the Western Hemisphere. Larger quotas were assigned to countries whose citizens were more traditionally identified with the American population. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 tightened the quota system. Immigration Reform A significant change in United States policy toward immigration came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This law removed strict quotas and Asian exclusion. Instead, it created preferences for persons with certain skills and gave priority to people with immediate family in the United States. The consequences of this legislation led to greater changes in immigration than were anticipated. By 1974, for example, foreignborn physicians made up 20 percent of all medical doctors in the United States. The “brain drain” from developing countries continued, as scientists, engineers, and scholars sought better conditions and higher salaries in the United States. The law also brought increasing non-European immigration, as family members petitioned to bring relatives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The increasing number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has led to calls for policing the U.S. border with Mexico more efficiently and for penalties for employers of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants have been accused of stealing jobs from United States citizens, draining social services, and changing the very nature of American society. In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act attempted to resolve these issues for many illegal immigrants. Those who could show permanent residency in the United States since 1982 could become legal residents. Employers who hired illegal immigrants were to be fined, and additional funds were appropriated for stronger immigration enforcement. Immigration reforms have continued, showing the changing response of American society over time. The Kennedy-Donnelly Act of 1988 permitted a lottery to provide visas for permanent resident status, and the 1990 Immigration Act raised annual immigration ceilings and ended restrictions on homosexuals, communists, and people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS); it also granted safe haven status for Salvadorans. This law was not without opposition from those who feared that disease or undesirable ideas would be spread by immigrants. Refugees Refugees have become an increasingly important part of population movements. Emigration from countries experiencing conflict has increased in the twentieth century, and the United States has traditionally thought of itself as a nation receptive to the oppressed. The need to resettle large numbers of eastern European refugees after World War II was rec547

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ognized by the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. During the 1980’s the churchsponsored sanctuary movement broke immigration laws by providing asylum for Salvadorans who feared deportation by immigration authorities enforcing strict refugee policies. The impact of immigration on American society has continued to challenge cherished concepts and ideologies and to highlight prejudices. The idea of the United States as an open door, a place where people from all lands can find a haven, is still shared by many. Since the 1980’s, however, this ideal has faced considerable challenges. The large numbers of Central Americans, Asians, and Haitians seeking asylum in the United States has led to tighter controls at borders and interdiction on the high seas. While some scholarship, particularly since the 1980’s, has stressed structural rather than personal reasons for population movements and has challenged the concept of the melting pot, American society has continued to mold immigrants from many nations. At the same time, American society has changed as a result of this immigration. James A. Baer Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration. Among the specific subjects covered are the economic contributions of immigrants, government obligations to address humanitarian problems, the impact of cultural diversity on American society, bilingual education, assimilation vs. cultural pluralism, and enforcement of laws regulating undocumented workers. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Well-written scholarly account of U.S. immigration from the colonial period through the 1980’s. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are race, government policy, sociological theories, naturalization, and undocumented workers. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Lynch, James P., and Rita J. Simon. Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. International perspectives on immigration, with particular attention to the immigration policies of the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. 548

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Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Roleff, Tamara, ed. Immigration. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Collection of articles arguing opposing viewpoints on different aspects of immigration, such as quotas and restrictions, revolving around questions of whether immigrants have a positive or negative impact on the United States. Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Presents a variety of social, political, and legal viewpoints of experts and observers familiar with immigration into the United States. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, ed. Immigration Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Collection of essays and theories of immigration, approaches to comparative research, and immigrant networks. See also Demographics of immigration; European immigrants, 17901892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; History of U.S. immigration; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration “crisis”; Immigration law; Justice and immigration; Undocumented workers.

Model minorities Definition: Members of minority groups that have attained exceptional educational and economic success and have achieved high degrees of assimilation into a dominant society Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Japanese immigrants; Refugees; Stereotypes Significance: In the United States, the term “model minority” has most often been applied to Asian Americans, notably Japanese and Chinese Americans. The concept of the model minority has been studied and debated since the 1960’s, when the term first appeared. Its validity has been both defended and attacked, and the possible harmful effects of the concept as an accepted and unquestioned stereotype have been argued. Another particularly contentious issue is that the suggestion that certain minorities are “models” implicitly contains the opposite idea: Other minorities are less than “models” and are perhaps even deficient in some way. 549

Model minorities

Definition and History of the Term A so-called model minority is any minority group (typically of non-European background) that does well despite having faced discrimination. The criteria by which a minority group is judged as doing well or not doing well vary, but they have included average family income; success in entrepreneurship; children’s educational achievement (for recently settled groups); and extent of symptoms of deviance or social pathology. The higher the first three, and the lower the last one, the likelier a group is to be considered a model minority. Since every ethnic or minority group in the United States has produced at least a few high achievers and at least a few failures and criminals, social scientists’ judgments of ethnic group success or failure are always statements of averages; they are often based on census data. The term first appeared in an article in The New York Times Magazine of January 9, 1966, entitled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” by American sociologist William Petersen. Before World War II, Petersen points out, those Japanese Americans born in Japan could neither own land in California nor become naturalized American citizens; their American-born children (the nisei) were barred from many types of employment. During World War II, Japanese Americans living in the Pacific coast states were herded into internment camps. Yet in the two decades after World War II, Japanese Americans achieved a level of education higher than that of white Americans; a level of family income at least equal to that of whites, and a level of social pathology (such as juvenile delinquency) lower than that of whites. Hence, Petersen calls Japanese Americans “our model minority.” In Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (1969), Harry L. Kitano, a Japanese American sociologist, also uses the term “model minority,” acknowledging its origin with Petersen. Kitano expresses ambivalence about the term, which he regards as an ethnocentric white majority’s view of a racial minority. Yet, like Petersen, Kitano ascribes the economic success of Japanese Americans after World War II to ethnic Japanese cultural values. Model Groups Japanese Americans are not the only Asian American ethnic group that has been noted by social scientists for its level of achievement since the 1960’s. Chinese Americans have also been so identified. The business success of both Chinese and Japanese Americans has been attributed by some sociologists and historians to ethnic cultural values, as exemplified by the rotating credit systems that immigrants established to help provide one another with funds to start businesses. Korean business success has been similarly explained. The academic success of Indochinese refugee schoolchildren has been ascribed to the congruence of the refugees’ Confucian ethic with the ethic of the American middle class. Louis Winnick, a scholarly expert on urban neighborhoods, went so far as to lump all Asian Americans together as a model minority. Some non-Asian groups have been viewed as model minorities as well. During the early 1970’s, post-1959 Cuban refugees were praised in the mass me550

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dia for having overcome adversity quickly. Thomas Sowell, a black conservative intellectual, asserts that British West Indian immigrants (who are mainly black) outperform native-born black Americans economically and educationally. Similarly, Ivan Light argued in 1972 that British West Indian immigrants do better in small business than native-born black Americans; they do so, he said, because of their rotating credit system. Writing in 1993, two journalists (white New Yorker Joe Klein and Haitian émigré Joel Dreyfuss) contended that Haitian immigrants exhibit fewer social pathologies and more signs of economic and educational advance than native-born black Americans. Social scientist Kofi Apraku has described post-1965 African immigrants (such as refugees from Ethiopia) as above average in occupational and entrepreneurial attainment.

Students of a Japanese-language school in Sacramento, California, around 1910. A long tradition of strong family support for education has contributed to the image of Asian Americans as “model minorities.” (Sacramento Ethnic Survey, Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center)

Sociological Viewpoint Sociologists who employ or support the model minority concept usually adhere to the assimilation model of interethnic relations. According to this theoretical model, the ultimate destiny of any American ethnic or minority group is to climb upward into the broad middle class. Such thinkers tend to see the progress of any ethnic or minority group as a function of its cultural values rather than of the extent of the discrimination it suffers. The relative slowness of any particular group to overcome poverty and win the acceptance of the majority is ascribed, at least in part, to that group’s cultural values; hence, one can regard some minorities as “models” and others as less exemplary. Such structural theorists as sociologist Stephen Steinberg, by contrast, argue that it is not cultural deficiencies that retard minorities’ progress but discriminatory barriers erected by the majority. These barriers can be far more widespread and insidious than is first apparent. Such theorists also contend that the seemingly miraculous progress of some model minorities can be explained by the social class background of the immigrants and by the opportunity structure that they found upon arrival rather than by any alleged superiority of those minorities’ cultural values. 551

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Implications The model minority concept has most often been applied in discussions of the relative success of certain Asian ethnic immigrant groups in the United States. The term has engendered much debate because of its implicit criticism of other groups—if these “model” groups could succeed, it suggests, then others should be able to as well. This implication then leads to the question: If certain groups cannot succeed as well as others in American society, where does the problem lie—with discrimination, with the attitudes of the dominant culture, or with the cultural attributes and attitudes of the minority groups themselves? The model minority concept has surfaced repeatedly in debates over the status of African Americans, the minority group that has been in the United States the longest but that has arguably assimilated least effectively. During the late 1950’s and the 1960’s, many white Americans felt anxieties about the Civil Rights movement; the urban unrest of the late 1960’s exacerbated fears and uncertainties about the future of race relations. Then, during the late 1970’s and 1980’s, white resentment of affirmative action programs, which primarily benefited African Americans, grew. At the same time, there was some bewilderment that inner-city black poverty persisted despite affirmative action. The model minority concept, with its evidence of Asian American success, seemed to suggest that such programs might be, or should be, unnecessary. Hence, from 1966 onward, the notion of Asian Americans as a model minority found receptive ears among conservative white Americans. By the middle and late 1980’s, it was being purveyed in a speech by President Ronald Reagan (in 1984), in magazine articles, and on television news programs (which placed special emphasis on the scholastic achievements of Asian American youth). Although most African Americans during the 1980’s resented being compared unfavorably with Asian Americans, some conservative black intellectuals, Sowell, Walter E. Williams, and Shelby Steele among them, defended the concept and pointed to Asian American success as an example for African Americans to follow. Controversy and Challenges Because of its use in arguments over public policy, the model minority thesis is hotly disputed. Thus a laudatory report on Indochinese refugee schoolchildren was criticized by sociologist Rubén Rumbaut for having covered only the Vietnamese, Sino-Vietnamese, and Lao, omitting data on the less successful refugees, the Hmong and the Cambodians. The overall high Asian American average in income and education, Asian American scholars Ronald Takaki, Deborah Woo, Peter Kwong, and Arthur Hu point out, hides a bipolar distribution: Chinese immigrants, for example, include both sweatshop laborers and scientists. Many of the Asian American youth who excel in school, it is emphasized, are children of well-educated immigrants who either hold professional jobs in the United States or did so in Asia; Asian immigrant teenagers from poorer, less well-educated families are not always high achievers, and they are some552

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times members of urban juvenile gangs. Asian American family incomes, it is conceded, may equal or surpass those of whites, but only because of a larger number of earners per family. Per capita income is less than that of whites; moreover, Asian Americans tend to live in areas with a higher than average cost of living, such as Hawaii, New York, and California. Also, Asian Americans statistically must achieve higher education levels than white Americans to equal their incomes. Sowell’s portrait of British West Indian immigrants to the United States as an ethnic success story has also been challenged. These immigrants, economist Thomas Boston argues in Race, Class, and Conservatism (1988), exceed both the average British West Indian and the average native-born black American in educational level; hence, the superior West Indian economic performance in the United States is no simple rags-to-riches story. Sociologist Suzanne Model, using census data, asserts that any West Indian socioeconomic lead over American-born African Americans had disappeared by 1990. If the “model” part of “model minority” has been criticized, so has the “minority” part, at least regarding Asian Americans. Although everyone agrees that certain Asian American groups have been unjustly persecuted, some scholars, such as political scientist Lawrence Fuchs, argue that no Asian American group was ever discriminated against as consistently, or for as long a time, as black Americans were. Some view the Asian American model minority stereotype as potentially harmful to Asian Americans themselves. Writing during the late 1980’s, Takaki and Woo warned that widespread acceptance of the stereotype might lead to governmental indifference to the plight of those Asian Americans who are poor and to neglect of programs that would help Asian immigrants learn English and find jobs. Takaki, worried about the loss of legitimate minority status, points to examples of low-income Asian American university students being denied aid under educational opportunity programs. He also thinks that the envy generated among black and white Americans by the model minority stereotype partially explains the violent anti-Asian incidents of the 1980’s. Paul D. Mageli Further Reading Barringer, Herbert R., Robert W. Gardner, and Michael J. Levin. Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993. Compares Asian Americans’ income, education, and family structure with those of other Americans. Chua, Lee-Beng. Psycho-social Adaptation and the Meaning of Achievement for Chinese Immigrants. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Sociological analysis of the adaptative processes which Chinese immigrants to the United States experience, with a close examination of traditional Chinese belief systems. 553

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Gibson, Margaret A. Accommodation Without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Examines the excellent academic performance of American-born Sikh youth in the face of majority prejudice. Kitano, Harry L. Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Classic exposition of the model minority thesis that ascribes the economic success of Japanese Americans after World War II to specific cultural traits inherited from Japan. Kramer, Eric Mark, ed. The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority.” Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Collection of essays on a wide variety of topics relating to cultural assimilation and the notion of “model minorities,” with particular attention to immigrant communities in Japan and the United States. Louie, Vivian S. Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Close study of the pressures within Chinese American families for children to excel in education. Petersen, William. Japanese Americans: Oppression and Success. New York: Random House, 1971. Elaboration and expansion of the model minority thesis propounded in Petersen’s 1966 article in The New York Times Magazine. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Chapter titled “Breaking Silences” is an eloquent and easily accessible critique of the Asian American model minority thesis. See also Asian American education; Asian American women; Assimilation theories; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Generational acculturation.

Mongrelization Definition: Racialist term for allegedly negative results of race mixing Immigration issue: Nativism and racism Significance: The term “mongrelization” was adopted by racist proponents of immigration restriction during the early decades of the twentieth century to dramatize their fear of the consequences of permitting unlimited immigration into the United States. A leading exponent of ideas about “mongrelization” was Madison Grant, a naturalist who was a founder and president of the New York Zoological Soci554

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ety. In his book The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Grant classified national and ethnic groups as “races” and arranged them in an evolutionary order, with the “Nordic” peoples of northern and western Europe considered the most highly evolved, and the peoples of eastern and southern Europe, especially Jews, Italians, and Slavs, ranked as markedly inferior. Grant believed that it had been scientifically established that mental as well as physical traits were genetically determined and could not be significantly altered by the environment. He also believed that in any mixture, inferior genes would triumph and “produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.” Grant was sure that the surviving traits will be determined by competition between the lowest and most primitive elements and the specialized traits of Nordic man; his stature . . . and his splendid fighting and moral qualities, will have little part in the resultant mixture.

Milton Berman Further Reading Curran, Thomas J. Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Perea, Juan F., ed. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 1996. See also Asian American stereotypes; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; Nativism; Xenophobia; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Muslims Identification: Immigrants to North America who adhere to the Islamic religion Immigration issues: Demographics; Middle Eastern immigrants; Religion Significance: As early as the late nineteenth century, Muslim American communities of significant size and number were forming in the United States and Canada. However, some people felt threatened by the rise of Islam in North America, and these fears reached unprecedented levels toward the end of the twentieth century. 555

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In March, 1998, Newsweek magazine estimated that six million Muslim Americans were living in the United States. It found that 42 percent of these Muslims were African Americans, 24.4 percent were South Asian Americans, 12.4 percent were Arab Americans, and 21.2 percent were of other ancestry. According to that article, although the Muslim comImage Not Available munity faces many hostile stereotypes, it had enough political clout for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to host a Ramadan party for Muslims, who overwhelmingly supported her husband over Senator Robert Dole during the 1996 presidential election. Newsweek found that the children of Muslim immigrants were adopting mainstream American ways. Muslim women have active mosque and professional roles, and some young people are dreaming of becoming Muslim American politicians. Muslims actively opposed the U.S. bombing of Iraq, and the American Muslim Council organized a lobbying campaign against this bombing. In December, 1997, the Muslim crescent and star, the Christian cross, and Jewish Hanukkah lamps were featured in Washington, D.C., holiday displays. However, vandals painted a swastika—the Nazi symbol—on the Muslim display. Like the Muslim symbols in the display, the religion of Islam has gained some level of recognition and influence in the United States but has not yet gained acceptance. Many Americans and Canadians see Islam as a threatening, foreign religion that inspires vicious acts of terrorism. This impression, reinforced by the 1993 bombing by foreign-born Muslims of the World Trade Center in New York, led many Americans to suspect that Muslims were behind the April, 1995, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Some committed hate crimes against innocent Muslim Americans. Later it was determined that the Oklahoma bombings had been committed by a non-Muslim American man, Timothy McVeigh. By the late 1990s, many American Muslims feared that their civil rights might be compromised if further acts of terrorism were committed in the name of Islam. That fear was realized after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York City’s World Trade Center of September 11, 2001. In the tightening of immigration rules and inroads into civil liberties that followed those events, Muslims—and even immigrants, such as Sikhs, whom many Americans thought looked like Muslims—suffered disproportionately. 556

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Practical Problems Being a practicing Muslim is not easy in the United States and Canada. Muslims do not eat pork or pork products or consume alcohol and often find it hard to obtain meat butchered according to Islamic tradition. Required to pray five times per day, Muslims sometimes find it difficult to fit their prayers into schedules designed for non-Muslims. Schools and businesses generally do not recognize Islamic holidays, and not every community has a mosque. The practical problems that are experienced by devout Muslims are in many respects similar to those experienced by Orthodox Jews. During Ramadan (the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which falls in the spring), Muslims and their families fast during the day. This makes it difficult for Muslims to entertain non-Muslim business clients and social guests. During their holiest month, observant Muslims suffer from heightened isolation. Future Projections The Muslim population in North America is increasing. Muslim Americans will almost certainly outnumber Jewish Americans within the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and the Muslim Canadian population is also growing rapidly. Therefore, both Muslims and the larger society have a strong interest in Muslim participation in interfaith relations. In addition, religious scholars are beginning to document New World changes in Islam to illustrate the impact of democracy and multiculturalism on a nearly fourteen-hundred-year-old religious tradition. Susan A. Stussy Further Reading Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, ed. Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Collection of interviews with Muslim immigrants to North America. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Critical analysis of the erosion of civil liberties in the United States since September 11, 2001, with attention to the impact of federal policies on immigrants and visiting aliens, particularly Muslims. Ghanea Bassiri, Kambiz. Competing Visions of Islam in the United States: A Study of Los Angeles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Scholarly community study by a Muslim author that covers the African American, Arab, Pakistani, and Iranian elements of the Los Angeles Muslim community and the differences in belief and practice among the groups. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2004. Examination of issues of Arab American identity and challenges to their rights after the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Hassoun, Rosina J. Arab Americans in Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003. Study of one of the largest concentrations of Arab immigrants in North America. 557

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Kaldas, Pauline, and Khaled Mattawa, eds. Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Collection of short stories focusing on themes of great interest to immigrant Arab children. Koszegi, Michael A., and J. Gordon Melton, eds. Islam in North America: A Sourcebook. New York: Garland, 1992. Impressive collection of essays on Islam in the United States and Canada. Chapter 7 includes a useful directory of Islamic organizations. Leonard, Karen Isaksen. Muslims in the United States: The State of Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003. Perhaps the most useful starting point for further research, this study contains a historical overview of Muslim immigration to the United States, as well as chapters on various aspects of Muslim immigration and adjustment to living in America. Marvasti, Amir B., and Karyn D. McKinney. Middle Eastern Lives in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Study of Middle Eastern families living in the United States. Nordquist, Joan, comp. Arab and Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern Origin: Social and Political Aspects—A Bibliography. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Reference and Research Services, 2003. Comprehensive bibliography of diverse aspects of Middle Eastern immigrants. Orfalea, Gregory. The Arab Americans: A Quest for Their History and Culture. Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Study of the special challenges faced by Arab immigrants in the United States. Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Traces the development of Islam in the United States from colonial days, when Muslim slaves tried to preserve their religion in the African diaspora, to the present Muslim expressions of faith in the African American community. See also Arab American intergroup relations; Arab American stereotypes; Arab immigrants; Asian Indian immigrants and family customs; Iranian immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jews and Arab Americans; Middle Eastern immigrant families.

Nativism Definition: Negative ethnocentrism, or an intense opposition to an internal minority on the grounds of its alien connections and its apparent threat to the dominant culture Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; European immigrants; Irish immigrants; Nativism and racism 558

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Significance: In the United States, periodic upsurges of nativism have resulted in immigration restrictions, attempts to force minority groups to assimilate into Anglo-American culture, and vigilante violence against immigrant groups. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has always exhibited a certain ambivalence toward immigrants. On one hand, immigrants have been welcomed as a necessary addition to the labor force and as a source of economic growth. On the other hand, they have been feared and resented because of their alien ways and their competition for jobs and political power. Nativists, the most outspoken critics of immigration, feared that the American way of life, and even the republic itself, was in danger from the constant stream of newcomers. They developed an ideology of nativism that comprised three identifiable strains: anti-Catholic nativism; racial nativism; and antiradical nativism. These three strains often overlapped in the various nativist organizations that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anti-Roman Catholic Nativism Anti-Catholic nativism had its roots in the religious views of the earliest English settlers in the American colonies. As products of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the early colonists viewed the pope as a foreign monarch who exercised dangerous influence through the Roman Catholic Church. The large influx of Irish Catholic immigrants during the early nineteenth century fueled an upsurge of anti-Catholic propaganda, which alleged that Irish Catholics were agents of the pope intent on undermining republican institutions. During the 1830’s, inventor Samuel F. B. Morse’s tract, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (1834), which called for the formation of the Anti-Popery Union to resist the papal plot, became required reading in many Protestant Sunday schools. In 1834, an anti-Catholic mob burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Ten years later, riots erupted in Philadelphia when Irish Catholics opposed the use of the Protestant King James version of the Bible in public schools. The American Protective Association (APA), organized in 1887, was the most visible manifestation of anti-Catholic nativism during the late nineteenth century. Its members swore never to vote for Catholic candidates, employ Catholic workers over Protestants, or join with Catholic strikers. The APA drew strong support from workers in the midwestern and Rocky Mountain states who feared competition from cheap Irish labor. By the late 1890’s, however, as Irish and German Catholics became an important part of the electorate, the more extreme anti-Catholic sentiment dissipated. The APA itself disappeared during the 1890’s. Racial Nativism During the late nineteenth century, a racial strain of nativism, cultivated by the self-professed guardians of Anglo-Saxon culture and apparently supported by scientific research, began to be directed against im559

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migrant groups. Ever since colonial times, white settlers had viewed themselves as culturally and physically different from, and superior to, Native Americans and African Americans. Some intellectuals adapted the biological research of Charles Darwin to argue that certain races would inevitably triumph over others because of their inherent superiority. English and American intellectuals confidently trumpeted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” and its institutions, and researchers set out to “prove” their cultural assumptions by measuring the cranial volumes of skulls from members of various ethnic groups and devising crude intelligence tests. As a new wave of immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe began to arrive, these newcomers were quickly labeled racially inferior. Racial nativism reached its zenith during the early twentieth century. Influenced by the European eugenics movement, with its emphasis on breeding the right racial groups, American nativists expressed alarm over the impact of the new immigrants. Madison Grant’s widely read The Passing of the Great Race (1916) summarized many of the racial nativist arguments. He argued that the superior Nordic “race” was being destroyed by the influx of southern and eastern Europeans, and warned that race mixing would result in an inferior hybrid race and the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Jewish and Italian immigrants, in particular, were often singled out for criticism in nativist publications because of their alleged racial inferiority.

Short-lived nativist newspaper published in Boston in 1852. (Library of Congress)

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Antiradical Nativism Immigrants also came under attack for political reasons during the late nineteenth century. Nativist writers worried that most immigrants came from nondemocratic societies, harbored socialist or anarchist sympathies, and would foment revolution in the United States. The participation of some immigrants in the labor agitation of the period seemed to confirm these fears of alien radicalism. Antiradical nativism intensified following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the onset of an economic crisis in the United States. Although most immigrants were not socialists, immigrants nevertheless constituted a majority of the membership of the American Socialist Party. During the Red Scare of 1919-1920, when many Americans feared that a communist revolution was imminent, immigrants and radicalism became synonymous in the public mind. Impact on Public Policy Nativism had its most significant impact on public policy in the area of immigration restrictions designed to discriminate against Asians and southern and eastern Europeans. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act cut off further immigration by Chinese laborers. During World War I, Congress overrode a presidential veto to enact literacy tests for all immigrants, which discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans who had less access to basic education. During the 1920’s, the United States adopted a system of quotas based on national origins for European immigration, imposing a maximum annual limit of 150,000 and allocating most of the slots to northern and western European countries. The national origins quota system formed the basis of immigration law until it was abolished in 1965. Richard V. Damms Further Reading Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Exploration of the evolution of nineteenth century nativism to twentieth century conservatism. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Classic historical work on early nineteenth century nativism. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with an emphasis on cultural and social trends, attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Standard account of American nativism after the Civil War. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of 561

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immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s, with an afterward on U.S. immigration policies after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Perea, Juan F., ed. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Collection of essays that identify a resurgence of nativism during the 1980’s and 1990’s. See also Asian American stereotypes; Assimilation theories; Cultural pluralism; Japanese immigrants; Japanese segregation in California schools; Know-Nothing Party; Mongrelization; Sacco and Vanzetti trial; Xenophobia; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Naturalization Definition: Process by which immigrants become citizens Immigration issues: Chinese immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Civil rights and liberties Significance: The U.S. Supreme Court has played a critical role in determining the rights of both resident aliens, noncitizens legally living in the United States, and undocumented aliens, noncitizens in the country illegally. The Court has also influenced the rights of aliens to become citizens and to maintain citizenship. The U.S. Constitution touches on the definition of citizenship only indirectly and makes no provisions for how aliens, or noncitizens, may become citizens. Moreover, although the amendments to the Constitution enumerate rights, it is not clear to what extent these rights apply to people who live in the United States but are not U.S. citizens. Because the Supreme Court is entrusted with interpreting the Constitution and establishing whether laws are consistent with this document, it has played a critical role in determining the rights of aliens. Exclusion and Deportation Congress has the constitutional power to decide which noncitizens may enter the United States and who may be excluded. During the first century of the nation’s existence, Congress made little use of its power to restrict immigration. One of the earliest pieces of immigration legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years. The Supreme Court up562

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held the right of Congress to exclude an entire national group from entering the country in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) and in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893). In theory, Congress could exclude all aliens from entering the United States because there is no constitutional right to immigration. Prior to entry, aliens have no constitutional rights. In Chew v. Colding (1953), the Court ruled that those who have successfully entered the country are protected by First Amendment rights to free speech, Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal protection of the law. Outside of the United States, however, these protections do not apply. The lack of constitutional rights by aliens seeking entry became clear in Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei (1953). Ignatz Mezei was a Romanian citizen who was a resident of the United States for twenty-five years. He returned to Romania to visit his mother in 1948. When he attempted to reenter the United States, first an immigration inspector and then the U.S. attorney general ordered him excluded. He was held on Ellis Island, which the Court ruled was “on the threshold” of U.S. territory. His confinement there could not be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment because he was not in U.S. territory. The Court affirmed this principle in United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy (1950), in which the German wife of an U.S. citizen was denied entry into the United States and held for months on Ellis Island. The Knauff-Mezei doctrine, that aliens outside the United States do not have constitutional protection, continued to be in effect, but the Court moderated it somewhat in the following years. In Landon v. Plasencia (1982), the Court ruled that an alien who has established legal resident status in the United States does not lose that status merely by traveling overseas and may be deported but not excluded. Congress has consistently excluded individuals on political grounds, such as association with a government opposed to the United States or membership in a political organization thought to be opposed to U.S. interests. Writers, artists, and intellectuals have often been among those excluded on these grounds. In 1969 the Justice Department refused to grant a visa to the Belgian journalist Ernest Mandel, who had been invited to speak at universities in the United States. Citing the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Court upheld the right of Congress to determine on political grounds who can be admitted to the country. In deportation, a noncitizen who has already entered the United States, either legally or illegally, is denied the right to remain and sent back to the country of origin. The Court officially recognized the right of Congress to enact deportation laws in the 1892 case Nishimura Ekiu v. United States. Aliens facing deportation enjoy more rights than those who are excluded because the former are actually in U.S. territory. Undocumented aliens, those in the United States illegally, make up the bulk of the deportations from U.S. soil. Deportation proceedings are not considered trials but civil procedures, so 563

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those being deported do not have all the safeguards given to defendants in criminal trials. Being an undocumented alien is in itself a reason for deportation. However, resident aliens are also subject to deportation. In Marcello v. Bonds (1952), the Court upheld the government’s right to deport a resident alien for violation of a marijuana law years earlier. In Galvan v. Press (1954), the Court approved the deportation of Juan Galvan, a resident alien, for having been a member of the Communist Party, even though it was a legal party at the time that Galvan was a member. Rights to Employment A number of Court rulings have affirmed the right of aliens residing legally in the United States to employment without discrimination by state or federal regulation. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, requires that all states give equal protection of the laws to all persons residing within their jurisdictions. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court struck down a San Francisco city ordinance aimed at preventing Chinese nationals from operating laundries on the grounds that this was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Four decades later, in Truax v. Raich (1915), the Court ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas statute that limited the number of aliens that any employer could hire. Citing Yick Wo, the Court ruled that the language of the Fourteenth Amendment included noncitizens under its protection. The Court’s decision observed that the right to work at common occupations was essential to the personal freedom that the amendment was intended to secure. Further, it observed that the power to control immigration is given by the Constitution to the federal government. If a state limits the opportunity for immigrants to earn a living, the state effectively limits immigration, which it does not have the authority to do. The Court has permitted both state and federal governments to refuse employment to noncitizens in some circumstances. The job of police officer, for example, may be restricted to citizens only. In Foley v. Connelie (1978), the Court upheld a New York state law that allowed only citizens to become state troopers. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who wrote the decision in this case, explained that police officers are found throughout American society and exercise wide powers over those U.S. citizens who have contact with them. Similarly, in Cabell v. Chavez-Salido (1982), the Court upheld a California statute requiring probation officers and those in similar occupations to be U.S. citizens. The idea that governmental positions of authority and responsibility can be restricted on the basis of citizenship was also extended to teachers in Ambach v. Norwick (1979). In this case, the Court gave its support to a New York statute that prohibited giving permanent teacher certification to an alien unless the alien demonstrated an intention to become a U.S. citizen. In general, the Court has ruled against barring noncitizens from civil service jobs, but it has left state and federal governments the right to exclude foreigners from civil service positions when there are compelling political rea564

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sons to do so. In Sugarman v. Dowell (1973), the Court struck down a New York law that allowed only citizens to get competitive civil service jobs because people holding high-level and elective positions, who were in the most sensitive and authoritative positions, were exempted. In Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong (1976), the Court ruled that a regulation of the federal Civil Service Commission that prohibited noncitizens from taking civil service jobs violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal legal protection. However, the Court also indicated that the regulation would be permissible if it came from the president or Congress, rather than from a mere governmental agency. The Court has distinguished between employment discrimination on the basis of ethnic or racial background and discrimination in employment on the basis of citizenship by private employers. Although discrimination against noncitizens by state or federal government is usually prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection, the employment policies of private employers are not laws and therefore are not covered by this guarantee. In private employment, employers are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. None of these prohibitions, however, keeps private employers from discriminating on the basis of citizenship. In Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co. (1972), the Court ruled that Farah Manufacturing Company’s decision to hire only U.S. citizens was not equivalent to discrimination on the basis of national origin because the company did employ large numbers of Americans of Mexican descent, the primary national origin of the noncitizens who were refused employment. Public Education and Public Assistance By definition, noncitizens who are in the United States illegally do not have the right to employment. However, the Court has issued rulings that have recognized the rights of both resident aliens and undocumented aliens to some of the other advantages of American society. One of the advantages of residence in the United States is access to the U.S. system of free public education. By the early twentieth century, free and compulsory public schools had been established in all areas of the United States. The right of children of noncitizen immigrants to attend these schools was widely accepted. Indeed, the “Americanization” of children from various ethnic backgrounds was seen by Americans in many areas with large immigrant populations as an important function of public education. The right of children of illegal immigrants to education at the public expense was a much more controversial issue, particularly as popular concern over illegal immigration increased from the late 1960’s onward. This issue came before the Court in the controversial case of Plyler v. Doe (1982). A section of the Texas Education Code allowed school districts in Texas to either prohibit undocumented alien children from attending public schools or to charge the families of these children tuition. Those who opposed the Texas statute maintained that employers in the state deliberately attracted illegal immigrant labor and that keeping undocu565

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mented aliens out of the school system would help to maintain a permanently disadvantaged and undereducated class of workers. Those who supported it pointed out that undocumented aliens could not expect to enjoy the benefits of a society when they were in that society illegally. They also claimed that if the Court upheld the statute, states would be obligated to extend every public benefit to all illegal immigrants who managed to escape capture. In its 1982 decision, the Court for the first time explicitly stated that undocumented aliens did enjoy the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and that the Texas statute was therefore unconstitutional. However, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who delivered the decision, also stated that some public benefits can be denied to adult illegal immigrants because adult aliens in the United States without proper documents are intentionally breaking the law. Although the right of resident aliens to public education has been widely accepted, their right to public assistance has been controversial. The case Graham v. Richardson (1971) dealt with the right of aliens to receive welfare benefits. The petitioners in this case challenged two state statutes: an Arizona statute requiring individuals receiving disability benefits to be U.S. citizens or residents for a minimum of fifteen years and a Pennsylvania statute that denied general assistance benefits to noncitizens. The Court ruled that the states could not restrict to citizens the benefits of tax revenues to which aliens had also contributed because this would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, the Court also observed that the federal government had the power to set policies toward immigrants. This made it possible for Congress to restrict access of resident aliens to some welfare benefits in 1996. Rights of Suspected Illegal Aliens The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is charged by Congress with regulating the movement of aliens into the United States. This means that USCIS officers have the power to detain, interrogate, and arrest those suspected of having entered the United States illegally. However, the Fourth Amendment guarantees to all those on U.S. soil—citizens or noncitizens—freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Because many Americans living near the Mexican border are of Mexican or Hispanic ancestry, moreover, the duty of the USCIS to find suspected illegal aliens raises the continual danger that Mexican or Hispanic Americans will be placed under suspicion without justification. In making rulings on issues in this area, the Court had to balance the duties of immigration officers with the Fourth Amendment rights of suspected illegal aliens. One of the chief limitations on the detention of suspected illegal aliens resulted from the case of Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973). In this case, the Court ruled that immigration officials could not use roving patrols far from the border to stop vehicles without a warrant or probable cause. This meant that immigration officers had to be able to demonstrate that a search by a rov566

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ing patrol took place either at the border or at the equivalent of a border, such as an airport. The practice of detaining suspected illegal aliens because of appearance or the language they speak is a difficult matter because it can easily be seen as discrimination against members of minority groups in the United States. The District of Columbia circuit court, in Cheung Wong v. Immigration and Naturalization Service (1972), ruled that immigration officers were justified in stopping and interrogating two individuals who did not speak English and who were Chinese in appearance outside of a restaurant that was suspected of employing illegal immigrants. This issue came before the Court in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975). The Court ruled that roving patrols could stop vehicles to question suspected illegal aliens, but they could not use appearance alone as a justification for stopping people. Race or apparent ancestry alone was not enough cause for an officer to detain an individual. In Brignoni-Ponce, though, the Court did allow officers to take ancestry into consideration along with other factors when deciding to investigate the legal status of a suspected alien. Naturalization and Denaturalization Resident aliens who are not U.S. citizens may become citizens through naturalization. The conditions under which an alien may become a citizen are determined by Congress,

Naturalization class in Chicago’s Hull-House during the early twentieth century. (University of Illinois at Chicago, University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection)

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and the power of Congress to set these conditions has been continually affirmed by the Supreme Court. The first Naturalization Act, passed in 1790, restricted citizenship through naturalization to “free white persons” of good character. Before the Civil War (1861-1865), nonwhites born on U.S. soil were considered ineligible for citizenship. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, nonwhites born in the United States were granted U.S. citizenship, but people who were not of European ancestry continued to be ineligible for naturalization. The Court upheld this racial restriction on naturalization in the case of Ozawa v. United States (1922). Takao Ozawa had immigrated to the United States as a child in 1894, graduated from Berkeley High School, and attended the University of California. When Ozawa applied for citizenship at the U.S. District Court for the Territory of Hawaii, the court ruled that he was qualified for citizenship in every way except one: He was not white. On appeal, the Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa was not entitled to naturalization as a U.S. citizen because he was not of European descent. Although the United States no longer has naturalization policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race, this is a result of legislation rather than of judicial rulings on discrimination in naturalization. Naturalization laws continue to require that new citizens support the basic form of government found in the United States. Those who, during a ten-year period before application for naturalization, were members of anarchist, communist, or other organizations considered subversive may be barred from citizenship. The Court placed some limitations on these political restrictions in Schneiderman v. United States (1943). Just as Congress determines the conditions under which individuals may be naturalized, it also historically determined the conditions under which they may be denaturalized, or stripped of their naturalized citizenship. Before the late 1950’s, the Court usually did not question the right of Congress to take citizenship from the foreign born. However, in Trop v. Dulles (1958), Chief Justice Earl Warren recognized the seriousness of denaturalization when he observed that deprivation of citizenship could be seen as a violation of “the principles of civilized treatment.” In Schneider v. Rusk (1964), the Court ruled that naturalized citizens could not lose their citizenship merely for living outside of the United States for extended periods of time. The greatest judicial limitation on denaturalization came in Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), in which a Polish-born citizen’s citizenship was removed for voting in an Israeli election. The Court ruled that Congress has no constitutional power to remove citizenship without the voluntary renunciation of the individual concerned. After this case, denaturalization has been limited to cases in which the government can prove that a foreign-born person obtained citizenship illegally or fraudulently. Carl L. Bankston III 568

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Further Reading Becker, Aliza. Citizenship for Us: A Handbook on Naturalization and Citizenship. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Legal Immigration Network, 2002. Practical guidebook for immigrants who wish to become American citizens. Carliner, David, Lucas Guttentag, Arthur C. Helton, and Wade Henderson. The Rights of Aliens and Refugees: The Basic ACLU Guide to Alien and Refugee Rights. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Somewhat dated but still useful practical handbook on the rights of noncitizens put together by the American Civil Liberties Union. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered is naturalization. Jacobson, David. Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Sociologist’s argument that the growth of immigrant populations in the United States and other countries has led to the granting of rights formerly reserved to citizens. Jacobson maintains that this has weakened the status of citizenship. Kondo, Atsushi, ed. Citizenship in a Global World: Comparing Citizenship Rights for Aliens. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Collection of essays on citizenship and immigrants in ten different nations, including the United States and Canada. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Collection of essays on a variety of naturalization issues. Neuman, Gerald L. Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Academic consideration of problems in applying U.S. constitutional law to noncitizens and discusses case law interpretations of immigrant rights. See also Citizenship; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Naturalization Act of 1790.

Naturalization Act of 1790 The Law: Federal law defining rules for naturalization Date: March 26, 1790 Immigration issues: Citizenship and naturalization; Government and politics; Laws and treaties 569

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Significance: This inaugural federal involvement in immigration—an area previously under control of individual states—established the first uniform rules for naturalization. Naturalization is the legal process by which a state or country confers its nationality or its citizenship to a person after birth. In most cases, the primary beneficiaries of naturalization are immigrants. After the American colonies gained their independence from Great Britain in 1787, each state adopted different rules for conferring U.S. citizenship upon its residents. President George Washington suggested that a uniform naturalization act at the federal level was needed. Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to pass uniform laws for naturalization. Congress exercised this power, for the first time, when it passed “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” on March 26, 1790. This act granted “all free white persons” with two years of residence the right of citizenship. In addition, the act stated that “the children of citizens of the U.S. that may be born beyond sea, or out of limits of the U.S., shall be considered as natural born citizens.” In effect, the act created two separate classes of people: free and white citizens, able to hold political office and entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship, and nonwhite persons, ineligible for membership in the U.S. community. The act further reinforced the part of the Constitution that limits membership in Congress to citizens who meet stipulated residence requirements and the presidency to natural-born citizens. The Naturalization Act was repealed five years later. Stephen Schwartz Further Reading Helewitz, Jeffrey A. U.S. Immigration Law. Dallas: Pearson Publications, 1998. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Cable Act; Chinese Exclusion Act; Immigration Act of 1917; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Immigration law; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Naturalization; Page law; War Brides Act.

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NGUYEN V. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the citizenship of a child of an unmarried U.S. parent who was born abroad Date: June 11, 2001 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Court cases Significance: In this ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute that established different citizenship rules for persons born abroad and out of wedlock depending on whether the father or mother was a U.S. citizen. Tuan Anh Nguyen was born out of wedlock in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and Joseph Boulais, a U.S. citizen. From the age of six, Nguyen was raised by his father as a permanent U.S. resident. After Nguyen pled guilty to sexually assaulting a child at the age of twenty-two, an immigration judge ordered him deportable. Nguyen and Boulais appealed on the basis of citizenship claims to the Board of Immigration Appeals; however, they were unable to meet the citizenship requirements for one born abroad by a citizen father and a noncitizen mother. The appeals court for the Fifth Circuit found that the gender distinctions in the immigration laws were unconstitutional. By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court, reversed the ruling of the lower court. In writing the opinion for the Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy applied the precedent of evaluating a gender-based classification with “intermediate scrutiny,” meaning that the classification must serve important governmental objectives and that any discriminatory provisions must be substantially related to those objectives. Kennedy concluded that this particular gender-based distinction in immigration law was valid for two reasons: to ensure that a biological parent-child relationship exists and to ensure that the child and citizen parent have a demonstrated opportunity to develop a meaningful relationship consisting of “real, everyday ties.” Thomas Tandy Lewis Further Reading Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Natu571

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ralization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. See also

Amerasians; Vietnamese immigrants; War brides.

Operation Wetback The Event: U.S. government program for the deportation of thousands of Mexican citizens Date: June 10-July 15, 1954 Place: California, Arizona, and Texas Immigration issues: Border control; Government and politics; Illegal immigration; Latino immigrants; Law enforcement; Mexican immigrants; Stereotypes Significance: Despite the investment of significant government resources, Operation Wetback had little long-range impact on the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States. A fact of life for the nation of Mexico is the existence of a highly prosperous colossus to the north, the United States. While there has long been a tendency for Mexican workers to seek to enter the more prosperous United States to work, the government of Mexico took a number of steps during the 1940’s and 1950’s to provide good jobs to keep workers at home. These steps included the building of irrigation projects and factories. Most of these projects were located in northern Mexico and had the effect of drawing a large number of workers to the border area. Jobs were not available for all who came, and many chose to make the short trip across the border into the United States to find work. The average annual income of workers in the United States was more than ten times that of Mexican workers—a strong enticement for Mexican laborers to emigrate to the United States, legally or illegally, temporarily or on a permanent basis. Mexican laborers who crossed the border into the United States during the early twentieth century most often found seasonal agricultural jobs. Starting about 1930, however, the Great Depression meant that many nowunemployed U.S. workers were willing to do back-breaking work in the fields for low pay. Accordingly, job opportunities for Mexicans evaporated, and those who did not leave voluntarily often were deported. Then, in 1941, war raised levels of employment in the United States, and as U.S. farmworkers departed to enter the military or to work in war factories, Mexican workers 572

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again began to enter the U.S. to do agricultural work. Most of the jobs they found were in California, Arizona, and Texas. The Bracero Program The U.S. and Mexican governments worked together to start a formal system called the bracero program. The program involved recruitment of Mexican laborers, the signing of contracts, and the temporary entry of Mexicans into the United States to do farmwork or other labor. The Mexican government favored the bracero program primarily because the use of contracts was expected to guarantee that Mexican citizens would be fairly treated and would receive certain minimum levels of pay and benefits. The U.S. government favored this formal system because it wanted to control the numbers of Mexicans coming into the United States and hoped the use of contracts would make it easier to ensure that the workers left when the seasonal work was completed. Labor unions in the United States supported the program because bracero workers could be recruited only after certification that no U.S. citizens were available to do the work. The bracero program worked with some success from 1942 until its discontinuation in 1964. In some years, however, and in certain localities, the use of illegal, non-bracero workers from Mexico continued. Some U.S. employers found too much red tape in the process of securing bracero laborers, and

Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande into Texas in 1914 to escape the disorder of the Mexican Revolution. The tradition of Mexican immigrants wading across the river to enter the United States gave rise to the pejorative term “wetbacks” for undocumented Mexican immigrants. (Library of Congress)

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they also noted that bracero wage levels were much higher than the wages that could be paid to illegal immigrants. Many Mexicans crossed the border illegally, because not nearly enough jobs were available through the bracero program. When the U.S. economy stumbled in 1953 and 1954, many U.S. citizens began to speak out against the presence of illegal aliens. They complained that illegal immigrants were a drain on U.S. charities and government programs. They also claimed that the immigrants took jobs at substandard wages that should go to U.S. citizens at higher wages. When reporters first asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Attorney General Herbert Brownell if they intended to enforce vigorously the immigration laws, both men seemed uninterested in the issue. As popular agitation increased, however, the Eisenhower administration began to develop plans for Operation Wetback. The operation was designed to round up illegal aliens and deport them, while forcing large farming operations to use the limited and controlled bracero labor instead of uncontrolled and illegal alien labor. Operation Wetback was under the overall control of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), directed by Joseph Swing, while day-to-day operations were supervised by an official of the U.S. Border Patrol, Harlon B. Carter. Operation Wetback Begins Operation Wetback took its name from a slang term first used in the southwestern United States to refer to Mexican immigrants who swam the Rio Grande or otherwise crossed into the U.S. illegally, seeking economic opportunities. The INS and its Border Patrol launched the operation in California on June 10, 1954, relying heavily on favorable press coverage to secure the support and cooperation of the general public. INS officials greatly exaggerated the number of agents they had in the field and the number of illegal aliens who had left or had been deported. Press coverage in California was generally quite favorable to Operation Wetback, praising the professional attitude of Border Patrol and INS agents. On the first day, more than a thousand persons were sent out of California on buses chartered by the INS. For several weeks, the number of daily deportations hovered around two thousand. The deportees were handed over to Mexican authorities at border towns like Nogales in Sonora, and the Mexican government sent them farther south by rail, hoping to prevent any quick reentry into the United States. By July 15, the main phase of Operation Wetback in California was complete. On that day, Border Patrol agents began their work in Texas. There, they met stiff local opposition from powerful farm interests, who were quite content to hire illegal aliens and pay them only half the prevalent wage earned by U.S. or bracero workers. Agents met a hostile press as well, and in some cases had trouble securing a meal or lodging. Nevertheless, the operation resulted in the deportation by bus of tens of thousands of illegal workers from Texas. The INS conducted smaller phases of Operation Wetback in Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and other states. Most of the 574

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illegals picked up nationwide were farmworkers, but some industrial workers were apprehended in cities from San Francisco to Chicago. During the operation, some complaints were registered about the conduct of Border Patrol officers. The officers sometimes were characterized as harsh and hateful in their actions, and they were regularly accused of harassing U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry. Some of these complaints seem to have been without foundation, particularly in Texas, where the powerful farm interests opposed the entire operation. On the other hand, there were a number of documented cases of U.S. citizens who had darker skin or Hispanic surnames being apprehended and deported to Mexico. Many of the aliens who were detained were kept in camps behind barbed wire pending their deportation. Some Mexicans and Mexican Americans spent several months hiding in terror, having quit their jobs to prevent their being apprehended at work. Deportees had to pay for their bus passage back to Mexico, to the dismay of human rights activists, who pointed out the unfairness of making someone pay for a trip he was being forced to take. The INS responded that the deportees should agree that paying for a bus trip back to Mexico was preferable to prosecution under the immigration laws and a possible jail sentence. Stereotypes Operation Wetback opened the door to stereotypes of Mexicans in the non-Hispanic community: Some press reports implied that the aliens were ignorant, disease-ridden union busters. As for the effectiveness of the operation in meeting its goals, nearly 100,000 illegal immigrants were returned to Mexico in the space of about three months. On the other hand, INS claims that more than one million illegal immigrants fled to Mexico on their own rather than face arrest were grossly exaggerated. Moreover, the boost to the bracero program given by Operation Wetback was only temporary; many employers returned to the use of illegal workers before the end of the 1950’s. Operation Wetback, while effective in the short term, provided no long-term solutions to the needs of Mexican workers, U.S. employers, or those who clamored for a more restricted U.S. border. Stephen Cresswell Further Reading García, Juan Ramon. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. The only book on this subject, García’s work thoroughly reviews the background, the deportation program, and the aftermath. Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005. Reexamination of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States that looks at the subject in the context of American dominance over Mexico. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Green575

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wood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. General history of the problem of illegal immigration in the United States that includes a chapter covering Operation Wetback and the bracero program. Norquest, Carrol. Rio Grande Wetbacks: Migrant Mexican Workers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971. Discusses Operation Wetback in the larger context of Mexico-United States immigration issues. United States. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Mexican Agricultural Laborers Admitted and Mexican Aliens Located in Illegal Status, Years Ended June 30, 1949-1967. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968. Shows changes in numbers of bracero workers and apprehensions of illegal Mexican immigrants. See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Bracero program; Deportation; Illegal aliens; Latinos; Latinos and employment; Mexican deportations during the Depression; Naturalization; Undocumented workers.

OZAWA V. UNITED STATES The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on citizenship requirements Date: November 13, 1922 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Court cases; Japanese immigrants Significance: In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese aliens did not qualify as “white” and therefore could not be naturalized as citizens. During the early twentieth century, naturalization was under the effective control of local and state authorities. In California and other Pacific states, fears of the “yellow peril” or “silent invasion” of Asian immigrants were deeply entrenched and politically exploited. In such states, citizenship had been repeatedly denied to both Chinese and more recent Japanese settlers, although there were some rare exceptions. The prevailing belief among the nativist majority was that such settlers should be ineligible for U.S. citizenship. Background Partly to test the Alien Land Law—a California law passed in 1913 that barred noncitizens from owning land in that state—Takao Ozawa sought U.S. citizenship in defiance of a 1906 law (U.S. Revised Statute, section 2169) that limited naturalization to “free white persons,” “aliens of Afri576

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can nativity,” and “persons of African descent.” Although born in Japan, Ozawa had been educated in the United States. He was graduated from high school in Berkeley and for three years attended the University of California. He was aware that some issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) had been naturalized, even in California. Specifically, Ozawa may have known of Iwao Yoshikawa, the first Japanese immigrant to be naturalized in California. Yoshikawa had arrived in San Francisco from Japan in 1887. A law clerk in his homeland, he had studied U.S. law in his adopted country and served as a court translator. In 1889 he began the naturalization process, which, presumably, was completed five years later, although there is no extant record of his naturalization. His case was publicized because it broached such issues as mandatory citizenship renunciation and the legality of dual citizenship. Regardless of Ozawa’s knowledge of Yoshikawa, on October 16, 1914, Ozawa applied for U.S. citizenship before the district court for the territory of Hawaii. He argued that he had resided in the United States and its territory of Hawaii for a total of twenty years, had adopted the culture and language of his host country, had reared his children as Americans in heart and mind, and was, by character and education, wholly qualified for naturalization. The district court ruled against Ozawa on the grounds that his Japanese ethnicity denied him access to naturalization. Ozawa then took his case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which passed it to the U.S. Supreme Court for instruction. In turn, the Supreme Court upheld the laws that in effect declared Ozawa ineligible for citizenship. Rather than question the justice of the racial restrictions on naturalization, the opinion limited its focus to clarifying the meaning of the term “white persons” and distinguishing between “Caucasian” and “white person,” determining that the latter, while a more inclusive term than the former, is not so inclusive as to include persons of Asian extraction. It concluded that a person of the Japanese race is not a free white person, within the meaning of U.S. Rev. Stat. § 2169 [the 1906 law], limiting the provisions of the title on naturalization to aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity, and to persons of African descent, and therefore such Japanese is not eligible to naturalization as a United States citizen.

In tracing the history of the naturalization laws, the Court attempted to demonstrate that all statutes preceding the 1906 act contested by Ozawa had the same intent: the selective admission to citizenship based on the interpretation of “white,” not as a racial appellation but as a reflection of character. It argued that the words “free white persons” did not indicate persons of a particular race or origin, but rather that they describe “personalities” and “persons fit for citizenship and of the kind admitted to citizenship by the policy of the United States.” According to that doctrine, any non-African alien, if desired by Congress, might be deemed “white.” Thus, the Court reasoned, 577

OZAWA V. UNITED STATES when the long-looked-for Martian immigrants reach this part of the earth, and in due course a man from Mars applies to be naturalized, he may be recognized as white within the meaning of the act of Congress, and admitted to citizenship, although he may not be a Caucasian.

Regardless of this race disclaimer, however, the Court, in reasoning through its arguments, distinguished between “whites” (all Europeans, for example) and “nonwhites” (such as the Chinese) on ethnic grounds pure and simple. The decision throughout sanctioned racial biases that assumed that an individual’s character was in some way delimited by his or her racial heritage. For example, at one point it provided a formulaic approach to determining citizenship eligibility for persons of mixed blood, supporting the idea, widely observed, that in order to be construed as white, a person must be “of more than half white blood.” Clearly, the decision upheld the seriously flawed assumption that character and racial heritage were inextricably interrelated. Nativist Sentiment The Supreme Court’s ruling reflected the prevailing nativist bias against Asian immigrants, an attitude that was reflected in both law and policy through the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, no more formidable barriers to citizenship were erected than those facing the issei (first-generation Japanese), Chinese, and other Asian immigrants. In 1924, an isolationist Congress enacted an immigration act placing numerical restrictions on immigrants allowed into the United States based on national origin. One provision of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reid Act, excluded immigrants ineligible for naturalization. Its obvious aim—to bar entry of Japanese aliens—quickly led to a deterioration in the diplomatic relations between Japan and the United States. The plight of Japanese already in the United States also worsened in the anti-Asian climate. In separate rulings, the Supreme Court went so far as to revoke citizenship that had been granted to some issei. In 1925, it even denied that service in the armed forces made issei eligible for naturalization, overturning a policy that had previously been in effect. Not only were issei barred from naturalization; in many states, “alien land laws” prohibited them from owning land and even entering some professions. That codified prejudice partly accounts for but does not justify the terrible treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when 112,000 of them, including 70,000 nisei (persons of Japanese descent born in the United States), were rounded up and incarcerated in detention centers that bore some grim similarities to the concentration camps of Europe. It was not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that the longstanding racial barriers to naturalization finally came down. John W. Fiero Further Reading Curran, Thomas J. Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Traces the origins of anti-immigrant movements in America, relating 578

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the xenophobic tradition to the exclusionist laws and practices of the inclusive period. Hosokawa, Bill. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York: William Morrow, 1969. Good general study of Japanese Americans and their struggle against legal and social discrimination. Some photographs; no bibliography or notes. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. O’Brien, David J., and Stephen Fugita. The Japanese American Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Scholarly study with focus on the legal and social problems confronting Japanese Americans before World War II and their rapid acculturation in its wake. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Survey of the history and economic and social conditions of Asian immigrants to the United States, both before and after the federal immigration reforms of 1965. Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Excellent and sensitive overview of Asian American history, with extensive notes and photographs. Wilson, Robert Arden, and Bill Hosokawa. East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States. New York: William Morrow, 1980. General history of Japanese migration to North America. Appendices provide census statistics, text of an exclusionist law, and a letter to President Woodrow Wilson pleading the issei cause. Yuji, Ichioka. “The Early Japanese Immigrant Quest for Citizenship: The Background of the 1922 Ozawa Case.” Amerasia 4, no. 2 (1977): 12. Brief account of the reasons for Ozawa’s legal action and his desire for citizenship. See also Citizenship; Immigration Act of 1921; Japanese immigrants; Naturalization; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Page law The Law: Federal legislation designed to prevent Asian prostitutes from entering the United States Date: March 3, 1875 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Illegal immigration; Laws and treaties Significance: Designed to prohibit Chinese contract workers and prostitutes from entering the United States, the Page law was eventually used to exclude Asian women in general. 579

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Chinese woman with her children and brother-in-law awaiting a streetcar in San Francisco around 1904. The sedate black outfit worn by the woman is typical of the dress worn by married Chinese women who wanted to distinguish themselves from prostitutes. (Library of Congress)

On February 10, 1875, California congressman Horace F. Page introduced federal legislation designed to prohibit the immigration of Asian female prostitutes into the United States. Officially titled “An Act Supplementary to the Acts in Relation to Immigration,” the Page law evolved into a restriction against vast numbers of Chinese immigrants into the country regardless of whether they were prostitutes. Any person convicted of importing Chinese prostitutes was subject to a maximum prison term of five years and a fine of not more than five thousand dollars. An amendment to the law prohibited individuals from engaging in the “coolie trade,” or the importation of Chinese contract laborers. Punishment for this type of violation, however, was much less severe and was much more difficult to effect, given the large numbers of Asian male immigrants at the time. As a consequence of this division of penalties, the law was applied in a most gender-specific manner, effectively deterring the immigration of Asian females into the United States. Within seven years following the implementa580

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tion of the law, the average number of Chinese female immigrants dropped to one-third of its previous level. Enforcement and Implementation An elaborate bureaucratic network established to carry out the Page law’s gender-specific exclusions was a catalyst for the decline in Chinese immigration rates. American consulate officials supported by American, Chinese, and British commercial, political, and medical services made up the law’s implementation structure. Through intelligence gathering, interrogation, and physical examinations of applicants, the consulate hierarchy ferreted out undesirable applicants for emigration and those suspected of engaging in illegal human trafficking. This investigative activity evolved well beyond the original intent of the law’s authors. Any characteristic or activity that could be linked, even in the most remote sense, to prostitution became grounds for denial to emigrate. Most applications to emigrate came from women from the lower economic strata of society; low economic status therefore became a reason for immigration exclusion. The procedure was a complicated one. Many roadblocks were placed in the way of prospective immigrants. Acquiring permission to emigrate took much time and effort. Passing stringent physical examinations performed by biased health care officials was often impossible. Navigating language barriers through official interviews aimed at evaluating personal character often produced an atmosphere of rigid interrogation, bringing subsequent denial of the right to emigrate. Such a complex system aimed at uncovering fraudulent immigrants placed a hardship upon those wishing to leave China. Because Hong Kong was the main point of departure for Chinese emigrating to the United States, all required examinations were performed there with a hierarchy of American consulate officials determining immigrant eligibility. In a sense, the Page law actually expanded consulate authority beyond any previous level. Corruption Charges Such increased power of the consular general in implementing the law provided an opportunity for possible abuses of power. In 1878, the U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, John Mosby, accused his predecessors of corruption and bribery. According to Mosby, David Bailey and H. Sheldon Loring were guilty of embezzlement. Both men were accused of setting up such an intricate system to process immigration applications that bribery soon became the natural way to obtain the necessary permission to do so. Mosby went on to charge that Bailey had amassed thousands of dollars of extra income by regularly charging additional examination fees regardless of whether an exam was performed. Mosby also accused Bailey of falsifying test results and encouraging medical personnel to interrogate applicants in order to deny immigration permission to otherwise legal immigrants. Most of the allegations of corruption surrounded the fact that monies allotted by the federal government for implementation of the Page law were far 581

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below the amount Bailey required to run his administration of it. Given this scenario, the U.S. government scrutinized Bailey’s conduct. No indictments came from the official investigation, however, and Bailey, who had previously been promoted to vice consul general in Shanghai, remained in that position. Further examination of Bailey’s tenure in Hong Kong has suggested that, if anything, he was an overly aggressive official who made emigration of Chinese women to the United States a priority issue of his tenure there rather than an opportunity for profit. Bailey was replaced in Hong Kong by H. Sheldon Loring. Unlike his predecessor, Loring did not enforce the Page law with as much vigor, allowing a slight yet insignificant increase in the annual numbers of Chinese immigrants. Nevertheless, Loring did enforce the law in an efficient manner, publicly suggesting that any shipowner who engaged in the illegal transport of women would be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law. Even so, Loring was accused of sharing Bailey’s enthusiasm for the unofficial expensive design of the immigration procedure. During Loring’s tenure, questions about his character began to surface mostly on account of his past relationships with individuals who engaged in questionable business practices in Asia. By the time that Mosby replaced him, such questions had become more than a nuisance. The new U.S. consul to Hong Kong began to describe his predecessor as a dishonest taker of bribes. Once again, the official dynamics of such charges brought forth an official inquiry from Washington. Like the previous investigation of Bailey, however, this investigation produced no official indictment against Loring. The only blemish concerned an additional fee that Loring had instituted for the procuring of an official landing certificate. As there was precedent for such a fee, Loring, like his predecessor, was exonerated of all charges. Having decided that his predecessors were indeed corrupt, yet unable to prove it, Mosby pursued enforcement of the Page law with relentless occupation. Keeping a posture that was above accusations of corruption, Mosby personally interviewed each applicant for emigration, oversaw the activities between the consulate and the health examiners, and eliminated the additional charges for the landing permits. In the end, the numbers of Chinese immigrants remained similar to those of Loring and below those of Bailey, with the numbers of Chinese female immigrants continuing to decline. Aside from being free from charges of corruption, Mosby’s tenure in office was as authoritative as those of his predecessors. Regardless of the personalities of the consulate officials in charge of implementing the Page law, the results were the same: The number of Chinese who emigrated to the United States decreased dramatically between the 1875 enactment of the law and the enactment of its successor, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Furthermore, the law’s specific application to Chinese women ensured a large imbalance between numbers of male and female immigrants during the period under consideration. In the long run that imbalance negatively affected Asian American families who had settled in the United States. 582

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The barriers that the Page law helped to erect against female Chinese immigrants made a strong nuclear family structure within the Asian American community an immigrant dream rather than a reality. Thomas J. Edward Walker Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes Further Reading Cheng, Lucie, and Edna Bonacich, eds. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Examines the development and intent of political movements among immigrants in the United States before World War II. Foner, Philip, and Daniel Rosenberg, eds. Racism, Dissent, and Asian Americans from 1850 to the Present. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. A documentary history that traces the political and social segregation of immigrants. Indicates the existence of more than one view among whites, African Americans, and others not of Asian descent on the position of Asians in the United States. Gordon, Charles, and Harry Rosenfield. Immigration Law and Procedure. Albany, N.Y.: Banks Publishers, 1959. An excellent history of immigration and emigration law. Covers the period from the 1830’s to the 1950’s; sectional discussions of European, African, Chicano, and Asian immigrant experiences. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Peffer, George Anthony. “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experience of Chinese Women Under the Page Law, 1875-1882.” Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (Fall, 1986): 28-46. Solidly documented research article showing the relationship between the Page law and engendered immigration of Chinese people during the first seven years of its existence. Tung, William L. The Chinese in America, 1820-1973. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1974. Provides chronological and bibliographical references on the changing status of Chinese people in American society. Includes good primary source materials. See also Asian American women; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese immigrants; Coolies; Discrimination; Mailorder brides; Picture brides; War brides; Women immigrants.

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Palmer raids The Event: Federal government roundup and deportation of suspected radicals Date: 1919-1920 Place: United States Immigration issues: African Americans; Civil rights and liberties; Government and politics; Law enforcement; Nativism and racism Significance: Fueled by extremist, anti-immigrant sentiments, the Palmer raids represented the most spectacular anti-civil liberties excesses of the Red Scare of 1919-1920. In an attempt to rid the nation of political radicalism, the U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, ordered various police units of the federal government to raid the homes and headquarters of suspected radicals and aliens. The raids and the arrests that followed were directed against those, usually foreign-born, who were accused of radicalism. This offense covered everything from parliamentary socialism to Bolshevism, encompassing “radical feminism,” anarchism, and labor militancy as well. In the immediate postwar period, American resistance to anything foreign stemmed from rumors and formal pronouncements of a great radical foreign conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the American way of life. Many Americans, encouraged by political rhetoric and official pronouncements, were convinced that a communist revolution was imminent and that a reaffirmation of traditional American values, coupled with a good dose of law and order, was the only thing that would make America safe for Americans. Political Context of the Raids In several respects, Palmer’s antiradical crusade continued the espionage and sedition prosecutions of the war years. The Overman Committee investigating German espionage during World War I, for example, simply switched to hunting communists and socialists after the war. The most spectacular excesses of the “Red Scare” ended by 1921, but the scare remained part of the political climate in the United States for many years to come. Antiradicalism, for example, played a significant role in the political agitation for immigrant restriction and antiforeign sentiments that followed the raids. In 1919, the U.S. government and organizations purporting to defend “Americanism” responded to any activity that was perceived to be radical: strikes were busted (1919 steel and coal strikes, for example); newspapers called for government action against all radicalism, perceived or real; duly elected legislators were denied their seats in the New York State Assembly; and the National Security League, whose main weapon was “organized patrio584

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tism,” successfully lobbied Congress to pass laws authorizing the deportation of aliens and other “irreconcilable radicals.” The American Legion, advocating the Americanization of United States society, declared that radicals were mostly from non-English-speaking groups. Individual state legislatures, among them those of Idaho and Oregon, came close to passing laws forbidding any publication not written in English. According to historian Frederick Allen, It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the U.S. Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror . . .

Public reaction to radicalism so affected Palmer that he ordered the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation) to infiltrate and investigate all radical groups. Following the implementation of this program, the bureau’s head, J. Edgar Hoover, reported back to Palmer that revolution was imminent. Palmer then organized a federal dragnet aimed at stepping up the raids and arrests. On January 2, 1920, federal agents arrested more than six thousand people, most without proper warrant, incarcerating them in jails and detention centers for weeks and even months without granting rights to legal counsel or bail. Of those arrested, 516 were eventually deported, including the feminist, anarchist, and militant labor organizer Emma Goldman and fellow anarchist and labor organizer Alexander Berkman. African American Victims The intolerance expressed in the Palmer raids took many forms. Some advocated book censorship and others inflicted agony on “hyphenated Americans,” including African Americans, who were arguably the chief victims of the Palmer raids and their aftermath. As African Americans moved to the North, northern whites reacted in fear. Many of them perceived the influx of these visibly distinct Americans to be a threat to their social status. The employment of African Americans threatened white workers with a status deprivation. In response, many whites struck out at the newcomers, rekindling racist fears of the past. For the emigrating African Americans, the move north signaled a refusal to accept a caste system in the South which had excluded so many of them from the general prosperity of the nation. Tension mounted as black aspirations clashed with racial norms. The racial conflict which followed immediately became linked to the antiradical mood of the time. White mainstream America feared social upset from any source, whether it was black Americans or radical immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan The mood of society in 1919 was as conducive to racial tension as it was to the Red Scare. Fueled by a witch hunt to weed out Bolsheviks and other radicals from America’s inner fabric, racial prejudice be585

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came a natural extension of a patriotic call for complete Americanism. From Chicago to Tulsa, racial relations often became racial violence. It was in just such an atmosphere that the Ku Klux Klan experienced a rebirth. Fighting for its own version of “one hundred percent Americanism,” the Klan played upon the fears and hostility that existed between urban and rural America. Klan propaganda, advocating a concern that public morals were being weakened by the mixing of the races and by “Red-inspired” trade unionism, sought to rally traditional Americans to its banner. The Klan’s chief A. Mitchell Palmer before he became U.S . attor- organizer, Edward Y. Clarke, roused his constituents against a “Jewishney general. (Library of Congress) Banker-Bolshevik conspiracy” that the Klan saw leading an international movement to take control of America. This fit right in with Palmer’s warning that a Bolshevik uprising would occur on May Day, 1920. Racism was fused to anti-Bolshevism and all that it implied. Because Jews were perceived by many in rural Protestant America to be of foreign birth, the Klan’s propaganda was received with patriotic fervor. Most rural Americans identified radicalism with foreigners. Jews, Roman Catholics, and immigrants fit into this xenophobic milieu. By 1921, Klan membership passed 100,000 and continued to grow. The Americanism crusade fit in nicely with concerns of American business over the growth of trade unionism. Strikes, after all, were a threat to profits, and American businesspeople were in no mood to have profits reduced. Labor organizers, in turn, called for a reorganization of the industrial system to promote workers to a position on par with the power and prestige of industrial capitalists. In a countervailing move against trade unionism, the business community called upon patriotism to defeat any “Bolshevik-inspired” labor organizing activity. Trade unionism was labeled as anti-American, radical, and foreign by design. American business viewed the struggle of the worker for better wages as the beginning of armed revolution in America. Anything or anyone associated with workers’ rights was therefore anti-American and should be treated as such. If this meant intolerance of constitutional guarantees, so be it. Legacy of the Raids A search for a human rights perspective on the Palmer Raids revolves around three interrelated questions. First, what gave 586

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rise to the Red Scare which precipitated the raids? Second, why were the raids aimed for the most part at an alien component of the labor movement? Third, was the entire phenomenon an aberrant episode or an action which set the tone for the rest of the decade? The Palmer raids became part of the “normalcy” of the Harding administration. Antiradicalism continued to play a role throughout the decade in the agitation for immigrant restriction and as a catalyst for the business community’s countervailing response of trade unionism. Significant antiimmigration activity resulted in the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which ended three centuries of free European immigration. This law laid the groundwork for continued anti-alien activity as some nativeborn Americans lashed out against those who, by their mere presence, challenged traditional norms. Union activity was confronted by the emergence of the antiunion “American Plan,” pursued by business throughout the decade. This effort, launched by employers to resist labor unionization on every front, included the use of labor spies to infiltrate the labor movement, the manipulation of public opinion through antiradical and anti-alien propaganda, and the hiring of strikebreakers to counter organized labor’s ultimate weapon. A major force behind the plan was the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Throughout the decade, NAM expended a very large amount of money and political influence to lobby against trade unionism. Palmer’s replacement, James Daugherty, complemented this activity in the courts. During Daugherty’s tenure in office, he was influential in obtaining many federal injunctions against work stoppages, forcing striking workers back to work. The courts also made it possible for trade union activities to be classified as a restraint of trade and therefore to be made illegal. The prevailing mood of the nation greeted such determinations with enthusiasm. At the beginning of the decade, 20 percent of all nonagricultural workers belonged to labor unions. By the end of the 1920’s, because of a combination of antiradicalism, employer pressure, and unfriendly government activity, this percentage was cut in half. Nativism and the Wobblies Support for official antiradical activity also fanned the fires of nativism. The Palmer raids continued a wartime obsession for internal security. A postwar recession, high unemployment, and failures of international cooperation led to an overall atmosphere of an inability to confront emerging social pathologies. Antiradical and deportation remedies of the Departments of Justice and Immigration were part of the nativistic renewal of the period. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) played a key part in the postwar antiradical renewal. Communist influence within the group encouraged anti-Bolshevist passions to surface against it. Pursuit of the Wobblies had been going on since their organization in 1905. Their attempt to unite all workers into one big union, and their objection to and rejection of 587

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revered American values such as free enterprise and upward social mobility, painted an anti-American and therefore foreign picture of the organization. Americans saw the Wobblies as a threat to the internal security of the nation and as a conduit of alien ideas, and the IWW became a feared organization. Whether it deserved this reputation was not the point. Federal policies toward the group took on an antiradical and antialien tone. By the time of America’s entry into World War I, the immigration, espionage, and sedition laws had been broadened to allow arrest and deportation of IWW officials. Many were jailed for conspiracy because of their opposition to the war. The organization’s leader, William Dudley (Big Bill) Haywood, fled from the United States to the Soviet Union, where he died and was buried in the Kremlin wall. IWW paranoia, and the fervent nativism which it helped to spawn, was reaffirmed after the war. Wobblies, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, were rounded up in antiradical and antialien crusades. The use of troops in the raids and the denial of legal rights to those arrested and held became at once an official answer to a nation’s security problem and an appeasement to an insecure public’s extreme xenophobia. This “normalcy” continued throughout the decade. Thomas J. Edward Walker Further Reading Briggs, Vernon M. Immigration and American Unionism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Scholarly survey of the dynamic interaction between unionism and immigration. Covers the entire sweep of U.S. national history, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press, 2003. Study of the modern problem of protecting constitutional rights while combatting terrorism whose historical background touches on the Palmer raids. Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Critical biography of the long-time director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that includes a chapter on the Palmer raids. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. “Intellectual history” that encompasses and synthesizes political, economic, and social change by providing a summary of agitation for immigrant restriction and against immigration during the early twentieth century. Kiel, R. Andrew. J. Edgar Hoover: The Father of the Cold War. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Extensive review of Hoover’s career, including the era of the Palmer raids. Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. The significance of this study lies in its examination of the problems of aliens and dissenters. Deals with the period from 1890 to 588

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1920, when the fear of foreigners and radicals increased in intensity. Concludes that such fears ultimately made aliens and radicals scapegoats for the country’s ills. Tuttle, William M., Jr. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1982. History that attempts to explain the race riot and its causes in terms of individuals and groups. The analysis gets its foundation from a revealing overview of 1919’s Red Summer and the Red Scare, detailing the racism and antiradicalism of that period. Wexler, Alice. Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Details the last twenty years of the life of American anarchist Emma Goldman, who was deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, at the height of the anticommunist movement. Presents the image of this radical feminist as “the most dangerous woman in America.” See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Immigration Act of 1921; Immigration Act of 1924; Immigration law; Nativism; Naturalization; Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

Picture brides Definition: Women who have arranged marriages with strangers—usually of the same nationality—in foreign lands that were facilitated by the prior exchange of photographs and letters Immigration issues: Families and marriage; Japanese immigrants; Women Significance: Picture bride marriages were especially common among Japanese immigrants to the United States and Hawaii before World War II. Between 1907 and 1924, more than fourteen thousand women immigrated to Hawaii and the mainland United States from Japan and Korea. Many of these Asian immigrants were picture brides--women who were selected as wives on the basis of their photographs. Some of their weddings were conducted by proxy, with only the women and pictures of the grooms in attendance. When the women reached their destinations, photographs were used to match them with their husbands or husbands to be. Often, however, the parties involved did not match the photographs that had been exchanged. The popularity of marrying picture brides among Japanese immigrants can be attributed to a combination of social, cultural, economic, and historical factors. It was first of all a logical extension of the tradition of arranged marriages. The lesser gender value placed upon daughters also encouraged 589

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their departure from their homeland into an alternative opportunity. In modern Japan, the exposure of women to education made them receptive toward the idea of travel, and the industrialization of the population paved the way for women to become laborers in America. More important, using family stability as a form of labor control, the plantations of Hawaii had long encouraged contracts between laborers and potential spouses. The experiences of picture brides—especially their conflicts with their husbands as a result of differences in age, education level, family background, personal aspirations, and taste—are a constant source of inspiration for writers and artists, as in Cathy Song’s poetry collection Picture Bride (1983) and Yoshiko Uchida’s 1987 novel and director-writer Kayo Hatta’s 1995 motion picture of the same title. Research indicates that picture brides could become accomplished in poetry and the arts, and hence serve as transmitters and creators of culture. Because picture brides often survived long after their husbands’ deaths, they have come to be venerated as matriarchs and culturebearers by younger generations. Balance Chow Further Reading Hoobler, Dorothy, Thomas Hoobler, and George Takei. The Japanese American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924. New York: Free Press, 1988. Makabe, Tomoko. Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada. Translated by Kathleen Chisato Merken. Ontario: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1995. Uchida, Yoshiko. Picture Bride. 1987. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. See also Japanese immigrants; Mail-order brides; Page law; War brides; Women immigrants.

PLYLER V. DOE The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the rights of noncitizens Date: June 15, 1982 Immigration issues: Court cases; Illegal immigration Significance: This Supreme Court decision extended the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee the right of noncitizens to public social services. 590

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In May, 1975, the Texas legislature enacted a law that denied financial support for the public education of the children of undocumented aliens. The state’s local school districts, accordingly, were allowed to exclude such children from public school enrollment. The children of noncitizen aliens who henceforth paid for their public school education still were permitted to enroll. Despite the statute, Texas public school districts continued enrolling the children of undocumented aliens until the 1977-1978 school year, when, amid a continuing economic recession and accompanying budget tightening, the law was enforced. An initial challenge to the 1975 law arose in the Tyler Independent School District in Smith County, located in northeastern Texas, but similar challenges in other school districts soon produced a classaction suit. The problem that had inspired the state law was the massive influx— principally of Mexicans but also of persons from other Central American countries—into Texas, as well as into New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Some of these people entered the United States for seasonal agricultural jobs, while others, undocumented, remained. Most were poor and seeking economic opportunities unavailable to them in Mexico and Central America. Figures released by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that when the Plyler case arose, between two and three million undocumented aliens resided in Texas and other southwestern portions of the United States. Texas claimed that 5 percent of its population, three-quarters of a million people, were undocumented aliens, roughly twenty thousand of whose children were enrolled in Texas public schools. With recession adversely affecting employment, many of the state’s taxpayers asked why they should bear the financial burdens of educating illegal aliens, as well as providing them with other benefits, such as food stamps and welfare payments. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision on Plyler v. Doe was delivered by Associate Justice William Joseph Brennan, Jr., a justice whom many observers considered a liberal but whose overall record was moderate. The Plyler majority ruling upheld a previous decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court that had ruled for the defendants. Chief Justice Warren Burger vigorously dissented from the majority opinion, along with justices Byron White, William Rehnquist, and Sandra Day O’Connor. On behalf of the Court’s majority, Brennan declared that the 1975 Texas statute rationally served no substantial state interest and violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed “that no State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Although the overriding concern of Reconstruction politicians, judges, and states ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment was to afford protection to newly emancipated African Americans, the equal protection clause increasingly had been interpreted to mean what it stated: guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to any person—precisely the line of reasoning taken by Brennan. 591

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Brennan and the Court majority likewise disagreed with the Texas argument that undocumented aliens did not fall “within its jurisdiction,” thus excluding them and their children from Fourteenth Amendment guarantees. Such an exclusion, Brennan declared, condemned innocents to a lifetime of hardship and the stigma of illiteracy. Impact of PLYLER The Plyler decision was novel in two important respects. It was the first decision to extend Fourteenth Amendment guarantees to each person, irrespective of that person’s citizenship or immigration status. Second, the Court majority introduced a new criterion for determining the applicability of Fourteenth Amendment protections: the doctrine of heightened or intermediate scrutiny. The Court avoided applying its previous standard of strict scrutiny. It recognized that education was not a fundamental right and that undocumented aliens were not, as it had previously phrased it, a “suspect class,” in the sense that they, like African Americans, historically had been victims of racial discrimination. Heightened scrutiny was warranted, Brennan and the majority agreed, because of education’s special importance to other social benefits and because children of undocumented aliens were not responsible for their status. Chief Justice Burger and the three other dissenting, generally conservative, justices, who were staunch advocates of judicial restraint, strongly criticized Brennan and the majority for what the dissenters considered to be arguing political opinions instead of adhering to sound jurisprudence. The dissenters seriously questioned heightened scrutiny as a judicial standard and found that the Texas statute substantially furthered the state’s legitimate interests. The Plyler decision represented a significant departure from the decision rendered by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Scott v. Sandford (1857), a decision that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed in part to nullify by political means. Plyler’s heightened standard of scrutiny, however, continued through the mid-1990’s to be controversial and confusing, both within the Supreme Court and among legal observers. The issue arising when the equal protection clause was applied to cases not involving racial discrimination had been raised in Buck v. Bell (1927), when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes denounced such decision making as “the usual last resort of constitutional arguments.” In Plyler, Brennan and the majority saw no chance to apply the Court’s already accepted classification of strict scrutiny to equal protection cases, because Plyler’s defendants, the undocumented aliens, were not victims of institutionalized racial discrimination or of reverse discrimination. They were illegals as a consequence of their own conscious actions. Nevertheless, as legal scholars observed, in order to prevent hardship and stigmas from afflicting schoolchildren, who were not responsible for their parents’ actions, the Plyler majority introduced an intermediate level of classification with their standard of heightened scrutiny. Such a standard raised questions about 592

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whether undocumented aliens and their families enjoyed rights to other government benefits, such as welfare assistance, medical care, and food stamps. The difficulties confronted by Texas, by other Southwestern states, and by illegal aliens and their children were alleviated somewhat by a broad federal amnesty program launched in 1992. Clifton K. Yearley Further Reading Aleinikoff, Thomas A., and David A. Martin. Immigration: Process and Policy. 2d ed. Saint Paul, Minn.: West, 1991. A careful review of modern U.S. immigration policies. Discusses the problems posed by illegal, undocumented aliens and the difficulties faced by government policy makers in coping with illegals. Blasi, Vincent, ed. The Burger Court. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. An authoritative yet readable analysis of the Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, which did little to modify civil rights decisions of his predecessors. Also clarifies Brennan’s attitudes and decisions. Curtis, Michael Kent. No State Shall Abridge. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986. A clear, scholarly exposition of the role played by the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights in modern U.S. jurisprudence, including civil and criminal rights, racial and reverse discriminations, and interpretations of due process. Hull, Elizabeth. Without Justice for All. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. A precise study bearing on the problems raised in Plyler, the historical plight of resident and illegal aliens and their families, and the varying status of their constitutional rights. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Broad discussion of modern federal government immigration policies that considers all sides of the debates about the rights of illegal aliens. Mirande, Alfredo. Gringo Justice. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. A spirited, dismaying critique of U.S. judicial and political treatment of Hispanic immigrants by both the states and the federal government. Provides excellent context for understanding important aspects of the Plyler case. Nelson, William. The Fourteenth Amendment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. An authoritative analysis of the evolution of the Fourteenth Amendment from a set of political principles to a vital part of twentieth century judicial decision making. Good analyses of the Supreme Court’s standards of scrutiny, including the intermediate or “heightened” scrutiny applied in Plyler. See also Asian American education; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Lau v. Nichols; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Naturalization; Proposition 187; Proposition 227. 593

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Polish immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the eastern European nation of Poland and its neighbors Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Refugees Significance: Because of their large numbers and tendency to settle in culturally diverse areas, Polish Americans have figured prominently in interethnic relations. As they have moved through the assimilation process, Polish Americans have been both victimized by prejudice and accused of discriminating against other ethnic and racial groups. Polish Americans are generally defined as those whose heritage was connected to the Polish language, culture, and Roman Catholicism. Polish Americans who arrived between 1608 and 1800 came for personal reasons, and those emigrating from 1800 to 1860 came to escape foreign control over their homeland. The third and largest wave, of 2.5 million immigrants between 1870 and 1924, sought to escape the economic hardships of their homeland. After World War II, a fourth wave of Poles came to the United States as displaced persons or political refugees fleeing the communist government. Intergroup Relations The relatively small number of Poles arriving during the first two immigration periods meant that intergroup relations were rather limited. The settlers who arrived from 1608 to 1800 did not establish communities, and relations with others in the United States were almost exclusively on an individual basis. However, Polish Americans who served during the American Revolution were regarded positively, and the political refugees, who made up the bulk of the next wave, gained the respect of Americans for their dedication to independence, nationalism, and liberalism. The large group of Poles arriving during the 1870-1924 wave interacted as a group with established American society, with earlier immigrants, and with other eastern and southern European immigrants. Because most Polish immigrants came to the United States to work as unskilled laborers in urban-industrial areas, established Americans viewed them as essential but not necessarily welcome additions. The vast differences in language and customs and the formation of distinct ethnic communities caused many people to question whether Poles could ever adapt to American society. Established Americans also mistrusted Poles because of their support of labor unions and their use of alcoholic beverages, which were contrary to Protestant ideals of individualism and sobriety. Relations between Polish Americans and earlier immigrants were often strained. Poles resented the English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish immigrants who constituted the skilled laborers and bosses in the mines, mills, and facto594

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ries. The Poles reacted against Irish American control of the Roman Catholic hierarchy by forming their own ethnic national parishes. This desire for a separate Polish Catholic identity became so strong that a schism with Roman Catholicism occurred when the Reverend Francis Hodur founded the Polish National Church in 1904. Although this group of Poles faced circumstances similar to those faced by other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, relations between these groups were not always the best. Poles held stereotypical views of and harbored resentments against other Slavs, and many had come to the United States with a tradition of anti-Semitism. When Poles and Lithuanians shared churches, the result was less than harmonious, and splits were usually the result. Although direct confrontations with Italians were not common, each group often accepted the prevalent stereotypes about the other. However, Polish American businesspeople often had solid working relationships with people of various ethnic backgrounds. Many young Polish immigrant women served as domestics in the homes of Euro-Americans or Jewish Americans and built a warm relationship with their employers. Despite the remnants of Old World anti-Semitism, Polish laborers and Jewish shopkeepers developed respectful and trusting business dealings. Poles cooperated with other immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to form labor unions. Their success in this venue played an important role in the establishment of unions as a powerful force in the United States.

Polish immigrant husking corn on a Connecticut farm in 1941. (Library of Congress)

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Polish Immigration to the United States, 1821-1898, 1920-2003 25,000 24,000 23,000 22,000 21,000 20,000 19,000 18,000 17,000 16,000 15,000 14,000 13,000 12,000 11,000 10,000 9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0

1939-1945 German occupation of Poland

1919 Restoration of Polish independence 1946-1989 Poland part of Soviet bloc during Cold War

?

1815-1918 Poland under foreign rule

1991-2000

2001-2003

1981-1990

1961-1970

1971-1980

1941-1950

1951-1960

1931-1940

1920

1921-1930

1891-1898

1899-1919

1881-1890

1861-1870

1871-1880

1851-1860

1831-1840

1841-1850

1821-1830

Source: U.S . Census Bureau. Data on specifically Polish immigration are not available for 1899-1919, when Poland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Assimilation and Intergroup Relations By the 1920’s, the passage of time and restrictive immigration laws hastened the assimilation process. Although Polish Americans were becoming more Americanized, new social structures were being established, altering intergroup relations. During the latter part of the twentieth century, Polish American intergroup relations involved the relations of the more elderly urban blue-collar workers, the whitecollar professionals, and the new associations of refugees from Poland. Many urban blue-collar workers came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. They endured a life of sacrifice and want but were able to gain social and economic mobility in the postwar boom years. However, by the 1970’s, economic decline had hit the major employers of many Polish Americans, and an increasing number of African Americans and Hispanics 596

Polish immigrants

had moved into traditionally Polish neighborhoods. Although most Polish Americans had adequate financial resources to sustain them into retirement, the combination of their weakened economic situation and the loss of their ethnic communities often resulted in resentment toward the newer residents. Although violent conflict was rare, tensions were high between urban Polish Americans and their new neighbors, the African Americans and Hispanics. Polish white-collar professionals, who often married non-Poles, tended to identify less with the ethnic group and more with the concerns of their socioeconomic class. At times, this caused them to become estranged from the older Polish Americans. The refugees from communism, relatively small in number, tended to affiliate with their socioeconomic and employment peers. Despite the differences in class and status, Polish Americans still face a certain degree of discrimination. Stereotypes that depict Polish Americans as lacking intelligence have been especially hurtful. Polish American acceptance of such humor has, perhaps, contributed to this prejudice. Although Polish Americans increasingly identify with middle-class values, some of these traditional patterns of intergroup dynamics persist. Paul J. Zbiek Further Reading Balch, Emily Greene. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Classic early study of Slavic immigrants including Poles. Bukowiczyk, John J. Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. Good general history of Polish immigrants in the United States. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Comparative study of the different challenges faced by members of eight major immigrant groups: the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles and Hungarians, Chinese, and Mexicans. Greene is also the author of The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.) Lopata, Helena Z. Polish Americans: Status Competition in an Ethnic Community. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Overview of the Polish American ethnic experience in one community. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1918. Reprint. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Another classic study of Polish immigrants that examines the condition of Poles in both the Old World and the New World. See also Anglo-conformity; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; EuroAmericans; European immigrants, 1892-1943; German immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Russian immigrants. 597

Proposition 187

Proposition 187 The Law: California voter initiative to limit public services available to undocumented immigrants Date: Voted on November 8, 1994 Place: California Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Latino immigrants; Laws and treaties; Mexican immigrants Significance: In this voter initiative, California residents expressed their resentment of the demands on state services made by the state’s large undocumented worker population. On November 8, 1994, approximately 60 percent of the voters of California marked their ballots in favor of Proposition 187, the so-called Save Our State or “SOS” initiative. Drafted by a conservative Orange County businessman, the proposition was designed to end state-funded education and welfare benefits for illegal aliens. It also limited publicly funded medical assistance available to illegal aliens, who could be treated only in life-threatening emergencies requiring immediate attention. Under provisions of the proposition, teachers and physicians were required to report illegal aliens to the immigration authorities. Hard pressed by an economic downturn and by a series of natural disasters including earthquakes, fires, and floods, the state of California was home to an estimated 1.6 million illegal aliens. Many of them held minimum-wage jobs that most Americans were reluctant to fill. The estimated annual cost to California for services related to illegal immigrants exceeded $3 billion. How much of this was offset by various taxes paid by these workers was a subject of debate. Both supporters and opponents of Proposition 187 agreed that this legislation was unconstitutional, violating both the equal protection guarantees of the U.S. Constitution and hundreds of antidiscrimination laws. The primary motivation of those who supported the initiative was to get the matter of providing public services to illegal aliens into the courts. Their ultimate aim was to overturn some legislation and to negate some of the related decisions handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Underlying the appearance of Proposition 187 on the ballot in 1994 was the campaign of Governor Pete Wilson, who rode a wave of conservatism into the state house in 1991. Wilson, a two-term U.S. senator with presidential ambitions for 1996, proposed legislation targeting illegal aliens. His programs were popular among voters who faced diminished employment opportunities, increased taxes, and decreased public services. Illegal aliens were identified as a cause of these problems. 598

Proposition 187

Wilson campaigned for the passage of Proposition 187 realizing that the national publicity such a campaign would generate could benefit him substantially among conservative voters, whose ranks were growing nationally. Despite its obvious defects, the proposition that six of every ten California voters approved enjoyed considerable popularity nationwide. Economic Effects Agriculture and mining had been mainstays of California’s economy since the sprawling territory achieved statehood in 1850, becoming the thirty-first of the United States. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, helped to build the state and became a fundamental part of its economy. California had long been one of several significantly multiethnic states. Many people count this among California’s greatest assets. California’s major industries, including defense and aerospace, began to feel severe economic pressures with the cessation of the Cold War during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Voters faced with uncertain economic futures resented having to pay taxes to help support those whose presence in their state and country was illegal. These undocumented immigrants contributed substantially to the state’s economy, however, by taking jobs that their legally documented counterparts were often unwilling to take and by paying taxes for unemployment insurance and supplemental security income, benefits to which they did not have access. Passage of Proposition 187 did not result in the disappearance of illegal immigrants from California. The conditions under which they remained there, however, were increasingly difficult. The full enactment of this initiative was blocked by the courts as test cases worked their way through the judicial system. Less than a week after the election, various groups had begun to test the law, and on November 14, 1994, a federal judge temporarily blocked enactment of the measure. It has been argued that Proposition 187 not only violated the U.S. Constitution and various laws but also created unacceptable conflicts between state law and professional ethics and responsibilities. For example, physicians are professionally obligated to treat any patient who requires treatment. A law mandating that they report patients who seek their professional services to the government violates the standards by which the medical profession traditionally has been guided. Consequences The repercussions following the passage of Proposition 187 were enormous. The vote had implications far beyond the matter of what services should be available to illegal aliens and their dependents. It reflected a major shift in the thinking of many Americans about the kind of nation the United States is becoming and suggested an undercurrent of racism. The proposition expanded debates on immigration at the national level. From the late 1960’s to the early 1990’s, Americans who had been unfairly disenfranchised became beneficiaries of legislation that accorded them the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Those who had been discriminated 599

Proposition 227

against because of race, gender, religion, sexual preference, or physical disability were now protected. Such programs as affirmative action required preferential treatment for those falling into the above categories in terms of employment, education, and other opportunities in organizations that receive government funding. These programs were intended to reverse the effects of past discrimination. In late July, 1995, the Board of Regents of the University of California voted to abolish affirmative action. They decided to end racial preferences in hiring and contracting by January, 1996, and end preferences in admissions to the nine campuses of the university system by January, 1997. Jack W. Peltason, president of the system, agreed to comply with the mandate, adding that the system sought to reflect California’s ethnic diversity in the populations of its nine campuses. Chancellor Chang-lin Tien of the University of California, Berkeley, had never strongly supported affirmative action. He accepted the regents’ recommendation that the universities in the system do everything they could to achieve diversity but without using preferences for admission based on race, gender, or ethnicity. R. Baird Shuman Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Jonas, Susanne, and Suzanne Dod Thomas, eds. Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. López, David, and Andrés Jiménez, eds. Latinos and Public Policy in California: An Agenda for Opportunity. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003. See also

Plyler v. Doe; Proposition 227; Undocumented workers.

Proposition 227 The Law: California voter initiative to abolish bilingual education in public schools Date: Voted on June 2, 1998 Place: California Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Education; Language; Latino immigrants; Laws and treaties; Mexican immigrants Significance: After thirty years of experimentation with bilingual education in California’s public schools, voters decided it did not work and voted overwhelmingly to end it in a ballot initiative. 600

Proposition 227

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Beginning the early education of schoolchildren in their own languages became a goal of California’s bilingual education policy during the 1970’s, when educators hoped that by giving children a strong educational start in their own languages, they would be better prepared to succeed after shifting over to English-language education. However, as time passed, that goal seemed impossible to achieve. California’s schoolchildren speak an estimated 140 different languages in their homes. To teach each group of them in their own languages before teaching them in English was beyond the resources of California’s massive education system. In June, 1998, the issue of bilingualism was placed before the voters of California in a referendum. Their response was strong: “No Mas”—no more bilingual education in their public schools. The liberal California of the 1960’s appeared to have reprogrammed itself in latter years with regard to social issues. In 1994, for example, Californians voted against providing government benefits to undocumented immigrants. Next, they voted against affirmative action. Finally, in November, 1997, voter groups filed petitions for a movement called English for the Children—a ballot measure sponsored by Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz, whose mother was an immigrant from Russia. In 1994, the Republican Unz had unsuccessfully challenged Republican incumbent Pete Wilson in the primary election for governor. California’s bilingual education controversy was also developing around the same time that the board of the Oakland Unified School District made its 601

Proposition 227

widely ridiculed pronouncement that Ebonics—black English—should be regarded as a language separate from English. Ironically, just as African Americans were split on the Ebonics debate, California’s Hispanic population was also splintered on the need for bilingual education. The Unz Initiative In 1987, just over 500,000 California children attended some type of bilingual classes. By 1997, the number had risen to nearly 1.4 million. According to a 1997 U.S. News & World Report story, California, with its burgeoning immigrant population, led the nation in proportion of its students who were not proficient in English, with a figure of 25 percent, compared with 6.7 percent of students nationally. By definition, these are students who cannot understand English well enough to keep up in school. Eighty-eight percent of California’s public schools had at least one limited English proficient (LEP) student, and 71 percent had at least twenty LEP students. (In 1997 the acronym LEP was changed to EL, for English learners.) Traditionally immigrants to the United States, speaking an assortment of languages, regard English as the language of upward mobility and want their children to learn it as quickly as possible. This attitude was still held by many immigrant families in California during the late 1990’s, and some of them were among the opponents to bilingual education. The largest non-English speaking groups in California were Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, 84 percent of whom indicated in late 1997 that they would support the Unz bilingual education initiative, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. That figure compared impressively with the 80 percent of white voters who indicated that they would back the initiative. The Unz measure was cochaired by Gloria Matta Tuchman, a Mexican American teacher who had used English immersion to teach students for about fifteen years. The measure also benefited from a strong endorsement from Jaime Escalante, the Bolivian immigrant who taught calculus to urban Latino youths and became California’s most famous schoolteacher—thanks, in part, to the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. The Unz initiative called for a one-year English immersion program, which many educators said wouldn’t prepare students for academic work in English, although it would allow them to speak more easily to their friends on the playground. Initially many state Republicans avoided the bilingual education debate, fearing that the Democrats would label supporters “racists.” They also recalled that while many Latinos had earlier begun by supporting Proposition 187, the ballot initiative to deny benefits to undocumented aliens, they later turned against it and also voted against the measure’s Republican supporters during the 1996 elections. Critics of the Unz measure argued that it ignored important research data that demonstrated successes in bilingual education programs. Supporters of the measure countered that bilingual education created an educational ghetto by isolating non-English speaking students and preventing them from becoming successful members of society. They also accused politicians and 602

Proposition 227

educators of profiting from bilingual education. For example, they noted that some bilingual teachers were paid up to five thousand dollars a year extra, while school districts were receiving hundreds of millions of extra dollars simply for placing students in bilingual classes. Opposition to the referendum was led primarily by major African American organizations, Democrats, the ethnic news media, several Asian American groups, bilingual education teachers, Latino activists, and organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the California PTA, the California School Boards Association, the California Teachers Association, and the California Federation of Teachers. Several of these organizations publicly denounced the Unz measure and viewed it to be the third in a chain of anti-immigrant proposals that emerged during the mid-1990’s. In March, 1998, three months before the state measure actually passed, the California state board of education voted unanimously to discard its thirtyyear-old bilingual education policy. Although California’s basic bilingual education law had expired in 1987, state law still required native-language instruction when necessary to provide immigrant children with an equal chance for academic success. Consequences In June, 1998, Californians voted, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent, for Proposition 227, which placed major restrictions on bilingual education, limiting parent choice on the education programs for their children. Proposition 227 mandated a one-size-fits-all approach to instruction of English learners. Afterward, Californians Together, a round table of education and civil rights groups and organizations, analyzed selected schools still providing bilingual instruction to substantial numbers of students and determined that their students could equal or exceed the performances of students in English-immersion classes. Additional discussions and findings on California’s and the nation’s bilingual education future will likely come from education organizations and think tanks such as the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education located at George Washington University, and the National Association for Bilingual Education, also headquartered in the nation’s capital. Keith Orlando Hilton Further Reading Anderson, Jim, et al., eds. Portraits of Literacy Across Families, Communities, and Schools: Intersections and Tensions. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Brittain, Carmina. Transnational Messages: Experiences of Chinese and Mexican Immigrants in American Schools. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2002. Hones, Donald F., and Cher Shou Cha. Educating New Americans: Immigrants Lives and Learning. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 603

Push and pull factors

Jonas, Susanne, and Suzanne Dod Thomas, eds. Immigration: A Civil Rights Issue for the Americas. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Kenner, Charmian. Becoming Biliterate: Young Children Learning Different Writing Systems. Sterling, Va.: Trentham Books, 2004. López, David, and Andrés Jiménez, eds. Latinos and Public Policy in California: An Agenda for Opportunity. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003. Osborn, Terry A., ed. Language and Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools: Democratic Principles in Action. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Wiley, Terrence G. Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. See also Anglo-conformity; Asian American Legal Defense Fund; Bilingual Education Act of 1968; Cultural pluralism; English-only and official English movements; Generational acculturation; Lau v. Nichols; Proposition 187.

Push and pull factors Definition: Conditions and forces that encourage people to migrate Immigration issues: Demographics; Labor; Sociological theories Significance: Because migration is costly and stressful, people generally migrate only when there are strong incentives to do so. For example, conditions where they live may become unusually bad, giving people a “push” to leave. On the other hand, conditions may appear unusually good somewhere else, and they feel a “pull” toward that location. Often a combination of “push” and “pull” factors motivates migration, but the “push” factor usually is necessary for migration to be seriously considered. Traditionally, religious and political persecution have been powerful push factors. The New England Puritans and the Pennsylvania Quakers fled religious persecution by coming to North America. Persecution of Jews in czarist Russia in the nineteenth century also motivated thousands to flee farther west. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin escalated such persecutions during the 1930’s and 1940’s, culminating in the torture and deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust and Soviet pogroms. During the 1990’s, refugees fled from tyrannical regimes in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. U.S. immigration policy has given favored status to people who can show they have been victims of such persecution. The push may also arise from unfavorable economic circumstances. Potato famines during the 1840’s led to a mass exodus from Ireland and the Scandi604

Push and pull factors

Many immigrants to North America endured great hardships in their transoceanic journeys. (Library of Congress)

navian countries, bringing many migrants to North America. Within the United States, the mechanization of cotton cultivation during the 1940’s and 1950’s greatly reduced the need for field hands in the South, causing thousands of African American families to move to the industrial North. The latter was a gradual process whereby the improvement in agricultural productivity reduced the number of people needed to produce food and fiber, leading to migrations from farms to towns and cities. The strongest pull factors have been economic. People often move to locations where they expect to find good jobs and comfortable incomes. North America has exerted this kind of pull on the rest of the world since the midnineteenth century. Initially the great attraction was the vast abundance of fertile and relatively cheap land. By 1900, however, American manufacturing industries were also eager to employ relatively cheap and docile immigrant la605

Racial and ethnic demographic trends

bor. Railroads, land speculators, and factory owners all sent recruiters to Europe to encourage immigrants. The United States has continued to exert this kind of pull, partly because its labor market is relatively free from apprenticeship regulations and monopolistic labor union restrictions on who can be hired. The clearest evidence is the flood of migrants coming northward from Mexico, who in addition have been “pushed” by poor economic conditions and a lack of jobs in their mother country. A strong pull during the 1990’s arose as American firms actively recruited people with computer skills, mostly from Asia. Immigration preferences are given to people with scarce job skills. Finally, an important pull results from the desire to be reunited with family members. During the early 1990’s, about half of all legal immigration into the United States involved spouses, children, or parents of U.S. citizens. Paul B. Trescott Further Reading Akhtar, Salman. Immigration and Identity: Turmoil, Treatment, and Transformation. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1999. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Zølner, Mette. Re-imagining the Nation: Debates on Immigrants, Identities and Memories. New York: P.I.E.-P. Lang, 2000. See also History of U.S. immigration; Israeli immigrants; Justice and immigration; Twice migrants.

Racial and ethnic demographic trends Definition: Changing composition of populations Immigration issues: African Americans; Chinese immigrants; Demographics Significance: The demographic makeup of North America has changed greatly over the years, affecting the relations between and relative power and dominance of the various racial and ethnic groups that live in these nations of immigrants. 606


Contemporary drawing of a government census taker in 1870. (Library of Congress)

The United States, Canada, and Australia are the three most important “receiving” countries for immigrants worldwide. The United States and Canada, as a result of their immigration policies, have become two of the world’s most ethnically diverse geographical areas. Two centuries ago, the population of these two nations was predominantly of white European heritage, but in the twenty-first century, nonwhites and people whose heritage is not European are expected to become an increasingly large part of their populations. Because the United States and Canada both possess a strong democratic ethos and high standard of living, they are likely to attract many more people, especially oppressed ethnic minorities. United States Since 1790, as required by the U.S. Constitution, a census has been conducted every ten years. The initial purpose of the census was to enable the U.S. government to determine an equitable apportionment of tax dollars and the number of representatives each area would send to Congress. During its early history, the census was executed by temporary workers in nonpermanent facilities. It was not until March, 1902, that the government created the Bureau of the Census with a full-time staff and permanent facilities. A perennial issue for the bureau has been the underreporting of certain subpopulations, including the very young, the poor, immigrants, and nonwhites. The resulting lower numbers have often resulted in those populations having less government representation and fewer benefits. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the bureau made great efforts to correct these shortcomings by making questionnaires available in Spanish and developing methods for assessing the undocumented immigrant population. 607


Regional Backgrounds of U.S. Immigrants, 1820-1985 (percent) 1820- 1861- 1900- 1921- 1961- 1971- 19811860 1899 1920 1960 1970 1980 1985 Northern and western Europe

95

68

41

38

18

7

5

3

7

6

19

12

4

2

Southern and eastern Europe

—

22

44

20

15

11

6

Asia

—

2

4

4

13

35

48

Latin America

—

—

4

18

39

40

35

2

1

1

1

3

3

4

North America

Other

Source: L. F. Bouvier and R. W. Gardner, Immigration to the U.S . Washington, D.C .: Population Reference Bureau, 1986.

During its first hundred years, the United States had an open immigration policy. It was not until 1882 that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which outlawed Chinese immigration for ten years. This anti-Chinese legislation followed thirty years of heavy Chinese immigration during which more than two hundred thousand Chinese came to the United States to escape overpopulation, poverty, and warfare in China. The history of legal immigration to the United States between 1820 and 1985 exhibits dramatic changes in the regions of the world from which immigrants came. Most striking is the decline of European immigrants, largely whites, and the significant increase in immigrants from Latin America and Asia, mostly Hispanics and nonwhites. Experts have projected population changes that suggest that by 2080, the U.S. population will consist of 49.8 percent white non-Hispanics, 23.4 percent Hispanics, 14.7 percent African Americans, and 12 percent Asians and other persons. Canada Canada, founded by the British and French, had exclusionary laws that discouraged nonwhite, ethnic immigrants, but these laws were relaxed after World War II. The nation’s present multicultural population reflects the new immigration policies: Of the almost 29 million people in Canada, as estimated in the 1996 census, about 40 percent are of British ancestry, 27 percent are of French, 20 percent are of other European, and 1.5 percent are of Indian and Inuit ancestry. The remaining population, 11.5 percent, consists of people of African, Asian, and Hispanic origins. Although the number of people with non-European ancestry in Canada’s population is expected to increase in the next century, it is anticipated that people of European descent will continue to dominate its culture and seats of political power. 608


Ancient Peoples of North America Recent archaeological research suggests that human beings, probably Homo erectus, were living in North America as far back as 135,000 years ago. At the time of the first European contact, about 12 million to 15 million Indians and 20,000 Inuit (Eskimos) were living in North America. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, about 2 million American Indians and around 81,000 Inuit lived in the United States. In Canada, in 1996, census takers reported fewer than 500,000 aboriginals, that is, people of either Indian or Inuit background. Mistreatment by whites and deadly epidemics account for the great reduction in the Indian population. Better living conditions (partly due to distance from early settlers) explain the increase in the Inuit population. African Americans The United States, with about 30 million African Americans, has the third-largest black population in the world (Brazil and Nigeria have larger populations); however, Canada has fewer than 1 million black people, mostly of West Indian descent. Contrary to popular belief, the first black people in North America were not slaves. In 1619, twenty black men became indentured servants to wealthy Virginian white men. However, most other Africans who landed in the United States came as slaves. From the beginning of the American slave trade in the seventeenth century to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, almost 90 percent of all African Americans in what is now the United States were slaves. The first U.S. Census in 1790 reported 757,000 African Americans. By 1800, they numbered 1 million. In the 1860 census, there were about 4,442,000 African Americans. The 1990 U.S. Census reported almost 30 million African Americans, or about 12.1 per-

Regional Backgrounds of U.S. Immigrants During the Twenty-first Century Region Europe Asia (including Middle East) Canada Mexico Caribbean Central America South America Africa Oceania Not specified Totals

2001

2002

2003

177,833 337,566 30,203 204,844 96,958 73,063 68,279 50,209 7,253 18,110

177,652 326,871 27,299 217,318 94,240 66,520 73,400 56,135 6,536 17,664

102,843 236,039 16,555 114,984 67,660 53,435 54,155 45,640 5,102 9,414

1,064,318

1,063,635

705,827


609


Foreign-Born Population in the United States in 2004 by Region of Birth Other 8% Europe 14%

Latin America (mostly Mexico) 53%

Asia 25%

cent of the total U.S. population of almost 250 million. By 2080, it is projected that African Americans will reach around 14.7 percent of the U.S. population. Although African Americans made tremendous progress in the second half of the twentieth century, many serious problems still need to be addressed and solved.

Hispanics Hispanics were among the earliest nonnative peoples to populate North America. In 1513, Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida, and in 1565, Spaniards settled St. Augustine in present-day Florida. They also colonized Mexico and parts of the American Source: U.S . Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2004. Southwest. As a result, Hispanics have largely been concentrated in the Southwestern states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California. In the past one hundred years, large Hispanic populations have also developed in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Illinois. In 1996, Hispanics numbered 28 million, or around 11 percent of the U.S. population. By 2080, this group is projected to constitute about 23.4 percent of the U.S. population and to be the largest ethnic group in the country. Asians and Arab Americans The first Asians to arrive in the United States were the Chinese. In 1849, there were only 54 Chinese in the whole nation. The 1990 U.S. Census estimated the Chinese American population at 1,645,000. The census counted 815,450 Japanese Americans, some 800,000 Korean Americans, about 815,000 East Indians, and 870,000 Arab Americans. More than two-thirds of the Arab Americans live in ten states and about one-third live in three metropolitan areas: Detroit, Michigan; New York City, and the Los Angeles area. Metropolitan Detroit has the largest Arab American community in the United States. During the 1880’s, Chinese and Japanese immigrants came to Canada to help construct the railroad and work on other industrial projects. They were soon followed by East Indians. From around 1900 until World War II, exclusionary laws kept most Asians from immigrating to Canada. However, after the war, Canada relaxed its immigration policies, and many Asians and other ethnic groups came to Canada. The Future For the last five hundred years, the United States and Canada have been dominated by white European peoples and cultures. However, in 610


the last fifty years, non-Europeans, nonwhites, Hispanics, and Asians have become the fastest-growing populations in these nations. Experts have predicted that by 2080 more than 50 percent of the U.S. population will be nonEuropean and nonwhite and that the largest ethnic group will be Hispanic. In Canada, although the makeup of the population is changing, it is not likely that the U.S. population patterns will be duplicated. However, the proportion of British, French, and European people in the overall population is projected to fall. In the face of these trends, the power and influence of the dominant white group in the United States and Canada will probably diminish somewhat, and the two nations will continue to be pluralistic and democratic societies that attract refugees and immigrants. R. M. Frumkin Further Reading Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are race, government policy, sociological theories, naturalization, and undocumented workers. Hughes, James W., and Joseph J. Seneca, eds. America’s Demographic Tapestry: Baseline for the New Millennium. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Collection of articles on a variety of demographic topics. Kertzer, David I., and Dominique Arel, eds. Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Census. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Articles on the Census Bureau’s constantly evolving employment of racial and ethnic categories. Nobles, Melissa. Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Study of the use made of census data in politics. Perlmann, Joel, and Mary Waters, eds. The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. Collection of critical essays on the U.S. Census’s changing racial categories and the social and political effects of these changes. Rodriguez, Clara E. Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Examination of the use of racial and ethnic categories in the census with particular attention to Hispanics, who have been frequently reclassified. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection 611

Refugee fatigue

of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants. Includes chapters on Mexicans, Cubans, Central Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Haitians, and other West Indians. Skerry, Peter. Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. Analytical study of the problems of accurately counting members of racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Census. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2004-2005. 124th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005. Starting place for any research on demographics. Updated annually, this reference source is available on compact disc, and much of its information is freely available online on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site. See also Censuses, U.S.; Demographics of immigration; Illegal aliens; Immigration “crisis.”

Refugee fatigue Definition: Reluctance of host countries to extend or expand assistance, asylum, or resettlement to refugees Immigration issues: Refugees; Sociological theories Significance: Also known as “compassion” fatigue, refugee fatigue develops when the citizens of nations receiving large numbers of refugees begin feeling overburdened by the needs of the newcomers and fear being overrun by outsiders. Refugees are typically victims of political persecution who are fleeing from their homelands in attempts to find asylum in other nations. Refugee, or compassion, fatigue is most likely to occur when the refugee population begins to become a significant burden on the host community’s economic and social infrastructure, or at least when the perception develops that such burdens are growing. Refugees sometimes flee into areas where they can find support among ethnic kinspeople, as often happens in Africa. In Asia, however, the flight of Sino-Vietnamese refugees into the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia during the 1970’s and 1980’s excited substantial xenophobic responses that greatly accelerated perceptions of compassion fatigue in the region. Such concerns may be allayed somewhat if other countries agree to provide opportunities to resettle in a third country and to finance the costs of temporary haven in the country of first asylum. However, donor country pop612

Refugee fatigue

President Gerald Ford during his April, 1975, visit to California, where he greeted arriving refugees from Vietnam. (NARA/Gerald R. Ford Library)

ulations and governments often grow tired of accepting resettled refugees and financing large overseas programs. When both host nations and countries of resettlement experience refugee or compassion fatigue simultaneously, pressures grow to eliminate humanitarian aid programs and to repatriate refugees or asylum seekers to their original homelands. In some cases, racial or ethnic biases heighten popular resentment of such humanitarian programs; more often, economics is the central cause of compassion fatigue. During the 1980’s, owing to the civil wars in Central America, large numbers of asylum seekers joined the stream of illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants from Mexico seeking work and safe haven in the United States. For many Americans, this influx led to fears of uncontrolled immigration and a hardening of attitudes toward those in distress. Robert F. Gorman Further Reading Balgopal, Pallassana R., ed. Social Work Practice with Immigrants and Refugees. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Cohen, Steve. Deportation Is Freedom! The Orwellian World of Immigration Controls. Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley, 2005. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Potocky-Tripodi, Miriam. Best Practices for Social Work with Refugees and Immigrants. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 613

Refugee Relief Act of 1953

Zolberg, Aristide R., and Peter M. Benda, eds. Global Migrants, Global Refugees: Problems and Solutions. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. See also Cuban refugee policy; Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Justice and immigration; Proposition 187; Proposition 227; Refugee Relief Act of 1953; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

Refugee Relief Act of 1953 The Law: Federal legislation that made it easier for political refugees to enter the United States Date: August 7, 1953 Immigration issues: Laws and treaties; Refugees Significance: Enacted in the aftermath of World War II, which displaced millions of people from their homes in Europe, the Refugee Relief Act created a legal means for admitting displaced persons outside the national quota system, on an emergency basis. The events of World War II and its immediate aftermath left millions of people displaced from their homelands. Included among those who had been made homeless by the destruction were Jewish survivors of the Naziperpetrated Holocaust and increasing numbers of political refugees who fled their homelands as communist governments took control in eastern Europe. In the United States, from the close of World War II well into the 1950’s, a debate raged about how restrictive or generous U.S. immigration and asylum law should be in view of the nation’s own interests and the larger humanitarian imperatives. Since 1924, U.S. immigration law had been based on a quota system, which was viewed as highly discriminatory against various countries and peoples. Under the pressures of war, however, Congress had allowed temporary immigration to help labor-starved industry. With China as one of the main U.S. allies in the Pacific theater of World War II, Congress revoked the ban on Chinese immigration in 1943; in 1945, it approved the War Brides Act, which permitted the entry of the alien spouses and children of members of the U.S. armed forces. President Harry S. Truman approved the admission of about forty thousand wartime refugees after the war and urged Congress to adopt less restrictive legislation that would permit the resettlement of larger numbers of displaced persons (DPs). Congress felt pressure to act, not only from the president but also from private charitable agencies that sought to liberalize admission policies in favor 614


of DPs in Europe and elsewhere. Two Jewish aid agencies, the American Council on Judaism (ACJ) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), joined forces with numerous Christian and other non-Jewish agencies to form the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons. This new group was headed by Earl G. Harrison and included on its board of directors many prominent U.S. citizens, among them Eleanor Roosevelt. The committee heavily lobbied the predominantly restrictionist Congress and supported legislation calling for the admission of 400,000 DPs. A long and rancorous debate followed, which produced a substantially watered-down bill known as the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. This act permitted 202,000 admission slots for DPs in Europe who feared to return to communist-held countries. While retaining the immigration quotas of previous years, the act allowed countries to borrow against future years’ quotas to accommodate DPs with immediate needs. It only permitted entry of people displaced prior to April 21, 1947, in the Allied occupied zones of Germany and Austria who were registered with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) and who were not communists. It required that the DPs be guaranteed employment by U.S. charitable agencies or other sponsors, and it gave preference to DPs with professional skills. While criticizing its discriminatory features, Truman signed the legislation, which also established the Displaced Persons Commission. Efforts by the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons and others to liberalize the Displaced Persons Act continued, as events in Europe and the deepening of the Cold War led to a climate more supportive of DP resettlement. Although delayed by Senator Patrick A. McCarran of Nevada, amendments eventually passed by Congress expanded the numbers of admission slots to 341,000 and relaxed the cutoff dates for eligibility and entry into the United States. When the Displaced Persons Act expired on December 31, 1951, President Truman relied on the regular immigration quotas and on the U.S. Escapee Program, established under the authority of the 1951 Mutual Security Act, to provide asylum in the United States to political refugees from communism. Truman also established a Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, which held hearings that demonstrated considerable support for liberalized admission of refugees from communism. Even as the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, sponsored by Senator McCarran (and therefore often called the McCarran-Walter Act), reemphasized the restrictive quota system for regular immigration, consensus was building to place emergency refugee admissions outside the regular immigration quota system. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953, also sometimes referred to as the Church bill because of the strong support it received from religious refugee assistance agencies, was the result of this ongoing debate about how to restructure U.S. immigration and refugee policy. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 made 209,000 special immigrant visas available to refugees and other special categories of persons. These were not tied in any way to the regular immigration quotas for countries under the 1952 615


Immigration and Nationality Act. This was seen as a major reform by private humanitarian organizations. In the years that followed, the 1953 act enabled the emergency entry of refugees from communism. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, invoked the act just before it was to expire, to provide emergency resettlement opportunities for Hungarian refugees in the waning months of 1956. Eisenhower also took advantage of his parole power, as acknowledged during the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act and earlier immigration legislation, to provide asylum opportunities for Hungarian refugees. The United States eventually accepted more than thirty-two thousand Hungarians. Thus, through the provisions of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, subsequent ad hoc emergency refugee legislation, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the U.S. government coped with refugee admissions until 1980, when Congress passed the more comprehensive and progressive Migration and Refugee Act. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was one brief but essential mechanism by which the U.S. government sought to fulfill humanitarian and political objectives relating to refugees. It represented an improvement on the Displaced Persons Act, although that much-maligned piece of legislation eventually led to the resettlement of about four hundred thousand persons to the United States, by far the single largest number of European refugees resettled by any country in the immediate postwar era. The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 also represented a bridge to later legislation, such as the Migration and Refugee Act of 1980, by treating emergency refugee admission outside the context of regular immigration quotas. It also represented the mistaken belief during the early 1950’s that refugee situations were temporary and amendable to ad hoc solutions. During the early 1950’s, the United States and other Western nations established the groundwork for more stable legal and institutional mechanisms for dealing with refugee situations. The United States supported the creation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1943 and the IRO in 1947 to cope with the needs of displaced persons and refugees in postwar Europe. Both were viewed as temporary agencies, as were the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), which began operations in 1952. In time, however, these bodies developed into permanent features of the international humanitarian landscape with the support of later U.S. administrations. The building of both legal and institutional mechanisms for coping with humanitarian problems was often highly controversial, heavily steeped in political motivation, and shortsighted. As measured in the huge numbers of persons assisted and protected over the years, however, the efforts are viewed by many as precious if difficult ones, of which the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 were imperfect but necessary components. Robert F. Gorman 616


Further Reading Carlin, James L. The Refugee Connection: A Lifetime of Running a Lifeline. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Fascinating autobiographical account of the development of post-World War II displaced persons and refugee policy. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Loescher, Gil, and John A. Scanlan. Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to Present. New York: Free Press, 1986. The first two chapters of this comprehensive analysis of U.S. immigration and refugee policy address the Displaced Persons and Refugee Relief Acts. Nichols, J. Bruce. The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee Work, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989. A detailed account of the relations between private voluntary organizations and the U.S. government in the fields of humanitarian aid, immigration, and refugee policy. See especially chapter 5. Sanders, Ronald. Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Immigration. New York: Schocken Books, 1988. This detailed historical account briefly examines the impact of U.S. refugee acts on Jewish immigration. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. Zucker, Norman L., and Naomi Flink Zucker. The Guarded Gate: The Reality of American Refugee Policy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Focuses mainly on refugee and asylum policy after the passage of the 1980 Migration and Refugee Act, but situates this discussion against developments after World War II. See also Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Refugee fatigue; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations.

617

Refugees and racial/ethnic relations

Refugees and racial/ ethnic relations Immigration issues: Nativism and racism; Refugees Significance: The controversies attending large refugee flows into the United States have been both a product of and a determinant of U.S. refugee policy. Fears of increased cultural and racial heterogeneity and the perceived international political interests of the United States have affected public policy and practice in this area. Refugees are viewed by some factions within the white majority population in the United States as being relatively nonaffluent and unwilling to assimilate to American culture. Furthermore, these factions and some well-established minority groups have expressed resentment over the success of the “ethnic enclave” strategy that has created significant local political power and prosperity for more recently arrived groups. In addition, some refugee groups have expressed anger at the perceived discriminatory application of refugee legislation. The result has been an exacerbation of tensions across racial and ethnic lines. History of U.S. Refugee Policy In 1951, the United Nations held the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which established the stillaccepted definition of a refugee and prohibited “refoulement,” that is, forcible repatriation. The United States was instrumental in establishing that to be a refugee, a person must be fleeing personal governmental persecution, not economic deprivation. This definition served U.S. Cold War interests by embarrassing new communist regimes that were generating large refugee populations. However, the United States did not sign the convention, preferring to handle asylum issues through domestic legislation. Throughout the 1950’s, the United States avoided making commitments to refugees that were of little political value to the nation. The ideological focus of U.S. refugee policy that developed throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s is illustrated by the fact that from the mid-1950’s through 1979, only 0.3 percent of refugee admissions were to people from noncommunist countries. “Political” vs. “Economic” Refugees U.S. legislation still extends asylum to “political refugees,” but those fleeing bad economies are termed “economic migrants” and are deported if they immigrate illegally. Awareness is growing that governmental oppression, economic malaise, and widespread social problems often go hand in hand, making it increasingly difficult to disentangle the reasons that people leave their homelands. Many displaced peo618


ple are fleeing reigns of terror perpetuated by their governments, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, and systematic and severe economic deprivation, but these people are not technically eligible for asylum. Although it seems clear that unprecedented numbers of forcibly displaced people are inadequately protected, the official recognition of a broader definition of “refugee” is unlikely because of the undeniable economic and perceived social and cultural costs of growing populations of people who have received asylum. The U.S. government has become increasingly concerned about the dramatically increasing numbers of asylum seekers, especially those who enter the country illegally, outside of established refugee-processing channels. The government’s position is understandable, as is that of the illegal entrants. For example, from 1980 to the early 1990’s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled in the face of death squads that had murdered their relatives and associates, and a similar situation existed in Guatemala. Yet, during this period,

Homeless Italian earthquake refugees on their way to America during the early twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

619


only fifty-four Salvadorans and no Guatemalans were accepted for resettlement in the United States, in spite of the fact that Central American refugee camps could assist only a small fraction of these people. Many of those remaining entered the United States illegally. Charges of Political and Racial Bias U.S. refugee policy was openly directed by Cold War considerations until 1980. Although there was some criticism of the U.S. refusal to extend asylum to those fleeing the regimes of U.S.-supported authoritarian leaders—the shah of Iran (Muhammad Reza Pahlavi), François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines—the flow of refugees was controlled, and a possible domestic political backlash avoided. The 1980 Refugee Act removed the requirement that refugees be fleeing communist regimes. That year, 800,000 immigrants and refugees entered the United States legally, a number that surpassed the combined total for the rest of the world. Growing sentiment for more restrictive policies emerged. The administration of President Ronald Reagan responded by reducing refugee admissions by two-thirds and heavily favoring those from communist countries, in spite of the new law. The Mariel boatlift (1980) brought 115,000 Cubans to the United States in five months, and the policy of forcibly returning Haitians, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans to brutal governments while admitting less physically threatened refugees from communist countries was soundly criticized in some quarters. The differential treatment accorded asylum seekers from Haiti and Cuba has generated charges of racial bias. As tens of thousands of desperate Haitians were deported or detained at sea and returned before reaching the United States, the U.S. government welcomed hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime. The Congressional Black Caucus set up a task force to study the issue and, after failing to change the U.S. policy, joined prominent church leaders and the Voluntary Agencies Responsible for Refugees in stating publicly that racism was behind the differential treatment of Haitians and other asylum seekers because of a reluctance on the part of the United States to admit large numbers of black refugees. Even as this controversy raged, the government announced that all Vietnamese and Laotians who reached safe haven would be considered refugees, while those fleeing Haiti were subjected to case-by-case screening and deportation. President George Bush continued Reagan’s policies. After the fall of the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti created an upsurge of “boat people,” the Bush administration successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to lift a ban on forced repatriation and intercepted and returned tens of thousands of Haitians. The administration of President Bill Clinton continued this practice and then forced the reinstatement of the Aristide government in an effort to stem the flow of refugees. Jack Carter 620


Further Reading Briggs, Vernon M., Jr., and Stephen Moore. Still an Open Door? U.S. Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1994. Discusses the effect of growing restrictionist sentiment on refugee policy in the United States. Edmonston, Barry, and Jeffrey S. Passel, eds. Immigration and Ethnicity: The Integration of America’s Newest Arrivals. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1994. Examination of assimilation issues and controversies. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are race, government policy, sociological theories, naturalization, and undocumented workers. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, with an emphasis on cultural and social trends, with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. Loescher, Gil, ed. Refugees and the Asylum Dilemma in the West. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Set of essays addressing refugeerelated problems and policies in Western nations, including the United States and Canada. Loescher, Gil, and Robert Scanlan. Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to Present. New York: Free Press, 1986. Study of U.S. refugee policy from World War II through the mid-1980’s. Reitz, Jeffrey G., eds. Host Societies and the Reception of Immigrants. La Jolla, Calif.: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2003. Collection of articles on interactions between immigrants and other members of their new societies in countries around the world, including the United States and Canada. Emphasis is on large urban societies. Includes chapters on African Americans and immigrants in New York City. Stepick, Alex, et al. This Land Is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Study of competition and conflict among Miami’s largest ethnic groups—Cubans, Haitians, and African Americans. See also Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Cuban refugee policy; Melting pot; Refugee fatigue; Refugee Relief Act of 1953; Vietnamese immigrants. 621

Russian immigrants

Russian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Russia Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Jewish immigrants Significance: Russian Americans have blended well with mainstream American society, many having peasant or industrial backgrounds similar to those of other European immigrants, while others were refugees from the Russian upper class or Jews who did not consider themselves Russian. Some immigrants were, however, suspected of promoting communism or being members of the Russian mafia. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, large numbers of Russians immigrated in successive waves to the United States and Canada. Many were members of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Orthodoxy remains one of the visible hallmarks of Russian immigrant communities. Its rituals and teachings are followed in Russian communities in Alaska, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. Nevertheless, Russian Jews were, and are, numerically the largest group of immigrants, particularly to the United States. However, because Russia was not very accepting of Jews, many of these immigrants were more likely to identify themselves as Jews rather than Russians upon entering the United States and Canada. In addition, because

Siberians preparing to emigrate to the United States in 1910. (Library of Congress)

622

Russian immigrants


Soviet and Russian Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 170,000 160,000 150,000 140,000 130,000 120,000 110,000 100,000 90,000 80,000 70,000 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

Russian Revolution of 1905-1906 Russian Revolution of 1917 1991 Collapse of Soviet Union

1918-1921 Civil war 1921 Creation of Soviet Union

1946-1989 Cold War


2001-2003

1981-1990

1991-2000

1961-1970

1971-1980

1951-1960

1931-1940

1941-1950

1911-1920

1921-1930

1891-1900

1901-1910

1881-1890

1861-1870

1871-1880

1841-1850

1851-1860

1831-1840

1821-1830


many came from western Russia, the so-called Pale of Settlement to which Russian Jews were restricted, which was once part of Poland-Lithuania, they might equally well have considered themselves Polish or Lithuanian Jews. The first Russians to reach the shores of North America came as traders, adventurers, and explorers. These hardy fur traders and missionaries settled the Alaskan wilderness when that territory belonged to Russia. The first Russians settled on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in 1784, and converted many local people to the Russian Orthodox religion, which many still practiced during the early twenty-first century. However, with the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, many of these first settlers returned to Russia. The First Wave A huge influx of immigrants from czarist Russia reached North America between 1881 and 1914. Almost half of these were Jews fleeing pogroms and other forms of persecution following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander III, for which the Jews were blamed. During this period, Jews were allowed to live only in the Pale of Settlement in western Russia, lands taken from Poland during the partitions of Poland a hundred years earlier. 623

Russian immigrants

A Russian Jew in New York City during the early twentieth century. (Library of Congress)

Most of these Jews lived in shtetls, and many were impoverished. Only about sixty-five thousand ethnic Russians left Russia during this period, most for economic reasons. Others, from the Carpathian area of the Ukraine and the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, did self-identify as Russians and were adherents of the Orthodox or the Uniate religion. The Second Wave The second wave of immigration occurred as a result of events in Russia that made it impossible for many persons, particularly members of the upper classes, to remain there. These events were the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War. More than two million people fled the new communist nation, many to the Balkans, western Europe, and Manchuria. Of these, approximately thirty thousand came to the United States. Among them were former White Russian soldiers (as opposed to the Red Communist armies), aristocrats, clergy, artists, and intellectuals. United in their hatred of the Bolsheviks, many intended to stay only until the Bolsheviks were ousted. Ironically, anticommunist movements in the United States often singled out these extremely anticommunist Russians for oppressive treatment, suspecting that a communist lurked behind every fur hat. The Third Wave A small wave of Russian immigration resulted from the massive dislocations of World War II. Germany had at various times occupied much of the Soviet Union, captured many Russians, and made them work in forced labor camps. After the war, many of these people were forcibly returned 624

Russian immigrants

to the Soviet Union, where they were often accused of collaboration with the enemy. Others, fearing similar oppression, chose to remain in displacedperson camps in Germany and Austria until they were allowed to immigrate to North America. This brought approximately twenty thousand Russians to the shores of North America. The Fourth Wave In contrast to earlier emigrations from Russia and the Soviet Union, these immigrants left Russia near the end of the twentieth century without hindrance on the part of the government in power. The impetus for this emigration was in large part agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union allowing Jews to leave Russia, nominally for Israel, but often in fact for the United States. Following their lead, a number of other Russians emigrated as well. This migration caused some social disturbances in the United States because a number of Russian mafia members who were among the newcomers caused major problems for newly arrived immigrants and the population at large. Gloria Fulton Further Reading Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including Russia. Hardwick, Susan Wiley. Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Exploration of religious reasons behind Russian immigration to the United States. Magocsi, Paul R. The Russian Americans. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Traces the immigration and settlement of Russians in North America, focusing on historical and economic issues, the people who might be considered Russian Americans, and the extent to which these peoples have become assimilated in North American society. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. Broad history of European immigration to the United States written for young readers. Shasha, Dennis Elliott, and Marina Shron. Red Blues: Voices from the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2002. Study of post-Cold War Russian immigration to the United States. Wertsman, Vladimir, ed. The Russians in America: A Chronology and Fact Book. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1977. Now dated but still useful reference book on Russians in the United States. See also Eastern European Jewish immigrants; European immigrant literature; Garment industry; Mail-order brides; Polish immigrants; Soviet Jewish immigrants. 625

Sacco and Vanzetti trial

Sacco and Vanzetti trial The Event: Robbery and murder trial of two Italian immigrants Date: 1920-1921 Place: Dedham, Massachusetts Immigration issues: European immigrants; Nativism and racism Significance: One of the most famous U.S. trials of the twentieth century, the robbery and murder case against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, generated worldwide protests, strikes, and riots as it focused the international spotlight on the small town of Dedham, Massachusetts. The trial was a celebrated example of anti-immigrant feeling during a period of heightened nativism. The two events, which may or may not have been connected, that culminated in the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti began on December 24, 1919, payday for the L. Q. White Shoe Company of Bridgewater, Massachusetts. A truck carrying approximately thirty-three thousand dollars in company payroll was unsuccessfully attacked. Pinkerton Agency detectives investigated the incident, and during eyewitness interviews they determined that one of the suspects appeared to be foreign-born, with a dark complexion and mustache, and that he fled in a large vehicle, probably a Hudson. The identified license plate had been stolen a few days earlier in Needham, Massachusetts, as had a Buick touring car. Thus, despite witnesses to the contrary, the detectives concluded that the Buick likely had been used in the robbery. No suspects were arrested, although tips emerged connecting the getaway car to a group of Italian anarchists. On April 15, 1920, in nearby South Braintree, the payroll for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory was being escorted, on foot, from the office to the factory by two security guards, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli. En route, the guards were attacked, robbed, and murdered by two men who escaped in a waiting vehicle. At the inquest, twenty-three eyewitnesses testified that the assailants appeared to be Italian, but few claimed they could positively identify the men. Recalling the tip about Italian anarchists storing a car in Bridgewater, police chief Michael E. Stewart traced the lead to Feruccio Coacci, an Italian scheduled for deportation. Coacci revealed that the car belonged to his housemate, Mike Boda, a known anarchist, and that it was currently being repaired in a garage in West Bridgewater. A police guard was planted outside the garage to wait for Boda. Meanwhile, as a result of the prevalent U.S. attitude toward radicals and in the wake of a national roundup and arrest of aliens, Italians Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had decided it would be wise to destroy their anarchist 626


literature. The abundance of material required transportation, and they arranged to borrow Boda’s vehicle. Although the trap was laid for Boda, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested as they attempted to claim the car. Neither man had a police record, but both were armed. Because the men were not informed of the reason for their arrest, they assumed they were being held as anarchists. Although they were read their rights, the language barrier may have obstructed their complete understanding. They were fingerprinted, their weapons confiscated but not tagged, and they were questioned for seven days without being charged. There was no lineup; the two were paraded in front of witnesses who were asked if they were the men involved in the holdup. On May 12, 1920, Vanzetti was charged with attempted murder and robbery at Bridgewater. The Trials Vanzetti’s trial began on June 22, 1920, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with Judge Webster Thayer presiding. The initial interviews by the Pinkerton detectives were not admitted, and all witnesses for the defense were of Italian origin. After only five hours of deliberation, the jury found Vanzetti guilty of assault with intent to rob and murder. Six weeks later, he was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years for intent to rob. The attempted murder charge was dropped after it was discovered that one of the jurors had brought his own shell casings for comparison. In September, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter during the South Braintree robbery. Each pleaded not guilty. A committee for their defense raised enough money to hire the radical California attorney Fred Moore, who cited the case as an establishment attempt to victimize the working man.

In 1976, the Community Church of Boston began honoring the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti by presenting the annual Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Award for Contributions to Social Justice to outstanding social activists. (The Community Church of Boston)

627


The new trial began on May 31, 1921, in Dedham, Massachusetts, once again under Judge Thayer, who, as the presiding judge in Vanzetti’s first trial, should have been disqualified. On June 4, the all-male jury was sworn in, and on June 6, Sacco and Vanzetti were marched, handcuffed, into the courtroom. Throughout the trial, the prosecution presented a bounty of circumstantial evidence: less-than-convincing “eyewitness” testimony; a cap from the scene, alleged to be Vanzetti’s, that was too small; expert testimony qualified with “I am inclined to believe”; no positive identification on the getaway car; ballistic evidence that was technical and confusing; and the accusation of “consciousness of guilt,” based on the false statements of the two when they thought they were being held for anarchy. Judge Thayer charged the jury to be “true soldiers” who would display the “highest and noblest type of true American citizenship,” and he referred to the defendants as “slackers.” On July 14, once again after a five-hour deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. The standard penalty in Massachusetts at the time was death by electrocution. Aftermath and Executions Sacco and Vanzetti remained incarcerated for six years while motions were filed in their behalf. The presiding judge heard all appeals, and each was weighed and denied by Judge Thayer. One motion stated Judge Thayer himself had demonstrated out-of-court prejudice against the two. Despite the growing doubt about the guilt of the men, Thayer remained adamant, and his animosity grew toward Moore. On November 8, the defense committee forced Moore to resign and hired William G. Thompson. While the legal avenues encountered roadblocks, Sacco was slipped a note from another prisoner, Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the crime. From the note, Thompson traced a link to the Morelli brothers, an Italian gang in Providence. This group had attacked the shoe factory in the past, and one member of the gang bore a resemblance to Sacco. Based on the new evidence, Thompson filed a motion for retrial, which was denied, and in April of 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to die the week of July 10. Due to the public outcry, the date was moved to August 10, and Vanzetti wrote a plea for clemency to Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller. In the letter, he asked not for pardon but for a complete review of the case. On June 1, the governor appointed a committee to review the case, but after examining their findings, he denied a new trial. On August 10, Sacco and Vanzetti were readied for execution. Thirty-six minutes before the time set for the execution, the governor issued a postponement, awaiting results of a Supreme Court appeal. On August 19, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, citing no authority. In Europe and South America, mobs rioted and marched on U.S. embassies. In France, Italy, and the United States, workers struck in protest. Five hundred extra policemen, armed with machine guns and tear gas, barricaded the crowd of thousands outside the jail. Just after midnight, on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. 628

Santería

Public interest in the case lived on, however, as many people continued to work to clear Sacco and Vanzetti’s names. On August 23, 1977, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed the date Sacco and Vanzetti Day, thus officially removing any stigma from their names. Joyce Duncan Further Reading Dickinson, Alice. The Sacco-Vanzetti Case. New York: Franklin Watts, 1972. An abbreviated overview of the case, including chronology and photos. Ehrmann, Herbert. The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Liberally illustrated account by the case’s assistant defense attorney from 1926 to 1927. Frankfurter, Marion Denman, and Gardner Jackson, eds. The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. New York: Octagon Books, 1971. Correspondence by both men written from prison, including Vanzetti’s letter to the governor. Joughin, G. L., and E. M. Morgan. The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Early but masterful analysis of the case. Russell, Francis. Tragedy in Dedham. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. Illustrated chronological recitation of events, including a discussion of public temperament. Weeks, Robert, ed. Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958. Provides insights from court records and other primarysource documents on the trial of the reputed anarchists. See also

Euro-Americans; Italian immigrants; Nativism.

Santería Identification: Afro-Cuban religion Immigration issues: African Americans; Cuban immigrants; Latino immigrants; Religion; Slavery; West Indian immigrants Significance: Santería is a cultural retention with origins in the African diaspora to the New World. Its existence is an example of the survival of elements of African cultures, despite the destructive forces of involuntary migration and slavery. The basic tenets, rituals, practices, and associated institutional mechanisms of Santería derive from the Yoruba priests and priestesses of the orishas, who were slaves at the close of the eighteenth and during the early decades of the 629

Scandinavian immigrants

nineteenth centuries. Santería, “the way of the saints,” is an admixture of Yoruba and other African practices with Roman Catholic traditions developed as a functional adaptation by many Cubans. The Cuban immigrants who entered the United States after Fidel Castro’s successful revolution in their homeland brought these religious practices with them. These rituals enjoy special significance as part of the new immigrants’ coping repertoire, enabling them to adjust better to acculturation in the United States. The practices of Santería are part of the larger spiritualistic belief system of other black West Indians (Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, and Guyanese) who immigrated to the United States. As these immigrants begin to live in urban spatial proximity and strive to maintain and regain their African cultural heritage, they and native African Americans have adopted Santería. In cities such as Miami and New York, there are many spiritual adherents. Aubrey W. Bonnett Further Reading Boswell, Thomas D., and James R. Curtis. The Cuban American Experience. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983. Vickerman, Milton. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. See also Cuban immigrants; Cuban immigrants and African Americans; Haitian immigrants; West Indian immigrants.

Scandinavian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Western Europe’s Scandinavian peninsula, which contains Sweden and Norway Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants Significance: Scandinavians were the earliest known European immigrants to North America, and modern Scandinavian Americans still have strong links to their cultural heritages. The earliest European immigrants to the Western Hemisphere are believed to have been Vikings of Scandinavian origin. In 986 c.e., a Norse expedition headed by Bjarni Herjolfsson sighted land thought to have been on the east coast of Canada. It was followed some dozen years later by Leif Eriksson, who made landing. Norse expeditions attempted to colonize Vinland (Newfound630


Scandinavian Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 70,000 65,000 60,000


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land) in 1003-1006 and 1007-1008 but ultimately failed because of infighting and conflicts with the native communities. These and subsequent expeditions did not result in permanent settlements on the North American continent. The first documented Scandinavian settlements in North America were Swedish and included a community along the Delaware River in 1638. John Hanson, the first president of the Continental Congress, claimed to be a fourth-generation descendant of immigrants who traced their family ties to Swedish royalty. Early Swedish enclaves founded in Delaware (Maryland), Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania still maintain their cultural affiliations. The Nineteenth Century In nineteenth century Scandinavia, social and economic conditions were stifling: Primogeniture ensured that only first sons could inherit their families’ estates, land foreclosures abounded, and the nobility controlled much of the property and paid few taxes. Cleng Peerson (originally Kleng Peterson Hesthammer), a dissenter persecuted by the Lutheran State Church of Norway, left for the United States in 1821. He became 631


so enamored of the United States that he purchased a sloop, the Restauration, and began a career as an immigrant agent. Peerson and other agents helped bring about a historically unparalleled exodus of citizens from both Sweden and Norway. Approximately 750,000 Norwegians emigrated to North America between 1849 and 1914; the Swedish exodus during this same period totaled approximately 1.2 million, nearly one-fourth of Sweden’s population. By 1890, about four hundred Minnesota towns sported Swedish names, and Norwegian-speaking travelers in North Dakota could find more people who spoke their native language than who spoke English. Seafarers historically, Norwegians founded communities on both coasts, in places such as Massachusetts and the Pacific Northwest. Many also followed Peerson to Texas to bask in the milder climate. Others were attracted to the open lands of the upper Midwest, particularly after the Homestead Act of 1862 allotted 160 acres of newly opened land to anyone who could “prove up” a claim. Some enterprising couples positioned their bedrooms, and even their conjugal beds, exactly on the property line between two allotments in order to qualify for both allotments, or 320 acres. Religious Influences Both Swedish and Norwegian immigrants carried with them a religious faith that saturated every aspect of their existence. It shaped their behavior, the cycle of their daily lives, and even their community identities. Both groups came from heavily Lutheran environments, where the mandate of “the Word alone, grace alone, faith alone” translated to immediate personal responsibility to God. Lutheranism, however, was not always a uniting influence for Scandinavians. Subdivisions within the church, called synods, reflected ethnic affiliations. The Swedish Lutherans supported the Augustana synod, and Norwegian Lutheranism included at least six synods. Some of the Norwegian Lutherans were followers of Hans Neilsen Hauge, a reformer who experienced a call to preach the gospel to Norway while working on his farm. His American followers were pious and hardworking, separating themselves from those whom they regarded as frivolous. Haugeans, for example, abstained from dancing, believing that it facilitated contact between the sexes that was fraught with temptation and spiritual peril. Swedish Covenant, Methodist, Baptist, Mormon, and a few Roman Catholic denominations also attracted both Swedish and Norwegian immigrants, and each group took their differences seriously. Haugeans, especially, abhorred anything resembling Roman Catholicism, while Catholics regarded Lutherans as spiritual heretics deprived of ritual. Interfaith marriages, when they did occur, alienated entire families; moving to different ethnic or religious communities could result in social isolation. In many instances, an unmarried pregnant woman was not allowed to marry the father of her child if he was not of her religion. The Swedish and Norwegian pioneers’ work ethic was also rooted in their 632


religious orientation. Both groups frowned on complainers; both subscribed to biblical passages reminding the faithful that labor was an opportunity bestowed by God. Sunday Sabbath, however, was observed with diligence—any activity resembling work, even use of scissors or knitting needle, was avoided, and a farmer who worked in his fields on a Sunday invited general disapproval. Sundays were devoted to worship and visiting with neighbors. Intergroup Relations Despite the many traits and attitudes they shared, Norwegians and Swedes preserved distance from each other, both socially and theologically. Norwegians tended to view Swedes as somewhat undisciplined, and Swedes typically regarded Norwegians as cold and dour. A cemetery might well have separate sections for each ethnicity; the family of one Norwegian woman, for example, was disappointed that she had to be buried in the Swedish section of a cemetery because she had married a Swedish man. The Scandinavians’ relationships with other immigrant groups were usually civil and often amicable. As long as ethnic boundaries coincided with those of cities and schools, mutual respect prevailed. Sometimes, however, school athletic rivalries became metaphors for national differences, as exemplified by the rivalry between two small towns in southern Minnesota, one predominantly Polish Catholic and the other, Norwegian Lutheran. Rivalries

Poster for a popular late 1890’s stage play that built its humor on exaggerated stereotypes of Scandinavian immigrants by depicting its title character as a big, simple-minded, and goodnatured oaf. The image at the right shows Yonson about to be victimized by hustlers after his arrival in New York. During the 1960’s, the name “Yon Yonson” was again popularized, this time in a musical ditty that begins, “My name is Yon Yonson/ I come from Visconsin. . . . ” (Library of Congress)

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persisted for years, often to the point that character traits were assumed, by each side, to correlate with place of residence. The two small schools did not consolidate until the latter part of the twentieth century. The ethnic and national boundaries began to blur in the twentieth century. Within the Lutheran Church, ethnic and synodical mergers began to bring Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Germans, and Finns together in worship. Automotive mobility brought together groups of people who had never been face to face before. Religious intermarriages were no longer exotic, much less reprehensible. However, there was one group with whom the Scandinavian Americans did not get along: the Native Americans. The Native Americans in the areas where Scandinavian Americans settled saw no particular advantage in the mainstream society’s intruding into theirs. The Scandinavian immigrants, like other settlers, viewed American Indians’ lifestyle as anachronistic and in need of “civilizing.” They defined civilization in terms of religious conversion, manifested by “whitening” of dress and behavior. A church worker involved in relations between Indian tribes and Scandinavian Americans noted that Norwegians, particularly, were in cultural opposition to the Native Americans. Norwegians were insular, while Native Americans were committed to their communities. Norwegians avoided dependence on others, while to the Native Americans, giving honored both the giver and the recipient. Many of these differences contributed to the cultural separation that persisted into the twenty-first century between Scandinavian Americans and American Indians, particularly in towns bordering Indian reservations. Although Scandinavian Americans initially sought to immerse themselves totally in the mainstream culture, they gradually took steps to preserve their culture. The colleges they built preserved their ethnic and doctrinal definitions, until, following the path of the ethnic small towns, they, too, became more inclusive. Swedish and Norwegian Americans also established museums and hosted festivals and found them to be not only personally but also economically bountiful. Ethnicity, once a stigma, was now a distinction. Brenda E. Reinertsen Caranicas Further Reading Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Meltzer, Milton. Bound for America: The Story of the European Immigrants. New York: Benchmark Books, 2001. See also European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; German immigrants; Literature. 634

Scotch-Irish immigrants

Scotch-Irish immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from Ireland who were of Protestant Scots descent Immigration issues: European immigrants; Irish immigrants Significance: The Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to North America and settled on the western frontier in the eighteenth century initially thought of themselves simply as Irish; however, as American nativist sentiments turned against the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish who began immigrating in large numbers during the early nineteenth century, they started calling themselves “Scotch-Irish” to dissociate themselves from the newcomers. Now more commonly known as “Scots-Irish,” the Scotch-Irish originated largely from Ulster, the northern counties of Ireland. Their immigration to North America began around 1695 and continued through the early nineteenth century, the largest wave arriving between 1717 and 1775. These consisted of native Ulster Protestants and Scots who had settled Ulster. Mostly Presbyterian, they brought to the New World a strong Calvinist tradition. Some may originally have been Roman Catholic but adopted Protestantism after arrival, in response to social prohibitions on Catholicism. Desires for land and religious freedom were the primary motives for immigration. Edged out by English settlers for arable land in the low country, the Scotch-Irish traveled the wagon roads that led to the western areas of Virginia and the Carolinas. The Scotch-Irish developed a reputation for being rugged, devout, and fiercely independent, leaving a stamp on the regions they pioneered. Past experiences created a deep suspicion of authority among the Scotch-Irish. A majority of Scotch-Irish Americans supported the American Revolution and later backed the Confederacy in the Civil War. Although early Scotch-Irish settlers referred to themselves simply as “Irish,” the term “Scotch-Irish” came into use in the nineteenth century, as Protestant Irish disdained identification with a newer group of immigrant Catholic Irish, a visible immigrant community by the late nineteenth century. As such, the Scotch-Irish may be properly classified as a subculture. Gene Redding Wynne, Jr. Further Reading Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Disney Enterprises, 1997. Fallows, Marjorie. Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Griffin, William D. A Portrait of the Irish in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. 635

Sephardic Jews

McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Diaspora in America. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984. Paulson, Timothy J. Irish Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. See also Anti-Irish Riots of 1844; Celtic Irish; European immigrants, 17901892; German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and African Americans; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Irish stereotypes.

Sephardic Jews Identification: Jews who follow the liturgy and customs developed by Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal as well as Babylonian Jewish traditions Immigration issues: European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Religion Significance: An upper class consisting mostly of intellectuals and members of the business elite, Sephardic Jews were the first Jewish immigrants to North America. Sephardic Jews (derived from sepharad, a place of exile) have a proud multicultural heritage that combines Islamic and Christian influences. Members have published biblical commentaries, literature, and works on science, philosophy, and legal issues. Persecuted by Roman Catholics during the Inquisition, they were forced to become Christian or face expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. Most of them left Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497 and settled in Holland, Brazil (Recife), Martinique, and various islands in the West Indies, where they prospered as a merchant class. Sephardic Jews were the first Jewish immigrants to arrive in the North American colonies. Some historians believe that Sephardic Jews accompanied Columbus on his voyage to America in 1492. Other historical records indicate that in 1634, the Portuguese Jew Mathias de Sousa arrived in Maryland and established the first American Jewish settlement. Shortly after, another Sephardim, Jacob Barsimson, arrived in the colonies on a Dutch West India Company boat. During the mid-seventeenth century, some Sephardic Jews settled in Rhode Island and Virginia. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil arrived in New Amsterdam. These refugees were not welcomed by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, whom some historians describe as a bigot and anti-Semitic. The policy of tolerance for Jews, followed in the Dutch American colonists’ native land, was applied in the colonies, and the Jews were allowed to remain, but some historians claim that this deference toward the Jews was primarily sparked by the colonists’ fear of losing economic benefits in New Amsterdam. The Sephar636

September 11 terrorist attacks

dic Jews in New Amsterdam were not allowed to build a temple or practice their religious beliefs in public; however in 1682, they rented a house for prayer meetings, and in 1730, the first synagogue, Shearith Israel, was built in New Amsterdam. Gradually, Sephardic Jews succeeded in becoming participants in the political process. They became a dominant force; however, in the first part of the nineteenth century they seemed to lose connection with their Jewish ancestry. Prominent, wealthy Sephardic families moved in the same social circles as Christian families such as the Rockefellers. Intermarriage with Christians led to a weakening of Jewish faith and culture among the Sephardic Jews, who remained prominent society members and set standards of morality, education, and social life. Competition arose between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, who often attended Sephardic synagogues and followed Sephardic ritual. Language was another barrier; the Sephardi spoke Ladino (medieval Castilian with an admixture of Hebrew), while the Ashkenazi spoke Yiddish (German, with an admixture of eastern European languages and Hebrew). Nineteenth century American Jews opted to assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon culture, thereby creating their own brand of Judaism. Sephardic Jews were soon outnumbered by Ashkenazi immigrants who began to dominate American Jewish culture. Maria A. Pacino Further Reading Marcus, Jacob R. The Colonial American Jew, 1492-1776. 3 vols. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Pool, David de Sola, and Tamara de Sola Pool. An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654-1954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Soviet Jewish immigrants; Twice migrants.

September 11 terrorist attacks The Event: Terrorist hijackings of commercial jetliners that were used to kill several thousand people in attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Date: September 11, 2001 Place: New York, New York; Washington, D.C.; rural Pennsylvania 637


The Events of September 11, 2001 At 8:45 a.m. on September, 11, 2001, an airliner flying out of Boston crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center, ripping a hole in several upper floors and starting a fire so intense that people on higher floors could not evacuate the building. At first, the crash was believed to be an accident. However, when a second airliner struck the Trade Center’s south tower eighteen minutes later, it was clear that neither crash had been accidental. Fearing that a large-scale terrorist attack was underway, government agencies shut down local airports, bridges, and tunnels. Less than one hour after the first crash, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered—for the first time in history—a stop to all flight operations throughout the United States. Only moments later, a third airliner crashed into the Pentagon Building outside Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, the intense fires in the Trade Center towers—fed by the airliners’ jet fuel—so weakened the buildings that they could no longer support their upper floors. At 10:05 a.m., the entire south tower collapsed; twenty-three minutes later, the north tower collapsed. Between those events, a fourth airliner crashed in a field outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As was later determined, all four airliners had been hijacked by operatives of a shadowy Middle Eastern organization known as al-Qaeda that was determined to kill as many Americans and do as much damage to the United States as possible. By any measure, the scheme was a great success. The cost of the physical damage of the attacks could be measured in billions of dollars. Although the extent of human fatalities was not as great as was initially feared, about three thousand people lost their lives—a number greater than all the American fatalities during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In addition, the sense of security from outside threats that Americans had long enjoyed was shattered. The impact of the terrorist attacks on American attitudes toward immigrants would be significant.

Immigration issues: Border control; Civil rights and liberties; Discrimination; Government and politics; Middle Eastern immigrants Significance: Often simply called “Nine-Eleven,” the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, hardened attitudes of the American public toward immigrants—especially those from the Middle East—and led to a tightening of border controls. At the end the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst century, more foreign-born people were entering the United States than at any previous time in the nation’s history. From 1990 through 2001, nearly 12 million people entered the country as legal permanent immigrants. Approximately 3 million came in as temporary nonimmigrants, and well over 1 million arrived as refugees and political asylum seekers. The population of illegal, or undocumented, immigrants living in the United States grew from 638


about 5 million people in 1996 to about 7 million in 2000, according to estimates of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Many of the undocumented immigrants had been admitted as temporary nonimmigrants and did leave after their visas expired. While most immigrants and visitors to the United States were job-seekers or tourists, a tiny minority were radical opponents of American policies. On September 11, 2001, Islamic radicals living in the United States hijacked four commercial airliners. They flew two of the planes into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, destroying the buildings and killing thousands of people. A third plane hit the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. military outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after a struggle between passengers and hijackers. Of the nineteen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt. All nineteen had entered the United States legally, on visas granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The events of September 11, 2001, intensified concerns that American borders had become too open. Homeland Security and the End of the INS On September 20, only nine days after the terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush reacted to the attacks by establishing the Office of Homeland Security, headed by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. In January, 2002, this cabinet-level office became the Department of Homeland Security. The new department was in-

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Nuns studying the pictures posted in New York City of persons missing after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. (Library of Congress)

tended to centralize efforts against terrorism, and the functions of nearly two dozen already existing agencies were to be brought under the department’s control. The INS was one of the agencies placed under Homeland Security. Originally created in 1933 from the merger of the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization, the INS moved from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice in 1940, reflecting a heightened concern over immigration as a security issue during the years before the United States entered World War II. Security questions once again encouraged change in 2001 and 2002, as many people asked how the nineteen foreign-born perpetrators of the September 11 attacks had been allowed to enter the United States. Concerns that the INS was too lax on security grew more intense after March, 2002, when news sources reported that not long before the terrorist attacks, the INS had approved changes in visa statuses, from tourist to stu640


dent, for Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi—two of the hijackers who died piloting planes into the World Trade Center. A year later, on March 1, 2003, the functions and offices of the INS were transferred to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security. Change in Immigration Policy Almost immediately after September 11, the federal government began passing new laws to tighten control over immigration. The most important of these laws was Public Law 107-56, whose full title was “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” the USA PATRIOT Act, or, more simply, the Patriot Act. It was passed by Congress on October 26, 2001. The act provided new reasons for denying immigrants entry into the United States, gave a broader definition to the concept of terrorist activity, and increased the number of justifications for deporting visitors and immigrants. Perhaps most controversially, the Patriot Act gave new powers to the U.S. attorney general, including the power to detain any persons the attorney general reasonably suspects of being connected to terrorist activity. In November, 2001, Congress passed the Border Security Act, authorizing more funds for immigration and customs staff, providing for the sharing of information on deportation cases among federal agencies, tracking foreign students, and tightening oversight in other ways. The Department of Justice also issued a variety of new directives and regulations in the months following September 11, including interviews with recently arrived Middle Eastern men and provisions for detaining terrorist suspects. Supporters of the new legal approaches argued that these steps were necessary to combat terrorism. Critics countered that they constituted an assault on civil liberties. Many observers also saw the parts of the crack down on terrorism as especially oppressive to Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants in the United States. Consequences of Changing Policies Changing immigration policies had little apparent impact on overall levels of legal permanent migration into the United States. In 2002, the federal government granted legal immigrant status to 1,063,732 people, approximately the same number as in the previous year and more than had been accepted as immigrants in any year since 1991. The number of immigrants dropped to 705,827 in 2003, but even that figure was still a larger number of legal immigrants than in either 1998 or 1999. Permanent immigration remained fairly stable because the Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau was processing people who had applied in earlier years and because much of the immigration into the United States was based on the re-unification of family members. Despite a general overall stability in immigration figures, immigration from a number of countries with large Islamic populations began an apparent drop. Overall immigration from nations in North Africa and Asia with 641


large or predominantly Islamic populations dropped from a historic high of nearly 80,000 people in 2001 to under 73,000 in 2002 and to under 52,000 in 2003. The numbers of temporary visitors from Islamic countries dropped even more noticeably. Visitors from the predominantly Islamic nations of North Africa and Asia decreased from 1,135,452 in 2001 to 808,322 in 2002 and 745,613 in 2003. Declines in visitors from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt were among the most marked. Whereas 66,721 Saudi Arabians had entered the United States in 2001, only 16,154 came in 2003. Those arriving from the United Arab Emirates decreased from 17,247 in 2001 to 5,368 in 2003. The numbers of Egyptian visitors went down by almost half: from 61,826 to 31,430 in 2003. The new federal policies affected enforcement of laws directed at undocumented immigrants from Islamic countries much more than they affected legal immigration levels. The total number of deportable noncitizens, from all parts of the world, who were located by American officials actually decreased steadily from 2000 through 2003. However, numbers of people from Islamic nations in North Africa and Asia who were classified as subject to deportation and were located by American officials jumped dramatically from 2,613 in 2001 to 4,902 in 2002 and then to 15,026 in 2003. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Barnett, R. Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004. Broad essay on the erosion of civil liberties in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Brzezinski, Matthew. Fortress America: On the Frontline of Homeland Security—An Inside Look at the Coming Surveillance State. New York: Bantam Books, 2004. Offering both hypothetical and real stories about the war on terror since September 11, 2001, this book takes a critical look at the Department of Homeland Security, the sacrificing of civil liberties, and damage done to international alliances. Cole, David. Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism. New York: New Press/W. W. Norton, 2003. Critical analysis of the erosion of civil liberties in the United States since September 11, 2001, with attention to the impact of federal policies on immigrants and visiting aliens. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. Comprehensive history of American immigration policy, from the beginnings of a major wave of European immigration in the late nineteenth century to the years following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Elaasar, Aladdin. Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab and Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America. Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2004. Study of the in642

Settlement house movement

creased pressures on Arab and other Muslim immigrants to the United States after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Goldberg, Daniel, Victor Goldberg, and Robert Greenwald. It’s a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11. New York: Nation Books, 2003. Forty-one articles and cartoons emphasizing civil liberties issues arising from antiterrorism efforts. Leone, Richard C., and Greg Anrig, Jr. The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism. New York: BBS PublicAffairs, 2003. Three experts on civil liberties warn of the consequences of the war on terrorism to American freedoms, while documenting how each generation of Americans has witnessed struggles between order and liberty. Steger, Manfred B. Judging Nonviolence: The Dispute Between Realists and Idealists. New York: Routledge, 2003. Balanced treatment of the arguments for and against nonviolence, written in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, with discussions of major social political movements that employed nonviolence. White, Jonathan R. Defending the Homeland: Domestic Intelligence Law Enforcement and Security. Stamford, Conn.: Wadsworth, 2003. Survey of law enforcement in the United States discussing how the criminal justice system has changed since September 11, 2001. See also Arab American stereotypes; Arab immigrants; Border Patrol, U.S.; Coast Guard, U.S.; Deportation; Illegal aliens; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Muslims.

Settlement house movement The Event: Rise of charitable settlement houses in major urban centers Date: 1890’s-early twentieth century Immigration issues: Families and marriage; Women Significance: The settlement house movement provided social services and cultural programs to immigrant and poor urban women and their families and professional opportunities to college-educated women who desired to work on behalf of social reform. The settlement house movement began among Christian Socialists and university-affiliated reformers in England and spread to major cities in North America during the 1890’s. The houses, which were established primarily in 643


the urban centers of the Midwest and Northeast, multiplied from six in 1891 to more than four hundred in 1910. They became principal agencies of social reform during the Progressive era. Philosophy and Ideals A reaction to growing urbanization, immigration, and changes in labor patterns, settlement houses emphasized social action to improve impoverished living conditions and exploitative labor practices. Influenced by the Social Gospel movement, they emphasized character building and an organic vision of society based on cultural mediation and mutual reciprocity between native-born citizens and immigrants and between the middle class and the poor. They simultaneously advocated social assimilation to middle-class norms and cultural pluralism or diversity. These positions often came into conflict. The original settlement houses were also experiments in collective living. Located in poor ethnic neighborhoods, they attracted resident workers who were mainly young, idealistic, college-educated men and women from well-to-do households. Programs and Services Early programs focused on providing services for children, including day care nurseries for the children of working mothers, kindergartens, boys’ and girls’ clubs, recreation programs, nature outings, playgrounds, and gymnasiums. Citizenship classes, emphasizing literacy and the English language, were held for adults, as well as practical training

Cooking class in Chicago’s Hull-House. (University of Illinois at Chicago, University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection)

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courses in home economics, dressmaking, cooking, sanitation, and nutrition. Medical and nursing services were provided by some houses, most notably by the extensive visiting nurse service of the Henry Street Settlement House in New York. Family counseling and job referral bureaus were offered to working women. Exhibitions, art history, and the performing arts, including music and drama, also played an important part in settlement house programming. Resident workers and teachers such as Ellen Gates Starr of Hull-House believed in the uplifting value of fine art appreciation. Efforts were made to attract Italian, Greek, and East European women to the houses by appealing to nationalist loyalties, including the planning of ethnic festivals, receptions, and celebrations of folk dancing and crafts. At Hull-House, a labor museum was established in which immigrant women demonstrated the history of textile arts. The museum program sought to bridge cultural gaps that had developed between first-generation immigrants, who were highly skilled in handicrafts and traditional manufactures, and their children, who were more familiar with factory work and mechanization, many having lost respect for older ways. Institutionalization and Reform Many of the programs that existed on a trial basis in the settlement houses were adopted by public school systems, park and urban planning agencies, and the developing juvenile justice system and social work institutions. In addition to providing services and stimulating appreciation of diverse cultural heritages, settlement workers were also in the forefront of the formation of social policy. They gathered data to educate the population at large as to the needs of the urban poor, and they lobbied for municipal reform and state and federal legislation that addressed the issues of housing, labor, women’s rights, and prostitution. Many of the reforms that they advocated became central tenets of the Progressive Party platform during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential bid in 1912. Ethnicity and Race While settlement workers saw themselves as advocates for the lower classes, their application of middle-class values was sometimes at odds with immigrant women’s perspectives. Conflicts existed, for example, over economic issues involved in child labor. While settlement workers sought to abolish the practice, many immigrant families relied on the income that children earned. Settlement workers also stressed white slavery aspects of prostitution, portraying the prostitute as a victim and emphasizing the sexual double standard and the curbing of male behavior while avoiding the idea of sex work as a chosen occupation. Few immigrant women ascended to positions of leadership in the protective leagues that emerged from the houses or in the resident work itself. While most settlements were run by native-born whites on behalf of white ethnic immigrants, some offered separate branches for black residents, and a few, such as the Phillis Wheatley Settlement in Minneapolis, were founded specifically as residence facilities for African Americans. 645


Women’s Opportunities and the Legacy of Reform Although settlement houses served both men and women, women such as Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement House and Jane Addams of Hull-House were among the earliest founders of houses and the most prominent leaders of the movement. The settlement houses in general provided outlets of usefulness for educated women, aid to working women with families, and models of effective female leadership, networking, and authority. Many women who initially were involved in settlement work went on to positions of influence in organizations, unions, and government agencies, broadening the impact of the settlement houses on the wider sphere of reform. Florence Kelley went from settlement experience to founding the National Consumers’ League in 1899, which worked to improve labor conditions for women and children. Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott both became directors of the Children’s Bureau. Alice Hamilton became a leading expert on industrial medicine and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), a labor organization, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights group, were formed with support from settlement workers. Alice Gannett of the Henry Street Settlement House led the lobbying efforts that resulted in the passage of the Mothers’ Aid Law of 1913, which provided pensions to needy mothers of dependent children, and Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott were leaders in the new field of social work. Both Addams and Wald became central figures in the war-era pacifist movement, with Addams chair of the Women’s Peace Party and head of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Wald president of the American Union Against Militarism. The settlement house movement bridged the gap between older Victorian concepts of charity and philanthropy and modern social work. Over time, the unique nature of the houses was eclipsed by the professionalization of social services, which changed the cooperative volunteer staffing of the settlements to salaried and specialized positions. Post-World War I conservatism and changes in fund-raising methods also diminished the operations of the houses. Barbara Bair Further Reading Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull House. Edited by Victoria Bissell Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Scholarly edition, with additional autobiographical materials, of a book that Addams first published in 1911. Provides detailed account of the establishment, operation, and philosophy of Hull-House. Bryan, Mary Linn McCree, and Allen Davis. One Hundred Years at Hull-House. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Compendium of primary sources about Hull-House, including numerous photographs. 646

Sikh immigrants

Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. An extensively documented examination of the contribution of U.S. settlementhouse workers to the development of social welfare. Provides a historical and ideological context for the work of Hull-House. Davis, Allen. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. An overview of the origin, guiding principles, activities, and accomplishments of American social settlements during their early years. Deegan, Mary Jo. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience Against Ancient Evils. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Study of HullHouse, from 1892 to 1960, in the context of racial and ethnic issues. Glowacki, Peggy, and Julia Hendry. Hull-House. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2004. Study of Hull-House, from 1892 to 1960, in the context of racial and ethnic issues. Levine, Daniel. Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. A useful discussion of the background, context, daily operations, institutional growth, and community influence of Hull-House. Shpak Lissak, Rivka. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890-1919. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Scholarly study of settlement houses that focuses on the services they provided to new immigrants. See also

Hull-House; Machine politics; Women immigrants.

Sikh immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from a religious community whose origins are in South Asia’s Punjab region Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Religion Significance: The numbers of Sikhs in the United States have never been large, but after the relaxation of restrictions on immigration from Asia during the 1960’s, highly educated and affluent Sikhs settled in every major American city. The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev (1469-1539), advocated peace, a casteless society, the oneness of God, and the unifying of Hindus and Muslims. Vicious persecution contributed to this peaceful community being transformed into the Khalsa, a soldier-saint brotherhood who believed it was right to draw the sword for a just cause. 647

Sikh immigrants

The Sikhs’ tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708), instituted the 5Ks, a term used for the symbols Sikhs wear, uncut hair under a turban being the most noticeable. Throughout their history, Sikhs have been respected for their martial valor, innovativeness, adaptability to diverse situations, and migratory tradition. Sikh commuImage Not Available nities are found throughout the world. The initial influx, from 1904 to 1923, consisted primarily of Sikhs who originated in rural Punjab and had agricultural backgrounds but were residing in Canada. They migrated south to escape being targets of violence. Some obtained employment in the lumber trade around Bellingham and Everett, Washington. In 1907, about one thousand Sikhs were expelled from the Pacific Northwest because local laborers believed they were depressing wages. The Sikhs and other Indians moved south to work on the farms in the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Imperial Valleys in the summer and labored in the California cities of Yuba City, Stockton, and El Centro in the winter. Their numbers probably never exceeded six thousand. Contemporary newspaper articles talked about the “Hindoo invasion” and “turbaned tide.” In 1918, the “Hindoo” conspiracy trials brought adverse publicity to the Sikh and Indian community of California. In 1913, the Ghadr (revolutionary) Party was formed and headquartered in San Francisco with the aim of gaining India’s independence from Great Britain. The defendants in the Hindoo case, active members of the Ghadr Party, were charged with violating U.S. neutrality laws. Much of the evidence and impetus to prosecute came from British agents. In 1923, immigration from India to the United States was effectively halted; legislation prevented South Asians from owning land, becoming citizens, or bringing spouses to the United States. As a result, some Sikhs married Mexican women. The Ghadr Party remained active, but at a reduced level. During the 1930’s, many Sikhs returned to India, and the population decreased to less than fifteen hundred. In 1946, the Luce-Celler Bill was passed, giving people of Asian Indian descent the right to become American citizens and creating an immigration quota for India. In 1965, immigration legislation ended the national origins quotas. Immi648

Southeast Asian immigrants

gration to the United States was based on the candidate’s ability to meet a set of qualifications. In India, a cadre of highly educated doctors, engineers, and scientists was ready to take advantage of the new laws. The Sikhs who immigrated under the relaxed laws are residentially dispersed in affluent suburbs. They gather in their local gurdwaras, or Sikh places of worship, which are part of the landscape of every major city in North America. Arthur W. Helweg Further Reading Chi, Tsung. East Asian Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2005. Helweg, Arthur W., and Usha M. Helweg. An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. La Brack, Bruce. The Sikhs of Northern California, 1904-1974. New York: AMS Press, 1988. Motwani, Jagat K. America and India in a “Give and Take” Relationship: Sociopsychology of Asian Indian Immigrants. New York: Center for Asian, African and Caribbean Studies, 2003. Singh, Jaswinder, and Kalyani Gopal. Americanization of New Immigrants: People Who Come to America and What They Need to Know. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. See also Asian Indian immigrants; Asian Indian immigrants and family customs; Twice migrants.

Southeast Asian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Southeast Asian nations of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Families and marriage; Refugees Significance: There are substantial Southeast Asian populations throughout North America, each with distinctive family customs. Since 1975 large numbers of Southeast Asians from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam have settled throughout the United States and southern Canada. Most of those from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam arrived in North 649


America as refugees after socialist governments came to power in those countries at the end of the Vietnam War. The Hmong, a minority group from the mountains of Laos, were among these refugees. The Thais arrived in North America as immigrants, not refugees, with the largest numbers entering as students or as spouses of U.S. or Canadian citizens. However, much of the Thai settlement is also a consequence of American involvement in the war in Southeast Asia from 1965 to 1975, because Thailand borders Cambodia and Laos and the war established many links between America and Thailand. California holds the largest concentrations of Southeast Asians in North America. Of the 149,014 Laotians in the 1990 U.S. Census, 58,058, or 39 percent, lived in California. Similarly, California was home to 32,064, or 35 percent, of the 91,275 U.S. Thais; 68,190, or 46 percent, of the 147,411 U.S. Cambodians; 46,892, or 52 percent, of the 90,082 U.S. Hmong; and 280,223, or 46 percent, of the 614,547 U.S. Vietnamese. Canada has a relatively small Thai population, found chiefly in Toronto, but by the late 1980’s it was home to more than 100,000 Southeast Asians from the other groups. About threequarters of Canadian Southeast Asians are Vietnamese, and they are primarily concentrated in Ontario Province, particularly in Toronto. Size and Youth of Families The Southeast Asians come from countries in which large families are customary and, as a consequence, their families tend to be much larger than those of other Americans. In the United States, for example, U.S. Census data show that the average American family had only 3.16 people per family. The average Canadian family was slightly larger. The average Cambodian family, by contrast, had 5.03 people, the average Laotian family 5.01, the average Vietnamese family 4.36, and the average Hmong family 6.58. Only the Thais, with an average family size of 3.48 people were close to other Americans. This is probably a reflection of the fact that so many Thais came to the United States as students or were married to non-Asian Americans. Partly as a result of large family size, Southeast Asians tend to be younger than other Americans. In 1990 about one-fourth of all Americans were younger than eighteen. That same year nearly half of all Cambodian Americans and Laotian Americans were younger than eighteen. More than one-third of Vietnamese Americans and nearly two-thirds of Hmong Americans were younger than eighteen. Only the Thais were similar to other Americans. The extreme youth of the refugee groups means that passing on traditional family customs and relations is an especially large task for Laotian, Cambodian, Hmong, and Vietnamese parents. Family Relations Husbands are regarded as the heads of families among all Southeast Asian groups, but women often wield much power, especially over matters having to do with the household. Children in traditional Southeast Asian families are expected to show a great deal of respect for elders. Older brothers and sisters are expected to take responsibility for younger sib650


lings, and younger children are expected to defer to their older siblings. The psychologist Nathan Caplan has argued that highly cooperative family relations may be one of the reasons why Southeast Asian children often do well in American schools, since brothers and sisters frequently help one another in doing schoolwork. Since women are regarded as the core of the family and the central carriers of tradition in all Southeast Asian cultures, parents tend to place higher expectations and restrictions on daughters than on sons. This sometimes causes resentment on the part of American-born daughters and may lead to friction within families. Both sons and daughters sometimes come into conflict with parents when the children attempt to live out American values of individual independence. Marriage and Wedding Customs The wedding customs of Thais, Laotians, and Cambodians are quite similar. In common traditional Thai and Laotian weddings, bridegrooms visit brides’ houses on the evening before the wedding. Buddhist monks bless elaborate begging bowls filled with water. Then a long strand of cotton thread is tied around couples’ and monks’ wrists and looped around the blessed water. This ceremony is intended to unite the souls (known in both Lao and Thai as kwan) of the betrothed. The next morning, monks, friends, and relatives sprinkle couples with the consecrated water. Later in the day, brides and bridegrooms sit together, dressed in traditional clothing, in front of a feast and wedding gifts in the presence of their families and guests. The monks recite prayers for couples’ happiness and well-being. In Cambodian weddings the ceremony usually begins in the morning at the brides’ homes, where Buddhist monks chant blessings. Locks of hair are cut from the heads of the betrothed. Cotton threads soaked in holy water are tied around the wrists of brides and bridegrooms. A circle of married couples then passes around a candle in order to bless the marriages. Such weddings are followed by a large feast, which may be held in a private home or in a restaurant, depending on the convenience and means of the families. Among the Hmong, marriages are traditionally arranged by go-betweens, who negotiate a price to be paid to the brides’ families. Marriages are made public by a two-day feast. In Laos, if families could not agree on a bride-price or if prospective husbands were unacceptable to brides’ families, suitors would often elope with the young women or kidnap them. Because the Hmong in America who have tried in some instances to follow this practice have been charged with kidnapping and rape, this custom has become very rare. Wedding customs of Vietnamese Americans are quite different from those of other Southeast Asians, because the Vietnamese have been much more influenced by Chinese civilization than other Southeast Asians and many Vietnamese are Roman Catholics. Although Roman Catholic and Buddhist Vietnamese maintain many social ties with one another, marriages of people of 651


different religious faiths are fairly rare. Roman Catholic and Buddhist Vietnamese in North America often live in separate communities. Although wedding customs differ among Vietnamese of different religions, wedding feasts following marriage ceremonies are a central tradition for all. Family Holiday Celebrations Holiday celebrations are important to Southeast Asian American families, because they provide opportunities for elders to pass on traditions and customs to younger people. Among all groups, New Year’s celebrations are the most widely held and most important. The Laotian, Cambodian, and Thai New Year is usually held in mid-April. Thais and Laotians in America frequently dress in traditional clothes and hold cultural exhibitions during New Year’s events, and they enjoy the custom of throwing water on each other. The Cambodians hold parties and dances and sometimes play a customary game in which young men and women throw a rolled-up scarf back and forth. At the Hmong New Year’s Festival, held at the time of the new moon in December, young men and women play a similar courting game, tossing a ball back and forth. The Vietnamese New Year, held in January or February, is a lively three-day celebration with a variety of family and community rituals. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Barr, Linda. Long Road to Freedom: Journey of the Hmong. Bloomington, Minn.: Red Brick Learning, 2004. Caplan, Nathan, John K. Whitmore, and Marcella H. Choy. The Boat People and Achievement in America: A Study of Family Life, and Cultural Values. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Cargill, Mary Terrell, and Jade Quang Huynh, eds. Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. Chan, Sucheng. Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. _______, ed. Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Mote, Sue Murphy. Hmong and American: Stories of Transition to a Strange Land. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Ng, Franklin, ed. Asian American Encyclopedia. 6 vols. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995. Proudfoot, Robert. Even the Birds Don’t Sound the Same Here: The Laotian Refugees’ Search for Heart in American Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Segal, Uma Anand. A Framework for Immigration: Asians in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 652

Soviet Jewish immigrants

Tenhula, John. Voices from Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. Growing Up American: The Adaptation of Vietnamese Children to American Society. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998. See also Asian American education; Asian American literature; Asian American stereotypes; Asian American women; Farmworkers’ union; Filipino immigrants; Hmong immigrants; Model minorities; Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Refugees and racial/ethnic relations; Vietnamese immigrants.

Soviet Jewish immigrants Identification: Jewish immigrants to North America who emigrated from the Soviet Union before its breakup during the early 1990’s Immigration issues: Demographics; European immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Refugees Significance: After suffering through a long history of oppression under the Russian czars and Soviet rulers, Jews living in the Soviet Union pressed for the right to emigrate. Many who were allowed to leave came to the United States, where they found it difficult to assimilate with other Jews. When the Bolsheviks assumed power in Russia in 1917, they promised to end the periodic pogroms (massacres) and frequent discrimination that Russian Jews had experienced under the czars. However, the Soviet government soon engaged in widespread, though perhaps less overt, forms of discrimination and persecution against the country’s Jewish population. In addition, because the Soviet Union’s official communist ideology included a commitment to atheism, Jews, along with other religious groups, were essentially barred from practicing their religion. Houses of worship were closed or destroyed, and religious leaders were imprisoned. During the era of détente during the 1970’s, the Soviet government permitted a significant increase in Jewish emigration. This was partly caused by the passage in the U.S. Congress of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which tied American-Soviet trade to an increase in the Soviet Union’s Jewish emigration permits. Although many Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel, a large portion of these emigrants eventually settled in the United States. Jewish American groups had lobbied the federal government both to pressure the Soviet government to release Jews and to permit more Soviet Jews to settle in the United States. 653

Soviet Jewish immigrants

Although the immigration campaign was highly successful, Soviet Jewish immigrants did not always integrate with the American Jewish community as well as had been hoped. The immigrants were frequently more secular, having grown up in an officially atheistic state. They also tended to be poor and eager to make use of resources made available by American Jewish groups. Politically, many Soviet Jewish immigrants were more conservative than the mainstream American Jewish groups. Also, many of the immigrants did not speak English. A number of American Jewish leaders expressed disappointment about their inability to incorporate Many refugees from the Soviet Union who could and assimilate the new immigrants. not obtain Soviet passports, traveled under League A second wave of Soviet Jewish of Nations passports such as this one, which was emigration took place during the issued shortly after Joseph Stalin took power in late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when the Soviet Union. (Library of Congress) Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev liberalized his country’s emigration laws. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in particular created a renewed impetus for Soviet Jews (and others) to leave their country. Many Soviet Jews were attracted to the United States by concerted campaigns by Jewish American groups. The number of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union increased from about 200 in 1986 to a peak of 185,000 in 1990. A total of more than 700,000 Soviet Jews immigrated to the United States between 1987 and 1997. The fact that many Soviet Jewish immigrants do not look, speak, or behave like mainstream American Jews has underscored an important principle of racial and ethnic relations. Frequently, cultural and societal differences— rather than purely racial, ethnic, or religious differences—have led to friction between groups. Similarly, the mere sharing of ethnic or racial backgrounds does not ensure intergroup harmony. Steve D. Boilard Further Reading Altshuler, Stuart. The Exodus of the Soviet Jews. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Shasha, Dennis Elliott, and Marina Shron. Red Blues: Voices from the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2002. 654

Taiwanese immigrants

Wertsman, Vladimir, ed. The Russians in America: A Chronology and Fact Book. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1977. See also American Jewish Committee; Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants; Jewish settlement of New York; Jews and Arab Americans; Justice and immigration; Mail-order brides; Russian immigrants; Sephardic Jews.

Taiwanese immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the East Asian island nation of Taiwan, which is also known as Nationalist China Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics Significance: Because of Taiwan’s special relationship with mainland China, the large number of Taiwanese immigrants in the United States have played an important role in relations among Taiwan, China, and the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a surge of Asian immigration to the United States. From 1965 to 1980, many Taiwanese who came to the United States as graduate students decided to remain as immigrants because the economic opportunities were better in America than in Taiwan. Many of these immigrants settled in ethnic communities such as Flushing and Queens in New York and Monterey Park in California. The Taiwanese immigrants felt comfortable in these communities because within them they could speak their native language and interact with other Taiwanese immigrants. In 1981, when Congress set a yearly quota of twenty thousand Taiwanese immigrants, the characteristics of those arriving changed. The new immigrants typically had not studied in the United States and were less likely to speak English. The concentration of non-English-speaking immigrants in certain areas such as Monterey Park caused a backlash, spawning efforts to have English declared the official language in states such as California during the mid- and late-1980’s. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 250,000 Taiwanese Americans lived in the United States. Of this group, 20 percent were born in the United States and 40 percent were naturalized citizens. The median age of this group was about thirty-five, and with a college graduation rate of 60 percent, a member of this group was much more likely to have completed higher education than was the average American. Eight percent of this group held doctoral degrees, and 48 percent were employed in managerial or profes655

Taiwanese immigrants

sional positions. Taiwanese Americans tended to be very prosperous, with average incomes higher than the national median; 71 percent of them owned their own homes. Throughout the history of Taiwanese immigration, organizations devoted to the social, economic, and political welfare of Taiwanese Americans have existed across the United States. Part of their social and cultural purpose has been to maintain Taiwanese cultural traditions among the immigrants and their descendants and to familiarize other Americans with those traditions. Therefore, many Taiwanese American organizations have introduced their communities to such cultural practices as eating Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) established the moon cakes to celebrate the autumn Republic of China on the island of Taiwan in festival, celebrating the Lunar New 1949, after Mao Zedong’s Communist Party Year, and preparing rice dumplings took control of the mainland and created the for the Dragonboat Festival. People’s Republic of China. Taiwan had a close Taiwanese American organizations relationship with the United States through the have also attempted to exert political Cold War, until the 1970’s, when the United States recognized the People’s Republic. The influence in both the United States question of Taiwan’s independence from China and Taiwan. In the United States, they remained unresolved into the twenty-first cen- have attempted to affect U.S. foreign policy toward China and Taiwan. They tury. (Library of Congress) have organized demonstrations to protest overseas incidents that have affected Taiwan and have lobbied members of Congress to support Taiwan’s efforts to remain free of China. Through political activities designed to affect their homeland, Taiwanese Americans have helped to create a more democratic Taiwan by helping to elect prodemocracy members to the Kuomintang (parliament) and by supporting the prodemocracy candidate during the 1996 presidential elections. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading Chee, Maria W. L. Taiwanese American Transnational Families: Women and Kin Work. New York: Routledge, 2005. Chen, Hsiang-Shui. Chinatown No More: Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Ng, Franklin, ed. Asian American Encyclopedia. 6 vols. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995. 656

Thai garment worker enslavement

Pyong Gap Min. Asian Americans. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. Zinzius, Birgit. Chinese America: Stereotype and Reality—History, Present, and Future of the Chinese Americans. New York: P. Lang, 2004. See also Amerasians; Asian American education; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1943.

Thai garment worker enslavement The Event: Southern California garment factory that employed seventy-two Thai immigrants in slavelike conditions until raided by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers Date: August 2, 1995 Place: El Monte, California Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Labor; Slavery Significance: This highly publicized incident helped to call attention to how the largely hidden problem of slavery in the modern world reaches even into industrialized democracies such as the United States. Before dawn on August 2, 1995, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials staged a raid on a garment factory in El Monte, California. The factory, surrounded by barbed wire, held seventy-two workers from Thailand, some of whom had lived and worked in the factory for years. When the workers first arrived in the United States, their employers took them from the airport directly to the factory. Each night, the workers, who sewed clothing that was sold under major brand names, were locked up and guarded. They worked from 7:00 a.m. to midnight every day, for $1.60 per hour, with no extra pay for working more than forty hours a week. Most of this pay was withheld by their employers as repayment for transportation costs to the United States. Factory owners often held children of the workers hostage to force the adults to keep working. The employers also threatened to beat workers who tried to escape. Captives Neighbors thought that the high walls and barbed wire surrounding the El Monte factory had been put in place to keep criminals out, 657

Thai garment worker enslavement

not to keep workers in. Immigration officers had been suspicious for a long time, however, and in 1992, the INS had sought a warrant to search the building. On that first occasion, federal prosecutors refused to grant the warrant, saying that the evidence of wrongdoing was not sufficient. By the time INS officers gained legal permission to stage their raid on the factory, some of the workers had been imprisoned for as long as seven years. The operation began during the late 1980’s when the Manasurangkun brothers from Thailand, Wirachai, Phanasak, and Surachai, together with their mother, Suni, joined with three other Thai people to recruit poor women in their native land. By bringing these women to the United States, the Manasurangkuns and their partners could get inexpensive labor to sew clothing for name-brand manufacturers. Over time, the treatment of the workers grew increasingly harsh, and the Manasurangkuns hired guards to keep them from escaping. According to Rojana Cheunchujit, a worker who spoke English and came to serve as a spokesperson for the others, the Thai women had to work sixteen hours a day and sleep on a dirty floor with cockroaches and mice. Two women who tried to escape were beaten and sent back to Thailand. Consequences The case of the Thai workers in El Monte helped call attention to the plight of garment workers in the United States. Since the 1960’s, the sewing of clothing has moved away from large factories and toward small producers who supply large retail stores with a variety of clothes designed to appeal to consumers with varied tastes. These large retail stores are relatively few in number and control much of the American market. To make profits, clothing manufacturers have had to keep their costs down because the retail stores want to supply customers with inexpensive clothes. The clothing manufacturers compete with each other to make garments as cheaply as possible, and the manufacturers therefore try to find the cheapest workers they can. Because immigrants, especially those in the country illegally, will work for lower wages than other people in the United States, by the 1990’s, a majority of garment workers were immigrant women. The slavelike conditions found at the El Monte factory are rare in the United States. Nevertheless, many garment workers labor in difficult and often illegal circumstances. For example, a 1994 investigation by California labor officials looked into the operations of sixty-nine randomly selected manufacturers. All but two of these manufacturers were found to be breaking federal or state laws or both. Half of them were violating minimum wage laws, 68 percent were violating laws regarding overtime, and 93 percent were violating health and safety regulations. The publicity created by the raid at El Monte led to an investigation of the clothing industry by the U.S. Labor Department within two weeks after the incident. The Labor Department warned more than a dozen of the largest U.S. retail merchants that they may have received goods made by the Thai workers. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich called a meeting with the retailers to discuss ways to avoid selling goods made by enslaved workers. 658

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Within two weeks of the raid, the California Labor Department demanded business records from sixteen garment makers believed to have had connections with the El Monte factory. California labor commissioner Virginia Bradshaw found that many of the manufacturers who did business with the El Monte factory were themselves engaging in illegal activities, and the California Labor Department fined several of them $35,000 each for failing to register their operations with the state. In late September, 1999, the California State Assembly passed Assembly Bill 633, a law designed to crack down on clothing sweatshops, businesses employing workers to make clothes under unfair and illegal conditions. Cheunchujit testified before the assembly when it was considering the law. The workers also sued the companies that hired the El Monte factory to make clothes. In July, 1999, their attorneys agreed with these companies that the workers would be paid $1.2 million for back wages and damages. Under the agreement, the workers would receive $10,000 to $80,000 each, depending on how many years they had been forced to work in the factory. The Manasurangkuns pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling the workers into the United States and keeping them in slavelike conditions. The four family members and three other Thai people who worked with them were sentenced to prison terms. Carl L. Bankston III Further Reading Bales, Kevin. New Slavery: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABCClio, 2001. Bush, M. L. Servitude in Modern Times. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2000. Miers, Suzanne. Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. See also Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance; Clotilde slave ship; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Garment industry; Southeast Asian immigrants; Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire; Women immigrants.

Tibetan immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the Tibetan region of China Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics Significance: Though nominally Chinese citizens, Tibetans are members of a distinct ethnic group whose homeland was once autonomous from China. A small number of Tibetan refugees live in the United States. 659

Tibetan immigrants

In May, 1951, one year after Chinese troops had occupied Tibet, the governments of Tibet and China agreed that China’s government would have control of Tibet and that the Dalai Lama would be the political leader of Tibet while the Panchen Lama would be the spiritual leader. In 1959, after an uprising in Tibet, the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 of his followers left Tibet to live in India. The Panchen Lama remained in China, but in 1964, he was removed from power by the Chinese government. The next year, Tibet was made an autonomous region of China, and, by 1966, the Chinese government had control of Tibetan newspapers, radio, and television. The Chinese refused to accept the Panchen Lama’s successor, chosen by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan priesthood, and substituted their own candidate for the position. During the 1990’s, a small number of the Dalai Lama’s followers moved to the United States, and by 1999, Tibetans were living in thirty-four states. These Tibetans brought the situation in their homeland to the attention of Americans in the hope that the United States would use its political influence to get the Chinese to recognize the autonomy of Tibet and the authority of the Dalai Lama and the members of the Lama priesthood. Throughout the United States, various groups such as the Students for a Free Tibet worked to make Americans aware of Tibetan culture and of its problems, presenting statistics on the numbers of Tibetans believed to have been killed by the Chinese and the number of monasteries that were reputedly destroyed. These Tibetans claimed that China had denied them freedom of religion by not allowing Tibetans to choose their own successor to the Panchen Lama or even to hang pictures of the Dalai Lama. As evidence of human rights violations, they related an incident involving Ngavong Choephel, who, in July, 1995, after going to Tibet as a Fulbright scholar to make a film on Tibetan arts, was arrested by the Chinese, charged with being a U.S. spy, and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. These groups noted that self-determination, a universal right named in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, was not available to Tibetans. In 1997, the American Episcopal Church passed a resolution urging talks between China and the Dalai Lama. July 6, the birthday of the Dalai Lama, was recognized as World Tibet Day with an interfaith call for freedom of worship for Tibetans. Festivals were held across the United States; popular rock groups such as Pearl Jam participated in a concert in Washington, D.C., in support of negotiations for a free Tibet. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore met with the Dalai Lama, and in 1997, Clinton announced the creation of a post for Tibetan Affairs in the State Department. The Tibetan campaign to raise American awareness had become so successful that many Americans plastered “Free Tibet” stickers on their automobile bumpers in support of the cause. Two pro-Tibetan movies were released by Hollywood in 1997, Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and Kundun, a biography of the Dalai Lama, directed by Martin Scorsese. Kundun was released even though the Chinese govern660

Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire

ment threatened economic reprisals against the Disney Company, which was responsible for the film. Both movies heightened Americans’ sympathies toward Tibet. During the opening week of Seven Years in Tibet, the International Campaign for Tibet handed out 150,000 action kits, explaining how moviegoers could help free Tibet. Annita Marie Ward Further Reading Bernstorff, Dagmar, and Hubertus von Welck, eds. Exile as Challenge: The Tibetan Diaspora. Rev. Eng. ed. Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 2003. Ng, Franklin, ed. Asian American Encyclopedia. 6 vols. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995. Powers, John. History as Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles Versus the People’s Republic of China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pyong Gap Min. Asian Americans. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995. See also Asian American stereotypes; Chinese immigrants; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Twice migrants.

Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire The Event: Lethal fire in a garment sweatshop employing mostly immigrant labor Date: March 25, 1911 Place: New York, New York Immigration issue: Labor Significance: This tragic accident that killed 146 people, most of them immigrant women, led to tougher laws in New York State to protect women and spurred union organizing among women. On March 25, 1911, a deadly fire broke out in the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, located in the Greenwich Village district of New York City. The entire structure was soon consumed by flames. The firm was a notorious sweatshop where a predominantly female force of immigrant workers turned out cheap clothing in wretched, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions. Such establishments were common in the garment district of New 661


York at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when poor women had to take work where they could find it. As the fire spread from the discarded rags where it had started, the trapped workers sought to escape by jumping out of windows to the pavement; they fell ten stories to their deaths. Others died inside from the effects of the smoke. Those who sought to flee found that exit doors did not open or that faulty fire escapes blocked their route. The death toll reached 146, most of them women. Dramatic pictures filled the New York newspapers the next day, depicting the horrors of the scene. The fire became one of the worst fatal accidents in the history of American industrialism. Protests about the unsafe conditions followed. A rally was organized by the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL) and drew eighty thousand marchers. An outraged public became even more incensed when a jury acquitted the building’s owners of wrongdoing. The popular outcry against sweatshops accelerated the campaign of the NWTUL and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) to reform the system in New York City that kept many women in economic serfdom to the clothing trade. The ILGWU, led by Rose Schneiderman and other female activists, joined with middle-class reformers in demands for a state investigating commission to probe the causes of the blaze and to recommend laws to prevent future fires in the garment district.

Several days after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company disaster, a procession was held to commemorate the victims of the fire. (Library of Congress)

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The New York State Factory Investigating Commission made its report in 1914 and advocated sweeping changes in health and safety regulations. At first, the New York legislature resisted an effort to implement the commission’s findings, but leading Democrats, including state senator Robert F. Wagner and future governor Alfred E. Smith, pressed for and secured passage of tougher laws against sweatshops. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire became a landmark episode in the effort to improve working conditions for all American women and to safeguard them against the devastating effects of industrial accidents. It represented a turning point in the struggle for decent treatment of women in the workplace during the era of progressive reform from 1900 to 1920 in the United States. Lewis L. Gould Further Reading Crute, Sheree. “The Insurance Scandal Behind the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.” Ms. 11 (April, 1983): 81-83. Discusses the profits made from the fire by the factory owners. Includes an interview with Pauline Newman, a labor union activist who began working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company when she was ten years of age. Ley, Sandra. Fashion for Everyone: The Story of Ready-to-Wear, 1870’s-1970’s. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. A history of the women’s clothing industry in the United States, discussing designers, fashions of the times, labor struggles, and methods of clothing production and distribution. Mitelman, Bonnie. “Rose Schneiderman and the Triangle Fire.” American History Illustrated 16, no. 4 (July, 1981): 38-47. A profusely illustrated account of the fire. Includes the text of a speech given days after the disaster by labor union activist Rose Schneiderman, whose impassioned call for action stirred many to demand reform legislation. Naden, Corinne. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, March 25, 1911. New York: Franklin Watts, 1971. A brief, simple summary of the fire, its causes, and its aftermath, with detailed maps of each floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on the day of the fire. Written for young readers, with numerous illustrations. Stein, Leon. The Triangle Fire. 1962. Reprint. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1985. The definitive work on the subject, written on the fiftieth anniversary of the fire. A detailed account drawn from court transcripts, official reports, newspaper articles, and interviews with survivors, which meticulously reconstructs the event through the eyes of the participants. See also Garment industry; Thai garment worker enslavement; Women immigrants.

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Twice migrants

Twice migrants Definition: People who emigrate to other countries more than once Immigration issue: Sociological theories Significance: Multiple migration is not a new phenomenon; however, it has become more common among migrant workers from developing nations. Migration is the physical movement of people within a social system. Sociologists have studied the subject through the examination of emigration and immigration—what pushes people to leave their homeland (emigrate) and what pulls people to enter a new culture and country (immigrate). In the latter part of the twentieth century, more complex approaches to migration have emerged as a result of the growing diasporic population of workers. For example, international demands for labor and the shift of capital across national boundaries have increased the rate of multiple migration. Scholar Parminder Bhachu examined a group of Asians of Sikh origin who first migrated to East Africa and then to the United Kingdom. In Africa, this group formed settled communities and shared past experiences as Asians of Sikh origin; they also, however, developed a strong East African identity, which was later reproduced in the United Kingdom. Thus, this Asian group created ties in more than one nation or culture through multiple migration. An increasing number of people migrate not just once or twice but even three times to various countries. Mary Yu Danico Further Reading Bhachu, Parminder. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. New York: Tavistock, 1985. Reitz, Jeffrey G., ed. Host Societies and the Reception of Immigrants. La Jolla, Calif.: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2003. See also Deportation; History of U.S. immigration; Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha; Israeli immigrants; Japanese Peruvians; Justice and immigration; Push and pull factors; Sephardic Jews; Sikh immigrants; Tibetan immigrants.

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Undocumented workers

Undocumented workers Definition: Immigrants who enter the United States illegally—without proper visas, passports, or other types of legal documentation, to obtain employment Immigration issues: Border control; Economics; Illegal immigration; Latino immigrants; Law enforcement; Mexican immigrants Significance: The term undocumented workers commonly applied to Mexican and Central American workers in the United States. Undocumented workers have formed the largest immigrant workforce since World War II. Historically, undocumented workers were referred to as “wetbacks,” a reference to the notion that Mexican immigrants illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border by swimming the Rio Grande (known on the Mexican side of the border as the Río Bravo), which runs along part of the Texas border. Although some illegal immigrants wade across the river, in reality few, if any, swim across, since the river is seldom deep enough to necessitate swimming. Not only was the term “wetback” an inaccurate descriptor for most individuals who entered the country illegally; it soon came to have derogatory and dis-

Undocumented Mexican farmworkers waiting to be sent back to Mexico at Calexico in 1972, during a period when an estimated 300,000 Mexicans were entering the United States illegally every year in search of employment. (NARA)

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Undocumented workers

criminatory connotations when it was applied to all Mexicans and even to native-born U.S. citizens of Mexican or any other Latin American descent who were living in the United States. The term “undocumented worker” is less politically charged than “wetback” or “illegal alien” and is a much more accurate and neutral descriptor of the individuals who come to the United States in search of work without legal papers. Celestino Fernández Further Reading Ahmed, Syed Refaat. Forlorn Migrants: An International Legal Regime for Undocumented Migrant Workers. Dhaka, Bangladesh: University Press, 2000. International perspectives on undocumented workers by an Asian scholar. Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Collection of balanced discussions about the most important and most controversial issues relating to immigration, including the regulation of undocumented workers. Foner, Nancy, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Collection of papers on immigration from a conference held at Columbia University in June, 1998. Among the many topics covered are government policy and undocumented workers. Jacobs, Nancy R. Immigration: Looking for a New Home. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Broad discussion of modern federal government immigration policies that considers all sides of the debates about the rights of illegal aliens. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Scholarly study of social and legal issues relating to illegal aliens in the United States during the twenty-first century. Staeger, Rob. Deported Aliens. Philadelphia: Mason Crest, 2004. Up-to-date analysis of the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States since the 1960’s, with particular attention to issues relating to deportation. Yoshida, Chisato, and Alan D. Woodland. The Economics of Illegal Immigration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Analysis of the economic impact of illegal immigration in the United States. See also Florida illegal-immigrant suit; Haitian immigrants; History of U.S. immigration; Illegal aliens; Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Naturalization; Plyler v. Doe; Proposition 187; Proposition 227; Refugee fatigue; September 11 terrorist attacks.

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Universal Negro Improvement Association

Universal Negro Improvement Association Identification: Early black nationalist organization Date: Founded in 1916 Place: New York, New York Immigration issues: African Americans; Civil rights and liberties Significance: Founded by a Jamaican immigrant, the Universal Negro Improvement Association was an organization dedicated to supporting African American racial pride and did much to advance the growth of black nationalism during the 1920’s. In March, 1916, a young black Jamaican, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, arrived in New York City. He had come to the United States in the hope of securing financial help for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he had founded in Jamaica two years earlier. After delivering his first public speech in Harlem in May, Garvey began a long speaking tour that took him through thirty-eight states. In May, 1917, he returned to Harlem and— with the help of his secretary and future wife, Amy Ashwood—organized the first American chapter of the UNIA. Though hardly noticed at the time, the establishment of this organization was a significant first step in the growth of black nationalism in the United States. Within a few years, the UNIA would claim millions of members and hundreds of branches throughout the United States, the Caribbean region, and Africa, and Garvey would be one of the most famous black people in the world. The Beginnings of the UNIA Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in 1887. He claimed to be of pure African descent. His father was a descendant of the maroons, or Jamaican slaves, who successfully revolted against their British masters in 1739. During his early years, Garvey gradually became aware that his color was considered by some in his society to be a badge of inferiority. Jamaica, unlike the United States, placed the mulatto in a higher caste as a buffer against the unlettered black masses. This reality caused a sense of racial isolation and yet pride to grow in the young black man. By his twentieth birthday, Garvey had started a program to change the lives of black Jamaicans. While working as a foreman in a printing shop in 1907, he joined a labor strike as a leader. The strike, quickly broken by the shop owners, caused Garvey to lose faith in reform through labor unions. In 1910, he started publishing a newspaper, Garvey’s Watchman, and helped form a political organization, the National Club. These efforts, which were not particularly fruitful, gave impetus to Garvey’s visit to Central America where he was 667


able to observe the wretched conditions of black people in Costa Rica and Panama. Garvey’s travels led him to London, the center of the British Empire. There the young man met Dusé Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian scholar, who increased the young Jamaican’s knowledge and awareness of Africa. During his stay in England, Garvey also became acquainted with the plight of African Americans through reading Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901). Washington’s autobiography raised questions in Garvey’s mind: I asked, where is the black man’s Government? Where is his King and his Kingdom? Where is his President, his country and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, I will help to make them.

Returning to Jamaica in 1914, Garvey created a self-help organization for black people to which he gave the imposing title, the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League. This new organization, renamed the Universal Negro Improvement Association, based its philosophy on the need to unite “all people of Negro or African parentage.” The goals of the UNIA were to increase racial pride, to aid black people throughout the world, and “to establish a central nation for the race.” Garvey, elected the first president of the UNIA, realized that black people would have to achieve these goals without assistance from white people. This self-help concept, similar to the philosophy (but not the practice) of Booker T. Washington, led Garvey to propose a black trade school in Kingston, Jamaica, similar to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. The idea did not attract wide support, and Garvey was temporarily frustrated. In 1915, Garvey decided to come to the United States in order to seek aid for his Jamaica-based organization. Although he had corresponded with Washington, the black leader had died before Garvey arrived in the United States in 1916. Garvey went directly to Harlem, which during the early twentieth century was becoming a center of black culture. The lives of African Americans were rapidly changing in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Metropolitan areas in the North were experiencing mass migrations of African Americans from the South. In New York City, for example, the black population increased from 91,709 in 1910 to 152,467 in 1920. African Americans were attracted by the promise of jobs and by the possibility of escaping the rigid system of segregation in the South. African Americans found, however, that they could not escape racism simply by moving. Northern whites also believed in the racial inferiority of African Americans and opposed black competitors for their jobs. The new immigrants, like their foreign-born counterparts, were crowded into the northern ghettos without proper housing or the possibility of escape. Racial violence broke out in several northern cities. The North proved not to be a utopia for African Americans. 668


These harsh realities aided Garvey in establishing the UNIA in New York. The population of Harlem was not attracted to the accommodationist philosophy of Washington or the middle-class goals of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Indeed, urban African Americans were wary of all prophets, even Garvey; but the young Jamaican was able to obtain support from the Jamaican immigrants in Harlem, who felt isolated, and he established a branch of the UNIA there in 1917. At first, the organization encountered difficulties. Local Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Impoliticians tried to gain con- provement Association, was deported from the United trol of it, and Garvey had to States in 1927 and eventually returned to his Jamaican fight to save its autonomy. The homeland, where he died in relative obscurity. (Library original branch of the UNIA of Congress) was dissolved, and a charter was obtained from the state of New York which prevented other groups from using the organization’s name. By 1918, under Garvey’s exciting leadership, the New York chapter of the UNIA boasted 3,500 members. By 1919, Garvey optimistically claimed 2 million members for his organization throughout the world and 200,000 subscribers for his weekly newspaper, The Negro World. The Black Star Line and the Collapse of the UNIA In an effort to promote the economic welfare of African Americans under the auspices of the UNIA, Garvey established in 1919 two joint stock companies—the Black Star Line, an international commercial shipping company, and the Negro Factories Corporation, which was to “build and operate factories . . . to manufacture every marketable commodity.” Stock in these companies was sold only to black investors. The Black Star Line was to establish commerce with Africa and transport willing emigrants “back to Africa.” Although both companies were financial failures, they gave many black people a feeling of dignity. As a result of his promotional efforts in behalf of the Black Star Line, the federal government, prodded by rival black leaders, had Garvey indicted for fraudulent use of the mails in 1922. He was tried, found guilty, and sent to prison in 1923. Although his second wife, Amy Jacques-Garvey, worked to hold the UNIA together, it declined rapidly. In 1927, Garvey was released from prison and deported as an undesirable alien. He returned to Jamaica and then went 669

Vietnamese immigrants

to London and Paris and tried to resurrect the UNIA, but with little success. He died in poverty in London in 1940. Although a bad businessman, Garvey was a master propagandist and popular leader who made a major contribution to race consciousness among African Americans. John C. Gardner updated by R. Kent Rasmussen Further Reading Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955. Often reprinted, this biography remains the best introduction to Garvey’s life. Garvey, Marcus. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Edited by Amy Jacques-Garvey, with new introduction by Robert A. Hill. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Classic collection of Garvey’s speeches and writings assembled by his wife. Hill, Robert A., ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. 10 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983-2006. The most extensive collection of original documents by and about Garvey and his movement. Hill, Robert A., and Barbara Bair, eds. Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Collection of Garvey’s most didactic writings, including autobiographical material that he wrote in 1930. A long appendix includes biographies of figures important in his life. Lewis, Rupert, and Maureen Warner-Lewis, eds. Garvey: Africa, Europe, the Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1986. Collection of original research papers on international aspects of Garveyism. See also African immigrants; Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Jamaican immigrants; Literature; West Indian immigrants.

Vietnamese immigrants Identifcation: Immigrants to North America from the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Demographics; Families and marriage; Refugees Significance: Large numbers of Vietnamese refugees fled to North America after the Vietnam War, disrupting their lives and forcing them to adapt to mainstream American culture. 670


Vietnamese Immigration to the United States, 1952-2003 30,000


In order to understand Vietnamese American family customs, it is important to examine briefly the historical background of Vietnamese immigration to North America. Technically, the Vietnamese were not immigrants at all, but refugees. Refugees are people who leave their native land and are afraid to return because of persecution and the threat of death. The Vietnamese sought safety in North America, a direct result of U.S. involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam.

1975 End of Vietnam War

25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000

2001-2003

1991-2000

1981-1990

1971-1980

1961-1970

1952-1960

1995 Background When the United U.S.-Vietnamese 5,000 States ended its military involverelations ment in Vietnam in 1974, it left normalized behind many Vietnamese citizens 0 who had been connected to the United States in some way. During the period immediately preceding the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, about 100,000 Vietnamese were evacuated. Many of this “first Source: U.S . Census Bureau. wave” were people who feared that their involvement with the Americans would lead to persecution or death under North Vietnamese communist rule. Most of this first group of refugees were educated urban-dwellers, about half of whom were Roman Catholic. Within two years after the fall of Saigon, the second wave of Vietnamese began leaving Vietnam. Many left by boat in order to escape ethnic and religious persecution as well as deprivation. Of this group, many were ethnic Chinese. Others were Montagnards who had allied themselves with American intelligence during the Vietnam War. Other minority groups fleeing Vietnam included the Cham and the Khmer, as well as the Hmong from nearby Cambodia. The second wave of refugees was generally less educated than earlier immigrants, and they were often from the countryside. A final group of refugees were the Amerasians, the children of American military personnel and (usually) Vietnamese women. The Amerasians, called bui doi (dust of life), were subjected to harassment and discrimination in Vietnam under communist rule. While many were killed, many other Amerasian children lived homeless in the streets. Eventually, some 68,000 settled in the United States under a special program for Amerasians.

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To speak of Vietnamese Americans as a homogeneous group is clearly an error. The refugees brought with them different customs, biases, and prejudices. Moreover, while their refugee status allowed them to enter North America more easily than other immigrant groups, it was also a source of trauma and pain. Many expected the move to be temporary and that they would soon return to Vietnam. Many had left family members behind, thinking that they would return or that they would be able to send for their families after they were settled. Demographics When the Vietnamese refugees came to the United States, they were settled by voluntary agencies who found sponsors for each family to help with the transition to life in the United States. As a result, the Vietnamese people were deliberately scattered throughout the country, the reasoning being that they would assimilate more quickly if they were on their own in the midst of mainstream American culture. What the well-intentioned voluntary agencies failed to consider is the importance of family in Vietnamese culture. Since most refugees had left their extended families behind, they needed to establish communities where other Vietnamese could take the place of the larger family. Therefore, once the refugees were initially settled in the United States, many moved a second time to be nearer to family members and other Vietnamese people. Many Vietnamese subsequently moved to California. The 1990 census showed that 45 percent of the Vietnamese American population lived in California, where the city of Westminster, in Southern California, has become the center of Vietnamese culture and economics in the United States. By 1998, the population of Vietnamese Americans had reached one million. Between 2000 and 2003, new immigrants from Vietnam entered the United States at a rate of more than 28,000 persons a year. During the 1990’s, Westminster alone had some 1,500 Vietnamese businesses. Texas has about 11 percent of the Vietnamese American population, followed by Washington with 4.8 percent, Virginia with 3.5 percent, and Louisiana with 2.9 percent. Florida and Pennsylvania also have significant Vietnamese American populations. Most Vietnamese Americans live in established Vietnamese communities in urban areas. They represent 8 percent of the total Asian American population and numbered around 593,213 in 1990. Of these, 31 percent arrived before 1980, 49 percent arrived between 1980 and 1990, and 20 percent are native born. In 1990 most Vietnamese Americans lived in family units headed by a father and a mother, although about 16 percent lived in female-headed households. Cultural Identity For the Vietnamese, family is the most important foundation of their society. The trauma and disruption caused by war and flight forced the refugees into situations in which their cultural norms shifted. In response to the fact that many Vietnamese were deprived of their families, 672


“adopted” kin groups grew up in Vietnamese communities, and family members moved to be closer to other family members arriving in North America. When the Vietnamese refugees arrived in North America, they quickly looked for work in order to survive and as a matter of self-respect. Among immigrant groups, Vietnamese Americans have a high employment rate. Nevertheless, many found themselves in jobs of lower socioeconomic status than the ones they left behind in Vietnam. In addition, Vietnamese women often found work more easily than did their husbands, largely because they looked for lower-status jobs. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese American self-perception is that they are hard-working, tenacious survivors; most adapted to their changed circumstances fairly quickly. Religion, Holidays, and Ceremonies One way that Vietnamese Americans maintain their cultural identity is through the observance of their religions. Many of the early refugees were Roman Catholics, and Vietnamese Americans have demonstrated leadership in the Roman Catholic Church. The majority of Vietnamese are Buddhists, and Buddhism affects the way most Vietnamese Americans view life. For the Buddhist, all life is suffering and the end to suffering comes only with the suppression of desire, which can be accomplished by following the Eightfold Path, which includes right speech, right action, right intention, right views, right livelihood, self-discipline, selfmastery, and contemplation. Confucianism is also a strong tradition among Vietnamese Americans. This philosophy has at its core the attention to social and familial order. A hierarchical system, Confucianism teaches the importance of filial piety. There are a number of other smaller religious sects among the Vietnamese, including Taoism, Cao Dai, and Hoa Hao, which also exert influence on the Vietnamese American community. In each case, however, the buildings housing the various religious institutions often serve as meeting places and community centers for Vietnamese Americans. Vietnamese Americans also preserve their cultural identity through the observance of Vietnamese holidays and traditions. By far the most important festival for Vietnamese Americans is Tet Nguyen Den, the Lunar New Year. It usually falls on three days at the end of January and the beginning of February. Tet is a family holiday, and all members of the family express appreciation and respect for one another. During Tet people give each other gifts, wear their best clothing, prepare special foods, and honor their ancestors. For Vietnamese Americans, this holiday is the cultural, social, and spiritual high point of the year. The Family and Cultural Change As family structure is the underpinning of Vietnamese culture, each person thinks of himself in relation to the other members of his nuclear and extended family. The father is traditionally the head of the family, while the mother must ensure harmony within the family unit. Children are valued and considered treasures. They are responsi673


Vietnamese-Chinese grocery store in New York City’s Lower Manhattan. (Smithsonian Institution)

ble for taking care of their parents in old age. Much of this structure arrived intact with the refugees. Yet, because so many refugees left members of their families behind and because so many men found that their wives must work in order to help support their families, family structure and identity shifted as Vietnamese Americans grew into the American mainstream culture. Children and adolescents have been placed under pressure by the tension between traditional and North American culture. Since they often learn English more quickly than their parents, young people find themselves having to translate and solve problems for their parents, leading to a role reversal that would not be typical in Vietnamese society. In addition, young people are subjected to the same pressures that other young North Americans face: drugs, alcohol, and gangs. Although much has been made of gangs among Vietnamese American youths, most scholars think that this has been exagger674


ated. In spite of the difficulties encountered by young Vietnamese, it seems clear that most young people still value education as do their families. As a group, Vietnamese Americans excel in school and continue their education past high school. Vietnamese Americans continue to work toward stability within the mainstream culture. Many Vietnamese incorporate American ways without disregarding Vietnamese ways. In spite of the difficulties that Vietnamese Americans have experienced in their new home, the family remains the source of support and stability for their culture. Diane Andrews Henningfeld Further Reading Bass, Thomas. Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home. New York: Soho Press, 1996. Important account of the lives of Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States after the Vietnam War ended. Caplan, Nathan, Marcella H. Choy, and John K. Whitmore. Children of the Boat People: A Study of Educational Success. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Widely cited study about the second generation of Vietnamese Americans. Cargill, Mary Terrell, and Jade Quang Huynh, eds. Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. Firsthand narratives of Vietnamese immigrants who fled their homeland at the conclusion of the Vietnam War. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including two from Vietnam. Du Phuoc Long, Patrick, with Laura Ricard. The Dream Shattered: Vietnamese Gangs in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Account of young Vietnamese Americans involved in crime. Nguyen, Qui Duc. Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Study of the experience of one Vietnamese family that immigrated to the United States. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants; includes a chapter on Vietnamese immigrants. Rutledge, Paul James. The Vietnamese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Perhaps the best general study of Vietnamese American resettlement. Vu, Nguy, ed. Risking Death to Find Freedom: Thirty Escape Stories by Vietnamese Boat People. Westminster, Calif.: VAALA & NV Press, 2005. Firsthand accounts of Vietnamese refugees who fled their homeland after the Vietnam War. Yarborough, Trin. Surviving Twice: Amerasian Children of the Vietnam War. 675

Visas

Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005. Study of the often difficult adjustments that Vietnamese immigrants have had to make in the United States. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. Straddling Two Social Worlds: The Experience of Vietnamese Refugee Children in the United States. New York: ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2000. Sociological study of Vietnamese immigrant chidren in the United States. See also Amerasians; Asian American stereotypes; Asian American women; Hmong immigrants; Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Refugee fatigue; Southeast Asian immigrants; War brides.

Visas Definition: Endorsements made on passports of people entering countries other than their own to indicate that the passports have been examined and that their bearers may proceed into the countries Immigration issues: Border control; Labor; Law enforcement Significance: Visas issued by U.S. consular officers are usually required of noncitizens as a condition of entry into the United States. United States immigration law provides a double buffer restricting noncitizen admission to the United States. With few exceptions, noncitizens must obtain visas issued by consular officers, State Department officials working in the noncitizens’ countries. Without a visa, most noncitizens are summarily excluded from the United States by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. Even if noncitizens have visas, the INS can still deny them entry based on the INS’s assessment of their eligibility to enter the United States. A visa is a travel document allowing noncitizens to travel to the United States and present themselves for admission. Although usually necessary for entry, it does not guarantee entry. State Department consular officers issue two basic types of visas: immigrant visas, for those persons coming to the United States to become permanent resident aliens, and nonimmigrant visas, for those who plan to come to the United States temporarily for pleasure, work, or study. Most immigrant visas are distributed to persons who have family ties to persons in the United States and to persons who possess job skills needed by U.S. employers. Out of approximately 675,000 immigrant slots each year, 55,000 are issued by a lottery weighted in favor of individuals from countries with low levels of immigration to the United States. 676

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Family Immigrant Visas United States immigration policy favors noncitizens with certain family ties to persons in the United States. Children, spouses, and parents of U.S. citizens are called “immediate relatives” and receive the highest priority under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act. To be considered a “child” for immigration purposes, a person must be under twenty-one years of age and unmarried. Unless they have undesirable traits, such as a criminal background, immediate relatives can obtain immigrant visas. The United States grants an unlimited number of immediate relative visas every year. Other noncitizens seeking immigrant visas based on family ties are subject to an annual numerical quota, fluctuating between 226,000 and 480,000 annually. These visas are split into four categories for processing and numerical purposes: unmarried sons and daughters (grown unmarried children) of U.S. citizens; spouses, children, and unmarried sons and daughters of permanent resident aliens; married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; and siblings of U.S. citizens. Because of the quotas placed on these categories of immigrants, backlogs develop. For example, there is about a ten-year wait to bring a sibling to the United States from Costa Rica. Employment Immigrant Visas United States immigration policy also favors industrious aliens who possess skills desired by or in short supply in the U.S. labor market. This policy conflicts with another policy, which seeks to protect the United States labor market. This tension is resolved in two ways: first, by placing numerical limits (approximately 140,000) on the number of these visas issued annually and, second, by imposing job offer and labor market tests on employment immigration, allowing noncitizens to receive an employment-based immigrant visa only if they have an offer of employment in the United States. Immigrants can meet this second condition only if there are no qualified U.S. workers able and willing to work in the jobs sought by immigrants, if employers pay prevailing wages, and if the hiring of aliens does not otherwise adversely affect the U.S. labor market. If it is in the national interest, the attorney general’s office may waive the job offer and labor market requirements for aliens who are members of professions for which an advanced degree is required or for aliens of exceptional ability. The job offer and labor market requirements are inapplicable to aliens with extraordinary abilities, as documented by sustained national or international acclaim, and to outstanding professors and researchers. The labor market test is also not applicable to certain multinational managers and executives engaged in intracompany transfers. Nonimmigrant Business and Employment Visas Many people seek to come to the United States temporarily to perform some type of work for an infinite variety of reasons. Some come for business meetings and others to market their goods. Still others come to perform warranty work or to start new businesses. Some noncitizens come to the United States temporarily as 677

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U.S. Visa Categories Family-based immigrant visas (all immigrant visa categories except the immediate relative category are subject to numerical restrictions) Visas for immediate relatives: spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens

• First preference: unmarried sons and daughters of U.S. citizens • Second preference: spouses and the unmarried sons and daughters (including children) of permanent resident aliens

• Third preference: married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens • Fourth preference: brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens Employment-based immigrant visas

• First preference: “priority workers,” which includes aliens of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives and managers

• Second preference: aliens who are members of the professions holding advanced degrees and aliens of exceptional ability

• Third preference: skilled workers, professionals, and other workers • Fourth preference: diverse group of “special immigrants,” including certain religious ministers, retired U.S. employees, and former U.S. military personnel

• Fifth preference: aliens who come to the United States to create employment opportunities by investing and engaging in a new commercial enterprise Visas for diversity immigrants (aliens who win a lottery weighted in favor of aliens from countries and regions that have a low immigrant stream to the United States) Nonimmigrant visas (nonimmigrant visas are designated by the letter of the alphabet preceding the description; for example, an F Visa is a study visa)

• A. Ambassadors, public ministers, other foreign government officials, their spouses, children, and servants

• • • • •

B. Temporary visitors for business or pleasure C. Aliens in transit D. Alien crew members E. Treaty traders, treaty investors, and their spouses and children F. Students attending an academic institution, and their spouses and children

• G. Representatives of foreign governments to international organizations, officers and employees of international organizations, and the spouses, children, and servants of such persons (continued)

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• H. Temporary workers, including registered nurses, workers in “speciality occupations,” agricultural workers, other workers, and the spouses, children, and servants of such persons

• I. Foreign media representatives, and their spouses and children • J. Exchange visitors, including those participating in academic exchanges, and their spouses and children

• • • •

K. Fiancés of U.S. citizens L. Certain intracompany transferees, and their spouses and children M. Vocational students, and their spouses and children N. Officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and their spouses and children

• O. Aliens of extraordinary ability in certain fields, their spouses and children, and certain assistants

• • • •

P. Certain artists and entertainers, and their spouses and children Q. Aliens participating in certain international cultural exchanges R. Religious workers, and their spouses and children S. Certain aliens who, according to the attorney general or the secretary of state, possess critical reliable information concerning criminal or terrorist organizations and the spouses, unmarried sons and daughters (including children), and parents of such persons

part of an intracompany transfer and others to enter the U.S. labor market for a temporary period of time, often in the hope of becoming permanent residents in the future. U.S. law categorizes the variety of justifications for coming to the United States for business or employment purposes by offering different types of visas for different situations. For example, the B visa allows noncitizens to come to the United States for business meetings. The H visa, for temporary workers, raises the same concerns about protecting the U.S. labor market as employment-based immigrant visas. The tension is resolved in a similar fashion by imposing annual quotas on the number of H visas and by requiring a labor market test. In some situations, these quotas can be circumvented if aliens qualify for an L visa as company managers, executives, or employees who have specialized knowledge and come to the United States in an intracompany transfer. These quotas may also be circumvented if persons qualify for an E visa as the employees of treaty traders or treaty investors—persons who, pursuant to treaties between their countries and the United States, come to the United States to engage in substantial trade with their home countries or to develop and direct enterprises in which they have made a substantial investment. Several million foreigners come to the United States as tourists every year 679

Visas

on B visas. Additionally, several hundred thousand persons come to the United States to study or participate in cultural exchanges. Many of these people travel on F, J, or M visas. Foreign students at U.S. academic institutions have most likely traveled to the United States on F visas, which normally allow students to stay in the United States for the duration of their studies. J visas are used by students in special circumstances, such as when the U.S. government or a foreign government pays for students’ education or when students come to the United States to acquire skills that are specifically needed in their native countries. In such instances, J visa holders may not apply for permanent residence in the United States until they have returned to their home countries for two years. M visas are used by vocational students and are more restrictive because of the higher incidence of immigration fraud and abuse among vocational students. Visa Processing For most immigrant categories, visa processing begins with a visa petition filed with the INS by a petitioning employer or family member in the United States. The alien seeking an immigration benefit is considered the beneficiary of the petition. Once the INS has done its background work, the file is sent to a visa consular officer overseas for processing. Depending on the category, some nonimmigrant visas begin with petitions to the INS and others in the visa consular office. Even if persons seeking a visa fit into one of the INS’s immigrant or nonimmigrant categories, visa consular officers deny them visas if it is determined that the persons are inadmissible. Aliens can be held inadmissible on certain health-related grounds, because of prior abuse of U.S. immigration laws, because of certain criminal activity, on national security grounds, and because they may become an economic burden. Additionally, if visa consular officials doubt that nonimmigrants will leave the United States at the appointed time, such aliens can be denied visas. To ensure that visa applicants qualify for admission to the United States, a personal interview with the visa consular office is often required. There is no judicial review of a denial of a visa application. Michael A. Scaperlanda Further Reading Beshara, Edward C., et al. Emigrating to the U.S.A.: A Complete Guide to Immigration, Temporary Visas, and Employment. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994. Comprehensive reference on practical immigration issues designed for immigrants. Hing, Bill Ong. Immigration and the Law: A Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999. Useful handbook of terms used in immigration law. Kurzban, Ira. Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook: A Comprehensive Outline and Reference Tool. 8th ed. Washington, D.C.: American Immigration Law Foundation, 2002. Comprehensive overview of U.S. immigration law and visas. Frequently updated. 680

War brides

Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. Legal textbook on immigration and refugee law. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Lynch, James P., and Rita J. Simon. Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. International perspectives on immigration, with particular attention to the immigration policies of the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. See also Demographics of immigration; Green cards; Immigration Act of 1990; Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha; Immigration “crisis”; Immigration law; September 11 terrorist attacks; Undocumented workers; War brides.

War brides Definition: Foreign spouses of American service personnel serving abroad during wartime Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Demographics; European immigrants; Families and marriage; Women Significance: Despite war-related problems, foreign brides, fiancés, and children of servicemen entered the United States in large numbers between 1943 and 1975 and raised new isses relating to U.S. immigration policies. War brides were non-American immigrants who were married or engaged to American servicemen stationed or assigned in a foreign country during, or as a result of World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. Estimates of the number of war brides from World War II vary widely from 115,000 to one million, depending on whether children and other dependents are included, on the chosen time period, and on who is included as a war bride. World War II war brides came from almost sixty nations. The first and largest single group was British. Others came later from Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. 681

War brides

War Brides and Immigration Law The military at first discouraged overseas marriages and engagements because it was feared that they would not last and that they would divert servicemen’s attention from the task at hand: fulfilling their military duties and responsibilities. Evidence from World War I suggested otherwise, as 6,400 of the 8,000 marriages between foreign women and American servicemen were permanent. Eventually, the military had to accept the inevitable. Secretly at first, and then by U.S. congressional legislation, war brides and fiancés were transported to the United States during and immediately following World War II, from 1943 to 1952. Although war brides were at first subject to the same naturalization process as other immigrants, they were exempt from quota limits. Most who came during World War II were wives and families of husbands who had been wounded or released from enemy prisoner of war camps. After the war, laws were passed with the intent of providing more orderly means for war brides to enter the United States. Asian war brides faced special problems because of the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. However, race and gender were removed as a bar to immigration to the United States after passage of the McCarranWalter Act of 1952. The number of Asian war brides increased dramatically from 1952 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. British War Brides The first and largest contingent of war brides, fiancés, and children, approximately seventy thousand persons from Great Britain,

World War II English war brides arrive in North America by ship. (Pier 21 Society)

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War brides

entered the United States during the mid-1940’s. During wartime they were secretly transported on ships carrying wounded servicemen, former prisoners of war, and enemy prisoners. After the war ended, considerable resentment was directed toward the transportation of war brides to the United States, because they occupied space that could have been filled by returning servicemen. At first, most military brides were ineligible for army transport, because only officers and noncommissioned officers in the top three enlisted ranks were allowed to use military transportation. The alternative for those in the lower four ranks was expensive commercial transportation until 1944, when they too became eligible for transportation at the army’s expense. The foreign wives of military husbands did not automatically receive U.S. citizenship. Rather, war brides were eligible for visas only and had to meet the same naturalization requirements as other immigrants. War brides were advantaged by not being included in immigration quotas established for their native countries. Children were admitted without restriction as long as fathers had been over twenty-one years of age when the children were born and had lived in the United States for more than ten years. Responding to pleas and pressures, Congress approved Public Law 271, the War Brides Act of December 28, 1945, the single most important piece of legislation pertaining to World War II war brides. The visa requirement was waived. If husbands of war brides were serving in the armed forces or had been honorably discharged, their wives and minor children could become U.S. citizens provided they had applied for citizenship during the three-year life of the act and had passed a medical examination. As had been the case earlier, war brides were nonquota immigrants. One problem remained; Public Law 271 was directed at war brides and children only. It did not apply to alien fiancés or, indeed, fiancés of American servicewomen. Congress responded again by passing Public Law 471, the Fiancés Act, on June 29, 1946. Foreign women and men engaged to present or former members of the armed forces whose status was identical to those included in Public Law 271 could obtain passport visas allowing them to enter the United States as temporary visitors for three months. If their marriages occurred during those three months, Public Law 271 applied. Otherwise, fiancés, with some exceptions, were compelled to leave the United States or be deported. In fact, the U.S. attorney general now possessed the power to require prospective American spouses to provide a bond, usually five hundred dollars, to cover all possible deportation expenses. Public Law 471 was in effect for eighteen months, until December 28, 1947. Plans were made to provide thirty ships to transport sixty thousand British war brides, grooms, and children by the end of June, 1946. An additional sixteen thousand came from Australia and New Zealand. The first official contingent of 452 war brides (thirty of whom were pregnant), 173 children, and one war groom left England on January 26, 1946. The youngest bride was sixteen years old and had an eighteen-month-old daughter, while the oldest was forty years old and had a seventeen-year-old daughter from a previous mar683

War brides

riage. Their American spouses had been wounded, were hospitalized in the United States, or had been deployed there. Of the seventy thousand World War II British war brides who entered the United States, most came from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Most also had completed their education at age fourteen. Their average age was twentyfour. British war brides were less likely than those from other nations to settle in a single ethnic community, in large part because of the absence of a language barrier. They were well received. Yet, many retained a strong bond with their homeland and were never completely assimilated into American society. Brides from Germany and Austria War brides came in much smaller numbers from other European nations, including from World War II enemy countries Germany and Austria. American servicemen were warned against marrying German women. Order Number 1067, issued in April, 1945, by the Allied Chiefs of Staff, made it clear that Germany was occupied as a defeated nation, not for liberation. Fraternization with German officials and the German population was strongly discouraged. Yet, Order 1067 was seldom enforced and almost universally ignored. German women who kept company with Americans were often referred to as “Ami whores” by other Germans. The term was applied both to German prostitutes and to German women employed by Americans. The tension created by opponents of fraternization was reduced when American military personnel who had participated in liberating the Nazi prisoner of war camps or who had fought against the Germans were sent home and replaced by troops who had not experienced wartime conditions. Restrictions on fraternization were lifted in Austria in August, 1945, and in Germany the following October. A year later the ban on American servicemen’s marrying Austrian and German women was lifted. By the end of December, 1946, 2,500 soldiers had applied to marry German women. Marriages, however, could not take place until American soldiers were within thirty days of completing their overseas tours of duty. Asian War Brides Initially, all Asians—whether nominal allies, such as the Chinese, or enemies—were subject to prewar immigration laws and quotas. During World War II Congress passed Public Law 199, the Magnuson Act of 1943, which repealed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act but set a quota of only 105 Chinese immigrants annually. Eventually, Chinese wives of American citizens were given nonquota status through an act passed on August 9, 1946. Most of the six thousand Chinese war brides married Chinese American soldiers. The most significant legislation assisting all Asian war brides, the McCarranWalter Act, was passed by Congress on June 27, 1952. It repealed the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 by eliminating both race and gender as a barrier to immigration. From 1947 to 1975 more than 165,000 Asian war brides entered the 684

War Brides Act

United States. Most were Japanese (66,000) and Filipino (52,000), although 28,000 Koreans, 11,000 Thais, and 8,000 Vietnamese were also admitted. Asian war brides experienced prejudice and discrimination from both native-born Americans and from their fellow Asians, including women who lived in the United States. As one Korean author expressed it, they were “caught in the shadows between the Korean and American communities” and would never be able to become members of Korean American society. Because of the difficulty in learning the English language, Asian war brides relied heavily on their American husbands. Isolation and the depression it provoked was the most common concern expressed by Asian war brides. Living on military bases magnified their loneliness. Yet, most chose to remain in the United States rather than return to their native countries. John Quinn Imholte Further Reading Gimbel, John. The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968. Hibbert, Joyce. The War Brides. Toronto, Canada: PMA Books, 1978. Moore, John Hammond. Over-Sexed, Over-Paid, and Over Here: Americans in Australia, 1941-45. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1981. Shukert, Elfrieda Berthiaume, and Barbara Smith Scibetta. War Brides of World War II. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1988. Virden, Jenel. Goodbye Piccadilly: British War Brides in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. See also Filipino immigrants and family customs; Japanese immigrants; Korean immigrants and family customs; Mail-order brides; Page law; Picture brides; Russian immigrants; War Brides Act; Women immigrants.

War Brides Act The Law: Federal law easing restrictions on immigration of war brides Date: December 28, 1945 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; European immigrants; Families and marriage; Laws and treaties; Women Significance: The War Brides Act relaxed immigration regulations to allow foreign-born spouses and children of U.S. military personnel to settle in the United States more easily. 685

War Brides Act

Between 1939 and 1946, more than sixteen million U.S. servicemen, primarily single and between eighteen and thirty years of age, were deployed to war theaters in foreign lands. Although the U.S. government discouraged servicemen from marrying at all—believing the single soldier, without distractions, would be of more value to the war effort—one million marriages to foreign nationals occurred during and shortly after the war. Aware of the potential for these liaisons, the U.S. War Department had issued a regulation requiring personnel on duty in any foreign country or possession of the United States to notify their commanding officer of any intention to marry at least two months in advance. Passage of the Act Before passage of the act, federal immigration law demanded strict adherence, and the waiting period was waived rarely for war brides, with a possible exception for the pregnancy of the bride-to-be. Usually, permission to marry was granted; however, certain couples, for example U.S.German, U.S.-Japanese, and those of different races, either encountered longer waiting periods or were denied permission completely. Many of those couples who had been granted permission and had married were separated for two to three years. In October, 1945, the Married Women’s Association picketed for transport to allow their families to reunite. Evidently, the three thousand members’ voices were heard; on December 28, 1945, the Seventy-ninth Congress passed an act to expedite the admission to the United States of alien spouses and alien minor children of U.S. citizens who had served in or were honorably discharged from the armed forces during World War II. These spouses had to meet the criteria for admission under the current immigration laws, including thorough medical examinations, and their applications had to be filed within three years of the date of the act. The War Bride Ships Following passage of the War Brides Act, thirty vessels, primarily hospital ships and army troopships, were selected to transport the women, children, and a few men—who were dubbed “male war brides”— to the United States. Even the steamships Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary were recruited for the task, because of their large passenger capacities. Transportation requests were prioritized by the military as follows: dependents of personnel above the fourth enlisted grade, dependents of personnel already placed on orders to the United States, wives of prisoners of war, wives of men wounded in action, and wives of men hospitalized in the United States. At the bottom of the priority pool were fiancés and spouses in interracial marriages. Before debarking, each spouse (usually a woman) had to present her passport and visa, her sworn affidavit from her husband that he could and would support her upon arrival, two copies of her birth certificate, two copies of any police record she might have, any military discharge papers she might have, and a railroad ticket to her destination from New York. The families who saw them off knew they might never see their children and grandchildren again. 686

War Brides Act

The American Red Cross was officially requested by the War Department to function as a clearinghouse for the brides, and many Red Cross volunteers served as “trainers” for the women in how to become American wives. Since many war brides did not speak English, the Red Cross also offered classes to aid in practical communication skills. On January 26, 1946, the first war bride ship, the SS Argentina, left Southampton, England, with 452 brides, 173 children, and 1 groom on board. Lauded as the “Pilgrim Mothers” voyage or the “Diaper Run,” the voyage was highly publicized. Many of the brides, upon arriving in the United States on February 4, were greeted by the U.S. press. In Germany and Japan, permission to marry had not easily been attained and often was not granted at all. The ban on marriage to Germans was lifted on December 11, 1946, with twenty-five hundred applications submitted by the end of the year; in Japan, the ban lingered much longer. During the first months of occupation during the war, approximately onehalf million U.S. soldiers had been stationed in or near Yokohama. Many young women, fearing for their lives, hid from these “barbarians,” but since the U.S. military was often the only source of employment, the women were forced to venture out. The country was in a cultural flux, resulting from economic deprivation, matriarchal predominance and female enfranchisement, and Emperor Hirohito’s renouncement of divinity. As the U.S. soldiers and Japanese women worked together, romantic relationships often developed, and because official permission to marry could not be obtained, many such couples were wed in secret in traditional Japanese ceremonies. Although as many as 100,000 Japanese brides were deserted, others sought immigration to the United States. However, one proviso of the War Brides Act was that émigrés could not be excluded under any other provision of immigration law. The Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 was still in place, and although Public Law 199 had overridden the act to allow Chinese immigration, the Japanese were still excluded. Many were not allowed admission to the United States until July, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the Soldier Brides Act, a thirty-day reprieve on race inadmissibility. The Brides in America In many cases, life for the war brides in the United States was not what they had expected. Many were treated poorly by isolationists who placed personal blame on all foreigners for U.S. involvement in the war, and many had to tolerate the scorn of former sweethearts who had been jilted because of them. Because of the influx of soldiers returning to the civilian population, available housing and jobs were limited. Often the brides found themselves in the middle of a family-run farm, with some as sharecroppers. Frequently, when adjustment to civilian life was difficult for the former military man, he would rejoin his outfit, leaving the bride behind with his family—strangers who were sometimes hostile to the foreigner in their midst. Many of the marriages made in haste soured just as quickly through homesickness, promises unkept, or abuse. War brides who were unhappy or abused 687

War Brides Act

often stayed in their marriages, however, from fear of losing their children or of being deported. Marriage did not confer automatic citizenship on foreign brides. They were required to pass exams to be naturalized, and many were still incapable of communicating in any but their native tongues. Public assistance was unavailable for these women. Within one year of the mass exodus from Europe and Asia, one out of three of the war marriages had ended in divorce, and it was predicted that by 1950, the statistics would be two out of three. This prediction proved incorrect, however. Many war brides not only preserved their marriages but also became valuable members of their new communities and contributors to American culture. In April, 1985, several hundred of these women, men, and children journeyed to Long Beach, California, for a reunion, appropriately held aboard the dry-docked Queen Mary. Joyce Duncan Further Reading Hibbert, Joyce. The War Brides. Toronto: PMA Books, 1978. Discussion of the mobilization and acclimation of war brides. Kubat, Daniel, et al. The Politics of Migration Policies. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1979. Discusses immigration laws and the political control behind them. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. Shanks, Cheryl. Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Scholarly study of changing federal immigration laws from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, with particular attention to changing quota systems and exclusionary policies. Shukert, Elfrieda Berthiaume, and Barbara Smith Scibetta. War Brides of World War II. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1988. Perhaps the definitive work on the subject of war brides; includes many interviews with brides. See also Filipino immigrants and family customs; Immigration Act of 1943; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952; Japanese immigrants; Korean immigrants and family customs; Mail-order brides; Page law; Picture brides; Russian immigrants; War brides; Women immigrants.

688

West Indian immigrants

West Indian immigrants Identification: Immigrants to North America from the West Indian islands of the Caribbean Sea Immigration issues: African Americans; Demographics; West Indian immigrants Significance: The success of black West Indian Americans has drawn the attention of sociologists and other scholars and created some conflict with other African Americans. Black West Indian immigrants and their descendants, a small group among the African American population, have achieved considerable economic, educational, and political success in the United States relative to native African Americans. Notable conservatives such as economist Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author Dinesh D’Souza contend that this group’s relative success in part demonstrates the error in attributing the economic and social plight of some African Americans exclusively to racism. The group’s exceptionalism has also been noted by sociologists such as Stephen Steinberg in The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (1981) and Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen in The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (1989). The portrayal of exceptionalism is only part of this group’s profile. Structural shifts in the U.S. economy mean that segments of this community will face severe sociopsychological adjustments to migration, coupled with constricted assimilation to American society. Pressures against full assimilation are greater for lower-class West Indians. Typically, middle- and upper-class professionals alternate between a more inclusive West Indian American or particularistic African American identity, and the lower/working class chooses a more ethnically focused, West Indian identity. West Indian Americans are immigrants from the former British West Indian Islands, Belize, and Guyana and their U.S.-born descendants. Most of the West Indian immigrants arrived in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1924, restrictive immigration legislation effectively halted immigration from the islands. Most of the immigrants settled in the Northeast, creating urban ethnic communities in Miami, Florida; Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; Hartford, Connecticut; and New York City; they settled in Brooklyn and formed ethnic enclaves in East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Canarsie, and Midwood districts. West Indian Exceptionalism Generally, West Indian immigrants have been perceived as models of achievement for their frugality, emphasis on education, and ownership of homes and small businesses. Economist Sowell ar689


West Indian Immigration to the United States, 1821-2003 100,000 95,000 90,000 1959 Cuban Revolution

85,000 80,000


75,000 70,000 65,000 60,000 55,000 50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

1991-2000

2001-2003

1971-1980

1981-1990

1961-1970

1941-1950

1951-1960

1921-1930

1931-1940

1901-1910

1911-1920

1891-1900

1871-1880

1881-1890

1851-1860

1861-1870

1841-1850

1821-1830

1831-1840

Source: U.S . Census Bureau. Data includes immigrants from all Caribbean isles.

gued that the group’s successes, including those of famous members such as General Colin Powell, derived from a distinctive cultural capital source and an aggressive migrant ideology, legacies of their native lands. Home ownership and economic entrepreneurship were financed partly by using a cultural source of capital, an association called susu (known in West Africa as esusu), that first reached the West Indian societies during the era of slavery. A susu facilitates savings, small-scale capital formation, and micro lending. These traditional associations have been incorporated into mainstream financial organizations such as credit unions and mortgage and commercial banks as they adapt to serve the needs of West Indian Americans. Demographer Albert Murphy, in a report for Medgar Evers College’s Ca690


ribbean Research Center in New York, found that in 1990, 29.1 percent of West Indian Americans had a bachelor’s degree or higher degree, compared with the U.S. average of 20.3 percent. In addition, their median household income in 1989 was $28,000, compared with $19,750 for African Americans overall and $31,435 for whites. Political and Social Incorporation Early immigrants such as PanAfricanists Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey and poet activist Claude McKay were among the first West Indian Americans to become well-known and wellrespected figures. Other famous West Indian Americans include Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; Franklin Thomas, the head of the Ford Foundation; federal judge Constance Baker Motley; Nobel laureate Derek Walcott; and actor Sidney Poitier. Activist Stokely Carmichael, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and Earl Graves, businessman and publisher of Black Enterprise, have also made impressive efforts on behalf of African Americans. From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, West Indian American politicians were elected with the help of the African American vote; many of the West Indians, believing their stay in the United States to be temporary, did not become citizens and were ineligible to vote. During the 1970’s, this trend changed, and two congressional districts in New York with heavy concentrations of West Indians became represented by African Americans. However, West Indian Americans, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with African American representation, have been fielding their own candidates in state and local elections in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. These efforts have been aided by the fact that since 1993, when legislation less favorable to the immigrant population was passed, West Indian Americans have been acquiring U.S. citizenship in greater numbers. This trend in resurgent ethnic political awareness suggests that West Indian Americans may succeed in electing a member of their group to office. Differential Assimilation At the beginning of the twentieth century, West Indian Americans and African Americans held negative stereotypes of each other and rarely interacted socially. During the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, the

Born on the island of St. Lucia in 1930, Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. (Virginia Schendler)

691


children of some West Indian immigrants downplayed their ethnicity and attempted to integrate into the African American community, but both groups’ images of each other changed slowly. Powell, in his autobiography, My American Journey (1995), recalls his African American father-in-law’s reaction when he proposed marriage to his daughter Alma: “All my life I’ve tried to stay away from those damn West Indians and now my daughter’s going to marry one!” The late 1960’s, with its emphasis on racial solidarity and group identity, eroded much of the conflict between African Americans and West Indian Americans and supplanted it with black nationalist sentiments and identity. At the turn of the twenty-first century, many West Indian Americans were caught in an identity crisis, unsure of whether they should be West Indians with a strong ethnic orientation, African Americans with a focus on their racial identity, or “West Indian Americans” with a more hybrid identity. Class pressures play influential roles in this identity dilemma. Lower- and working-class West Indian Americans have strong affiliations with their ethnicity and its cultural symbols, using the ethnic community as a “structural shield” in their coping repertoire. However, a growing segment of West Indian American professionals regard themselves as West Indian Americans because this identity unites the more desirable choices by eliminating obstacles to their ultimate assimilation as Americans. In addition, this community is not monolithic, and class divisions segment the group as well as influence its responses to racism and other societal challenges. Aubrey W. Bonnett Further Reading Bean, Frank D., and Stephanie Bell-Rose, eds. Immigration and Opportunity: Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. Collection of essays on economic and labor issues relating to race and immigration in the United States, with particular attention to the competition for jobs between African Americans and immigrants. Conley, Ellen Alexander. The Chosen Shore: Stories of Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Collection of firsthand accounts of modern immigrants from many nations, including the Caribbean island of Barbados. Heron, Melonie P. The Occupational Attainment of Caribbean Immigrants in the United States, Canada, and England. New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2001. Useful study of the employment of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Parrillo, Vincent. Strangers to These Shores. 5th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997. General treatment of race and ethnic relations with sections on both Jamaicans and Rastafarians. Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Collection of papers on demographic and family issues relating to immigrants that includes chapters on West Indians. 692

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Vickerman, Milton. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Study of the West Indian immigrant experience that contains interviews with Jamaicans in New York City who tell of contending forces of racism and equal treatment in the United States. Waters, Mary C. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Examines the Jamaican immigrant experience in the United States. Watkins-Owens, Irma. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Study of West Indians in New York City’s predominantly African American community. Zphir, Flore. Trends in Ethnic Identification Among Second-Generation Haitian Immigrants in New York City. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 2001. Close study of Haitian immigrants in New York City. See also Afro-Caribbean immigrants; Cuban immigrants; Dominican immigrants; Haitian boat people; Haitian immigrants; Jamaican immigrants; Latinos.

White ethnics Definition: Immigrants to North America from eastern and southern European nations Immigration issues: European immigrants Significance: Immigrants from southern and eastern European nations and their descendants are often regarded as “ethnics” because they tend to retain their ethnic identities. White ethnics, or eastern and southern European Americans, have immigrated from or are the descendants of immigrants from countries such as Italy, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria. Southern Europeans began coming to the United States in large numbers between 1800 and 1920. Many of the immigrants were peasants and unskilled laborers. These immigrants settled in the cities and were often employed in entry-level jobs in plants and factories. Many southern Europeans and their descendants remained in this labor sector well into the twentieth century. Immigrants from southern Europe faced prejudice upon their arrival to the United States. Protestantism was the dominant religion in the United States, and many people feared that the increase in Roman Catholic immigrants from southern Europe would negatively affect the Protestant mores of 693

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the country. Immigration from this area was sharply reduced with the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924 but increased again in 1965 when restrictive immigration policy ended with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Many southern European Americans live in New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, and the Midwest. Indicators of status such as educational attainment, occupational level, and income show that southern Europeans as a group have reached parity with the Anglo-Protestant population and generally have surpassed non-European groups. In general, southern European Americans are highly assimilated, and their ethnicity is displayed primarily in symbolic ways. Amy J. Orr Further Reading Benmayor, Rina, and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2005. Burgan, Michael. Italian Immigrants. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Greene, Victor R. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants Between Old World and New, 1830-1930. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. See also Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants; Eastern European Jewish immigrants; Ethnic enclaves; European immigrant literature; European immigrants, 1790-1892; European immigrants, 1892-1943; German immigrants; Gypsy immigrants; Irish immigrants; Irish immigrants and discrimination; Jewish immigrants; Nativism; Polish immigrants; Russian immigrants; Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Women immigrants Immigration issues: Demographics; Families and marriage; Refugees; Women Significance: Immigrant women have often had to contend with exploitative work situations and greater-than-aveerage risks of physical abuse, including domestic violence. Since the seventeenth century, women have journeyed alone or as members of families to North America. Coming first from England, Africa, Ireland, northern and western Europe, in the nineteenth century they immigrated from southern and eastern Europe and from China and Japan. The major source of immigration shifted in the twentieth century from Europe to Latin America and Asia. 694

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Poster issued by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1919 to call attention to the contributions of women immigrants. (Library of Congress)

History In early colonial America, women arrived from England as wives or were imported as purchased wives. Many came as indentured servants who were bought and sold like slaves; they endured physical and sexual abuse. Some were transported as convicts. Female slaves were brought from Africa. Throughout the eighteenth century, although female immigrants experienced extreme job discrimination, they worked in a variety of trades. Between 1820 and 1880, many women settled in the rural Midwest, where life on the prairies was lonely and harsh. In urban areas, the most commonly available work for young single women was domestic service, although as the century progressed they began to find employment in factories. Married women often preferred to undertake piecework at home or to take in boarders. Compared to men, there was a high proportion of destitute immigrant women. In towns and cities, women joined the developing union movement and began to speak out against intolerable working conditions. Their first strike was organized in 1825, when the United Tailoresses of New York demanded higher wages. By 1859, of the six million workers in the United 695

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States, half a million were women. They labored as domestic servants (33,000), teachers (55,000), and factory workers (181,000), half of whom were employed in textile mills. Leonora Barry, an Irish immigrant, commented on the largest problem for female workers: Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them.

From 1880 to 1920, arrivals from Europe substantially increased. For women, positions as domestic servants continued to be most easily secured. In 1900, when white-collar jobs became available to women, Irish women worked in Canada and the United States as office workers, shop clerks, or teachers. Chinese and Japanese women immigrated to Hawaii, the continental United States, and Canada. As the number of Asian immigrants on the Pacific Coast increased, an exclusionary movement developed. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act abruptly curtailed Chinese immigration; it would not be repealed until 1943. The 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement strictly limited Japanese immigration. It did not exclude family members of residents, however, and therefore many Japanese women immigrated to the United States as “picture brides.” In 1917, the ban on Chinese immigrants was extended to all Asian countries.

Japanese women arriving at the Angel Island immigrant reception center in San Francisco Bay during the 1920’s. Under the federal Cable Act of 1922, female immigrants could no longer automatically assume the U.S . citizenship of their American husbands. (Smithsonian Institution)

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The Early Twentieth Century In the twentieth century, many female immigrants continued to live under grim circumstances. Entering the labor force at an unprecedented rate, they faced discrimination and grueling conditions. Urban domestic service was managed by a network of unregulated and exploitative city agencies. Rents were frequently inflated. The Chicago Immigrant Protective League was founded in 1907 to help foreign-born arrivals find work, housing, and education. In New York City, new immigrants found work in sweatshops, in which conditions ranged from unhealthy to dangerous. In the winter of 1909, some women organized and voted to strike. As a result, membership increased in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Unions. Demands were won in more than three hundred shops, and some women succeeded in becoming union officials. Yet, improved factory conditions were not sufficient to prevent a number of fires, including one in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that killed 146 people, mostly women. That same year, social scientist Francis Kellor described immigrants as “the poorest protected of all humanity in this country . . . even worse than children.” Immigration during the first decade of the twentieth century exceeded by thirty-five million the total of any previous decade. Nativistic sentiment prompted Congress to enact new restrictions on immigration, including a literacy test (1917), a quota system (1921, 1924, and 1927), and the extension of deportation criteria. The Great Depression provoked further exclusion, so that total immigration for the decade of the 1930’s was lower than at any previous point since the 1820’s. Post-World War II During World War II (1939-1945), issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) were interned with their families in camps by the U.S. government. Following the war, the War Brides Act (1945) allowed Chinese, Japanese, and European women to enter the United States as wives of servicemen. Similarly, during the 1960’s and 1970’s, such marriages were common throughout Southeast Asia. In 1962, the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act was passed to help Cubans resettle in the United States. By 1965, the major source of immigration had shifted from Europe to Latin America and Asia. The Immigration Act of 1965, which amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 abandoned national origins quotas and introduced preference categories. After 1976, no country could send more than 20,000 people in any one year to the United States; the rule resulted in a higher proportion of bluecollar immigration. The 1980 Refugee Act was introduced to deal with the refugees from Indochina who were admitted following the end of hostilities in Vietnam in 1975. During the 1970’s, a “mail-order bride” industry developed that enabled women from the Philippines, Thailand, and eastern Europe to immigrate to the United States. In 1991, procedural guidelines for immigration screening were developed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Canada developed 697

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gender-sensitive rules to make it easier for women to pass through the screening process. In 1992, in order to manage the immigration of refugees more strictly, Canada introduced new restrictive laws. During the 1990’s, women were as likely as men to immigrate to the United States. Developing nations, such as Mexico and the Philippines, became the primary source of immigration. In 1993, Mexico provided the largest number of immigrants, including numerous undocumented women. As more American women sought employment out of the home, Central American women, migrating in order to gain economic and social security, filled the need for domestic help in cities. In 1993, The Chicago Review addressed the exploitation of immigrant women: “To earn their living they perform the most varied jobs, many of them menial and sub-human.” Concern surfaced regarding immigrant beneficiaries of two welfare programs in the United States: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). In 1993, 6.0 percent of the immigrant population were on public assistance, compared with 3.4 percent of all citizens. Twenty-nine percent of all legal immigrants were living below the poverty line. Since 70 percent of all Americans living below the poverty line were female, it is probable that a high percentage of them were immigrant women. When women depart from their own cultures, they may lose their customary support systems. They have often left patriarchal and hierarchical traditions. In the United States, they enter a more egalitarian world with a more open sexuality. Gender and family roles can be thrown into disequilibrium. Domestic violence against immigrant women has increased, and there has been a higher incidence of depression and substance abuse among these women. Often eager to take advantage of opportunities, immigrant women are more willing than men to accept any job that is offered, even working in garment sweatshops. Women from different immigrant groups face many of the same issues, but how they cope with these issues varies from one culture to another. Susan E. Hamilton Further Reading Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, ed. Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2005. Agosin, Marjorie. Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America. Edited by Mary G. Berg. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999. Neidle, Cecyle S. America’s Immigrant Women. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Strum, Philippa, and Danielle Tarantolo, eds. Women Immigrants in the United States: Proceedings of a Conference Sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International 698

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Center for Scholars and the Migration Policy Institute, September 9, 2002. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003. See also Amerasians; Asian American women; Cable Act; Garment industry; Hull-House; Indentured servitude; Mail-order brides; Page law; Picture brides; Settlement house movement; Thai garment worker enslavement; Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire; War brides.

Wong Kim Ark case The Case: U.S. Supreme Court decision on legal status of children of immigrants who are born in the United States Date: March 28, 1898 Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Citizenship and naturalization; Court cases Significance: In this ruling the Supreme Court held that children born in the United States, even to temporary sojourners, are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, regardless of their race or nationality. After the Civil War, the Constitution of the United States was amended to deal with the end of slavery and the legal status of the freed slaves. Under existing law, notably the 1857 Dred Scott case (Dred Scott v. Sandford), even free African Americans could not become citizens. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was drafted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and to protect their rights from infringement by state governments, begins: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The Fourteenth Amendment ended neither racial prejudice nor various racially based legal discriminations. In 1882, 1884, and 1894, Congress passed a series of laws known as the Chinese Exclusion Acts. These statutes were designed to keep persons of Chinese ancestry out of the United States. They were particularly aimed at the importation of Chinese laborers and at the “coolie” system—a form of indentured labor. The acceptance of low wages by imported Chinese immigrants angered many Americans. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873. His parents were Chinese subjects permanently domiciled in the United States. In modern termi699

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nology, they would have been called “resident aliens.” They had been in business in San Francisco and were neither employees nor diplomatic agents of the government of China. In 1890 they returned to China after many years in the United States. Wong Kim Ark also went to China in 1890, but he returned to the United States the same year and was readmitted to the country on the grounds that he was a U.S. citizen. In 1894 he again went to China for a temporary visit but was denied readmission to the United States on his return in August, 1895. The government’s position was that under the Chinese Exclusion Acts, a Chinese person born to alien parents who had not renounced his previous nationality was not “born or naturalized in the United States” within the meaning of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the government’s position was correct, Wong Kim Ark was not a citizen of the United States and was not entitled to readmission to the country. Wong brought a habeas corpus action against the government in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. That court’s judgment in favor of Wong was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the government. Justice Horace Gray wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion for a 6-2 majority. Gray’s argument begins with the assumption that the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has to be read in the context of preexisting law. The Court’s opinion begins with a long review of citizenship practices and legal customs. The U.S. tradition had been to distinguish between “natural-born” and naturalized citizens. This distinction came from English common law. In England, for hundreds of years prior to the American Revolution, all persons born within the king’s realms except the children of diplomats and alien enemies were said to have been born under the king’s protection and were natural-born subjects. This rule was applied or extended equally to the children of alien parents. Moreover, the same rule was in force in all the English colonies in North America prior to the revolution, and was continued (except with regard to slaves) under the jurisdiction of the United States when it became independent. The first American law concerning naturalization was passed in the First Congress. It, and its successor acts, passed in 1802, assumed the citizenship of all free persons born within the borders of the United States. It was not until the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts that any U.S. law had sought to alter the rule regarding natural-born citizens. On the European continent, however, the law of citizenship was different. Most other European countries had adopted the citizenship rules of ancient Roman law. Under the Roman civil law, a child takes the nationality of his or her parents. Indeed, when United States v. Wong Kim Ark reached the Supreme Court, the government argued that the European practice had become the true rule of international law as it was recognized by the great majority of the countries of the world. This was the historical and legal context for the Fourteenth Amendment’s language “All persons born or naturalized in the United States. . . .” According to Justice Gray, the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to extend 700

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the rule providing citizenship for natural-born persons to the freed slaves and their children. The amendment did not establish a congressional power to alter the constitutional grant of citizenship. Gray’s opinion reviews many of the Court’s prior opinions upholding the principle. The Chinese Exclusion Acts, passed after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, could not affect the amendment’s meaning, according to the majority, and therefore did not affect the established rule of natural-born citizenship. The grant of constitutional power to Congress to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization” did not validate the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Wong, as a natural-born citizen, had no need of being naturalized. The Court held that “Every person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization.” Moreover, the majority held that Congress’ power of naturalization is “a power to confer citizenship, not to take it away.” In other words, Congress had the power to establish uniform rules for naturalization but could not alter the plain-language and common-law meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. The dissenting justices saw the case differently. Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote an extensive dissent in which Justice John Marshall Harlan joined. In their view, the common-law rule sprang from the feudal relationship between the British crown and children born within the realm. American law was not bound to follow the common-law rule because there were differences between “citizens” and “subjects.” In a republic such as the United States, citizenship was a status created by and conferred by the civil law. Because nothing in U.S. law had explicitly endorsed the common-law principle of citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment did not have to be read so as to include it. Fuller argued that Congress is free to pass statutes that define and interpret the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the dissenters’ view, then, the Chinese Exclusion Acts could constitutionally limit the reach of the phrase “born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Under this interpretation, Wong Kim Ark would not have been a citizen and his exclusion would have been constitutional. The Court’s decision in this case was important because it stripped the government of the power to deny the citizenship of persons born in the United States of alien parents. Robert Jacobs Further Reading Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Good discussion of the effects and technical aspects of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese 701

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Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s, with an afterward on U.S. immigration policies after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. History of U.S. immigration laws supported by extensive extracts from documents. McKenzie, Roderick Duncan. Oriental Exclusion: The Effect of American Immigration Laws, Regulations, and Judicial Decisions upon the Chinese and Japanese on the American Pacific Coast, 1885-1940. New York: J. S. Ozer, 1971. Discusses the human aspect of the Chinese exclusion laws. See also Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1943; Migration; Page law; “Yellow peril” campaign.

Xenophobia Definition: Irrational or exaggerated fear of foreigners Immigration issues: Discrimination; Nativism and racism; Religion Significance: Xenophobia and nativism gave birth to the eugenics movement and influenced theories about which human characteristics are desirable or undesirable, and these unscientific theories have been cited as justifications for restricting immigration from some parts of the world. Members of premodern (traditional) societies often exhibit distrust and fear of any persons not immediately known to them. Social scientists call this unreasoning and seemingly instinctual fear of strangers “xenophobia.” Xenophobia manifests itself in modern societies among members of subcultures, religious sects, ethnic groups, and political movements. Because people of similar beliefs and cultural backgrounds often tend to associate largely with one another, they develop little understanding of people with different beliefs and cultural backgrounds. As a result, in a pluralistic society such as the United States, xenophobia develops between Jews and Christians, between African Americans and European Americans, and between the members of many other groups that have limited interaction with people with backgrounds different from theirs. 702

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Often xenophobia leads directly to ethnocentrism, a conviction that one’s own group and its culture are superior to all other groups and their cultures. Xenophobia and ethnocentrism form essential elements of “nativism.” Sociologists include nativist movements as part of a larger category called “revitalization movements.” Revitalization movements usually occur within societies or groups that have suffered stress and whose cultures have suffered disorganization. Such movements aim to better the lives of their members, often at the expense of the members of other groups. Modern examples include the African American separatist movement in the United States, the Nazi movement in Germany during the period between the world wars, the Branch Davidian religious sect of the late twentieth century, the Indian Ghost Dance movement in the western United States during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many others. Several nativist movements, fueled by xenophobia, have actively advocated the use of eugenics to revitalize their own culture by eliminating foreign traits from their memberships. Eugenics Eugenics is a branch of science that deals with the improvement of the hereditary qualities of human beings through controlled or selective breeding. Eugenicists argue that many undesirable human characteristics (for example, inherited diseases such as hemophilia and Down syndrome) can be eliminated through careful genetic screening of couples planning to marry. Moderate eugenicists advocate the creation of a central data bank of genetic records for entire populations. A person contemplating marriage would be able to investigate the genetic endowment of his or her chosen partner to ascertain whether that person had a genetic weakness. More radical eugenicists argue that governments should take a direct hand in racial improvement by passing laws forbidding genetically flawed individuals from reproducing. Others hold that genetically flawed individuals should be medically sterilized. Eugenicists justify their positions on economic and scientific grounds: They maintain that the human race cannot spare scarce resources to tend to those born with genetic handicaps and that people must somehow compensate for the retrogressive evolutionary effects of modern technology. According to many eugenicists, the cost of keeping genetic defectives alive through the use of modern medical technology will eventually bankrupt world society. These eugenicists also believe that if genetically unsound men and women are allowed to breed uncontrollably, all of humanity will eventually inherit their debilitating characteristics. Before the rise of modern industrial society and the development of medical science, genetically defective individuals rarely lived long enough to reproduce, which controlled their negative influences on the human gene pool. Today, society not only expends increasingly scarce medical care on these people but also allows them to perpetuate and to spread their genes. The only way to reverse this retrogressive evolution, say the eugenicists, is to control or prevent the reproduction of that part of the world’s population that carries dysfunctional genes. 703

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The debate concerning eugenics has taken on a greater urgency with the recent strides that have been made in genetic engineering, particularly cloning. This new technology may make possible not only the medical elimination of genetic defects but also the “engineering” of desirable characteristics. It is apparently possible that genetic engineers may in a few decades be able to increase the intelligence of future generations (or decrease it). They may also be able to ensure that progeny will be tall (or short) or fair complected (or dark), to determine their hair color, and even to determine their sex. For some people, these possibilities presage a brilliant future. For others, they conjure up frightening images of an Orwellian nightmare. In either case, ethical questions are profound and complex. Consequences The instances in which governments or societies have implemented eugenics principles have not inspired confidence that eugenics goals will ever be achieved. They have not only failed to eliminate undesirable characteristics in the populations on which they were tested but also, in virtually every instance, have resulted in abuses that are indefensible in any moral court. Those who have controlled eugenics programs have been influenced in the passage and implementation of eugenic laws by xenophobia, nativism, and outright racism, rather than by sound scientific principles. The leading spokesperson for the eugenics movement in the United States for many years was Charles B. Davenport. Davenport taught zoology and biology at Harvard University and the University of Chicago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many scientists of his era, Davenport assumed that each “race” had its own characteristics. Davenport led a grassroots nativist movement in the United States that eventually succeeded in passing eugenics laws at both the national and state levels. The Immigration Act passed by large majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress in 1924 governed who could immigrate to the United States from abroad. Its language made immigration from northern Europe relatively easy, while residents of Africa and Asia found themselves virtually excluded. As several of its supporters (including future president Calvin Coolidge) acknowledged, the Immigration Act was designed to prevent the decline of the “Nordic” race by limiting the influx of members of “inferior” races. Scientists in Germany, especially anthropologists and psychiatrists, began advocating eugenics legislation before the beginning of the twentieth century. Eugenics seemed to offer scientific validation for the racial theories of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders (theories based not on scientific evidence but on xenophobia and nativism). Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, German doctors and directors of medical institutions—apparently authorized by Hitler—began the socalled euthanasia program. In mental institutions, hospitals, and institutions for the chronically ill, doctors began to kill (by neglect, by lethal injection, and by poisonous gas) those persons judged to be “useless eaters.” Although it was supposedly terminated after 1941, the program resulted in the deaths 704

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German dictator Adolf Hitler (holding hat) and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini inspecting troops during Hitler’s visit to Italy. Hitler and Mussolini both came to power on the strength of their fascist principles, which were strongly xenophobic. (Library of Congress)

of many thousands of people. Some of the personnel involved in the euthanasia program formed the nucleus of the units that carried out the legalized murder of enormous numbers of people in Nazi concentration camps in Poland from 1942 to 1945. Most of the victims were members of races deemed “inferior” by Nazi ideologists: Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. It is little wonder that many people are fearful of the policies advocated by contemporary eugenicists. Beginning during the 1930’s, the affinity between Nazi racial theories and eugenics caused most biological and medical scientists around the world to renounce eugenics policies and experiments. The information about the concentration camps that became known at the many war crimes trials held after 1945 seemed to have dealt a death blow to eugenicist dreams of a perfected human race. By the mid-1950’s, eugenics societies around the world were seemingly bereft of members and influence. Nevertheless, an increasing number of physicians began to recognize the many possible benefits of continued genetic research. By the 1970’s, genetic researchers had shown conclusively that some ethnic and racial groups were especially susceptible to certain genetic disorders. African Americans are particularly prone to the single-gene disorder called sickle-cell anemia, Ashkenazic Jews to Tay-Sachs disease, and Americans whose ancestors came from the Mediterranean area to Cooley’s anemia. The new eugenics/genetics societies in the United States led a movement that resulted 705

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in the National Genetic Diseases Act of 1976, which funded research into the detection and treatment of genetic disorders. A number of states extended their postnatal screening programs to include many single-gene disorders. Doctors developed a medical procedure known as amniocentesis, which allowed them to identify genetic and chromosomal disorders during the early stages of pregnancy. If an unborn fetus was identified as genetically flawed, parents could elect abortion. During the 1970’s, eugenicists also turned their attention to the population explosion. They found increasing cause for alarm because most of the human population increase was occurring in the Third World (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and among the bottom socioeconomic strata of industrialized nations. Fearing for the quality of the human gene pool, many eugenics groups began to advocate and finance “family planning” programs in the Third World and among domestic socially disadvantaged populations. These new programs clearly indicate that the nativism and xenophobia that influenced earlier generations of eugenicists are still operative. Paul Madden Further Reading Curran, Thomas J. Xenophobia and Immigration, 1820-1930. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Traces the origins of anti-immigrant movements in America, relating the xenophobic tradition to the exclusionist laws and practices of the inclusive period. Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York: Holt, 1911. Despite its age, this study is still valuable in understanding the arguments of early eugenicists. Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration history from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Provides an emphasis on cultural and social trends, with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Graham, Loren R. Between Science and Values. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Thoughtful and provocative exploration of the moral and ethical issues raised by genetic engineering; Graham is critical of the old eugenics and of the xenophobia and ethnocentrism upon which it was based. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Study showing how nativism was given a measure of scientific legitimacy by the eugenics movement. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Study clearly demonstrating the influence of nativism, xenophobia, and outright racism on the leading eugenicists. Muller-Hill, Benno. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others—Germany, 1933-1945. Translated by George R. Fraser. 706

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Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1988. Establishes the relationship between the eugenics movement in Germany and both the euthanasia program and the mass murder in concentration camps. See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Assimilation theories; Cuban refugee policy; Cultural pluralism; English-only and official English movements; History of U.S. immigration; Immigration Act of 1921; Japanese segregation in California schools; Mongrelization; Nativism; Palmer raids; Sacco and Vanzetti trial.

“Yellow peril” campaign The Event: Anti-Asian immigration nativist campaign Date: 1890’s-early twentieth century Place: West Coast Immigration issues: Asian immigrants; Chinese immigrants; Discrimination; Japanese immigrants; Nativism and racism Significance: The San Francisco Bulletin’s “yellow peril” campaign against Japanese immigrants strengthened anti-Asian feeling in the United States and strained relations between the U.S. and Japanese governments. In 1890, only about two thousand Japanese people were living in North America. They worked mainly as laborers and farmhands in California and the Pacific Northwest. Despite their minuscule numbers, the use of Japanese to break a labor strike in the coal mines in British Columbia began what was to become a widespread anti-Japanese campaign. Typical of the political rhetoric that was to become prevalent was a campaign slogan used in 1887 by Dr. O’Donnell of San Francisco: “Japs must go.” Although the slogan had little effect on O’Donnell’s failed political campaign, it was a sign of things to come. In 1889, the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin began a series of editorials attacking Japanese immigrants and making a case that they were dangerous to white American workers and to American culture. On May 4, 1892, he wrote: It is now some three years ago that the Bulletin first called attention to the influx of Japanese into this state, and stated that in time their immigration threatened to rival that of the Chinese, with dire disaster to laboring interests in California.

The San Francisco Bulletin’s yellow peril campaign helped strengthen the growing anti-Japanese fervor in California. The campaign was not only against 707


This turn-of-the-twentieth-century toy gun bears the message, “Chinese must go.” When its trigger is pulled, the figure in the hat kicks the Chinese figure. (Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley)

Japanese laborers, who they claimed threatened “real” American workers, but also against their perceived threat to American culture. Met with hostility, prejudice, and discrimination, Japanese in many urban areas settled into ethnic enclaves known as Little Tokyos, where they could feel safe and comfortable among fellow compatriots and secure employment. Effects On June 14, 1893, the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution requiring all Japanese students to attend the already segregated Chinese school instead of the regular public schools. Because of Japanese protests, the resolution was rescinded; however, it marked the beginning of legal discrimination against the Japanese in California. In 1894, a treaty between the United States and Japan allowed citizens open immigration, but both governments were given powers to limit excessive immigration. In 1900, because of American protests, Japan began a voluntary program to limit Japanese emigration to the United States. The Alaska gold rush of 1897-1899 attracted a great number of white laborers, and when the Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railroads worked to build a connecting line from Tacoma and Seattle to the East, extra laborers were needed. The companies turned to Japanese immigrants as workers. 708


Some of these laborers came from Japan and Hawaii. The rapid influx of Japanese laborers created further anti-Asian sentiments and hostility. With the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act up for renewal in 1902, the anti-Japanese sentiment occurred in the overall context of a growing anti-Asian movement, especially among labor unions and various political groups. In April of 1900, the San Francisco Building Trades Council passed a resolution to support the renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and to add the Japanese to this act to “secure this Coast against any further Japanese immigration, and thus forever settle the mooted Mongolian labor problem.” The county Republican Party lobbied extensively to get the national Republican Party to adopt a Japanese exclusion plank in their national platform. San Francisco mayor James Phelan and California governor Henry Gage joined the calls for Japanese to be included in the renewal of the Exclusion Act. However, when the exclusion law was extended in 1902, Japanese people were not included. After the 1905 defeat of Russia by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, a growing fear of Japanese power led to further agitation and political tactics to limit Japanese immigration and influence in America. Whereas Chinese people were hated and despised by various politicians, labor leaders, and some regular citizens, Japanese people were feared. In 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle launched another anti-Japanese campaign, emphasizing the dangers of future immigration. Later, the San Francisco Labor Council, at the urging of A. E. Ross and with the support of San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz, launched boycotts against Japanese merchants and white merchants who employed Japanese workers. Later that year, sixty-seven labor organizations formed the Asiatic Exclusion League (originally called the Japanese and Korean ExcluThis turn-of-the-twentieth-century advertisement for rat sion League), and the Ameripoison carried a double message: It used the negacan Federation of Labor passed tive stereotype of a Chinese “coolie” eating rats to a resolution that the provisions make its point about the effectiveness of the product, of the Chinese Exclusion Act be while pointing a finger at the Chinese figure next to extended to include Japanese the words, “They must go!” (Asian American Studies Liand Koreans. brary, University of California at Berkeley) 709


In 1906, anti-Asian sentiments continued to grow. San Francisco was struck by a major earthquake in April, and civil unrest increased. Japanese persons and businesses were attacked and looted. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco School Board ordered that all Japanese, Korean, and Chinese students attend a segregated “Oriental school.” (This regulation was later changed to include only older students and those with limited English proficiency.) Japan protested that the school board’s action violated the U.S.-Japan treaty of 1894, bringing the San Francisco situation into international focus. The Gentlemen’s Agreement To assuage Japan, President Theodore Roosevelt arranged with the school board to rescind its order in exchange for federal action to limit immigration from Japan. In the ensuing U.S.-Japan “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” Japan promised not to issue passports to laborers planning to settle in the United States and recognized U.S. rights to refuse Japanese immigrants entry into the United States. In an executive order issued on March 14, 1907, Roosevelt implemented an amendment to the Immigration Act of 1907, which allowed the United States to bar entry of any immigrant whose passport was not issued for direct entry into the United States and whose immigration was judged to threaten domestic labor conditions. Subsequent California legislation, the Heney-Webb bill or Alien Land Law of 1913, attempted to limit Asian interests within the state by prohibiting Asians from owning property. Although anti-Japanese sentiments lessened during World War I after Japan joined the Allies in the war against Germany, almost immediately following the war these sentiments resurfaced. The 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts barred Asian laborers from the United States. In California, a campaign to pass the 1920 Alien Land Law attracted the support of the American Legion and the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. In an effort to avoid widespread prejudice and discrimination, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), founded in 1930 and consisting of second-generation Japanese Americans (nisei), sought to follow a path of economic success through individual efforts, the cultivation of friendship and understanding between themselves and other Americans, and assimilation into American culture. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, nisei were urged by JACL leaders to prove their worth as patriotic Americans by contributing to the economic and social welfare of the United States and to the social life of the nation by living with other citizens in a common community. Their efforts would find a new obstacle in 1941, however, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 allowing internment of Japanese Americans in segregated camps. Gregory A. Levitt Further Reading Gabaccia, Donna R. Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Survey of American immigration 710

ZADVYDAS V. DAVIS

history from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Provides an emphasis on cultural and social trends, with attention to ethnic conflicts, nativism, and racialist theories. Ichihashi, Yamato. The American Immigration Collection: Japanese in the United States. 1932. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Thorough description of Japanese immigration into the United States with an excellent chapter on anti-Japanese agitation. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Study of immigration from China to the United States from the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the loosening of American immigration laws during the 1960’s, with an afterward on U.S. immigration policies after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. McWilliams, Carey. Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944. A dated but excellent account of anti-Japanese American prejudice and discrimination up to World War II. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. An excellent overview of the broader picture of Asian immigration and settlement in the United States. Wilson, Robert A., and Bill Hosokawa. East to America: A History of the Japanese in the United States. New York: William Morrow, 1980. An excellent account of Japanese immigration and settlement in the United States. See also Asian American stereotypes; Burlingame Treaty; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act; Chinese exclusion cases; Chinese immigrants; Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush; Chinese immigrants and family customs; Chinese Six Companies; Coolies; Immigration Act of 1943; Migration; Page law; Wong Kim Ark case.

ZADVYDAS V. DAVIS The Case: U.S. Supreme Court ruling on detention and deportation of aliens Date: June 28, 2001 Immigration issues: Civil rights and liberties; Court cases Significance: In a decision that would have an immediate impact on thousands of people, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not detain deportable aliens indefinitely simply because no other country is willing to accept them. Kestutis Zadvydas, a person of Lithuanian ancestry, was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and entered the United States as a child. After he 711

ZADVYDAS V. DAVIS

built a long criminal record, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ordered him to be deported to his country of citizenship. However, both Lithuania and Germany rejected his citizenship claims and refused to accept him. After being detained by the U.S. government for more than five years, Zadvydas claimed that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibited the INS from indefinitely detaining him without condemnation in a criminal trial. The INS justified the detention by reference to an interpretation of a 1996 federal statute. A federal appeals court refused to exercise judicial review over the immigration policies of the legislative and executive branches. By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court repudiated the idea of allowing the INS unlimited discretion for detaining Zadvydas and others in similar circumstances. Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer emphasized that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment put “important constitutional limitations” on legislative and executive policies toward all persons who had entered the country, even if they were in the country illegally. After a “reasonable” period of six months, if deportation appeared unlikely in the foreseeable future, he wrote that the INS had the burden of showing an adequate reason for keeping the person in custody. He observed that preventive detention would be appropriate when there was sufficient evidence that a person was dangerous to society. Thomas Tandy Lewis Further Reading Bischoff, Henry. Immigration Issues. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Blake, Nicholas J., and Raza Husain. Immigration, Asylum and Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Legomsky, Stephen H. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy. 3d ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2002. LeMay, Michael C., and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. See also Chinese detentions in New York; Deportation; Haitian immigrants; Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy; Immigration and Naturalization Service; Naturalization; September 11 terrorist attacks.

712

Appendices

Bibliography General Studies Barkan, Elliott R. And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920 to the 1990’s. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1996. Looks at the changing composition of the immigrant population during the twentieth century and considers the impact of immigrants on American society. Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. A look at how immigrants adjusted to American society that considers the situations immigrants faced in their homelands and how they drew on their homeland traditions in adjusting to life in the new country. Looks primarily at European immigrants but also Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2d ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. An excellent general treatment of immigration history. Looks at the motives and experiences of immigrants from 1500 to the end of the twentieth century and considers major issues relating to immigration. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970. A classic study of the identifications and inter-group relations of American ethnic and immigrant groups. Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants. Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1991. A new edition of President Kennedy’s classic 1958 book calling for an end to discrimination in immigration laws. Kennedy’s championing of the change in immigration laws helped to lead to the historic 1965 shift in immigration policy. Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. A history of the United States from the perspective of its ethnic groups. Tends to emphasize non-white, non-European groups and their experiences with racism. Post-1965 Immigrants Hamamoto, Darrell Y., and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds. New American Destinies: A Reader in Contemporary Asian and Latino Immigration. New York: Routledge, 1997. Essays cover U.S. immigration history, labor force participation among immigrants, new theoretical frameworks for studying immigration, various lived experiences among these immigrant populations, and community-building. Millman, Joel. The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy, and Our Values. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. The author, a journalist, takes an anecdotal approach to recounting the lives of contemporary American immigrants. He argues that immigrants are re-building the American economy and reclaiming lost neighborhoods. 715

Bibliography

Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. A description of the nature and variety of immigrant settlement in the United States in the late twentieth century. Offers an optimistic view of the role of immigrants in American life. Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. An excellent history of late twentieth century immigration to the U.S. This second edition includes a detailed discussion of the 1990 Immigration Act, an evenhanded examination of issues connected to undocumented or illegal immigration, and consideration of the new immigrants arriving from areas in and around the former Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. Rosenzweig, Mark R., and Guillermina Jasso. The New Chosen People: Immigrants in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990. Slightly dated now, but a good introduction to the post-1965 immigrants and the issues facing them. Ueda, Reed. Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Begins by looking at the legacy of the restrictive immigration policy of the United States, then describes the transformation of American immigration policy to a worldwide one in 1952 and 1965. Provides a good section on the changing face of immigration as a result of post-1965 immigration policy. Considers America as a world melting pot. In the last chapter, the author is somewhat critical of the rise of ethnic identity politics. Immigration Policy, Law, and Theoretical Issues Borjas, George. Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. An examination of the economic effects of immigration. Borjas finds that immigrants contribute to the American economy, but that the large numbers of low-skilled workers tend to intensify economic inequality in the United States and harm lower-paid native born workers. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. A detailed history of American immigration policy since the late nineteenth century. Hing, Bill Ong. Defining America Through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. A broad survey of federal immigration policies and their impact on the social structure of the United States. Hirschman, Charles, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds. The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. A comprehensive compilation of research and thinking on American immigration. The authors of the various chapters look at theories of international migration and at how immigrant groups change in the United States. They consider the social, economic, and political consequences of immigration. 716

Bibliography

Assimilation and Adaptation of Immigrants Gordon, Milton M. Assimilation in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. The classic work on immigrant adaptation, written before the great wave of immigration following the 1965 change in immigration law. Gordon argues that immigrant groups tend to follow stages of assimilation, beginning with acculturation and ending with marital assimilation. Light, Ivan, and Parminder Bhachu, eds. Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993. A study of how culture and ethnic networks together can channel immigrants into small business ownership. Portes, Alejandro, ed. The New Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996. A selection of topical essays that examine the main challenges facing the children of immigrants. Rumbaut, Rubén, and Alejandro Portes, eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. The authors of the chapters in this book look at the patterns of adaptation of children of specific immigrant groups in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The research collected here is based on the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study. Suárez-Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco. Children of Immigration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Written by the codirectors of the Harvard Immigration Project, the book examines how immigrant children and children of immigrants are faring in the United States. It gives particular attention to their special needs as students and to how American schools are addressing these special needs. The Debate over Modern Immigration Beck, Roy. The Case Against Immigration: The Moral, Economic, Social, and Environmental Reasons for Reducing U.S. Immigration Back to Traditional Levels. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Beck is an environmental and population control activist who makes a case for drastically reducing immigration in this book. Briggs, Vernon M. Mass Immigration and the National Interest. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992. The author, an economist, argues that nineteenth and early twentieth century immigration aided the U.S. economy but the post1965 immigration does not. Brimelow, Peter. Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. New York: Random House, 1996. A controversial argument for drastically cutting back immigration that maintains the large numbers of immigrants arriving from non-European societies cannot be easily assimilated into American culture. Camarota, Steven. Importing Poverty: Immigration’s Impact on the Size and Growth of the Poor Population in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies, 1999. Looks at the composition of the poor population in 1979, 1989, and 1997 in order to suggest how immigration affected the growth of the poor population in the United States. 717

Bibliography

Heer, David. Immigration in America’s Future: Social Science Findings and the Policy Debate. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996. An evenhanded presentation of social scientific research on the impact of immigration on American life. The author presents and interprets data on trends in immigration and asks readers to decide the policy implications for themselves. Perea, Juan, ed. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 1997. A collection of essays that attack laws, policies, and popular movements seen as anti-immigrant. The essays have the common thread of suggesting that all efforts to limit immigration are reflections of a latent nativism. Reimers, David M. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Traces the history of American attitudes toward immigration. The author questions the major arguments against immigration, while suggesting that there are also difficulties with simply assuming that the United States can continually absorb large numbers of immigrants. Nativism in American History Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Far Right in American History. 2d ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. A comprehensive history of anti-immigrant movements in American history that argues those opposed to immigrants have been dedicated to protecting the nation against what they saw as alien ideas and people. He maintains that after 1919, fear of aliens shifted from fear of the foreigners themselves to fear of foreign ideologies, particularly communism. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan, 1938. A classic study of nativism that helped bring the topic into the mainstream of historical work. As the title indicates, Billington places a great deal of emphasis on anti-Catholicism in American nativism. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. A study of the interconnected forces of nationalism and ethnic prejudice in American life during the great wave of migration at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Migration, Gender, and Family Issues Abel, Emily K., and Marjorie Pearson, eds. Across Cultures: The Spectrum of Women’s Lives. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1989. Gender issues across cultures are addressed in this anthology. In terms of migration, Carole H. Browner and Dixie L. King discuss “Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women and Immigration.” DiQuinzio, Patrice, and Iris Marion Young, eds. Feminist Ethics and Social Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Chapters address social policy from a feminist perspective. Immigration law is of particular impor718

Bibliography

tance in Uma Narayan’s chapter, “‘Male-Order’ Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence, and Immigration Law.” Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. While some chapters address migration patterns from the “global south” or developing countries to the developed locale of the U.S., migration flows throughout the world are addressed throughout the book. In particular, the gendered dynamics of migration are well-illustrated by all of the contributions. Further, an analysis of transnational flows of love and support offer a unique perspective on the “emotional labor” of women migrant workers. Gabaccia, Donna R., ed. Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992. This anthology provides analyses of U.S. immigration and women immigrants from a feminist perspective. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, ed. Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. The editor points out that gender is an important aspect of migration and shapes migration patterns, but that gender has received relatively little attention in migration studies. Hondagneu-Sotelo brings together some of the best work in this area. Huang, Fung-Yea. Asian and Hispanic Immigrant Women in the Work Force: Implications of the United States Immigration Policies Since 1965. New York: Garland, 1997. Using data from the Current Population Survey, Huang highlights the similarities and differences between two immigrant groups of women, Asian and Hispanic, and the differences between women who entered the U.S. with husbands versus those who entered independently. Kelson, Gregory A., and Debra L. DeLaet, eds. Gender and Immigration. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Beginning with an analysis of the invisibility of women in international migration scholarship, contributions to this anthology address issues ranging from immigration policy and gender relations to gender, marriage patterns, and sexuality among immigrants. Luibhéld, Eithne, and Lionel Cantú, eds. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. This book provides a novel perspective on migration as the editors bring together research on sexual orientation and U.S. immigration. Immigrants and Literature Fine, David M. The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880-1920. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. This book is one of the best studies of American immigrant fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It places this writing in the context of American immigration history. Mendoza, Louis G., and Subramanian Shankar, eds. Crossing Into America: The New Literature of Immigration. New York: New Press, 2003. A collection of lit719

Bibliography

erature, diary entries, and letters that map the “great second wave” of American immigration. Young, new writers along with authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez discuss the many varied experiences of new immigrants to America. Muller, Gilbert H. New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Explores the immigrant experiences and emerging identities of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos from the Caribbean, African-Caribbean immigrants, and Asian Americans through their contemporary fiction. African Americans and New African Immigrants Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Looks at the history of slaves in America, beginning with the first involuntary immigrant generations, which Berlin calls the Charter Generations. Emphasizes regional variations in the character of slavery. _______. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Probably the most authoritative work on black slavery in North America. Conniff, Michael L., and Thomas J. Davis. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Takes a comparative approach to the history of involuntary African immigrants and their descendants in the Caribbean, Brazil, Spanish America, and North America. Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. A classic and fundamental source of information on numbers of slaves, mortality rates, and living conditions during the slave trade. Kasinitz, Philip. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. The author, a prominent sociologist specializing in immigration, compares the experiences of pre-1965 West Indian immigrants to those who came after 1965 and argues that the status and power of Caribbean immigrants decreased as African Americans became more politically involved in the years after the Civil Rights movement. Asian Americans Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking, 2003. A well-written history of Chinese Americans that looks forward to their possible future definitions of racial identity. Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. A case study of a Hmong child in the United States who suffered a seizure. The book gives insight into the traditional shamanistic beliefs of Hmong refugees in the U.S. and how these contrast with American views of health and the world. Freeman, James A. Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese American Lives. Stanford, Calif.: 720

Bibliography

Stanford University Press, 1989. The story of fourteen Vietnamese refugees and their struggles to adapt to life in the United States. Min, Pyong Gap, ed. Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues. 2d ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2005. A broad overview of the Asian American experience that provides chapters on issues relevant to Asian Americans and descriptions of individual Asian ethnic groups. Also includes eight photo essays. This is an essential work for anyone interested in contemporary Asian Americans. Spickard, Paul R. Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group New York: Twayne, 1996. Tells the history of Japanese Americans, beginning with those who arrived between 1890 and 1910 and continuing on to new Japanese immigrants arriving in the late twentieth century. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998. Combines a general discussion of Vietnamese American refugees with a case study of Vietnamese children in a particular community. European Groups Bailyn, Bernard. From Protestant Peasants to Jewish Intellectuals: The Germans in the Peopling of America. Oxford, England: Berg, 1988. A history of the different waves of immigration of one of the largest ethnic groups in America. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Although it deals with Italian Americans throughout American history, the central part of this book concerns the mass immigration of Italians between 1880 and 1924. Miller, Kerby A., and Patricia Mulholland Miller. Journey of Hope: The Story of Irish Immigration to America. New York: Chronicle Books, 2001. A history of Irish Americans that presents their time in America as a triumphant success story. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: A Classic Work in Immigration History. Edited by Eli Zaretsky. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. A new, abridged edition of a 1927 sociological study. The book is very important in the social scientific study of immigration, as well as a good introduction to Polish American settlement. Latinos Davis, Mike. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City. New York: Verso, 2000. Looks at how Latinos, as the fastest growing and perhaps largest segment in American society, are transforming American urban life. Galarza, Ernesto. Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story. Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally and Loftin, West, 1978. A history of the Bracero program that describes the treatment of Mexican laborers and the impact of the program. 721

Bibliography

Massey, Douglas S., Rafael Alarcon, Jorge Durand, and Humberto González. Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Combines historical, anthropological, and survey data to study migration to the United States from four communities in Mexico. Portes, Alejandro, and Robert L. Bach. Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. A key work on Latin American immigration, contrasting two important but very distinctive groups. Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Looks at how Mexicans, coming to Los Angeles as temporary sojourners, gradually became permanent residents and at the institutions and social networks created by them. Suro, Roberto. Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Looks at the essential issues connected to Latino migration to the United States. The author takes stands on issues, arguing, for example, that legal Latino immigrants need to take a position against illegal immigration. Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo Carl L. Bankston III

722

Time Line of U.S. Immigration History All legislative acts mentioned below are federal laws unless otherwise noted. Subjects of essays in the main text are printed in small caps on their first mentions. For additional historical statistics, see the articles on “Census, U.S.,” “Demographics of immigration,” and “Racial and demographic trends,” as well as the articles on individual immigrant groups. c. 15,000 b.c.e Ancestors of Native Americans begin crossing the Bering Strait into North America. 1003-1008

Norse explorers make tentative attempts to establish settlements in North America.

1492

Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World opens the Western Hemisphere to immigration from the Old World.

1565

Spanish found St. Augustine in Florida—the earliest permanent European settlement in North America.

1607

(April) English settlers arrive in Chesapeake Bay and found Jamestown colony.

1619

First African slaves arriving in Virginia represent the first African immigrants to North America.

1620

(November) Earliest Pilgrims land at Plymouth.

1624

Thirty French Belgian families, sponsored by the Dutch West India Company, found New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan Island.

1626

First African slaves arrive in the Dutch lands of the northeast.

1629-1640

Puritan Great Migration to New England takes place.

1634

Sephardic Jews found the first recorded settlement of Jewish immigrants in North America in Maryland.

1638

First recorded settlement of Scandinavian immigrants is founded along the Delaware River.

1654

Jewish immigrants begin arriving in New Amsterdam from Brazil.

1664

Dutch cede control of the colony of New Netherlands to England.

1680’s

German immigrants who are beginning to arrive in Pennsylvania become known as the “Pennsylvania Dutch” as their settlement continues into the eighteenth century.

1681

William Penn receives proprietorship of Pennsylvania from King Charles II of England.

1695

Scotch-Irish immigrants begin arriving in North America.

723

Time Line of U.S. Immigration History 1784

Russians begin settling in Alaska.

1790

Naturalization Act of 1790, the first federal law addressing naturalization issues, stipulates that any “free white person” may obtain U.S. citizenship after two years of residency.

1790

Federal government conducts the first national census.

1790

Revenue Marine, the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard, is established.

1798

Naturalization law is revised to require fourteen years of residence before becoming a citizen.

1798

Passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts gives the U.S. president the authority to deport all foreigners who are regarded as dangerous.

1799

(February) Federal riot of 1799 in Philadelphia is the first mass public reaction to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

1800

Led by the Federalist Party, the U.S. Congress passes the Alien Acts. These include the Nationalization Act, which lengthens the residency requirement for citizenship and makes citizenship more difficult for immigrants to acquire; the Alien Act, which gives President John Adams the authority to deport any non-citizen thought to be dangerous; and the Alien Enemies Act, which permits the capture and imprisonment of enemy aliens in time of war.

1802

Congress reduces the residency requirement for becoming a citizen to five years.

1808

Congress bans the importation of slaves. It continues to be legal to hold native-born slaves and some slaves continue to be smuggled into the United States from Africa and the Caribbean.

1819

U.S. begins to collect data on immigrants by requiring ship’s captains and others bringing in immigrants to keep records and submit manifests.

1834

Inventor Samuel F. B. Morse’s anti-Roman Catholic tract, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States calls for the formation of the Anti-Popery Union to resist the influence of Catholic immigrants.

1844

(May-July) Anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia express anti-immigrant sentiments of nativism.

1845

Ireland experiences a potato crop failure, beginning the Great Irish Famine, which prompts almost 500,000 people to migrate from Ireland to North America between 1845 and 1850.

1848

(February) Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican War; Mexico cedes its northern territories to the United States, and about 100,000 Mexicans suddenly become citizens of the United States.

724


California gold rush begins and attracts a wave of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Some of these immigrants settle in San Francisco, where they build the first American Chinatown.

1854

Chinese district associations in the United States join together to form the Chinese Six Companies, which becomes the primary organization representing Chinese residents.

1854

Anti-immigrant Native American Party, also known as the “KnowNothing Party” wins every statewide office and a majority of seats in the state legislature in Massachusetts elections.

1857

William Marcy Tweed becomes a leader of New York City’s Tammany Hall and uses his influence in machine politics to assist arriving immigrants while soliciting their political support.

1859

CLOTILDE slave ship is the last American ship to deliver involuntary African immigrants to the United States.

1861-1865

U.S. Civil War disrupts immigration from Europe.

1866

Ku Klux Klan is founded in Tennessee.

1868

In order to encourage Chinese immigrants to settle on the West Coast, the United States persuades the Chinese government to ratify the Burlingame Treaty, which allows people to leave China for America.

1869

Transcontinental railroad is completed. This releases immigrant workers, many of them Chinese, into the job market, especially in California.

1870

Naturalization Act of 1870 extends naturalization rights to people of African descent, but excludes other non-whites.

1875

(March) Congress passes the Page law to prevent Asian prostitutes from entering the United States.

1880

Italian immigrants begin entering the country in large numbers.

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act bans the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States for ten years.

1884-1893

Constitutionality of the Chinese Exclusion Act is tested in the Chinese exclusion cases.

1885

(December) U.S. Supreme Court approves taxing immigrants in the so-called Head money cases.

1888

American Protective Association is founded to combat the growing influence of Roman Catholic immigrants.

1889

Jane Addams establishes Hull-House in Chicago, helping to begin the settlement house movement.

1890’s

Anti-Asian "yellow peril" campaign develops on the West Coast.

1891

(March) Bureau of Immigration—the forerunner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service—is established, and Congress sets health qualifications for new immigrants.

725


Geary Act extends the Chinese Exclusion Act for an additional ten years and requires Chinese in the United States to obtain a certificate of residence.

1892

First newspaper for Arab immigrants is started in New York City.

1892

Quarantine station for immigrants opens on the northwest side of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

1892

(January) Ellis Island, the largest and most famous immigrant station in the United States, opens. During the turn of the century wave of immigration, from 1892 to 1924, three-quarters of all the immigrants arriving in the United States arrive through Ellis Island.

1895

Chinese American Citizens Alliance is formed in San Francisco.

1898

(March) In the Wong Kim Ark case, the Supreme Court rules that children born in the United States are U.S. citizens, regardless of the status of their parents.

1903-1905

Approximately 7,200 Korean immigrants arrive in Hawaii to work on sugar plantations.

1904

Congress extends the Chinese Exclusion Act indefinitely.

1904

First wave of Sikh immigrants arrives in North America.

1906

American Jewish Committee is formed as an advocacy group for Jewish immigrants.

1906

Hawaii Sugar Planters Association hires attorney A. F. Judd to travel to the Philippines to recruit field workers and make arrangements for bringing the workers to Hawaii. By 1930, three quarters of the agricultural workers in Hawaii are Filipinos.

1906

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle exposes harsh living conditions of immigrants working in Chicago.

1906

(October) Japanese segregation in California schools begins when the San Francisco school board orders the segregation of Japanese pupils.

1907

Immigration Act of 1907 increases the head tax on new immigrants from two to four dollars and, in a provision aimed at Japanese immigrants, gives the president of the United States the authority to deny admission to any immigrants he believes have a negative influence on labor conditions.

1907

(March) United States and Japan reach the Gentleman’s Agreement, under which the United States allows Japanese residents to attend San Francisco public schools, and Japan agrees to end the emigration of Japanese laborers to the United States.

1908

Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot introduces the term “melting pot” to the English language.

726


Immigration station begins operating at China Cove on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The Angel Island facility will operate until 1940, handling 100,000 immigrants granted entry into the United States, most of them from Asia. These include 60,000 Chinese immigrants.

1910

Mexican Revolution begins. Political and economic chaos in Mexico over the following ten years cause an estimated quarter of a million Mexicans to resettle across the border in the United States.

1911

California legislators introduce twenty-seven bills for alien land laws designed to prevent Japanese immigrants from owning land in the state.

1911

(March) Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire kills 146 garment workers—mostly women immigrants—in New York City.

1916

Naturalist Madison Grant advances the idea of "Mongrelization" in The Passing of the Great Race, which classified national and ethnic groups as “races.”

1916

Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association in New York City.

1917

(April) United States enters World War I, and President Woodrow Wilson establishes regulations on enemy aliens, restricting the movements and rights of people from the countries with which the United States is at war. Federal agents intern 6,300 people under these regulations.

1917

(May) Immigration Act of 1917 bars the entry of immigrants who cannot read or write in English or in their own languages, as well as immigrants from Asia.

1917

(October) Russian Revolution begins period of increasing Russian emigration.

1919-1920

Under the direction of U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, federal agents round up and deport foreign radicals with state and local police assistance in a series of purges known as the Palmer raids.

1920-1921

Sacco and Vanzetti trial reveals depth of American prejudice against Italian immigrants.

1921

(May) Immigration Act of 1921 creates the first national origins quota law. This limits immigrants from any particular country to 3 percent of the number of people from that country in the United States in 1910. The act also places a ceiling of 350,000 immigrants per year.

1922

(September) Cable Act restricts the citizenship rights of immigrants.

1922

(November) In Ozawa v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Japanese aliens are not “white” and cannot be naturalized as citizens.

727


(May) Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, tightens the national origins quotas by limiting immigration from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country living in the United States in 1890. The annual ceiling on immigrants is lowered to 165,000. The act also creates the U.S. Border Patrol.

1927

Marcus Garvey is declared an undesirable alien and is deported.

1929

Congress makes annual immigration quotas by national origin permanent and sets the annual ceiling on immigrants at roughly 150,000. The restrictions of the 1920’s bias immigration heavily in favor of northern and western Europe, which receives 83 percent of the visas to enter the United States as immigrants. Southern and eastern Europe receive 15 percent of the visas and only 2 percent of the visas go to the rest of the world.

1929

League of United Latin American Citizens is founded as an advocacy organization for Latinos.

1930

(August) Japanese American Citizens League is founded.

1931

Federal government begins Mexican deportations to conserve jobs for American citizens.

1934

(March) Tydings-McDuffie Act places the Philippines on track toward independence from the United States, reclassifies Filipinos from American nationals to aliens, and restricts the admission of Filipino immigrants to the United States to only fifty persons per year. After World War II, the Philippines becomes independent, the quota for Filipino immigrants is raised to one hundred per year, and Filipinos become eligible to naturalize as U.S. citizens.

1937

Sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen publishes The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrants, which introduces the concept of the Hansen effect.

1939

SS Louis, carrying more than 900 German Jewish refugees, is met off the coast of Florida by a Coast Guard patrol boat sent to prevent refugees from swimming ashore.

1939

John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the internal migrations of Americans fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

1940

In response to war in Europe and Asia, the Alien Registration Act requires the registration and fingerprinting of all non-citizens in the United States. About 5 million non-citizens register.

1941

(December) Japan’s attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, brings the United States into World War II.

1942

Wartime labor needs lead the United States to establish the bracero program, which brings Mexican laborers, primarily in agriculture, to the United States. The program continues through 1964 and helps to establish a pattern of labor migration from Mexico.

728


(February) Japanese American internment begins when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs an executive order requiring all persons of Japanese ancestry living west of the Rocky Mountains on the mainland United States to be sent to remote camps for the duration of World War II. Later, Japanese Peruvians were deported from Peru to the United States, where they were immediately interned in the Japanese American camps.

1943

(December) Immigration Act of 1943 repeals Asian exclusion laws.

1945-1990

More than 5 million Afro-Caribbean immigrants—including Cubans and Haitians—enter the United States.

1945

(May) End of World War II in Europe leaves many people homeless

1945

(December) War Brides Act enables wives and children of U.S. servicemen to enter the country on a non-quota basis.

1948

In response to urging by President Harry S. Truman, Congress passes the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 to deal with the problem of refugees and displaced people in Europe following the war. Truman is criticized for excluding more than 90 percent of displaced Jews. The act is revised in 1950 and most of the discrimination against Jewish refugees is removed.

1950-1953

United States fights in the Korean War.

1951

United Nations holds Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

1952

(June) Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, becomes the basis of U.S. immigration policy. It establishes a four-category preference system, makes it easier for Asians to immigrate, and makes it tougher for communists to enter the United States. The act retains the national origins quota system.

1953

(August) President Harry S. Truman’s appeal to Congress to help escapees from the communist countries of Eastern Europe leads to the passage of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which allows 200,000 more visas than are authorized under national immigration quotas.

1954

Ellis Island closes. From 1892 through 1953, the Ellis Island immigration facility has processed more than 12 million immigrants.

1954

(June-July) U.S. government deports thousands of Mexican laborers in Operation Wetback.

1956

President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorizes the admission of 38,000 Hungarian refugees who have fled Hungary after a failed anticommunist uprising.

729


Congress passes the Refugee-Escapee Act, which defines refugees as those escaping from communist or communist-dominated countries.

1958

Future president John F. Kennedy publishes A Nation of Immigrants, calling attention to the contributions made by immigrants.

1959

Fidel Castro leads revolutionary forces to power in Cuba.

1959

Tibetan uprising against the Chinese government prompts 100,000 Tibetans to go to India.

1959-1962

First Cuban immigrants to flee Castro’s new government arrive in the United States and settle primarily in the Little Havana area of Miami.

1960

U.S. government creates the Cuban Refugee Program to handle the processing and resettlement of Cuban refugees.

1963

Miami-Dade County, with its growing population of Cubans and other Hispanics, becomes the location of the first bilingual education program in U.S. public schools.

1964

Milton Gordon publishes Assimilation in American Life, a major study of the assimilation of immigrants into American society.

1965-1973

Chartered planes known as “Freedom Flights” bring more than 260,000 Cuban refugees to the United States. Fidel Castro orders the flights ended on April 6, 1973.

1965

Thanks to relaxation of immigration restrictions, Jamaican immigrants begin arriving in larger numbers than ever before.

1965

President Lyndon Johnson makes the long-closed and decaying immigrant station at Ellis Island part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Planning begins for the restoration of Ellis Island.

1965

(October) Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, expands the preference system adopted by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The new law repeals the national origins quota system and makes family reunification the primary basis of immigration law. The act also establishes a ceiling of 170,000 on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere.

1966

(January) The term “model minority” first appears in a New York Times Magazine article by sociologist William Petersen.

1968

Bilingual Education Act, which is passed as Title 7 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provides funds for special programs for speakers of minority languages.

1968

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund is formed in San Antonio, Texas, to promote Latino rights.

730

Time Line of U.S. Immigration History 1972-1980

Around 50,000 Haitian boat people flee from the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, arriving illegally on the coast of Florida in hastily constructed, overcrowded boats. In response, the U.S. government begins the practice of interdiction, stopping the Haitian boats at sea and returning most of their passengers to Haiti.

1974

Asian American Legal Defense Fund is formed to defend and promote the legal rights of Asian Americans.

1974

(January) In Lau v. Nichols the U.S. Supreme Court rules that public schools must provide bilingual education to limited-Englishspeaking students.

1975

(April) After fall of Saigon government, U.S. president Gerald Ford authorizes the admission of 130,400 refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Most of those in this first wave of refugees are Vietnamese immigrants and the numbers of Southeast Asian immigrants increase.

1976

First Hmong immigrants begin arriving in the United States.

1977

U.S. attorney general Griffin Bell uses his parole authority to allow thousands of people from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to resettle in the United States. President Jimmy Carter signs legislation permitting these refugees to become permanent residents.

1978

Federal government adopts a new worldwide ceiling of 290,000 immigrants per year, replacing the Eastern and Western ceilings established in 1965.

1979

Islamic revolution in Iran leads to large increase in the numbers of Iranian immigrants to the United States and other nations.

1980-1990

Civil wars rage in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. An estimated one million political and economic refugees from these countries flee north to the United States, settling mostly in California and on the East Coast.

1980’s

Liberalization of emigration laws under Mikhail Gorbachev leads to an increase in the numbers of Soviet Jewish immigrants to the United States.

1980

In response to the large numbers of immigrants that have begun to arrive from Southeast Asia and other locations, Congress passes the Refugee Act. This places refugees in a category separate from other immigrants, and it provides a definition of refugees as people fleeing their countries because of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. The president is given authority to establish the number of refugees to be allowed into the United States. The ceiling on regular immigrants is lowered from 290,000 per year to 270,000 per year.

1980

(April-September) Fidel Castro opens the port of Mariel to Cubans who want to leave the country. More than 115,000 people take advantage of the Mariel boatlift to cross to Key West, Florida.

731


Congress sets an annual quota of 20,000 Taiwanese immigrants.

1982

(June) In Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court extends the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to give noncitizens the right to public social services.

1983

(June) Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on deportation has wide-ranging political ramifications.

1984

(December) United States and Cuba agree that Cuba will take back nearly 3,000 criminals and mental patients who have arrived with the Mariel boatlift and the United States would issue visas to political prisoners and others who wished to leave Cuba.

1986

Concerns over illegal immigration into the United States lead Congress to pass the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This raises the annual ceiling on legal immigration from the 270,000 established six years earlier to 540,000. To decrease the jobs drawing illegal aliens into the country, the act introduces stiff penalties for employers of those in the country illegally. The act also offers amnesty to illegal aliens who can prove that they have resided in the United States since January 1, 1982.

1988

Congress passes the Civil Liberties Act, which authorizes each internee of a wartime relocation camp for Japanese Americans to receive $20,000 and an apology from the United States. About 60,000 Japanese Americans apply for and receive these reparations.

1989

(June) Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy criticizes American treatment of refugees.

1990’s

Tibetan immigrants begin arriving in the United States.

1990

(September) National Immigration Museum opens at Ellis Island.

1990

(November) Immigration Act of 1990 raises the worldwide ceiling on immigration to 700,000 for 1992 through 1994, with the ceiling to go down to 675,000. The act revises the 1952 Immigration Act so that immigrants can no longer be excluded because of political beliefs or affiliations.

1992

President George Bush issues Executive Order 12807, directing the Coast Guard to interdict undocumented aliens at sea and to return them to their places of origin.

1992

(May) Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance is formed to promote the interests of Asian and Pacific islander immigrants.

1993

(June) Chinese detentions in New York, as federal authorities take into custody 276 illegal immigrants.

732


North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is established among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The act is intended primarily to reduce barriers to trade, but it also requires the three countries to ease restrictions on the movement of business executives and professionals. This promotes professional migration from Canada to the United States, in particular.

1994

(April) In the Florida illegal-immigrant suit, the state of Florida demands restitution from the federal government for its own expenditures on illegal immigrants.

1994

(June) The Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform, also known as the Jordan Commission, calls for limiting legal immigration to 500,000 per year, with 100,000 slots to be granted to immigrants with needed job skills, and the report calls for strict controls on the hiring of illegal immigrants where necessary.

1994

(August) Responding to the large numbers of Cubans attempting to leave their country after Fidel Castro declares that he is not opposed to people leaving, the U.S. changes its Cuban refugee policy when President Bill Clinton declares that Cuban refugees will no long be allowed automatic entry to the United States.

1994

(November) California voters approve Proposition 187, a voter initiative designed to limit public services available to undocumented immigrants.

1995

Thai garment worker enslavement scandal is revealed when captive immigrant garment workers are freed in Southern California.

1996

Congress votes to increase the numbers of Border Patrol agents from 5,000 to 10,000 over the following five years and it orders the construction of fences along the U.S.-Mexico border.

1996

Welfare Reform Act denies public assistance services to resident aliens for a period of time.

1996

(March) Immigration and Naturalization Service creates a selfpetitioning process for immigrants who are battered spouses and battered children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. If approved, the petitions enable immigrants to remain in the United States after separating from abusive spouses.

1998

Population of Muslims in the United States reaches about 6 million persons.

1998

(June) California voters approve Proposition 227, a voter initiative designed to end bilingual education in public schools.

1999

(November) Elián González rescue off the southern coast of Florida touches off a diplomatic conflict between the United States and Cuba.

2001

In Zadvydas v. Davis the Supreme Court rules that the government may not detain deportable aliens indefinitely simply because no other country accepts them.

733


(June) In Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the citizenship of children born abroad and out of wedlock who have only one American parent.

2001

(September) In September 11 terrorist attacks, nineteen Islamic radicals hijack four American airlines; they fly two planes into the towers of New York’s World Trade Center, destroying the buildings and killing thousands of people. A third plane hits part of the Pentagon, and a fourth crashes in Pennsylvania after a struggle between passengers and hijackers. Nine days later, U.S. president George W. Bush reacts to the events of September 11 by creating the Office of Homeland Security. The following January this is upgraded to the Department of Homeland Security.

2001

(October) Congress passes Public Law 107-56, known as the USA Patriot Act. The act includes new reasons for denying entry into the United States, gives a broader definition to the concept of terrorist activity, and increases the causes for deporting visitors and immigrants.

2001

(November) Congress passes the Border Security Act, authorizing more funds for immigration and customs staff, providing for the sharing of information on deportation cases among federal agencies, tracking foreign students, and tightening oversight in other ways.

2003

(March) Functions and offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service are transferred to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (UCIS), a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security. Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger—an immigrant from Austria— is elected governor of California.

2004

Approximately 9 million illegal aliens are believed to be living in the United States.

2005

With a budget of more than $40 billion, the Department of Homeland Security has such responsibilities as protecting national targets, coordinating domestic intelligence and preparedness, and monitoring the flow of immigration.

Carl L. Bankston III Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo

734

Indexes

Category Index African Americans . . . . Asian Immigrants . . . . . Border Control . . . . . . Chinese Immigrants . . . Citizenship and Naturalization . . . . . Civil Rights and Liberties . . . . . . . . Court Cases . . . . . . . . Cuban Immigrants . . . . Demographics . . . . . . Discrimination . . . . . . Economics . . . . . . . . Education . . . . . . . . . Ethnic Enclaves . . . . . . European Immigrants . . Families and Marriage . . Government and Politics. Illegal Immigration. . . . Irish Immigrants . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

737 737 738 738

. . . 739 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

AFRICAN AMERICANS African immigrants, 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Clotilde slave ship, 168 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Discrimination, 201 Haitian boat people, 297 Haitian immigrants, 300 Irish immigrants and African Americans, 400 Jamaican immigrants, 415 Korean immigrants and African Americans, 469 Ku Klux Klan, 477 Literature, 507 Palmer raids, 584 Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606 Santería, 629

739 740 740 740 740 741 741 741 741 742 742 742 742

Japanese Immigrants . . Jewish Immigrants . . . Labor . . . . . . . . . . Language . . . . . . . . Latino Immigrants . . . Law Enforcement. . . . Laws and Treaties. . . . Literature . . . . . . . . Mexican Immigrants . . Middle Eastern Immigrants. . . . . . Native Americans . . . . Nativism and Racism . . Refugees . . . . . . . . Religion . . . . . . . . . Slavery. . . . . . . . . . Sociological Theories . Stereotypes . . . . . . . West Indian Immigrants Women . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

743 743 743 743 743 744 744 744 744

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

744 744 745 745 745 745 746 746 746 746

Universal Negro Improvement Association, 667 West Indian immigrants, 689 ASIAN IMMIGRANTS Alien land laws, 19 Amerasians, 22 Asian American education, 52 Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 56 Asian American literature, 57 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Asian American women, 63 Asian Indian immigrants, 67 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76 Chinatowns, 130

737

Category Index Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133 Chinese detentions in New York, 138 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Chinese immigrants, 146 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Chinese immigrants and family customs, 155 Chinese Six Companies, 160 Coolies, 174 Filipino immigrants, 258 Filipino immigrants and family customs, 264 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 Hmong immigrants, 324 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese immigrants, 431 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 Korean immigrants, 466 Korean immigrants and African Americans, 469 Korean immigrants and family customs, 473 Lau v. Nichols, 499 Little Tokyos, 516 Migration, 542 Model minorities, 549 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571 Ozawa v. United States, 576 Page law, 579

738

Sikh immigrants, 647 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Taiwanese immigrants, 655 Thai garment worker enslavement, 657 Tibetan immigrants, 659 Vietnamese immigrants, 670 War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 Wong Kim Ark case, 699 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 BORDER CONTROL Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 Chinese detentions in New York, 138 Coast Guard, U.S., 172 Demographics of immigration, 190 Deportation, 195 Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267 González rescue, 290 Green cards, 293 Haitian boat people, 297 Homeland Security Department, 327 Illegal aliens, 334 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366 Immigration law, 376 Justice and immigration, 458 Latinos, 481 Operation Wetback, 572 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 Undocumented workers, 665 Visas, 676 CHINESE IMMIGRANTS Alien land laws, 19 Amerasians, 22 Asian American education, 52 Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 56 Asian American literature, 57 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Asian American women, 63 Burlingame Treaty, 109 California gold rush, 115 Chinatowns, 130

Category Index Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133 Chinese detentions in New York, 138 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Chinese immigrants, 146 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Chinese immigrants and family customs, 155 Chinese Six Companies, 160 Coolies, 174 Demographics of immigration, 190 Family businesses, 246 Generational acculturation, 273 History of U.S. immigration, 316 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Lau v. Nichols, 499 Migration, 542 Model minorities, 549 Nativism, 558 Naturalization, 562 Page law, 579 Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606 War brides, 681 Wong Kim Ark case, 699 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 CITIZENSHIP AND NATURALIZATION Alien and Sedition Acts, 15 Assimilation theories, 79 Cable Act, 113 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Citizenship, 164 Deportation, 195 Discrimination, 201 Green cards, 293 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366

Immigration law, 376 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 383 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Naturalization, 562 Naturalization Act of 1790, 569 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571 Ozawa v. United States, 576 War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 Wong Kim Ark case, 699 CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES Accent discrimination, 1 African immigrants, 3 American Jewish Committee, 26 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Chicano movement, 125 Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133 Chinese Six Companies, 160 Citizenship, 164 Deportation, 195 Discrimination, 201 English-only and official English movements, 214 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Immigration law, 376 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 Jewish immigrants, 443 Ku Klux Klan, 477 Lau v. Nichols, 499 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Naturalization, 562 Palmer raids, 584 Proposition 187, 598

739

Category Index Proposition 227, 600 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 667 Zadvydas v. Davis, 711 COURT CASES Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Head money cases, 309 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371 Lau v. Nichols, 499 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571 Ozawa v. United States, 576 Plyler v. Doe, 590 Wong Kim Ark case, 699 Zadvydas v. Davis, 711 CUBAN IMMIGRANTS Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Family businesses, 246 Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267 González rescue, 290 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 383 Latinos, 481 Latinos and employment, 488 Latinos and family customs, 494 Little Havana, 512 Mariel boatlift, 524 Santería, 629 DEMOGRAPHICS Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Arab American intergroup relations, 33 Arab immigrants, 41 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Asian American women, 63 Asian Indian immigrants, 67 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72

740

Celtic Irish, 119 Censuses, U.S., 120 Chinatowns, 130 Chinese immigrants, 146 Cuban immigrants, 176 Demographics of immigration, 190 Dominican immigrants, 207 Filipino immigrants, 258 German immigrants, 284 Haitian immigrants, 300 Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants, 304 History of U.S. immigration, 316 Hmong immigrants, 324 Immigration “crisis,” 372 Iranian immigrants, 392 Irish immigrants, 395 Israeli immigrants, 405 Italian immigrants, 409 Jamaican immigrants, 415 Japanese immigrants, 431 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Jewish immigrants, 443 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Korean immigrants, 466 Latinos, 481 Muslims, 555 Polish immigrants, 594 Push and pull factors, 604 Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606 Russian immigrants, 622 Scandinavian immigrants, 630 Sikh immigrants, 647 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653 Taiwanese immigrants, 655 Tibetan immigrants, 659 Vietnamese immigrants, 670 War brides, 681 West Indian immigrants, 689 Women immigrants, 694 DISCRIMINATION Accent discrimination, 1 Alien land laws, 19 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Arab American stereotypes, 38 Asian American stereotypes, 60

Category Index British as dominant group, 107 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Deportation, 195 Discrimination, 201 English-only and official English movements, 214 Ethnic enclaves, 219 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1990, 356 Immigration law, 376 Indigenous superordination, 391 Irish immigrants and discrimination, 402 Irish stereotypes, 403 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 Ku Klux Klan, 477 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Nativism, 558 Page law, 579 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 Xenophobia, 702 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 ECONOMICS Bracero program, 103 California gold rush, 115 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Family businesses, 246 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Garment industry, 270 Head money cases, 309 Illegal aliens, 334 Indentured servitude, 387 Korean immigrants and African Americans, 469 Latinos and employment, 488 Undocumented workers, 665 EDUCATION Accent discrimination, 1 Asian American education, 52 Bilingual education, 85

Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 Lau v. Nichols, 499 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Proposition 227, 600 ETHNIC ENCLAVES Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Asian American women, 63 Chinatowns, 130 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 Ethnic enclaves, 219 Generational acculturation, 273 Irish immigrants, 395 Italian immigrants, 409 Little Havana, 512 Little Italies, 514 Little Tokyos, 516 EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 British as dominant group, 107 California gold rush, 115 Celtic Irish, 119 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 Euro-Americans, 222 European immigrant literature, 224 European immigrants, 1790-1892, 235 European immigrants, 1892-1943, 240 German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s, 281 German immigrants, 284 Gypsy immigrants, 295 History of U.S. immigration, 316 Indentured servitude, 387 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish immigrants and African Americans, 400

741

Category Index Irish immigrants and discrimination, 402 Irish stereotypes, 403 Italian immigrants, 409 Jamestown colony, 419 Jewish immigrants, 443 Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Literature, 507 Little Italies, 514 Migration, 542 Nativism, 558 Polish immigrants, 594 Russian immigrants, 622 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626 Scandinavian immigrants, 630 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 635 Sephardic Jews, 636 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653 War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 White ethnics, 693 FAMILIES AND MARRIAGE Amerasians, 22 Asian American women, 63 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72 Assimilation theories, 79 Cable Act, 113 Chinese immigrants and family customs, 155 Family businesses, 246 Filipino immigrants and family customs, 264 González rescue, 290 Hull-House, 332 Indentured servitude, 387 Japanese American internment, 427 Korean immigrants and family customs, 473 Latinos and family customs, 494 Mail-order brides, 521 Middle Eastern immigrant families, 538 Picture brides, 589 Settlement house movement, 643

742

Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Vietnamese immigrants, 670 War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 Women immigrants, 694 GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS Alien and Sedition Acts, 15 Federal riot of 1799, 257 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy, 310 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371 Immigration law, 376 Know-Nothing Party, 465 Machine politics, 518 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Naturalization Act of 1790, 569 Operation Wetback, 572 Palmer raids, 584 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION Au pairs, 84 Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 Coast Guard, U.S., 172 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Deportation, 195 Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267 Green cards, 293 Haitian boat people, 297 Homeland Security Department, 327 Illegal aliens, 334 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366 Immigration “crisis,” 372 Immigration law, 376 Justice and immigration, 458 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Operation Wetback, 572 Page law, 579 Plyler v. Doe, 590 Undocumented workers, 665

Category Index IRISH IMMIGRANTS Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 British as dominant group, 107 Celtic Irish, 119 European immigrants, 1790-1892, 235 Federal riot of 1799, 257 German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s, 281 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish stereotypes, 403 Nativism, 558 Scotch-Irish immigrants, 635 JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS Alien land laws, 19 Amerasians, 22 Asian American education, 52 Asian American literature, 57 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Asian American women, 63 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 Japanese American Citizens League, 424 Japanese American internment, 427 Japanese immigrants, 431 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Japanese segregation in California schools, 438 Little Tokyos, 516 Model minorities, 549 Ozawa v. United States, 576 Picture brides, 589 War Brides Act, 685 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 JEWISH IMMIGRANTS American Jewish Committee, 26 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 Israeli immigrants, 405 Jewish immigrants, 443 Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Middle Eastern immigrant families, 538

Russian immigrants, 622 Sephardic Jews, 636 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653 LABOR Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76 Au pairs, 84 Bracero program, 103 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 Coolies, 174 Family businesses, 246 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Garment industry, 270 Green cards, 293 Indentured servitude, 387 Latinos, 481 Latinos and employment, 488 Latinos and family customs, 494 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Push and pull factors, 604 Thai garment worker enslavement, 657 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 661 Undocumented workers, 665 Visas, 676 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707 LANGUAGE Accent discrimination, 1 Anglo-conformity, 27 Assimilation theories, 79 Bilingual education, 85 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 English-only and official English movements, 214 Generational acculturation, 273 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Lau v. Nichols, 499 Melting pot, 529 Proposition 227, 600 LATINO IMMIGRANTS Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 Chicano movement, 125

743

Category Index Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Dominican immigrants, 207 Latinos, 481 Latinos and employment, 488 Latinos and family customs, 494 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503 Little Havana, 512 Mariel boatlift, 524 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Operation Wetback, 572 Proposition 187, 598 Proposition 227, 600 Santería, 629 Undocumented workers, 665

Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy, 310 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration Act of 1943, 353 Immigration Act of 1990, 356 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration law, 376 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 383 Justice and immigration, 458 Naturalization Act of 1790, 569 Page law, 579 Proposition 187, 598 Proposition 227, 600 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 614 War Brides Act, 685

LAW ENFORCEMENT Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Coast Guard, U.S., 172 Deportation, 195 Green cards, 293 Homeland Security Department, 327 Illegal aliens, 334 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 366 Immigration law, 376 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Operation Wetback, 572 Palmer raids, 584 Undocumented workers, 665 Visas, 676

LITERATURE Asian American literature, 57 European immigrant literature, 224 Literature, 507

LAWS AND TREATIES Alien and Sedition Acts, 15 Alien land laws, 19 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 90 Burlingame Treaty, 109 Cable Act, 113 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 276 Head money cases, 309

744

MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS Border Patrol, U.S., 96 Bracero program, 103 Chicano movement, 125 Farmworkers’ union, 251 Illegal aliens, 334 Justice and immigration, 458 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531 Mexican deportations during the Depression, 533 Operation Wetback, 572 Proposition 187, 598 Proposition 227, 600 Undocumented workers, 665 MIDDLE EASTERN IMMIGRANTS Arab American intergroup relations, 33 Arab American stereotypes, 38

Category Index Arab immigrants, 41 Iranian immigrants, 392 Israeli immigrants, 405 Jewish immigrants, 443 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Middle Eastern immigrant families, 538 Muslims, 555 September 11 terrorist attacks, 637 NATIVE AMERICANS German immigrants, 284 Hawaiian and Pacific islander immigrants, 304 Melting pot, 529 Migrant superordination, 542 NATIVISM AND RACISM Anglo-conformity, 27 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Chinese Exclusion Act, 140 Chinese exclusion cases, 144 Chinese immigrants and California’s gold rush, 151 English-only and official English movements, 214 European immigrant literature, 224 European immigrants, 1892-1943, 240 German and Irish immigration of the 1840’s, 281 Immigration Act of 1917, 339 Immigration Act of 1921, 343 Immigration Act of 1924, 349 Immigration “crisis,” 372 Indigenous superordination, 391 Irish stereotypes, 403 Know-Nothing Party, 465 Mongrelization, 554 Nativism, 558 Palmer raids, 584 Refugees and racial/ethnic relations, 618 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626 Xenophobia, 702 “Yellow peril” campaign, 707

REFUGEES Amerasians, 22 Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Haitian boat people, 297 Haitian immigrants, 300 Helsinki Watch report on U.S. refugee policy, 310 Hmong immigrants, 324 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 358 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 362 Immigration law, 376 Japanese Peruvians, 437 Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Mariel boatlift, 524 Migration, 542 Model minorities, 549 Polish immigrants, 594 Refugee fatigue, 612 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 614 Refugees and racial/ethnic relations, 618 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653 Vietnamese immigrants, 670 Women immigrants, 694 RELIGION American Jewish Committee, 26 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29 Arab American intergroup relations, 33 Arab immigrants, 41 Ashkenazic and German Jewish immigrants, 49 Asian Indian immigrants and family customs, 72 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, 212 Generational acculturation, 273 Iranian immigrants, 392 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish stereotypes, 403 Israeli immigrants, 405 Jewish immigrants, 443

745

Category Index Jewish settlement of New York, 449 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Melting pot, 529 Muslims, 555 Santería, 629 Sephardic Jews, 636 Sikh immigrants, 647 White ethnics, 702 SLAVERY African immigrants, 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 British as dominant group, 107 Clotilde slave ship, 168 Coolies, 174 German immigrants, 284 Indentured servitude, 387 Jamaican immigrants, 415 Santería, 629 Thai garment worker enslavement, 657 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES Accent discrimination, 1 Anglo-conformity, 27 Asian American education, 52 Assimilation theories, 79 Cultural pluralism, 188 Generational acculturation, 273 Hansen effect, 303 Immigrant advantage, 338 Indigenous superordination, 391 Melting pot, 529 Migrant superordination, 542 Migration, 542 Push and pull factors, 604 Refugee fatigue, 612 Twice migrants, 664 STEREOTYPES Arab American intergroup relations, 33

746

Arab American stereotypes, 38 Asian American stereotypes, 60 Coolies, 174 Gypsy immigrants, 295 Irish immigrants, 395 Irish stereotypes, 403 Jews and Arab Americans, 454 Model minorities, 549 Operation Wetback, 572 WEST INDIAN IMMIGRANTS African immigrants, 3 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 11 Cuban immigrants, 176 Cuban immigrants and African Americans, 180 Cuban refugee policy, 184 Dominican immigrants, 207 González rescue, 290 Haitian boat people, 297 Haitian immigrants, 300 Jamaican immigrants, 415 Latinos, 481 Santería, 629 West Indian immigrants, 689 WOMEN Arab American stereotypes, 38 Asian American women, 63 Au pairs, 84 Cable Act, 113 Garment industry, 270 Hull-House, 332 Indentured servitude, 387 Mail-order brides, 521 Picture brides, 589 Settlement house movement, 643 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 661 War brides, 681 War Brides Act, 685 Women immigrants, 694

Index of Court Cases Afroyim v. Rusk, 568 Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 566 Ambach v. Norwick, 564 Bowsher v. Synar, 372 Brown v. Board of Education, 206, 499 Buck v. Bell, 592 Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 564 Carino v. University of Oklahoma Board of Regents, 2 Castañeda v. Pickard, 502 Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 144-146, 563 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 202 Cherokee Tobacco case, 202 Cheung Wong v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 567 Chew Heong v. United States, 144-146 Chew v. Colding, 563 Chinese exclusion cases, 144-146 Civil Rights cases, 205 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 699 Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co., 565 Ex parte Endo, 430 Ex parte Milligan, 430 Foley v. Connelie, 564 Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 144-146, 563 Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu, 2 Galvan v. Press, 564 Graham v. Richardson, 566 Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 565 Head money cases, 309 Hirabayashi v. United States, 429, 435

Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371-372 Korematsu v. United States, 204, 430, 435 Landon v. Plasencia, 563 Lau v. Nichols, 85, 94, 499-503 League of United Latin American Citizens v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 506 Lee Joe v. United States, 144-146 Marcello v. Bonds, 564 Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary School Children v. Michigan Board of Education, 501 Mistretta v. United States, 372 Morrison v. Olson, 372 New York Indians v. United States, 202 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571-572 Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, 563 Northwest Arctic School District v. Califano, 502 Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese, 313 Ozawa v. United States, 568, 576-579 Passenger Cases, 309 Plessy v. Ferguson, 205, 322, 439, 499 Plyler v. Doe, 565, 590-593 Schneider v. Rusk, 568 Schneiderman v. United States, 568 Scott v. Sandford, 592 Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 563 Slaughterhouse cases, 205 Sugarman v. Dowell, 565 Sweatt v. Painter, 206

747

Index of Court Cases Trop v. Dulles, 568 Truax v. Raich, 564

Wong Kim Ark case, 699-702 Wong Quan v. United States, 144-146

United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 563 United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 567 United States v. Jung Ah Lung, 144-146 United States v. Winans, 202 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 699-702

Yasui v. United States, 430 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 162, 564

748

Zadvydas v. Davis, 711-712

Index of Laws and Treaties Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition from Chinese Coolie Labor of 1862 (California), 61 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, 251 Alien Act of 1798, 257-258, 319 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 15-18, 257-258 Alien Enemies Act of 1798, 257-258 Alien Land Law of 1913 (California), 19, 204, 433, 441, 576, 710; repeal of, 435 Alien Land Law of 1920 (California), 21, 710 Alien land laws, 19-22, 578; in California, 204, 433, 435, 441, 576, 710 Alien Registration Act of 1940, 728 Amerasian Homecoming Act, 24 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, 196 Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 85, 90-96, 501 Border Security Act of 2001, 641 Burlingame Treaty, 109-113, 141-142 Cable Act of 1922, 113-115, 425 California; Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 (California), 254 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 140-144, 157, 274, 277, 321, 562, 608; amendment of, 136, 162, 204; and Border Patrol, 97; and California nativists, 147, 154; and congressional powers, 563; and exclusion cases, 144-146; exemptions to, 349; and Japanese immigrants, 432; renewal of, 112, 354, 709; repeal of, 353-356; and Wong Kim Ark case, 699-701 Citizenship Act of 1924, 166

Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 436 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1-2, 92, 201, 206, 499, 565 Constitution, U.S., 18, 444, 564, 570; and alien rights, 294, 562; and census, 121, 607; and citizenship, 164, 562; and English language, 218; and Native Americans, 202; and naturalization, 167, 570; and Proposition 187, 598-599; and slavery, 6, 201 Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, 181 Dawes Act of 1887, 166 Declaratory Act of 1766 (Great Britain), 165 Deportation Act of 1929, 535 Displaced Persons Act of 1948, 355, 615-616; expiration of, 615 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 92-93 Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 346, 534 Employment Equity Act of 1986 (Canada), 474 Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, 335 Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, 501 Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, 429 Expropriation Act of 1907, 114 Fiancées Act of 1946, 683 Fifteenth Amendment, 205 Fifth Amendment, 294, 712; due process clause, 712 First Amendment, 17, 563 Forant Act of 1885, 546 Fourteenth Amendment, 145, 162, 164, 166, 205, 500, 699; and citizenship, 700; equal protection clause, 205, 461, 564-566 Fourth Amendment, 563, 566

749

Index of Laws and Treaties Geary Act of 1892, 136, 143, 145, 157 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 19-20, 276-280, 433, 696, 710; and San Francisco school segregation, 441 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 126, 128, 484, 724 Hart-Celler Act of 1965, 463 Homeland Security Act of 2002, 173, 328; and illegal aliens, 335 Homestead Act of 1862, 632 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, 196, 367, 378 Immigration Act of 1882, 240 Immigration Act of 1903, 349 Immigration Act of 1907, 710 Immigration Act of 1917, 68, 339-343, 546; and Asiatic Barred Zone, 190; and head tax, 534 Immigration Act of 1921, 343-348, 352 Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act), 21, 42, 51, 123, 136, 147, 244, 274, 322, 349-354, 463, 547, 694, 704; and Japanese, 578; and trade unions, 587 Immigration Act of 1943, 163, 353-356, 684 Immigration Act of 1965, 322, 697 Immigration Act of 1986; marriage fraud provision, 380, 524 Immigration Act of 1990, 313, 356-358, 463 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act), 24, 62, 322, 358-362, 377, 426, 463, 547, 578, 677, 682, 684, 697; amendments of, 194; and Japanese immigrants, 435; and West Indians, 417 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 43, 68, 123, 148, 191, 352, 355, 362-366, 373, 378, 499, 547; amendment of, 384; and Korean immigrants, 474

750

Immigration and Naturalization Service, 97 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 62, 191, 336, 378, 383-387, 463, 532, 547; and au pairs, 84; and employment, 492; revision of, 357 Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, 203 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 203 Internal Security Act of 1951, 359 Kennedy-Donnelly Act of 1988, 547 Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870-1871, 478 Lindbergh law of 1934, 479 Luce-Celler Bill of 1946, 648 McCreary Act of 1893, 145 Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962, 697 Mothers’ Aid Law of 1913, 646 Multiculturalism Act of 1988 (Canada), 194 Mutual Security Act of 1951, 615 National Genetic Diseases Act of 1976, 706 Nationality Act of 1870, 160 Naturalization Act of 1790, 568-570 Naturalization Act of 1798, 16, 257-258; repeal of, 18 Naturalization Act of 1802, 166 Naval Clearing Act of 1962, 305 North American Free Trade Agreement, 461, 733 Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, 682, 684, 687 Page law of 1875, 579-583 Patriot Act of 2001, 641, 734; and illegal aliens, 335 Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 (Great Britain), 396 Proposition 187 (California), 268, 461, 598-600, 602

Index of Laws and Treaties Proposition 227 (California), 28, 85, 502, 532, 600-604

Thirteenth Amendment, 166, 201, 205, 699 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, 728

Refugee Act of 1980, 179, 191, 311-313, 463, 620, 697 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 355, 361, 548, 614-617

Virginia Charter of 1606, 165 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 401 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 501

Scott Act of 1888, 143, 145, 157 Sedition Act of 1798, 257-258 Sixth Amendment, 294 Soldier Brides Act of 1947, 687

War Brides Act of 1945, 355, 435, 614, 683, 685-688, 697 War Measures Act of 1942 (Canada), 435

751

Index of Personages Abbott, Edith, 646 Abourezk, James, 44 Abraham, Spencer, 44, 47 Achick, Tong K., 154 Adamic, Louis, 229 Adams, John, 16-17 Addams, Jane, 332-334, 646 Anaya, Rudolfo, 509 Anneke-Giesler, Mathilde Franziska, 286 Anthony, Susan B., 286 Antin, Mary, 228 Aoki, Shuzo, 278-279, 438-440 Arens, Richard, 359 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 298-299, 301, 620 Arthur, Chester A., 112, 142 As-sing, Norman, 153 Atta, Mohammed, 641

Bradstreet, Anne, 507 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 646 Brennan, William Joseph, Jr., 566, 591-592 Breslin, Jimmy, 233 Breyer, Stephen G., 712 Brimelow, Peter, 375 Brownell, Herbert, 574 Bryan, William Jennings, 20 Buck, Pearl S., 22, 23 Buffalo Hump, 286 Burger, Warren E., 372, 501, 564, 591-592 Burlingame, Anson, 111 Bush, George, 85, 298-299, 302, 436; and Haiti, 620 Bush, George W.; and Homeland Security Department, 328, 639; and Mexico, 335

Bailey, David, 581-582 Balaguer, Joaquín, 208 Baldwin, James, 510 Barolini, Helen, 233 Barr, William P., 297 Barry, Leonora, 696 Barsimson, Jacob, 636 Barzun, Jacques, 216 Beck, Roy, 374 Bell, Thomas, 229 Bellow, Saul, 216, 230 Berkman, Alexander, 585 Bernstein, Robert L., 311 Bigler, John, 154 Bjarni Herjolfsson, 630 Black, Hugo L., 479 Blackmun, Harry A., 297, 501 Blyden, Edward, 691 Bok, Edward, 229 Borjas, George, 375 Box, John, 98, 101 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 233 Bradford, William, 507 Bradshaw, Virginia, 659

Cable, John L., 113-115 Cabot, John, 409 Cadwalader, George, 31 Cahan, Abraham, 228 Callaghan, Morley, 510 Capra, Frank, 414 Caputo, Philip, 233 Carmichael, Stokely, 691 Carr, Matthew, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 486; and Mariel boatlift, 525-527 Castillo, Ana, 509 Castro, Fidel, 176-178, 180-181, 183-187, 247, 486, 512; and González, Elián, 290-293; and Mariel boatlift, 524-528 Cather, Willa, 230, 508 Cédras, Raoul, 299 Chadha, Jagdish, 371 Chávez, César, 128, 251-257 Chen, Lily Lee, 132 Cheunchijit, Rojana, 658-659 Chiang Kai-shek, 656 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 354

753

Index of Personages Chiles, Lawton M., Jr., 185, 267-269, 394 Chin, Frank, 58 Chinda, Viscount, 19-20 Chisholm, Shirley, 691 Choephel, Ngavong, 660 Chopin, Kate, 508 Ciardi, John, 233 Cisneros, Sandra, 509 Cixi, 111 Clark, Hugh, 32 Clarke, Edward Young, 479, 586 Cleveland, Grover, 341, 344 Clinton, Bill, 182, 196, 302, 527, 620, 660; and Cuba, 184-187 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 556 Cohn, Fannia, 272 Colt, LeBaron, 346 Columbus, Christopher, 409 Cooke, Alistair, 216 Coolidge, Calvin, 345, 704 Crèvecœur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de, 507, 529 Cronkite, Walter, 216 Cruz, Philip Vera, 77 Cummings, Samuel, 258 Dalai Lama, 659-661 Daley, Richard J., 519 Darwin, Charles, 560 Daugherty, James, 587 Davenport, Charles B., 704 Davis, Edward Bertrand, 268 Davis, James J., 99 DeVoto, Bernard, 233 Dillingham, William Paul, 344, 346 DiMaggio, Joe, 413 DiPrima, Diane, 233 Doak, William N., 535-536 Donato, Pietro di, 233 Donleavy, J. P., 233 Douglas, William O., 501 D’Souza, Dinesh, 689 Duane, William, 17, 258 Dukakis, Michael, 629 Duke, David, 480 Dunne, Peter Finley, 231 Duvalier, François, 298, 301, 620 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 298, 301

754

Eaton, Edith Maud (Sui Sin Far), 57 Eaton, Winifred (Onoto Watanna), 57 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 361, 574, 616 Eliot, T. S., 510 Ellison, Ralph, 508 Escalante, Jaime, 602 Escueta, Mel, 59 Fante, John, 233 Farrakhan, Louis, 62 Farrell, James T., 232 Feinstein, Dianne, 269 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 233, 414 Ferraro, Geraldine, 414 Fillmore, Millard, 465 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 232, 510 Flaherty, Joe, 233 Ford, Gerald, 613 Ford, Henry, 446 Foster, Bill, 169-170 Fox, Vicente, 335 Frank, Leo, 446 Frumkin, Robert, 457 Fujimori, Albert, 437 Fuller, Alvan T., 628 Fuller, Melville W., 701 Gage, Henry, 709 Galarza, Ernesto, 252 Gallagher, Tess, 233 Gallatin, Albert, 17 Garvey, Marcus, 13, 417, 508, 667-670, 691 Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 286 Gibran, Kahlil, 47 Gingrich, Newt, 269 Gioia, Dana, 233 Gold, Michael, 230 Goldman, Emma, 585 Gonzáles, Rodolfo “Corky,” 128 González, Elián, 290-293 Gonzalez, M. C., 505 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 654 Gordon, Mary, 233 Gore, Al, 660 Gotti, John, 413 Grant, Madison, 345, 347, 554-555, 560

Index of Personages Grant, Ulysses S., 445 Graves, Earl, 691 Gray, Horace, 700 Green, John, 109 Green, Rose Basile, 233 Green, William, 99 Guo Liang Chi, 140 Gutiérrez, José Ángel, 128 Hague, Frank, 519 Hakluyt, Richard, 507 Hamill, Pete, 233 Hansen, Marcus Lee, 303 Hanson, John, 631 Harding, Warren G., 345-346, 587 Harlan, John Marshall, 701 Harrison, Earl G., 615 Hauge, Hans Neilsen, 632 Hayakawa, S. I., 216 Hayashi, Tadasu, 279-280 Hayes, Rutherford B., 112, 142 Haywood, Bill, 588 Hearst, William Randolph, 440 Helton, Arthur C., 311 Hemingway, Ernest, 510 Henry, Patrick, 165 Himes, Chester, 510 Hinojosa, Rolando, 509 Hirohito, 687 Hitler, Adolf, 446-447, 604, 704-705 Ho, Fred, 59 Holder, Eric, 691 Hoover, Herbert, 535 Hoover, J. Edgar; and Palmer raids, 585 Houdini, Harry (Erik Weisz), 213 Howard, Maureen, 233 Howe, Harold, II, 92 Howells, William Dean, 231 Hudspeth, Claude, 100 Huerta, Dolores, 251 Hughes, Charles Evans, 97-98 Hughes, Langston, 508 Humphrey, Hubert H., 359 Hunter, Evan, 233 Hwang, David Henry, 59 I-Hsin, 111 Irving, Washington, 509

Jackson, Jesse, 36 James, Henry, 231, 510 Jedlicka, Davor, 523 Jefferson, Thomas, 17-18, 410 Johnson, Albert, 345-347 Johnson, Hiram Warren, 20 Johnson, Lyndon B., 93, 320, 363; and bilingualism policy, 92-93; and Cuba, 178; on Ku Klux Klan, 480 Kahakua, James, 2 Kang, Younghill, 57 Kearney, Denis, 142, 349 Kennan, George, 277 Kennedy, Anthony M., 571 Kennedy, Edward, 364 Kennedy, John F., 127, 363, 399; A Nation of Immigrants, xiii Kennedy, Robert F., 47, 253, 255, 364 Kennedy, William, 232 Kenrick, Francis, 30 Kephart, William M., 523 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 479 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 509 Kitazaki, George, 2 König, Karin, 311 Kosinski, Jerzy, 230 Kramer, Samuel, 31 La Guardia, Fiorello, 414 Larkin, Thomas Oliver, 115 Lazarus, Emma, 225 Leif Eriksson, 630 Levin, Lewis, 30-32 Levy, Asser, 452 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 229 Liliuokalani, 307 Lillo, Don De, 233 Lincoln, Abraham, 445 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 340, 342, 344, 350 Long, Huey, 519 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 508-509 Loring, H. Sheldon, 581-582 Lotus Blossom, 57 Lucena, Abraham de, 452 Lyon, Matthew, 17

755

Index of Personages McCarran, Patrick, 359, 615 McCarthy, Mary, 232 McKay, Claude, 417, 508, 691 McKinley, William, 344 McMichael, Morton, 31 McVeigh, Timothy, 556 Malamud, Bernard, 230 Manasurangkun brothers, 657-659 Mandel, Ernest, 563 Mandela, Nelson, 183 Mangione, Jerre, 233 Mao Zedong; and Taiwan, 656 Marciano, Rocky, 413 Marcos, Ferdinand, 620 Marshall, James Wilson, 115 Mason, Richard Barnes, 115 Maximilian, Alexander Philipp, 286 Meagher, Timothy, 169-170 Megapolensis, Dominie Johannes, 451-452 Meissner, Doris, 267-268 Meusenbach, John, 286 Mezei, Ignatz, 563 Michlin, Arnold, 456 Miller, Samuel F., 309 Mitchell, George, 47 Moore, Robert, 258 Mosby, John S., 581-582 Motley, Constance Baker, 691 Mussolini, Benito, 510, 705 Nabokov, Vladimir, 230 Nader, Ralph, 371 Nanak Dev, Guru, 647 Neale, Leonard, 258 Neier, Aryeh, 311 Newport, Christopher, 420 Nguyen, Tuan Anh, 571-572 Noor, Queen, 47 O’Connor, Edwin, 232 O’Connor, Flannery, 232 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 591 O’Hara, Frank, 233 O’Hara, John, 232 Old Owl, 286 Olsen, Tillie, 230 O’Neill, Danny, 232

756

O’Neill, Eugene, 231-232 Onoto Watanna (Winifred Eaton), 57 Opechancanough, 421 Ortega, Daniel, 486 Ozawa, Takao, 568, 576-579 Ozick, Cynthia, 230 Page, Horace F., 580 Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza, 392, 620 Paine, Thomas, 507 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 584-589 Park, Robert Ezra, 221 Peerson, Cleng, 631 Peltason, Jack W., 600 Pendergast, Tom, 519 Penelas, Alex, 292 Phelan, James, 709 Pinochet, Augusto, 620 Pocahontas, 421-422 Poe, Edgar Allan, 231 Poitier, Sidney, 691 Polk, James K., 115 Pound, Ezra, 510 Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 372 Powers, J. F., 233 Powhatan, 421 Puzo, Mario, 226, 233, 413 Rabin, Yitzhak, 407 Rahall, Nick Joe, 44 Raleigh, Walter, 419 Randall, Margaret, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 302, 384, 430, 552, 620; and bilingual education, 85, 94; and civil rights, 502; and Cuba, 527 Rehnquist, William H., 372, 591 Reich, Robert B., 658 Reno, Janet, 267-268; and Cuban refugees, 185, 290-293 Reynolds, James, 258 Ridge, Tom, 639 Riis, Jacob, 229 Rolfe, John, 422 Rölvaag, O. E., 508 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 615 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 398, 520; and Japanese internment, 424, 426, 428, 434, 710

Index of Personages Roosevelt, Theodore, 277-278, 645; and Japanese immigration, 279, 433, 439, 441, 710; on language, 216 Root, Elihu, 278-280, 438 Rosier, James, 419 Roth, Henry, 229 Roth, Philip, 226 Rusk, Dean, 364 Sabath, Adolph, 346 Sacco, Nicola, 413, 626-629 St. John, J. Hector, 507, 529 Saionji, Kinmochi, 438 Sandburg, Carl, 229 Santana, 286 Saroyan, William, 229-230 Scheuer, James H., 92 Schmitz, Eugene E., 440, 709 Schneiderman, Rose, 272 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 216, xiii Scott, Dred, 592, 699 Serra, Junípero, 316 Seward, William Henry, 111, 283 Shehhi, Marwan al-, 641 Shenouda III, Pope, 48 Shepard, Charles R., 137 Simmons, William J., 478 Sinclair, Upton, 230, 507-508 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 230 Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara, 47 Slocum, Tokutaro “Tokie” Nishimura, 426 Smathers, George A., 178 Smith, Alfred E., 398-399, 663 Smith, Betty, 232 Smith, H. T., 183 Smith, John, 420-422, 507 Smith, Joseph, 221 Smith, Wayne, 525-526 Smythe, Thomas, 422 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 230 Somers, George, 422 Sousa, Mathias de, 636 Sowell, Thomas, 552 Stalin, Joseph, 604 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 286 Starr, Ellen Gates, 332-334 Steele, Shelby, 552 Steinbeck, John, 508-509

Stevens, John Paul, 297 Strong, Josiah, 242 Stuyvesant, Peter, 443, 450-452, 636 Suar, Xavier, 183 Sugi, Suma, 425 Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton), 57 Sun Yat-sen, 141 Surial, H. G., 48 Sutter, John Augustus, 115 Taft, William Howard, 19, 341, 344-345 Talese, Gay, 233 Tan, Amy, 59, 509 Taney, Roger B., 592 Taylor, Edward, 507 Thomas, Clarence, 207, 297 Thomas, Franklin, 691 Thoreau, Henry David, 231 Tien, Chang-lin, 600 Tijerina, Reies López, 128 Tingley, George B., 154 Truman, Harry S., 359-361, 615, 687; and European refugees, 322, 614 Tuchman, Gloria Matta, 602 Twain, Mark, 510 Tweed, “Boss” William Marcy, 519 Tz’u-hsi (Cixi), 111 Unz, Ron, 532, 601 Valachi, Joseph, 413 Vang Pao, 324 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 413, 626-629 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 410 Vespucci, Amerigo, 409 Visel, Charles P., 536 Walcott, Derek, 691 Wales, J. A., 135 Wallach, John, 457 Walter, Francis, 359 Washington, Booker T., 668 Washington, George, 505, 570 West, Thomas, 422 Wheatley, Phillis, 7, 507 White, Byron R., 372 White, John, 507

757

Index of Personages Williams, Walter E., 552 Wilson, Pete, 598, 601 Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 341, 345-346, 350, 727 Wingfield, Edward Maria, 420 Wong Kim Ark, 699-702 Wong, Kent, 77 Wright, Luke E., 278-280 Wright, Richard, 510

758

Yamauchi, Wakako, 59 Yarborough, Ralph Webster, 92-93 Yerby, Frank, 510 Yezierska, Anzia, 229 Yoshikawa, Iwao, 577 Young, Brigham, 221 Zadvydas, Kestutis, 711-712 Zangwill, Israel, 226, 530

Subject Index AAJF. See American Arab and Jewish Friends AALDF. See Asian American Legal Defense Fund AAUG. See Association of Arab American University Graduates Abbott, Edith, 646 Abourezk, James, 44 Abraham, Spencer, 44, 47 Acadia, 508 Accent discrimination, 1-3 ACCESS. See Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services Acculturation, 221, 530; of Arabs, 48; and assimilation, 80; of Cubans, 630; of Dominicans, 209, 211; and ethnic enclaves, 273; generational, 273-276 Achick, Tong K., 154 ACJ. See American Council on Judaism Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition from Chinese Coolie Labor of 1862 (California), 61 Adamic, Louis, 229 Adams, John, 16-17 ADC. See American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Addams, Jane, 332-334, 646 AFDC. See Aid to Families with Dependent Children Affirmative action, 121, 123, 206, 600-601; and immigrants, 9; and Latinos, 181; white resentment of, 552 AFL. See American Federation of Labor African Americans; and Cuban immigrants, 180-184; and Irish immigrants, 400-401; and Korean immigrants, 469-472; stereotypes, 691 African immigrants, 3-11 Afro-Caribbean immigrants, 6, 9, 11-15, 181; and Santería, 629-630 Afroyim v. Rusk, 568

Agricultural Labor Relations Act, 251 Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, 251-252 Agriculture, 243, 384, 605; and British immigrants, 107; European, 241, 281, 316, 410, 445; and European immigrants, 235, 281; and Filipino immigrants, 260; and Irish immigrants, 403; and Jamaican immigrants, 417; and Japanese immigrants, 19, 433, 439, 517; and Mexican immigrants, 99, 101, 103-107, 191, 251-257, 572-573; and World War II, 103-107 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 698 AJC. See American Jewish Committee Alabama; Clotilde slave ship, 168-171; and Ku Klux Klan, 479-480 Alaska; Filipino immigrants, 280; gold rush, 708; Native Americans, 123-124; Russian immigrants, 622-623; and U.S. Census, 123-124 Alianza Federal de Mercedes, La, 128 Alien Act of 1798, 257-258, 319 Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, 15-18, 257-258 Alien Enemies Act of 1798, 257-258 Alien Land Law of 1913 (California), 19, 204, 433, 441, 576, 710; repeal of, 435 Alien Land Law of 1920 (California), 21, 710 Alien land laws, 19-22, 578; in California, 204, 433, 435, 441, 576, 710 Alien Registration Act of 1940, 728 Alien Registration Receipt (green) Cards, 293-295 Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 566 ALRA. See Agricultural Labor Relations Act Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 271 Ambach v. Norwick, 564

759

Subject Index Amerasian Homecoming Act, 24 Amerasians, 22-26; Vietnamese, 671 American Arab and Jewish Friends, 456 American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 36, 44-45 American Civil Liberties Union, 218, 314 American Council on Judaism, 615 American Dream, 90, 344, 507; and Chinese immigrants, 149; and European immigrants, 225; and Irish immigrants, 398-399; in literature, 59, 149, 226, 229, 233 American Federation of Labor, 344 American Immigration Lawyers Association, 381-382 American Indians. See Native Americans American Jewish Committee, 26-27, 615 American Legion, 99, 585, 710 American Museum of Immigration, 225 American Party. See Know-Nothing Party American Protective Association, 344, 350, 559 Amish, 284 Amnesty International, 298, 314 Anabaptists, 285 Anarchists, 319, 344, 349, 561, 568, 584; Goldman, Emma, 585; Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626-629 Anaya, Rudolfo, 509 Angel Island, 432, 434, 546, 696; opening of, 726 Anglican Church, 107 Anglo-conformity, 27-28, 319 Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, 329 Anneke-Giesler, Mathilde Franziska, 286 Anthony, Susan B., 286 Anti-Defamation League, 446 Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29-33, 559 Antin, Mary, 228 Anti-Popery Union, 559 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, 196 Aoki, Shuzo, 278-279, 438-440

760

APA. See American Protective Association APALA. See Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, 36 Arab immigrants, 41-49; intergroup relations, 33-38; and Jews, 454-458; stereotypes, 35, 38-42, 454 Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services, 44 Arens, Richard, 359 Argentina, SS, 687 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 298-299, 301, 620 Arizona; alien land laws, 21; and Border Patrol, 97; illegal aliens, 335; Japanese immigrants, 204, 434; Latinos, 505, 591, 610; and Mexican War, 101, 484; Operation Wetback, 572-576; welfare system, 566 Arkansas; alien land laws, 21; discriminatory laws, 564; and Operation Wetback, 574; refugee detention camps, 526 Armenians, 229 Arthur, Chester A., 112, 142 Ashkenazic Jews, 49-51, 405-406, 444, 452, 455, 637, 705 Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 56 Asian Americans; advocacy organizations, 56, 76-79, 133-137, 424-427; education, 52-55, 549-554; literature, 57-60; as “model minorities,” 549-554; stereotypes, 52, 60-63, 324, 553; women, 63-67 Asian immigrants; and citizenship, 576-579, 648; mail-order brides, 522; and Page law, 579-583. See also individual ethnic groups Asian Indian immigrants, 67-71; demographics, 192; families, 72-76; and U.S. Census, 123 Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 76-79 Asiatic Barred Zone, 190, 359, 363 Asiatic Exclusion League, 19, 136, 277, 709

Subject Index Assimilation; and acculturation, 273; and Anglo-conformity, 79-82; differential, 691; and European Americans, 226; and European immigrants, 412; and “model minorities,” 551; and pluralism, 226; processes, 237; and settlement houses, 644; theories, 79-83, 189, 222, 228, 462 As-sing, Norman, 153 Association of Arab American University Graduates, 40, 43 Association of Immigration Attorneys, 382 Asylum, 197-199; and Cubans, 13, 300, 620; and Haitians, 13, 300, 302, 620; and quotas, 380; and refugee fatigue, 612; and Salvadorans, 548; and Truman, Harry S., 322; and U.S. refugee policy, 310-315, 378, 381, 459, 614-616, 618-619 Atta, Mohammed, 641 Au pairs, 84 Australia, 67, 607, 683 Australian immigrants, 347, 352; mail-order brides, 523 AWAIR. See Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services AWOC. See Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee Aztecs, 127, 483 Aztlán, 126 Bailey, David, 581-582 Balaguer, Joaquín, 208 Baldwin, James, 510 Baltic immigrants, 50, 242. See also Lithuanian immigrants Baltimore, 131, 270 Bangladeshi immigrants, 72 Baptist Church, 632 Barolini, Helen, 233 Barr, William P., 297 Barry, Leonora, 696 Barsimson, Jacob, 636 Barzun, Jacques, 216 Beck, Roy, 374 Belize, 689 Bell, Thomas, 229

Bellow, Saul, 216, 230 Berkman, Alexander, 585 Bernstein, Robert L., 311 Bible, 30, 32, 404, 559 Bigler, John, 154 Bilingual education, 28, 85-96, 218, 499-503; and Chicano movement, 128; and cultural pluralism, 189; and Dominican immigrants, 209; and English-only movement, 216; and generational acculturation, 275; and Proposition 227, 600-604. See also Education Bilingual Education Act of 1968, 85, 90-96, 501 Birmingham church bombing, 479 Birth of a Nation (film), 478 Bjarni Herjolfsson, 630 Black, Hugo L., 479 Blackmun, Harry A., 297, 501 Blyden, Edward, 691 Bohemians, 271; in literature, 230, 508 Bok, Edward, 229 Bolivians, 487 Border Patrol, U.S., 96-103, 328, 367-368, 460; deportation power, 101; and Homeland Security Department, 329; and illegal aliens, 335; and Operation Wetback, 574-575 Border Security Act of 2001, 641 Borjas, George, 375 Boston; Chinatown, 131; Chinese immigrants, 136; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Immigration Restriction League, 350; Irish immigrants, 398; Italian immigrants, 410, 514; West Indian immigrants, 689 Bowsher v. Synar, 372 Box, John, 98, 101 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 233 Bracero program, 103-107, 191, 252, 385; and Operation Wetback, 573-575; and unionization, 251-252, 255 Bradford, William, 507 Bradshaw, Virginia, 659 Bradstreet, Anne, 507

761

Subject Index Brazil, 50; African slaves, 484; black population, 609; Jewish settlers, 443, 450-451, 636 Breckinridge, Sophonisba, 646 Brennan, William Joseph, Jr., 566, 591-592 Breslin, Jimmy, 233 Breyer, Stephen G., 712 Brimelow, Peter, 375 British immigrants, 190, 194, 316; in Canada, 608; demographics, 192; as dominant group, 107-109; first settlements, 316, 419-423; Gypsies, 295; indentured servants, 388; Protestants, 235-236; and quotas, 191; war brides, 681-683 Brown v. Board of Education, 206, 499 Brownell, Herbert, 574 Bryan, William Jennings, 20 Buck, Pearl S., 22, 23 Buck v. Bell, 592 Buddhism, 67; and Koreans, 468, 473, 476; and Southeast Asians, 651; and Vietnamese, 673 Buffalo Hump, 286 Burger, Warren E., 372, 501, 564, 591-592 Burlingame, Anson, 111 Burlingame Treaty, 109-113, 141-142 Burma, 324 Bush, George, 85, 298-299, 302, 436; and Haiti, 620 Bush, George W.; and Homeland Security Department, 328, 639; and Mexico, 335 Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 564 Cable, John L., 113-115 Cable Act of 1922, 113-115, 425 Cabot, John, 409 CACA. See Chinese American Citizens Alliance Cadwalader, George, 31 Cahan, Abraham, 228 California; Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 (California), 251, 254; alien land laws, 19-21; Angel Island, 432, 434, 546, 696; Arab immigrants, 34; Asian

762

Americans, 64; Asian immigrants, 69; and Border Patrol, 97; Chinatowns, 131-132; Chinese immigrants, 136, 155; Delano Grape Strike, 128, 253, 255; Filipino immigrants, 259-261, 264; gold rush, 115-119, 146, 151-156, 160; Hmong immigrants, 324; illegal aliens, 335; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Japanese immigrants, 277, 425, 431, 438-443, 709; Korean immigrants, 467, 544; and Ku Klux Klan, 480; Latinos, 128, 505, 591, 610; Little Saigon, 54; Little Tokyos, 516; Mexican immigrants, 536; natural disasters, 598; Operation Wetback, 572-576; Proposition 187, 268, 461, 598-600, 602; Proposition 227, 28, 85, 502, 532, 600-604; segregation in, 278, 708; Sikh immigrants, 648; Southeast Asian immigrants, 650; Taiwanese immigrants, 655; Thai garment workers, 657-659; undocumented immigrants, 598-600; Vietnamese immigrants, 672. See also Los Angeles; San Francisco California, University of, 63, 600 Callaghan, Morley, 510 Cambodia, 23-24, 526, 671 Cambodian immigrants, 53, 62, 64, 649-650 Canada; Arab immigrants, 33, 36; Asian immigrants, 63-64, 67-68; bilingualism, 89; borders, 97; Chinatowns, 193; Chinese immigrants, 155; Filipino immigrants, 259, 264; and Japan, 193; Japanese immigrants, 62; Japanese internment, 57, 517; Korean immigrants, 474; Little Tokyos, 517; Muslim immigrants, 557; Sikh immigrants, 648; Southeast Asian immigrants, 650; and U.S. Border Patrol, 96, 98-99 Canadian immigrants in the United States, 192 Capra, Frank, 414 Caputo, Philip, 233

Subject Index Carino v. University of Oklahoma Board of Regents, 2 Carmichael, Stokely, 691 Carr, Matthew, 258 Carter, Jimmy, 486; and Mariel boatlift, 525-527 Castañeda v. Pickard, 502 Castillo, Ana, 509 Castro, Fidel, 176-178, 180-181, 183-187, 247, 486, 512; and González, Elián, 290-293; and Mariel boatlift, 524-528 Cather, Willa, 230, 508 CCBA (Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association). See Chinese Six Companies Cédras, Raoul, 299 Celtic Irish, 119-120 Censuses, U.S., 120-125; and slaves, 6. See also Demographics Center for Constitutional Rights, 313 Central Intelligence Agency, 324 Chadha, Jagdish, 371 Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 144-146, 563 Chávez, César, 128, 251-257 Chen, Lily Lee, 132 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 202 Cherokee Tobacco case, 202 Chesapeake Bay Colony, 5, 388, 419-420 Cheunchijit, Rojana, 658-659 Cheung Wong v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 567 Chew Heong v. United States, 144-146 Chew v. Colding, 563 Chiang Kai-shek, 656 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 354 Chicago, 193; Arab immigrants, 36; Asian Americans, 64; Chinatown, 131; Chinese immigrants, 136; Filipino immigrants, 261; garment industry, 270-271; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Hull-House, 332-334, 644; Irish immigrants, 398; Italian immigrants, 410, 514; Korean immigrants, 474; in literature, 230, 232, 507; Little Tokyo, 518; machine politics, 399,

519; Mexican immigrants, 101, 536; South Asian immigrants, 72 Chicago Immigrant Protective League, 697 Chicano movement, 125-130 Chicanos. See Mexican immigrants Chile, 620 Chiles, Lawton M., Jr., 185, 267-269, 394 Chin, Frank, 58 China; and Burlingame Treaty, 109-113, 141-142; establishment of People’s Republic, 355; and Great Britain, 110, 146; Hmongs, 324; and Japan, 158; Nationalist government, 354; and Opium Wars, 146; Taiping Rebellion, 545; and Taiwan, 22, 656; and Tibet, 659-661; war brides, 681; and World War II, 143, 148, 354, 614. See also Taiwan Chinatowns, 54, 130-133, 134, 355; and generational acculturation, 273; in literature, 57; and Little Tokyos, 517; Los Angeles, 160; San Francisco, 141, 147, 151-156, 158, 161-163; Vancouver, British Columbia, 193 Chinda, Viscount, 19-20 Chinese; and California gold rush, 151-155; New York detentions, 138-140 Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 133-137 Chinese Americans; and education, 52; and U.S. Census, 123 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. See Chinese Six Companies Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 140-144, 157, 274, 277, 321, 562, 608; amendment of, 136, 162, 204; and Border Patrol, 97; and California nativists, 147, 154; and congressional powers, 563; and exclusion cases, 144-146; exemptions to, 349; and Japanese immigrants, 432; renewal of, 112, 354, 709; repeal of, 353-356; and Wong Kim Ark case, 699-701

763

Subject Index Chinese exclusion cases, 144-146 Chinese immigrants, 146-150, 354, 608, 694; and California’s gold rush, 151-155; demographics, 192; families, 155-160; and quotas, 347; stereotypes, 57, 137, 159. See also Taiwanese immigrants Chinese Six Companies (Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association), 135-136, 154, 160-163 Chinese stereotypes, 404; coolies, 174-176 Chisholm, Shirley, 691 Choephel, Ngavong, 660 Chopin, Kate, 508 Church bill. See Refugee Relief Act of 1953 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Ciardi, John, 233 “Circular migration,” 491 Cisneros, Sandra, 509 Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons, 615 Citizenship, 164-168; and Asians, 576-579, 648; and Cable Act, 113-115; and foreign parentage, 571-572; and Fourteenth Amendment, 568, 700; and Native Americans, 121, 166; naturalization rules, 569-570; and Puerto Ricans, 196, 489; and war brides, 688 Citizenship Act of 1924, 166 Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S., 328, 335, 369, 641 Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 436 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1-2, 92, 201, 206, 499, 565 Civil Rights cases, 205 Civil War, U.S., 111, 281, 320; German immigrants in, 286; Irish in, 400; and Jews, 445; and Ku Klux Klan, 477; Scotch-Irish immigrants in, 635; and slavery, 7 Cixi, 111 CLAO. See Council of Lebanese American Organizations Clark, Hugh, 32 Clarke, Edward Young, 479, 586 Cleveland, Grover, 341, 344

764

Clinton, Bill, 182, 196, 302, 527, 620, 660; and Cuba, 184-187 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 556 Clotilde slave ship, 168-171 Coast Guard, U.S., 172-174; and Chinese immigrants, 138-139; and Cuban immigrants, 185, 187, 290-293, 526; and Haitian boat people, 297-300; and Homeland Security Department, 330 Cocaine, 172-173 Cohn, Fannia, 272 COINS, 123 Cold War, 599; and Cuban policy, 185 Colombia; drug traffic, 294; refugees from, 487 Colorado; anti-Chinese rioting, 134; Chinatowns, 131; Chinese immigrants, 136; Hmong immigrants, 324; Latinos, 128, 505, 610 Colt, LeBaron, 346 “Columbia,” 236 Columbus, Christopher, 409 Community-oriented policing; and illegal aliens, 336 Compassion fatigue, 612-614 Connecticut; garment industry, 270; Irish immigrants, 233; Jamaican immigrants, 417; West Indian immigrants, 689, 691 Constitution, U.S., 18, 444, 564, 570; and alien rights, 294, 562; and census, 121, 607; and citizenship, 164, 562; and English language, 218; and Native Americans, 202; and naturalization, 167, 570; and Proposition 187, 598-599; and slavery, 6, 201. See also individual amendments Cooke, Alistair, 216 Coolidge, Calvin, 345, 704 Coolies, 61, 141, 174-176, 699; and Page law, 580; and stereotypes, 159 Costa Rica, 525, 668, 677 Cotton farming, 97, 99, 483; mechanization of, 605; and slavery, 6

Subject Index Council of Lebanese American Organizations, 45 Crèvecœur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de, 507, 529 Crimean War, 281 Criminal law, 367; and deportation, 198-199, 381, 564; and hate crime, 45; and Hmong marriages, 326; and illegal aliens, 20, 334-336, 368, 385, 526; and immigration, 240, 294, 677, 680; and Ku Klux Klan, 479; and youth gangs, 500 Cronkite, Walter, 216 Cruz, Philip Vera, 77 Cuba; and González, Elián, 290-293; and Mariel boatlift, 524-528; Santería, 629-630 Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, 181 Cuban immigrants, 176-180, 489; and African Americans, 180-184; businesses, 247, 512-514; and U.S. Census, 123; demographics, 192; deportation of, 181, 527; families, 494, 496; and Haitians, 14; holidays, 498; and immigration law, 384, 386, 697; and Little Havana, 512-514; as “model minority,” 550; stereotypes, 527; and U.S. refugee policy, 184-187 Cultural pluralism, 188-190, 215, 218, 273, 644 Cummings, Samuel, 258 Customs and Border Protection, 97 Dalai Lama, 659-661 Daley, Richard J., 519 Darwin, Charles, 560 Daugherty, James, 587 Davenport, Charles B., 704 Davis, Edward Bertrand, 268 Davis, James J., 99 Dawes Act of 1887, 166 Declaration of Independence, 201 Declaratory Act of 1766 (Great Britain), 165 Delano Grape Strike, 128, 253, 255 Delaware; Iranian immigrants, 394 Demographics, 120-125, 190-195, 373-374; Africans, 6; Arab

Americans, 33-34, 44, 454-455; Asian Americans, 52, 63; and Chinatowns, 132; Chinese immigrants, 146; Dominican immigrants, 208; European immigrants, 225, 281; Filipino immigrants, 261; illegal aliens, 334; immigrants, 638, 641; Indian and Pakistani immigrants, 72; Israeli immigrants, 405-406, 408; Italian immigrants, 409, 514; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Japanese immigrants, 277; Jewish immigrants, 50, 454; Korean immigrants, 467, 470, 474; Latinos, 489, 496, 533; Pacific islanders, 305; Southeast Asian immigrants, 650, 672; trends, 606-612; Vietnamese immigrants, 672. See also Censuses, U.S. Denmark, 229, 318 Deportation, 195-200, 384, 562-563, 711-712; and Alien Act, 16; of Arabs, 46; and Border Patrol, U.S., 101; of Chinese, 145, 157; and communists, 357; of Cubans, 181, 527; of Garvey, Marcus, 669; of Haitians, 181, 302; of illegal aliens, 294, 336-337; and Immigration and Naturalization Service, 367-368; and immigration law, 377-378, 380-382; and literary tests, 342; of Mexicans, 106, 127, 533-537, 572-576; and Operation Wetback, 106; Palmer raids, 584-589; and Patriot Act, 641; rates, 167; of refugees, 310-312, 548, 618, 620; and terrorist attacks, 642; and war brides, 683, 687 Deportation Act of 1929, 535 Depression era, 191, 319, 572, 596, 697; and Asian Indian immigrants, 68; and Canada, 194; Dust Bowl migrants, 253; and Jews, 446; in literature, 508; and machine politics, 520; Mexican deportations, 127, 533-537; trade unions, 61 Detroit, 183, 456; Arab immigrants, 34, 36, 41-42, 47, 455, 610; Chinese immigrants, 136; Ford Motor Company English school, 224; Maronite immigrants, 48; Mexican

765

Subject Index immigrants, 536; police brutality in, 183 DeVoto, Bernard, 233 Dillingham, William Paul, 344, 346 Dillingham Commission, 244, 349, 543 DiMaggio, Joe, 413 DiPrima, Diane, 233 Disasters, 310, 327-328; in California, 598; and Homeland Security Department, 329 Discrimination, 201-207, 412, 551-552, 564-565; and accents, 1-3; and acculturation, 275; vs. AfroCaribbeans, 13-14; alien land laws, 19-22; vs. Arab Americans, 36, 40, 42-44, 454; vs. Asian Americans, 56, 65, 77, 319, 321-322; vs. Chinese, 61, 132, 136, 140-147, 154, 156, 158, 161; and civil rights laws, 499; vs. Cuban immigrants, 526-527; vs. Dominican immigrants, 210; and ethnic enclaves, 219-222, 708; vs. European immigrants, 561; vs. Filipino immigrants, 263; vs. Haitians, 302; vs. Hawaiians, 306; and immigration law, 261, 344, 364, 386, 568, 614, 618; vs. Iranians, 394; vs. Irish immigrants, 231, 235, 400, 402-403; vs. Japanese immigrants, 424, 431, 438-443; vs. Jews, 445-446; vs. Latinos, 492, 504-505; in literature, 57; vs. Mexican immigrants, 104, 126-127, 532-537, 666; vs. Polish Americans, 597; vs. war brides, 685; vs. women immigrants, 695, 697 Disney Company, 661 Displaced persons, 359, 594, 614-617 Displaced Persons Act of 1948, 355, 615-616; expiration of, 615 Displaced Persons Commission, 615 Doak, William N., 535-536 Domestic Preparedness, Office of, 329 Dominican immigrants, 207-211, 247, 375, 494; families, 496; holidays, 498; and Puerto Ricans, 210; and Puerto Rico, 486 Dominican Republic, 13, 484, 486 Donato, Pietro di, 233

766

Donleavy, J. P., 233 Douay Bible, 30 Douglas, William O., 501 Dps. See Displaced persons Dred Scott v. Sandford, 699 Drug traffic; and Coast Guard, U.S., 172 D’Souza, Dinesh, 689 Duane, William, 17, 258 Dukakis, Michael, 629 Duke, David, 480 Dunne, Peter Finley, 231 Dust Bowl, 253 Dutch immigrants, 107, 225, 235, 318, 544 Dutch West India Company, 443, 450-452, 636 Duvalier, François, 298, 301, 620 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 298, 301 Eastern European Jewish immigrants. See Jewish immigrants, Eastern European Eaton, Edith Maud (Sui Sin Far), 57 Eaton, Winifred (Onoto Watanna), 57 Ebonics, 602 EBPSUSA. See El Bireh Palestine Society of the USA Ecuador, 91 Education, 247, 460-461, 565-566; and Amerasians, 25; and Arab Americans, 35, 43-45; and Asian Americans, 52-55, 64-65, 69-70, 74, 77, 549-554; and assimilation, 82, 275; and Chinese, 158-159; and cultural pluralism, 189; and discrimination, 206; and Hmongs, 53-54, 62, 325; and illegal aliens, 590-593; and immigration policy, 191, 194; and Jamaicans, 417-418; and Japanese, 278, 438-443, 708; and Koreans, 468, 474; and Laotians, 54; and Latinos, 491, 494, 506; and “model minorities,” 550, 552-553; and Pacific islanders, 305, 307; and Roman Catholic Church, 238; and Scandinavians, 238; and Taiwanese, 655; teachers, 238; and Vietnamese, 675; and West Indians, 689. See also Bilingual education

Subject Index EEOC. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Eisenhower, Dwight D., 361, 574, 616 El Bireh Palestine Society of the USA, 45 El Salvadoran immigrants, 193, 313, 548, 619-620 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 92-93 Eliot, T. S., 510 Ellis Island, ii, xxvi, 225, 241-242, 318, 352, 363, 544, 563; closing of, 244; creation of reception center, 235, 240; detention pen, 197; health inspectors, 317 Ellison, Ralph, 508 Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 346, 534 Employment Equity Act of 1986 (Canada), 474 English as a second language, 87, 501, 545 English language, 107, 375, 462; and accent discrimination, 1-3; and Anglo-American conformity, 28; and assimilation, 80, 82; and bilingual education, 85-96, 499-503; development programs, 87; and Filipinos, 263; and Japanese, 440; and Latinos, 484, 492; and mail-order brides, 523; in Philippines, 259; and settlement houses, 644; and war brides, 685. See also Languages English-only and official English movements, 214-219 English Plus, 218 Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, 335 Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, 501 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 201 Escalante, Jaime, 602 Escueta, Mel, 59 Eskimos, 123, 609 ESL. See English as a second language Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co., 565

Ethiopian immigrants, 8, 312, 551 Ethiopian Jews, 540 Ethnic enclaves, 66, 90, 219-222, 344, 618; and acculturation, 273; Afro-Caribbean, 14; Asian, 62; Chinese, 130-133; Cuban, 492, 512-514; and discrimination, 708; Irish, 398; Italian, 412, 514-516; Japanese, 516-518, 708; Jewish, 50; Swedish, 631; West Indian, 689. See also Chinatowns; Koreatowns; Little Havana; Little Italies; Little Jerusalem; Little Saigon; Little Tokyos Eugenics movement, 322, 345, 347, 560, 702-707 Euro-Americans, 222-224 European immigrants, 235-245; family businesses, 247; literature, 224-234; and U.S. policy, 340, 349, 352, 359. See also individual nationalities Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, 429 Ex parte Endo, 430 Ex parte Milligan, 430 Executive Order 9066, 424, 426, 428, 430, 434, 710 Expropriation Act of 1907, 114 FAA. See Federal Aviation Administration Falasha Jews, 540 Family businesses, 246-250; Jewish, 454; Korean, 469-472; Pacific islanders, 308 FAN. See Feminist Arab Network Fante, John, 233 Farm Workers Association. See National Farm Workers Association Farmworkers’ union, 251-257 Farrakhan, Louis, 62 Farrell, James T., 232 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Aviation Administration, 46 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 45, 428, 479, 585 Federal Emergency Management Agency, 328-329 Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, 329

767

Subject Index Federal Protective Service, 329 Federal riot of 1799, 257-258 Feinstein, Dianne, 269 Feminist Arab Network, 36 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 233, 414 Ferraro, Geraldine, 414 Fiancées Act of 1946, 683 Fifteenth Amendment, 205 Fifth Amendment, 294, 712; due process clause, 712 Fiji, 67 Filipino immigrants, 258-264; and citizenship, 61; demographics, 192; families, 264-267; and Gentlemen’s Agreement, 280; mail-order brides, 522; and U.S. Census, 123, 261; war brides, 685. See also Philippines Fillmore, Millard, 465 Films; and Arab stereotypes, 40; and Chinese stereotypes, 137; and Italian stereotypes, 413 Finns, 634 First Amendment, 17, 563 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 232, 510 Flaherty, Joe, 233 Florida; bilingual education, 91; citrus industry, 241; Cuban immigrants, 176-177, 179-184, 247, 375, 512-514, 524-528; Dominican immigrants, 208; and González, Elián, 290-293; Haitian immigrants, 181, 300, 302; illegal-immigrant suit, 267-269; Iranian immigrants, 394; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Latinos, 610; Spanish settlements, 316, 610; Vietnamese immigrants, 672. See also Miami Flower Drum Song (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 131 Foley v. Connelie, 564 Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 144-146, 563 Forant Act of 1885, 546 Ford, Gerald, 613 Ford, Henry, 446 Foster, Bill, 169-170 Fourteenth Amendment, 145, 162, 164, 166, 205, 500, 699; and citizenship, 568, 700; equal protection clause,

768

205, 461, 564-566, 590; and segregation, 499 Fourth Amendment, 563, 566 Fox, Vicente, 335 Fragante v. City and County of Honolulu, 2 France, 628; and Alien and Sedition Acts, 15-18; citizenship in, 23; Gypsies, 295 Frank, Leo, 446 French Canadians, 508 French immigrants, 225, 295, 318, 507, 529, 544 Frumkin, Robert, 457 Fujimori, Albert, 437 Fuller, Alvan T., 628 Fuller, Melville W., 701 Gage, Henry, 709 Galarza, Ernesto, 252 Gallagher, Tess, 233 Gallatin, Albert, 17 Galvan v. Press, 564 Garment industry, 71, 76, 213, 270-272; Thai worker enslavement, 657-659; Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 661-663; and women, 697-698 Garvey, Marcus, 13, 417, 508, 667-670, 691 Geary Act of 1892, 136, 143, 145, 157 General Trades Union of Philadelphia, 29-30 Generational acculturation, 273-276 Gentlemen’s Agreement, 19-20, 276-280, 433, 696, 710; and San Francisco school segregation, 441 Georgia, 183; Gypsy immigrants, 296; and Ku Klux Klan, 478-479; lynching, 446; slavery, 286 German American Alliance, 287 German immigrants, 235, 281-290; and alcohol, 236; demographics, 192; language, 216; and Native Americans, 286; and slavery, 286; stereotypes, 545 Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 286 Ghadr Party, 648 Ghettos. See Ethnic enclaves Gibran, Kahlil, 47 Gingrich, Newt, 269

Subject Index Gioia, Dana, 233 Gitanos (Gypsies), 296 Godfather, The (Puzo), 226, 413 Gold, Michael, 230 Gold rush, Alaska, 708 Gold rush, California, 115-119, 146, 156, 160; and Chinese immigrants, 151-155 Goldman, Emma, 585 Gonzaga University, 24 Gonzáles, Rodolfo “Corky,” 128 González, Elián, 290-293 Gonzalez, M. C., 505 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 654 Gordon, Mary, 233 Gore, Al, 660 Gotti, John, 413 Graham v. Richardson, 566 Grant, Madison, 345, 347, 554-555, 560 Grant, Ulysses S., 445 Graves, Earl, 691 Gray, Horace, 700 Great Britain; and China, 110, 146; colonial influence of, 107-109; Declaratory Act of 1766, 165; and Jamaica, 416; Poor Law Extension Act of 1847, 396; and slave trade, 6, 169; and XYZ affair, 15 Green, John, 109 Green, Rose Basile, 233 Green, William, 99 Green cards, 293-295, 379-380 GTU. See General Trades Union of Philadelphia Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 126, 128, 484, 724 Guadeloupe, 9 Guam, 305, 485 Guatemala, 484; refugees from, 312-313, 619-620; schools, 91 Guatemalan immigrants, 193 Guo Liang Chi, 140 Gutiérrez, José Ángel, 128 Guyana, 13, 630, 689 Gypsy immigrants, 295-297; stereotypes, 296 Hague, Frank, 519 Haiti, 620; U.S. occupation of, 8

Haitian immigrants, 8-9, 300-303; boat people, 9, 297-300; and Cubans, 14; deportation of, 181, 302; and immigration law, 386 Hakluyt, Richard, 507 Hamill, Pete, 233 Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 565 Hansen, Marcus Lee, 303 Hansen effect, 303-304 Hanson, John, 631 Harding, Warren G., 345-346, 587 Harlan, John Marshall, 701 Harlem Renaissance, 417, 508 Harrison, Earl G., 615 Hart-Celler Act of 1965, 463 Hate crime; and Arabs, 35, 44-45; and Muslims, 556 Hauge, Hans Neilsen, 632 Haugeans, 632 Hawaii, 304-308; Asian Americans, 64; Chinese immigrants, 155; English language in, 1-2; Filipino immigrants, 2, 259, 261, 264; and Gentlemen’s Agreement, 279; and Immigration Act of 1943, 354; indigenous population, 123; Japanese immigrants, 277, 279, 425, 431; Korean immigrants, 473-474, 544; and Native Americans, 124; Ozawa v. United States, 576-579; picture brides, 589-590; sugar industry, 260, 277, 439, 473; and U.S. Census, 123 Hayakawa, S. I., 216 Hayashi, Tadasu, 279-280 Hayes, Rutherford B., 112, 142 Haywood, Bill, 588 Head money cases, 309 Head taxes, 100-101, 309, 534-535 Hearst, William Randolph, 440 Helsinki Watch, 310-315 Helton, Arthur C., 311 Hemingway, Ernest, 510 Henry, Patrick, 165 Himes, Chester, 510 “Hindoo” conspiracy trials, 648 Hinojosa, Rolando, 509 Hirabayashi v. United States, 429, 435 Hirohito, 687

769

Subject Index Hispanics. See Cuban immigrants; Dominican immigrants; Latinos; Mexican immigrants; Puerto Ricans Hitler, Adolf, 446-447, 604, 704-705 Hmong immigrants, 64, 324-327, 552, 650, 652, 671; and education, 53-54, 62; families, 650-651 Ho, Fred, 59 Holder, Eric, 691 Holocaust, 455, 463, 604, 614 Homeland Security Act of 2002, 173, 328; and illegal aliens, 335 Homeland Security Department, 327-332, 335, 369; and Border Patrol, U.S., 96, 335; and Coast Guard, U.S., 172-174; creation of, 639 Homestead Act of 1862, 632 Hoover, Herbert, 535 Hoover, J. Edgar; and Palmer raids, 585 Houdini, Harry (Erik Weisz), 213 Howard, Maureen, 233 Howe, Harold, II, 92 Howells, William Dean, 231 Hudspeth, Claude, 100 Huerta, Dolores, 251 Hughes, Charles Evans, 97-98 Hughes, Langston, 508 Huguenots, 544 Hull-House, 332-334; cooking class, 644 Human Rights Watch, 310 Humphrey, Hubert H., 359 Hungarian immigrants, 50, 224, 543, 616, 693 Hunter, Evan, 233 Hutterites, 285 Hwang, David Henry, 59 I-Hsin, 111 ICEM. See Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration Idaho; alien land laws, 21; Chinatowns, 131; English-only movement, 585 ILGWU. See International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Illegal aliens. See Illegal immigration Illegal immigration, 334-338, 372-376, 378, 533-537, 665-666; and education, 590-593; and

770

immigration law, 383-387; and Operation Wetback, 572-576; and Page law, 579-583; and refugees, 619 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, 196, 367, 378 Illinois; Asian Americans, 64; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; Chinese immigrants, 155; Japanese immigrants, 425; Korean immigrants, 467; Latinos, 610; Mexican immigrants, 101; and Operation Wetback, 574. See also Chicago Immigrant advantage, 338-339 Immigration; and Coast Guard, U.S., 172; and Homeland Security Department, 328; and illegal aliens, 334-338 Immigration Act of 1882, 240 Immigration Act of 1903, 349 Immigration Act of 1907, 710 Immigration Act of 1917, 68, 339-343, 546; and Asiatic Barred Zone, 190; and head tax, 534 Immigration Act of 1921, 343-348, 352 Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act), 21, 42, 51, 123, 136, 147, 244, 274, 322, 349-353, 463, 547, 694, 704; and Japanese, 578; and trade unions, 587 Immigration Act of 1943, 163, 353-356, 684 Immigration Act of 1965, 322, 697 Immigration Act of 1986; marriage fraud provision, 380, 524 Immigration Act of 1990, 313, 356-358, 463 Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Bureau of, 369 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act), 24, 62, 322, 358-362, 377, 426, 463, 547, 578, 677, 682, 684, 697; amendments of, 194; and Japanese immigrants, 435; and West Indians, 417 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 43, 68, 123, 148, 191, 352, 355,

Subject Index 362-366, 373, 378, 499, 547; amendment of, 384; and Korean immigrants, 474; and Taiwanese, 655 Immigration and Naturalization Service, 97, 312-313, 334-338, 366-371, 506, 574; and Florida illegal-immigrant suit, 267-269; and green cards, 293; and Homeland Security Department, 640; Operation Wetback, 572-576; reorganization of, 335; and Thai garment workers, 657-659 Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 371-372 Immigration Commission, United States, 344, 349 Immigration “crisis,” 372-376 Immigration history, 316-323 Immigration law, 376-383; and deportation, 195-200, 377-378, 380-382; and discrimination, 344, 364, 386, 568, 614, 618; and terrorist attacks, 641 Immigration quotas. See Quotas Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 62, 191, 336, 378, 383-387, 463, 532, 547; and au pairs, 84; and employment, 492; revision of, 357 Immigration Restriction League, 344, 350 Indentured servitude, 387-390; and African immigrants, 483, 609; and Asian immigrants, 67; and British immigrants, 317; and Chinese immigrants, 133, 139, 699; and English immigrants, 107; and slavery, 4; and women, 695 Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, 203 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 203 Indiana, 101 Indians. See Asian Indian immigrants; Native Americans Indians, American. See Native Americans Indigenous superordination, 391-392 Indonesia, 612

Industrial Workers of the World, 587-588 INS. See Immigration and Naturalization Service Institute for Palestine Studies, 45 Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 616 Internal Security Act of 1951, 359 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, 271, 662, 697 International Red Cross. See Red Cross International Refugee Organization, 615-616 IPS. See Institute for Palestine Studies Iran, 620 Iranian immigrants, 392-395 IRCA. See Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 Irish immigrants, 119-120, 236, 281-284, 318, 395-400, 543; and African Americans, 400-401; and alcohol, 236; demographics, 225-226, 235; and discrimination, 402; employment of, 238; and Federal riot of 1799, 257-258; and immigration law, 340; and nativism, 29-33, 559; persecution of, 320; and Philadelphia riots, 29-33; and Poles, 594; prejudice against, 320; and Roman Catholic Church, 29-33, 402, 559; Scotch-Irish, 107, 120, 235, 402, 635-636; and slavery, 237, 400; stereotypes, 282, 399, 403-405, 545; women, 696 Irish riot. See Federal riot of 1799 IRO. See International Refugee Organization Irving, Washington, 509 Israel; and American Jewish Committee, 26; and American Jews, 448, 455-457; and Arab Americans, 41-42, 46-47, 455-457; and Falasha Jews, 540; and Israeli Americans, 405-409; and Russian Jews, 625, 653 Israeli immigrants, 405-409; stereotypes, 407. See also Jewish immigrants Italian immigrants, 409-415; businesses, 514-516; demographics,

771

Subject Index 192; Little Italies, 514-516; and “mongrelization,” 555; and nativism, 560; stereotypes, 226, 409, 414 Italy, 628 IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World Jackson, Jesse, 36 JACL. See Japanese American Citizens League Jamaica, 363; Rastafarian movement, 13 Jamaican immigrants, 9, 181, 247-248, 415-419; and education, 417, 418; Garvey, Marcus, 667; and Santería, 630 James, Henry, 231, 510 Jamestown colony, 4, 410, 419-423 Japan; and Amerasian children, 23-24; and Canada, 193; and China, 158; and Gentlemen’s Agreement, 19, 276-280, 433, 441, 710; and Russia, 709; U.S. air bases in, 22; U.S. occupation of, 22; and World War II, 62, 437 Japanese American Citizens League, 424-427, 710 Japanese American internment, 62, 321, 427-430, 431-432, 437; in fiction, 57; and Japanese Peruvians, 437-438; and Little Tokyos, 517 Japanese Americans; businesses, 516-518; and education, 52; and generational acculturation, 274; as “model minority,” 550; and U.S. Census, 123 Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, 277-278, 709 Japanese Exclusion League, 440-441 Japanese immigrants, 321, 431-436, 694; in Canada, 517; and education, 278, 438-443; generational acculturation, 685; and Hawaiian sugar industry, 277; and immigration policy, 349; Little Tokyos, 516-518; and picture brides, 589-590; and quotas, 347; segregation in California schools, 278, 438-443, 708; stereotypes, 57,

772

61; and U.S. citizenship, 576-579; women, 696; and “yellow peril” campaign, 707-711 Japanese Peruvians, 437-438 Japantowns. See Little Tokyos JDL. See Jewish Defense League JDO. See Jewish Defense Organization Jedlicka, Davor, 523 Jefferson, Thomas, 17-18, 410 Jewish Defense League, 457-458 Jewish Defense Organization, 457 Jewish immigrants, 443-449; advocacy organizations, 26-27; and Arab Americans, 454-458; Ashkenazic, 49-51, 405-406, 444, 452, 455, 637, 705; and Canadian immigration policy, 194; Eastern European, 212-214; Ethiopian, 540; garment workers, 271; and generational acculturation, 273; German, 282, 284-285; intermarriage of, 82; Israeli, 405-409; and Ku Klux Klan, 479, 586; literature of, 226, 228-230; and “mongrelization,” 555; and nativism, 560; prejudice against, 236; and Roman Catholic Church, 636; Russian, 604, 622-623, 625, 653-655; Sephardic, 34, 405, 408, 444, 452, 454-455, 636-637; settlement of New York, 449-453; stereotypes, 446; and U.S. immigration policy, 614. See also Israeli immigrants Johnson, Albert, 345-347 Johnson, Hiram Warren, 20 Johnson, Lyndon B., 93, 320, 363; and bilingualism policy, 92-93; and Cuba, 178; on Ku Klux Klan, 480 Johnson-Reid Act. See Immigration Act of 1924 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 59, 509 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 230, 507 Justice and immigration, 458-464 Kahakua, James, 2 Kang, Younghill, 57 Kansas, 21 Kearney, Denis, 142, 349 Kennan, George, 277

Subject Index Kennedy, Anthony M., 571 Kennedy, Edward, 364 Kennedy, John F., 127, 363, 399; A Nation of Immigrants, xiii Kennedy, Robert F., 47, 253, 255, 364 Kennedy, William, 232 Kennedy-Donnelly Act of 1988, 547 Kenrick, Francis, 30 Kent State University, 457 Kentucky, 287 Kephart, William M., 523 Khmer, 671 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 479 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 509 Kitazaki, George, 2 KKK. See Ku Klux Klan Know-Nothing Party, 32, 136, 283, 320, 465 König, Karin, 311 Korean immigrants, 192, 466-469, 544; and African Americans, 469-472; in Canada, 474; and education, 468, 474; families, 473-477 Korean War; and Amerasian children, 22, 24; and Korean immigration, 473; and war brides, 681, 685 Koreatowns, 66, 466, 474 Korematsu v. United States, 204, 430, 435 Kosinski, Jerzy, 230 Kramer, Samuel, 31 Ku Klux Klan, 477-481 Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870-1871, 478 La Guardia, Fiorello, 414 Ladino, 637 Landon v. Plasencia, 563 Languages, 240, 242, 344, 545; and African immigrants, 171; and Chicano movement, 129; and Chinese immigrants, 131, 158, 163; and Gypsies, 296; of India, 73; and Italian immigrants, 514-515; Japanese, 425; and Jewish immigrants, 637; and Koreans, 467-468, 475; and Latinos, 484, 491, 506; and Mexican immigrants, 484; and Native Americans, 203, 530; and

Pacific islanders, 306; Polish, 594; Scandinavian, 632; Spanish, 1, 316; and Taiwanese immigrants, 655; and war brides, 684-685. See also English language Laos; Amerasians, 24; Hmongs, 324; and Vietnam War, 324 Laotian immigrants, 62, 64, 620, 649-650; and education, 54; Hmongs, 324-327 Larkin, Thomas Oliver, 115 Latinos, 481-488; advocacy organizations, 503-507, 531-533; and education, 491, 494, 506; employment, 488-493; families, 494-499; and Roman Catholic Church, 497; stereotypes, 497. See also individual ethnic groups Lau v. Nichols, 85, 94, 499-503 Law. See individual acts and Immigration law Lazarus, Emma, 225 League of United Latin American Citizens, 503-507 League of United Latin American Citizens v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 506 League of Women Voters, 426 Lebanon, 39, 42, 44-48, 454; civil war, 545 Lee Joe v. United States, 144-146 Leif Eriksson, 630 Levin, Lewis, 30-32 Levy, Asser, 452 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 229 Liberia, 7 Liliuokalani, 307 Lillo, Don De, 233 Lincoln, Abraham, 445 Lindbergh law of 1934, 479 Literacy tests, 97, 100, 204-205, 226, 339-345, 349, 401, 534-535, 561, 697 Literature, 507-512; of Asian Americans, 57-60; of European immigrants, 224-234 Lithuanian immigrants, 271, 595, 623, 711; in literature, 230. See also Baltic immigrants Little Havana, 512-514

773

Subject Index Little Italies, 514-516; and generational acculturation, 273 Little Jerusalem, 445 Little Saigon, 54, 220 Little Tokyos, 516-518; and Chinatowns, 517; and generational acculturation, 273 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 340, 342, 344, 350 London Company, 388, 419 Long, Huey, 519 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 508-509 Loring, H. Sheldon, 581-582 Los Angeles; Arab immigrants, 34, 455, 610; Asian Americans, 64; Chinatown, 130, 132, 160; Chinese immigrants, 136, 141; Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief, 536; Filipino immigrants, 264; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Iranian immigrants, 392; Israeli immigrants, 405; Korean immigrants, 470, 474-475; Little Tokyo, 434, 516-517; Mexican immigrants, 536; riots, 62, 471; Russian immigrants, 622; South Asian immigrants, 72 Lotus Blossom, 57 Louisiana; alien land laws, 21; bilingualism in, 91; French Canadians, 508; Gypsy immigrants, 295; and Ku Klux Klan, 480; machine politics, 519; slavery in, 5; Vietnamese immigrants, 672. See also New Orleans Louisiana Territory, 316 Luce-Celler Bill of 1946, 648 Lucena, Abraham de, 452 LULAC. See League of United Latin American Citizens Lutheran Church, 285, 631-632, 634 Lynching, 175, 416, 446, 478 Lyon, Matthew, 17 McCarran, Patrick, 359, 615 McCarran-Walter Act. See Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 McCarthy, Mary, 232 McCreary Act of 1893, 145

774

Machine politics, 205, 333, 518-521; and Irish immigrants, 238, 399, 401; Miami, 183 McKay, Claude, 417, 508, 691 McKinley, William, 344 McMichael, Morton, 31 McVeigh, Timothy, 556 Mafia, 413 Magnuson Act. See Immigration Act of 1943 Mail-order brides, 521-524; stereotypes, 523-524 Maine; and Ku Klux Klan, 479; Roman Catholic immigrants, 419; Seeds of Peace camp, 457 Malamud, Bernard, 230 Malawi, 311 Malaysia, 612 Manasurangkun brothers, 657-659 Mandel, Ernest, 563 Mandela, Nelson, 183 Mangione, Jerre, 233 Manzanar Relocation Center, 429 Mao Zedong; and Taiwan, 656 Marcello v. Bonds, 564 Marciano, Rocky, 413 Marcos, Ferdinand, 620 Mariana Islands, 305 Mariel boatlift, 172, 179, 181, 524-528, 620 Maronite Catholic Church. See Orthodox Christians Marshall, James Wilson, 115 Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary School Children v. Michigan Board of Education, 501 Martinique, 9, 636 Maryland; Jewish immigrants, 636; and Know-Nothing Party, 465; Korean immigrants, 467; Swedish immigrants, 631. See also Baltimore Mason, Richard Barnes, 115 Massachusetts; Chinese immigrants, 155; Dominican immigrants, 208; Roman Catholic Church, 320, 559; Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626-629; Scandinavian immigrants, 632; Swedish immigrants, 631. See also Boston

Subject Index Mauritius, 67, 522 Maximilian, Alexander Philipp, 286 Mayan, 484 Meagher, Timothy, 169-170 Megapolensis, Dominie Johannes, 451-452 Meissner, Doris, 267-268 Melting pot theory, 90, 224, 226-228, 274, 319, 529-531, 544; and assimilation, 79-82; and Chinese immigrants, 134; critiques of, 189, 462, 548; and cultural pluralism, 188-189; and immigrant motivation, 338; and literature, 226-227 Mennonites, 284, 286, 545 Mestizos, 127, 129, 483 Methodist Church, 285, 632 Meusenbach, John, 286 Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 531-533 Mexican Americans. See Mexican immigrants Mexican deportations, 127, 533-537 Mexican Farm Labor Program. See Bracero program Mexican immigrants, 484; and Chicano movement, 125-130; deportation of, 572-576; families, 494; holidays, 498; illegal, 334-338; and Ku Klux Klan, 480; laborers, 489-490; and Mexican Revolution, 483; and Sikhs, 648; stereotypes, 127, 575; unemployment among, 491; and U.S. Census, 123 Mexican War, 101, 125-126, 484, 544 “Mexicano,” 127, 251 Mexico; borders, 97, 367, 460, 547; and bracero program, 103-107; indigenous cultures, 483; and Mexican Americans, 125; and Operation Wetback, 572-576 Mezei, Ignatz, 563 MFLP (Mexican Farm Labor Program). See Bracero program Miami; crime, 526; Cuban immigrants, 482, 486, 512-514; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Little Havana, 512-514; machine politics, 183;

Puerto Rican immigrants, 182; West Indian immigrants, 689 Michigan; Arab immigrants, 33, 44; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; Mexican immigrants, 101. See also Detroit Michlin, Arnold, 456 Middle East Friendship League, 457 Middle Eastern immigrants, 538-541; and U.S. Census, 124. See also Arab immigrants; Iranian immigrants; Israeli immigrants; Jewish immigrants Migrant superordination, 542 Migration, 542-549 Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962, 697 Miller, Samuel F., 309 Minnesota; alien land laws, 21; Hmong immigrants, 324 Miscegenation laws, 433 Mississippi; civil rights worker murders, 479 Missouri; alien land laws, 21; and California gold rush, 116; German immigrants, 287; machine politics, 399, 519; and Operation Wetback, 574 Mistretta v. United States, 372 Mitchell, George, 47 Model minorities, 549-554; Chinese, 158; stereotypes, 52, 159 Mongrelization, 554-555 Montagnards, 671 Montana, 21, 131, 324 Moore, Robert, 258 Moravians, 271 Mormons, 221, 632 Morrison v. Olson, 372 Mosby, John S., 581-582 Mothers’ Aid Law of 1913, 646 Motley, Constance Baker, 691 Multiculturalism Act of 1988 (Canada), 194 Muslims, 555-558; stereotypes, 556; and terrorist attacks, 641 Mussolini, Benito, 510, 705 Mutual Security Act of 1951, 615 Myanmar, 324

775

Subject Index NAAA. See National Association of Arab Americans NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nabokov, Vladimir, 230 Nader, Ralph, 371 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nahuatl, 484 NAM. See National Association of Manufacturers Nanak Dev, Guru, 647 Nation of Immigrants, A (Kennedy), xiii National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 206, 646, 669 National Association of Arab Americans, 44 National Association of Manufacturers, 587 National Farm Labor Union, 252 National Farm Workers Association, 251-257 National Genetic Diseases Act of 1976, 706 National Lawyers’ Guild, 382 National Origins Act. See Immigration Act of 1924 National Women’s Trade Union League, 272, 646, 662 Nationalist Chinese. See Taiwanese immigrants Nationality Act of 1870, 160 Native American (newspaper), 31 Native Americans; and citizenship, 121, 166; discrimination against, 202; and German immigrants, 286; and Hawaiians, 124; literature of, 507; and “melting pot,” 529-530; and Pacific islanders, 308; precolonial population, 609; and Scandinavians, 634; and slavery, 317; and U.S. Census, 123; and U.S. Indian policy, 202-203 Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, 710 Native Sons of the Golden State, 136 Nativism, 320, 558-562, 702-707; and Asian immigrants, 578; defined, 81;

776

and Italian immigrants, 412-413; and Ku Klux Klan, 322; and Palmer raids, 587-588; and Philadelphia riots, 29-33; and Roman Catholic Church, 559, 586; and Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 626-629; and undocumented workers, 321; and World War I, 91 Naturalization, 167, 562-569; and Cable Act, 114; and Chinese refugees, 355; and green cards, 293-294; and immigration law, 377-378; and Japanese immigrants, 278. See also Citizenship; Immigration and Nationality Acts Naturalization Act of 1790, 569-570 Naturalization Act of 1798, 16, 257-258; repeal of, 18 Naturalization Act of 1802, 166 Naval Clearing Act of 1962, 305 Neale, Leonard, 258 Nebraska, 223, 230, 508; alien land laws, 21 Neier, Aryeh, 311 Net migration rate, 543 Nevada; Chinatowns, 131 New Jersey; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; Dominican immigrants, 208; Iranian immigrants, 394; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Korean immigrants, 467; Latinos, 610; Orthodox Christian immigrants, 48; Swedish immigrants, 631; West Indian immigrants, 689, 691 New Mexico; alien land laws, 21; Latinos, 128, 505, 591, 610; in literature, 508; and Mexican War, 484; Spanish settlements, 316 New Orleans, 13, 169; Cuban immigrants, 176; German immigrants, 282; Irish immigrants, 397; in literature, 508; slavery in, 5 New York City, 50; Arab immigrants, 34, 455, 610; Asian Americans, 64; Asian immigrants, 71; Chinatown, 131-132; garment industry, 270-271; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Haitian immigrants, 302; Iranian immigrants, 392; Irish immigrants,

Subject Index 398; Israeli immigrants, 405; Italian immigrants, 410-411, 514; Jamaican immigrants, 417; Jewish immigrants, 50; Jewish settlement of, 449-453; Korean immigrants, 470, 474; Little Tokyo, 516, 518; machine politics, 519; Maronite immigrants, 48; Puerto Rican immigrants, 14; Russian immigrants, 271; slavery in, 5; South Asian immigrants, 72; tenements, 229; terrorist attack on, 637-643; Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 271, 661-663, 697; West Indian immigrants, 689 New York Indians v. United States, 202 New York State; Asian Americans, 64; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; Chinese immigrants, 155; Dominican immigrants, 208; Haitian immigrants, 300; Iranian immigrants, 394; Japanese immigrants, 425; Korean immigrants, 467; Latinos, 610; Taiwanese immigrants, 655 New Zealanders, 347, 352, 683 Newport, Christopher, 420 Newspapers; anti-Asian, 136; anti-Irish, 403; anti-Jewish, 446; Arab American, 42, 455; Chinese American, 158; foreign-language, 27; German American, 286; Italian American, 515; Japanese American, 425; Jewish, 455; and mail-order brides, 521; Mexican American, 536; nativist, 31, 584 NFLU. See National Farm Labor Union NFWA. See National Farm Workers Association Nguyen, Tuan Anh, 571-572 Nguyen v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 571-572 Nicaragua, 116, 486 Nicaraguan immigrants, 200 Nigerian immigrants, 8 Nine-Eleven. See September 11 terrorist attacks Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, 563 Noor, Queen, 47

North American Free Trade Agreement, 461, 733 North Carolina, 444; Hmong immigrants, 324; and Ku Klux Klan, 480 North Dakota, 632 Northwest Arctic School District v. Califano, 502 “Nuyoricans,” 14 NWTUL. See National Women’s Trade Union League OAP. See Overseas Admission Program O’Connor, Edwin, 232 O’Connor, Flannery, 232 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 591 OCR. See Office for Civil Rights Office for Civil Rights, 500-502 Office of Hawaiian Affairs, 307 OHA. See Office of Hawaiian Affairs O’Hara, Frank, 233 O’Hara, John, 232 Ohio; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; German immigrants, 287; Kent State University, 457; Mexican immigrants, 101 Oklahoma, 508; federal building bombing, 45, 393, 556; Filipino immigrants, 2 Old Owl, 286 Olsen, Tillie, 230 O’Neill, Danny, 232 O’Neill, Eugene, 231-232 Onoto Watanna (Winifred Eaton), 57 Opechancanough, 421 Operation Wetback, 106, 572-576 Opium Wars, 146 Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese, 313 Oregon; alien land laws, 21; Chinatowns, 131; Chinese immigrants, 136; English-only movement, 585; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Japanese immigrants, 425, 516 Organization of American States, 298 Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, 682, 684, 687 Ortega, Daniel, 486 Orthodox Christians, 42, 44, 48, 622-624

777

Subject Index Ottoman Empire, 42 Overseas Admission Program, 312 Ozawa, Takao, 568, 576-579 Ozawa v. United States, 568, 576-579 Ozick, Cynthia, 230 Pacific islanders, 304-308; as Native Americans, 308. See also Hawaiians Page, Horace F., 580 Page law of 1875, 579-583 Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza, 392, 620 Paine, Thomas, 507 Pakistan, 70, 311 Pakistani immigrants, 71-76 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 584-589 Palmer raids, 584-589 Panama, 668 Park, Robert Ezra, 221 Passenger Cases, 309 Patriot Act of 2001, 641, 734; and illegal aliens, 335 Pearl Buck Foundation, 22 Peerson, Cleng, 631 Peltason, Jack W., 600 Pendergast, Tom, 519 Penelas, Alex, 292 Pennsylvania; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; Chinatowns, 132; garment industry, 270; German immigrants, 216, 284, 286; refugee detention camps, 526; Swedish immigrants, 631; Vietnamese immigrants, 672; welfare system, 566. See also Philadelphia Peruvian immigrants, 437-438, 487 Phelan, James, 709 Philadelphia; anti-Irish riots, 29-33, 559; Chinatown, 131; Federal riot of 1799, 257-258; garment industry, 270; Italian immigrants, 410, 514; Jewish immigrants, 444; poor house, 390; South Asian immigrants, 72 Philippines, 123, 620; Amerasian children, 23-24; war brides, 681. See also Filipino immigrants Picture brides, 64, 434, 589-590, 696 Pilgrims, English, 108 Pinochet, Augusto, 620 Plessy v. Ferguson, 205, 322, 439, 499

778

Plyler v. Doe, 565, 590-593 Plymouth Company, 419 Pocahontas, 421-422 Poe, Edgar Allan, 231 Poitier, Sidney, 691 Polish immigrants, 242, 507, 594-597; stereotypes, 597 Political machines. See Machine politics Polk, James K., 115 Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 (Great Britain), 396 Portugal; explorations of, 483; Gypsies, 295; Jews, 636-637; and slave trade, 483 Portuguese immigrants, 306; in Canada, 194 Pound, Ezra, 510 Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 372 Powers, J. F., 233 Powhatan, 421 Powhatan Confederacy, 420 Proposition 187 (California), 268, 461, 598-600, 602 Proposition 227 (California), 28, 85, 502, 532, 600-604 Prostitutes, 320, 343, 545, 645; Asian, 64; Chinese, 175, 580; Filipino, 23; German, 684; and Page law, 579-583 Puerto Ricans, 14, 179; “circular migration,” 491; and citizenship, 196, 489; and Dominicans, 210; families, 496; family life, 494; holidays, 498; occupations of, 490-491; unemployment among, 491; and U.S. Census, 123 Puerto Rico, 485; and Dominican immigrants, 486 Puritans, 107, 507, 604 Push and pull factors, 604-606, 664 Puzo, Mario, 226, 233, 413 Queen Mary, SS, 686, 688 Quota Law of 1921. See Immigration Act of 1921 Quotas, 8, 99, 123, 191, 244, 379, 460-461, 463, 561, 677, 679; and Asian immigrants, 62, 68, 684; and

Subject Index Chinese immigrants, 112, 354; and family members, 380, 677; and Haitian immigrants, 299; and Immigration Act of 1921, 343-348; and Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act), 322, 349-352, 534, 547; and Immigration Act of 1990, 463; and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 359; and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 355, 362-365, 547; and Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 386; and Jewish immigrants, 51; and Latin American immigrants, 99-100; and Mexican immigrants, 97; and refugees, 380, 614-615; and Taiwanese immigrants, 655; and war brides, 682-683 Rabin, Yitzhak, 407 Race mixing, 554-555, 560 Racial and ethnic demographic trends, 606-612 Rahall, Nick Joe, 44 Raleigh, Walter, 419 Randall, Margaret, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 302, 384, 430, 552, 620; and bilingual education, 85, 94; and civil rights, 502; and Cuba, 527 Red Cross, 278, 687 Red Scare, 478, 561, 584-589 “Redemptioners,” 388 Refugee Act of 1980, 179, 191, 311-313, 463, 620, 697 Refugee fatigue, 612-614 Refugee Relief Act of 1953, 355, 361, 548, 614-617 Refugees, 310-315; African, 9; deportation of, 548; Haitians, 297-300; and racial/ethnic relations, 618-621; Tibetans, 659-661; and U.S. policy, 184-187, 524-528 Rehnquist, William H., 372, 591 Reich, Robert B., 658 Religion. See individual religions Reno, Janet, 267-268; and Cuban refugees, 185, 290-293 Reynolds, James, 258

Rhode Island; Hmong immigrants, 324; Jewish immigrants, 444, 636; and slave trade, 6 Ridge, Tom, 639 Riis, Jacob, 229 Rio Grande, 97, 116, 504, 573-574, 665 Rolfe, John, 422 Rölvaag, O. E., 508 Roman Catholic Church; and Anti-Irish Riots of 1844, 29-33, 559; and the Bible, 30; and education, 238; and Filipino immigrants, 266; and German immigrants, 285; in Guam, 305; hierarchical structure, 235; and Irish immigrants, 29-33, 238, 396-399, 402, 404, 559; and Jews, 636; and Know-Nothing Party, 465; and Ku Klux Klan, 479; and Latinos, 497; and nativism, 559, 586; and Polish immigrants, 594-595; prejudice against, 350; and Santería, 630; and Scandinavian immigrants, 632; and Scotch-Irish, 120; and Spanish immigrants, 177; Ursuline order, 320; and Vietnamese immigrants, 651, 671, 673 Romnichals (Gypsies), 296 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 615 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 398, 520; and Japanese internment, 424, 426, 428, 434, 710 Roosevelt, Theodore, 277-278, 645; and Japanese immigration, 279, 433, 439, 441, 710; on language, 216 Root, Elihu, 278-280, 438 Rosier, James, 419 Roth, Henry, 229 Roth, Philip, 226 Rusk, Dean, 364 Russia; and Japan, 709 Russian immigrants, 242, 622-625; garment workers, 271; mail-order brides, 522 Sabath, Adolph, 346 Sacco, Nicola, 413, 626-629 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 413, 626-629 St. John, J. Hector, 507, 529 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 30

779

Subject Index Saionji, Kinmochi, 438 Samoans, 123, 305-306 San Francisco; Asian Americans, 64, 438-443; Chinatown, 130-131, 141, 147, 151-156, 158, 161-163, 580; earthquake, 158, 278, 438-439, 710; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Japanese immigrants, 438-443; Little Tokyo, 516; South Asian immigrants, 72; “yellow peril” campaign, 707-711 “Sanctuary laws,” 336 Sandburg, Carl, 229 Santana, 286 Santería, 629-630 Saroyan, William, 229-230 Scandinavian immigrants, 235, 630-634; and education, 238; and Native Americans, 634 Scheuer, James H., 92 Schmitz, Eugene E., 440, 709 Schneider v. Rusk, 568 Schneiderman, Rose, 272 Schneiderman v. United States, 568 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 216, xiii Scotch-Irish immigrants, 635-636 Scott, Dred, 592, 699 Scott Act of 1888, 143, 145, 157 Scott v. Sandford, 592 Secret Service, U.S.; and Homeland Security Department, 330 Sedition Act of 1798, 257-258 Seeds of Peace, 457 Segregation, 322, 668; in California, 438-443; and Chinese immigrants, 161; and Japanese Americans, 278, 427, 438-443, 708; and languages, 216; and Mexican Americans, 126, 504; of schools, 206, 499 Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, 384 Sephardic Jews, 34, 405, 408, 444, 452, 454-455, 636-637 Sephardim. See Sephardic Jews September 11 terrorist attacks, 39, 173, 327, 637-643; and hate crimes, 45; and Homeland Security Department, 327-332; and illegal aliens, 335; and Immigration and Naturalization Service, 369

780

Serra, Junípero, 316 Settlement house movement, 643-647; Hull-House, 332-334 Seward, William Henry, 111, 283 Shahn, Bernarda Bryson, 4 Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 563 Shehhi, Marwan al-, 641 Shenouda III, Pope, 48 Shepard, Charles R., 137 Sikh immigrants, 68, 71, 647-649, 664 Simmons, William J., 478 Sinclair, Upton, 230, 507-508 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 230 Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara, 47 Sixth Amendment, 294 Slaughterhouse cases, 205 Slave trade, 4, 168-171, 609; abolition of, 108 Slavery, 108, 205, 317, 322; and African immigration, 3-11; in Caribbean, 11; and citizenship, 166; and Constitution, U.S., 201; and “coolie” labor, 175; and German immigrants, 286; and indentured servitude, 388-389, 695; and Irish immigrants, 237, 400; in Jamaica, 416; and Know-Nothing Party, 465; and Native Americans, 317; and Santería, 629; and U.S. Census, 122 Slavic immigrants, 244, 344, 351, 595; and “mongrelization,” 555; Poles, 594-597 Slocum, Tokutaro “Tokie” Nishimura, 426 Smathers, George A., 178 Smith, Alfred E., 398-399, 663 Smith, Betty, 232 Smith, H. T., 183 Smith, John, 420-422, 507 Smith, Joseph, 221 Smith, Wayne, 525-526 Smuggling; of African slaves, 6, 168-171; and Border Patrol, 100-101; of Chinese immigrants, 138-140; drugs, 294; and Immigration and Naturalization Service, 367; of laborers, 461, 659

Subject Index Smythe, Thomas, 422 Social Gospel movement, 644 Soldier Brides Act of 1947, 687 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 230 Somers, George, 422 Sousa, Mathias de, 636 South Carolina, 18; Jewish settlers, 50 South Dakota, 149, 285, 508 Southeast Asian immigrants, 649-653; Hmongs, 324-327 Soviet Jewish immigrants, 653-655 Sowell, Thomas, 552 Spain; explorations of, 483; Gypsies, 295; Jews, 636-637; and slave trade, 483 Spanish-American War, 178, 485 Sri Lanka, 194 Stalin, Joseph, 604 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 286 Starr, Ellen Gates, 332-334 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, 336 Statue of Liberty, 225, 320, 363; Lazarus’s poem, 225 Steamships, 116, 240, 282 Steele, Shelby, 552 Steinbeck, John, 508-509 Stereotypes; African American, 691; Arab, 35, 38-42, 454; Asian American, 52, 59, 60-63, 553; Chinese, 57, 137, 159, 174-176, 404; Cuban, 527; German, 545; Gypsy, 296; Irish, 282, 399, 403-405, 545; Israeli, 407; Italian, 226, 409, 414; Japanese, 57, 61; Jewish, 446; Latino, 497; in literature, 226; mail-order brides, 523-524; Mexican, 127, 575; “model minorities,” 324, 549, 553; Muslim, 556; Polish, 597; West Indian, 691 Stevens, John Paul, 297 Strong, Josiah, 242 Stuyvesant, Peter, 443, 450-452, 636 Suar, Xavier, 183 Sugarman v. Dowell, 565 Sugi, Suma, 425 Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton), 57 Sun Yat-sen, 141

Superordination, 391-392, 542 Surial, H. G., 48 Sutter, John Augustus, 115 Sweatt v. Painter, 206 Taft, William Howard, 19, 341, 344-345 Taiwan, 163, 355; and China, 22, 656 Taiwanese immigrants, 146, 655-657; and education, 52, 655 Talese, Gay, 233 Tammany Hall, 519 Tan, Amy, 59, 509 Taney, Roger B., 592 Tangrenbu (Chinatown), 131 Taylor, Edward, 507 Television; and emergency planning, 330 Tennessee; and Ku Klux Klan, 477, 480; machine politics, 519; and Operation Wetback, 574 Terrorism; and Homeland Security Department, 327-332; September 11, 39, 173, 327, 335, 637-643 Texas; alien land laws, 21; Anglo-American settlement, 504; Asian Americans, 64; Asian Indian immigrants, 69; and Border Patrol, 97; German immigrants, 287; Gypsy immigrants, 296; illegal aliens, 335; Korean immigrants, 467; and Ku Klux Klan, 479; Latinos, 505, 590-593, 610; Mexican immigrants, 92, 101; and Mexican War, 484; Operation Wetback, 572-576; segregation in, 206, 504; Vietnamese immigrants, 672 Texas, University of, 206 Thai Americans; and education, 52 Thai immigrants, 649-650, 657-659, 697 Thailand, 23; Amerasians, 24; Hmongs, 324; war brides, 681, 685 Thirteenth Amendment, 166, 201, 205, 699 Thomas, Clarence, 207, 297 Thomas, Franklin, 691 Thoreau, Henry David, 231 Tibetan immigrants, 659-661 Tien, Chang-lin, 600

781

Subject Index Tijerina, Reies López, 128 Tingley, George B., 154 Transportation, Department of, 173 Transportation Security Administration, 329 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, 271, 661-663, 697 Trinidad and Tobago, 9, 13, 67, 363, 630 Trop v. Dulles, 568 Truax v. Raich, 564 Truman, Harry S., 359-361, 615, 687; and European refugees, 322, 614 Tuchman, Gloria Matta, 602 Twain, Mark, 510 Tweed, “Boss” William Marcy, 519 Twice migrants, 664 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, 728 Tz’u-hsi (Cixi), 111 UFW. See United Farm Workers of America UFWOC. See United Farm Workers Organizing Committee Ukrainian immigrants, 624 Undocumented immigrants; and Border Patrol, 96 Undocumented workers, 191, 319, 547, 665-666; in Florida, 267-269; Haitians, 302; and immigration law, 383-387; and nativists, 321. See also Illegal immigration UNHCR. See United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association Unionism, 29-30, 236, 344, 346, 586-587; and Asian immigrants, 19, 61, 76-78, 135, 157, 277, 349, 709; and bracero program, 573; and farmworkers, 99, 101, 251; and garment workers, 271, 697; and Polish immigrants, 594; and West Indians, 13, 417, 667; and women, 646, 661-663, 695, 697 United Farm Workers of America, 251-257 United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, 251

782

United Farm Workers Union, 77 United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 311-312, 616, 697 United States Code, 172, 381 United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 563 United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 567 United States v. Jung Ah Lung, 144-146 United States v. Winans, 202 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 699-702 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 311 Universal Negro Improvement Association, 667-670 Unz, Ron, 532, 601 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 366 U.S. English, 216 USA Patriot Act. See Patriot Act of 2001 USCIS. See Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Utah, 21, 131 Valachi, Joseph, 413 Vang Pao, 324 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 413, 626-629 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 410 Vespucci, Amerigo, 409 Vietnam; and Amerasian children, 23-24; communism in, 23; Hmongs, 324; war brides, 681, 685 Vietnam War; and Amerasian children, 23; and Chicano movement, 129; Hmongs, 324, 650; and Laos, 324; in literature, 59, 233; and Montagnards, 671; protest movements, 430; and war brides, 681-682, 685 Vietnamese immigrants, 62, 64, 620, 649-650, 670-676; demographics, 192; and education, 675; and U.S. Census, 123 Vikings, 630 Virginia; Jewish immigrants, 636; Korean immigrants, 467; Native American peoples, 316; settlement of, 4, 316-317, 410, 419-423, 609; slavery in, 4; Vietnamese immigrants, 672

Subject Index Virginia and Kentucky Resolves, 17-18 Virginia Charter of 1606, 165 Visas, 208, 352, 357, 374, 676-681; categories, 378-379; fees, 99-101; and lottery, 547; and quotas, 191, 377; reentry, 143; and refugees, 615; violations of, 193, 294; and war brides, 683, 686 Visel, Charles P., 536 Voluntary Agencies Responsible for Refugees, 620 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 401 Voting Rights Act of 1975, 501 Walcott, Derek, 691 Wales, J. A., 135 Wallach, John, 457 Walter, Francis, 359 War brides, 681-688 War Brides Act of 1945, 355, 435, 614, 683, 685-688, 697 War Measures Act of 1942 (Canada), 435 War Relocation Authority, 426 Washington, Booker T., 668 Washington, D.C.; Chinatown, 131; and Ku Klux Klan, 479; Maronite immigrants, 48; police brutality in, 183; terrorist attack on, 327, 637-643 Washington, George, 505, 570 Washington State; alien land laws, 21; Chinatowns, 131; Chinese immigrants, 136; Gypsy immigrants, 296; Hmong immigrants, 324; Japanese immigrants, 425; Korean immigrants, 467; Vietnamese immigrants, 672 West, Thomas, 422 West Indian immigrants, 551, 553, 689-693; and education, 689; Jamaicans, 415-419; stereotypes, 691 “Wetbacks,” 572-576, 665-666 Wheatley, Phillis, 7, 507 Whig Party, 29, 237, 283 White, Byron R., 372 White, John, 507 White ethnics, 693-694 Whom Shall We Welcome?, 361 Williams, Walter E., 552

WILPF. See Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Wilson, Pete, 598, 601 Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 341, 345-346, 350, 727 Wingfield, Edward Maria, 420 Wisconsin; German immigrants, 287; Hmong immigrants, 324; refugee detention camps, 526 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Women immigrants, 694-699; Arabs, 36, 44, 46; Asian, 59, 63-67, 579-583; and Cable Act, 113-115; and California gold rush, 117; Chinese, 355; Filipino, 260, 262; and garment industry, 213, 270-272, 657-659, 661-663, 697; Hmong, 326; and indentured servitude, 387-390; Irish, 282, 398; Israeli, 408; Japanese, 435, 441; Korean, 475; mail-order brides, 521-524; Middle Eastern, 538; Muslim, 556; and Page law, 579-583; picture brides, 589-590; Polish, 595; and settlement houses, 643-647; Southeast Asian, 650; Vietnamese, 671; war brides, 681-688 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 646 Wong, Kent, 77 Wong Kim Ark, 699-702 Wong Kim Ark case, 699-702 Wong Quan v. United States, 144-146 World Trade Center, 639 World War I; and Arab immigrants, 42; Jewish refugees, 26; and Ku Klux Klan, 51; and nativism, 91; and war brides, 682 World War II; and agricultural labor, 103-107; and bracero program, 103-107; and Japan, 437; Japanese American internment, 62, 321, 424, 426-432, 434, 437-438, 710; and Japanese immigrants, 62; and Japanese Peruvians, 437-438; in literature, 57; and Little Tokyos, 517; and Mexican Americans, 129; occupation of Japan, 22; and war brides, 681-688

783

Subject Index

Xenophobia, 226, 320, 702-707; and culutral pluralism, 188; and English-only movement, 218; and Federalists, 16; and nativists, 81; and Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 413

“Yellow peril,” 61, 432, 438-443, 576; campaign, 707-711 Yerby, Frank, 510 Yezierska, Anzia, 229 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 162, 564 Yiddish, 50, 285, 444, 637 Yon Yonson (play), 633 Yoshikawa, Iwao, 577 Young, Brigham, 221 Young Women’s Christian Association, 695

Yamauchi, Wakako, 59 Yarborough, Ralph Webster, 92-93 Yasui v. United States, 430

Zadvydas, Kestutis, 711-712 Zadvydas v. Davis, 711-712 Zangwill, Israel, 226, 530

WRA. See War Relocation Authority Wright, Luke E., 278-280 Wright, Richard, 510 Wyoming, 61, 131, 136

784

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