4. Crucibles of war

Hostilities lingered in the immediate aftermath of the war, but the onset of the Cold War dramatically improved the standing of Japanese Americans. “Crucibles of war” explains how the worldwide struggle against communism compelled the United States to cultivate friendships with Asian nations and peoples, including emergent postcolonial states such as India, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Burma. The walls of Asian exclusion crumbled with the piecemeal abolishing of laws restricting immigration, citizenship, employment, residence, and miscegenation, underwritten by a reworking of racial ideologies and immigration controls that remade Asians into model immigrants and citizens, even as it positioned them as innately suited for educational attainment and economic success.

3. Living in the margins

“Living in the margins” considers the lived realities of immigrants’ efforts to foster community, livelihood, and family under exclusion. Birthright citizenship was a key steppingstone to securing some rights in the United States, but still did not protect the American-born from racial discrimination. Asian Americans remained primarily associated with demarcated residential and employment niches that confined their perceived threat, but also facilitated the pooling and sharing of resources necessary for survival in an openly hostile society. Anti-Asian hostilities became institutionalized through laws, government bureaucracies, and social and economic discrimination. The nadir was World War II when Japanese, even American-born citizens, were removed into “relocation camps” as “enemy aliens.”

2. Race and the American republic

Asian immigration tested American ideals of equality, forcing the issue of whether all racial groups could be integrated into the United States. “Race and the American Republic” describes the various laws—including the 1790 Nationality Act, which limited the right of citizenship by naturalization to “free white persons”; the 1913 Alien Land Law; and the 1917 Barred Zone Act—that shaped attitudes and institutional practices regarding whether and how Asians could claim rights and belonging. Exclusion at the borders paralleled laws that enacted forms of segregation domestically. The cornerstones of successful integration into American lives—citizenship, property ownership, and mixed-race marriage—were made unavailable to later Asian immigrants.

1. Empires and migration

The first Asians—Filipino “Luzon Indians” on a Spanish galleon—arrived on the North American continent in the late sixteenth century. Through periods of conquest and capitalism, and then colonization and adaptation, almost one million people from China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and India arrived seeking opportunities to better their fortunes and improve their lives. “Empires and migration,” outlines the key historical periods that facilitated this mobilization. It also explains that Asian immigration challenged the United States’ constitutional claims of equality for all, highlighting the question of which racial groups could claim citizenship, triggering America’s first attempts to systematically control its borders and limit the rights of immigrants and visitors.

5. Imperialism, immigration, and capitalism

“Imperialism, immigration, and capitalism” considers the Southeast Asians who entered the United States between 1975 and 1994, mostly as refugees resulting from theVietnam War. It goes on to review the “model minorities”—the Asians whose outstanding educational and economic performance exceeds that of native-born whites. Greater integration, however, has not protected Asian Americans from continued racialization as foreigners, and struggles for greater equality and acceptance continued long after legal discriminations had been lifted. The threat of Asian immigrants has largely dissipated because immigration laws and bureaucracy maintain their numbers at acceptable levels, and those who immigrate mostly convey sufficient economic or political advantages for Americans to feel their admission and settlement are justifiable.