The Chinese Must Go
The Chinese Must Go

Author: Beth Lew-Williams

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-02-26

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0674919920

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Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize Winner of the Sally and Ken Owens Award Winner of the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize “A powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.” —Richard White “A riveting, beautifully written account...that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border.” —Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Must Go shows how American immigration policies incited this violence, and how this gave rise to the concept of the “alien” in America. Our story begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens—and long before Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act, the nation’s first attempt to bar immigration based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment failed to slow Chinese migration, armed vigilante groups took the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, policymakers redoubled their efforts to seal the borders, overhauling immigration law and transforming America’s relationship with China in the process. By tracing the idea of the alien back to this violent era, Lew-Williams offers a troubling new origin story of today’s racialized border. “The Chinese Must Go shows how a country that was moving, in a piecemeal and halting fashion, toward an expansion of citizenship for formerly enslaved people and Native Americans, came to deny other classes of people the right to naturalize altogether...The stories of racist violence and community shunning are brutal to read.” —Rebecca Onion, Slate

On a Collision Course
On a Collision Course

Author: Kaoru Ueda

Publisher: Hoover Press

Published: 2020-07-01

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 081792356X

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In five meticulously researched essays, Yasuo Sakata examines Japanese migration to the United States from an international and deeply historical perspective. Sakata argues the importance of using resources from both sides of the Pacific and taking a holistic view that incorporates US-Japanese diplomatic relationships, the mass media, the American view of Asian populations, and Japan's self-image as a modern, westernized nation. In his first essay, Sakata provides an overview of resources and warns against their gaps and biases; those that remain may reflect culturally based inaccuracies. In the other essays, Sakata examines Japanese migration through a multifaceted lens, incorporating an understanding of immigration, labor, working conditions, diplomatic relationships, and the effects of war and mass media. He further emphasizes the distinctions between the dekasegi period, the transition period, and the imin period. He also discusses the self-image among Japanese as distinct from the Chinese, more westernized and able to assimilate—a distinction lost on Americans, who tended to lump the Asian groups together, both in treatment and under the law. Japan's Meiji era brought the opening of Japanese ports to Western nations and Japan's eventual overseas expansion. This translated volume of Sakata's well-researched work brings a transnational perspective to this critical chapter of early Japanese American history.