Reception of Asians to the United States

World War II was a watershed for Asian-American identity. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The next day, the United States and China together declared war on Japan. The mainstream media began to portray the Chinese as honest and hardworking and the Japanese as treacherous and cruel. A Time magazine article on 22 December 1941 was intended to assist American society at large to physically distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese. According to the article, Japanese men were "broader hipped" than Chinese men; and the Chinese expression was likely to be "more placid, kindly, open while Japanese were arrogant, hesitant and nervous in conversation" (cited by Takaki, p. 370). In 1943, all Chinese exclusion acts were repealed; a quota of 105 was granted; and Chinese immigrants became eligible for citizenship. In 1946, Congress also extended the privilege of naturalization to Filipinos and Asian Indians with an annual quota of 100 respectively. The policy change was in fact a response to Japanese war propaganda, which often criticized racial discrimination against the Chinese in America. When the House delayed the repeal bill in June 1943, Japanese radio immediately challenged the sincerity of the American government in ending the racial disparity. During the war, magazines, journals, and newspapers defined Japanese-Americans as the "Fifth Column" and "potential spies or espionage agents" and called for mass internment. Shinto and Buddhist priests and Japanese-language teachers and newspaper editors were arrested as "enemy aliens." Based on popular sentiment rather than on "military necessity," Executive Order 9066 placed 120,000 Japanese Americans in ten internment camps without a legal procedure. In February 1943, the U.S. government required all internees to answer a loyalty questionnaire. Question No. 27 asked draft-age males about their willingness to serve in the U.S. armed forces while Question No. 28 required them to swear unqualified allegiance to America. Racial ideology embodied in the questionnaire implied that Japanese were not loyal. Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Frederic Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of the internment policy in court when they were ordered to go to the camps.

The 1965 Immigration Reform Act is another landmark in Asian-American history. Growing political consciousness among Asians in the late 1960s through participation in the civil rights movement, anti–Vietnam War protests, and student strikes demanding ethnic studies courses on university campuses laid the theoretical foundation for Asian-American identity. Asian America became a meaningful political term. Asian population in America also grew dramatically since the law removed racial criteria from immigration policy for the first time in American history. In 1965, Asian-Americans numbered about one million, or less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. In 2002, their numbers had increased 72 percent in a decade, and in 2004 they numbered almost 12 million, representing 4.2 percent of U.S. population. In December 1966, U.S. News and World Report published an article entitled "Success Story of One Minority in the United States." This and many other articles on "Model Minority" myth commended the economical rise of Asian-Americans in spite of historical discrimination and accused African-Americans of making unreasonable demands for government assistance. Post-1965 racial rhetoric presents Asian-Americans as a minority with high educational attainment levels, high median family incomes, and low crime rates. Some Asian-American scholars and leaders strongly disagree with this Model Minority theory, for it downplays historical racial discrimination against Asians and creates misunderstanding and conflicts between Asians and other groups. But there are many Asians who take a more nuanced view toward it. In any case, the "glass ceiling" is still a major obstacle to the career mobility of many professional Asian-Americans, and the "sweat shop" job is often the only option for working-class immigrant Asian women. More importantly, a high percentage of contemporary Asian-American families, especially the refugee immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, still live below the poverty line, and the Model Minority theory has disqualified Asians as racial minorities from important social remedy programs in education and employment. Asian-Americans have a long way to go in their pursuit of racial equality.