The Immigration Act of 1917 Proved Xenophobia is as American as Apple Pie

                                    Woodrow Wilson vetoed the 1917 Immigration Act only because of its Literacy mandate..

On February 5, 1917 Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto making the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, the law of the land.  It was the most restrictive legislation yet enacted and banned immigration from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands.

China was not included only because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 already barred entry from that country and the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907 restricted immigration from there.  The act was aimed at potential new reservoirs of immigrants like Korea and especially India which was then exporting cheap labor to every corner of the British Empire and which was beginning to trickle into the States.

A scare headline and article in a California newspaper about a feared influx of South Asian Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.

Wilson, not known for his racial enlightenment, had vetoed the measure not over its sweeping anti-oriental provisions, but because it also required immigrants to be literate.  He feared that would choke the supply of cheap labor to American industry.

Besides illiterates, the act banned a laundry list of other undesirables including “idiots, feeble-minded persons, criminals, epileptics, insane persons, alcoholics, professional beggars, the mentally or physically defective, polygamists, and anarchists.

The Asiatic Barred Zone in the 1917 act somewhat mirror the countries on the former Resident of the United Stats would-be travel bans targeting Muslims and those who look like they might be.

Widely derided as racist by most historians, today the Act is held up as model legislation by those MAGA anti-immigrants literate in history.

Of course, American xenophobia and anti-immigration zeal did not end there.  Decades of American industrial strife—virtual open class warfare—in which waves of Old World immigrants including Jews, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, Poles, Slavs, and other Eastern Europeans—played prominent parts—contributed to a rise in nativism.  The Russian Revolution and the post-World War I Red Scare threw American oligarchs into a panic.  Anti-Semitism in particular was on the rise because many leading labor militants, Socialists, and anarchists were Jews.

The inevitable result was the Immigration Act of 1924 which limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to just two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 Census.  The effect was to suddenly lop off the stream of mostly “swarthy” European immigration which had flooded American shores since the Civil War.

More than 900 Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany aboard the liner St. Louis like these looking out of portholes in Havana were denied entrance to the U.S. in 1939,  Most died in the Holocaust.

The Act was working exactly as intended when most Jews fleeing Nazism and the Holocaust were turned away.  Tens of thousands of those who were refused visas and entry permits or who were actually turned away including the famous case of a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution turned away from Havana, Cuba and denied entry to the US in 1939 eventually died in Nazi death camps. 

The internment of Japanese, Niseis, and their families during World War II and the resultant loss of their homes, farms, businesses, and properties showed that fear of the Yellow Peril was still alive and well, especially when contrasted with the very limited internment of Germans and Italians despite large pro-Nazi and fascist pre-war movements.  Only those who were found to be active Axis agents or were identified as positive threats were arrested.  By contrast, no such movements existed among the Japanese and they proved to be loyal to the United States including many who volunteered for the Armed Forces even as their families remained behind barbed wire.

Notices of detainment posted in San Francisco in 1942--a panic response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Slowly, the internments were recognized as a gross injustice and a massive violation of civil liberties.  Finally in 1988 President Ronald President Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which Congress apologized on behalf of the nation for the internment camps, saying they did “a grave injustice” to those of Japanese ancestry.  Largely symbolic reparations of payments of $20,000 to former internees were made—far less than actual losses.  Many internees had already died, and their descendants received nothing.  Generational wealth remained wiped out.

Still, by the turn of the 21st century East Asians were held up by many whites as “model minorities” for their assimilation into the dominant culture, adoption of English, academic and professional success, and perhaps most of all for by in large not “making trouble” by demanding rights. 

But even that was sometimes shaky.  The same people who wailed that affirmative action programs for African Americans at colleges and universities were unfair to more qualified white applicants also complained about the “over representation” of Asians who had earned their places by good grades and high test scores, and demanded caps on their admissions.

Newer, poorer Asian immigrants, notably the Vietnamese boat people, and Hmongs uprooted by the American wars in Southeast Asia were deeply resented in areas where they were settled and subject to harassment and sometimes physical attack.

Asian communities and their allies rallied to stop hate crimes.

In 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic ripped the scab off the old wound.  Chinese and other Asians were blamed for the spread of the disease that killed so many and disrupted lives for more than two years.  Physical attacks and murders spread across the country often targeting the most vulnerable—elderly immigrants in poor urban areas—but also on campuses and in rural communities.  Attackers included not just the usual suspects—white racists and nationalists—but Blacks some of whom had long resented Asian shop owners in their communities, blamed immigrants for vaccinations that they widely mistrusted, and the comparative success of the model minority.

Clearly, this nation has a long way to go.