The Chinese Must Go

Download or read book The Chinese Must Go written by Beth Lew-Williams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigration policies incited violence against Chinese workers, and how that violence provoked new exclusionary policies. Locating the origins of the modern American "alien" in this violent era, she makes clear that the present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

Download or read book At America's Gates written by Erika Lee and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-01-21 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Download or read book Asian American Studies Now written by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian American Studies Now truly represents the enormous changes occurring in Asian American communities and the world, changes that require a reconsideration of how the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies is defined and taught. This comprehensive anthology, arranged in four parts and featuring a stellar group of contributors, summarizes and defines the current shape of this rapidly changing field, addressing topics such as transnationalism, U.S. imperialism, multiracial identity, racism, immigration, citizenship, social justice, and pedagogy. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.

Download or read book The Chinese Must Go written by Beth Lew-Williams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Perpetually Cool written by Anthony B. Chan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2007-02-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna May Wong was an extraordinary Asian American woman who became the country's most famous film actress of Chinese descent. From small parts in silent films to starring roles in Hollywood and across the Atlantic, Wong made an impression on audiences of all persuasions. In Perpetually Cool, Anthony Chan takes the reader on a compelling journey through Wong's early years in Los Angeles and her first Hollywood pictures. Chan also examines the scope and nature of race, gender, and power and their impact on Wong's personal growth as a Chinese American. Perpetually Cool is not only the captivating story of a cinematic career, but also of roots and identity, as it recounts Wong's desire to connect with her heritage in the United States and in China. Chan provides extensive textual analyses of Wong's signature films, especially The Toll of the Sea (1922), The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks, and her most famous role as Hui Fei in Shanghai Express (1932), opposite Marlene Dietrich. Perpetually Cool is a fitting tribute to the influence of this Chinese American icon.

Download or read book The Deportation Machine written by Adam Goodman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By most accounts, the United States has deported around five million people since 1882-but this includes only what the federal government calls "formal deportations." "Voluntary departures," where undocumented immigrants who have been detained agree to leave within a specified time period, and "self-deportations," where undocumented immigrants leave because legal structures in the United States have made their lives too difficult and frightening, together constitute 90% of the undocumented immigrants who have been expelled by the federal government. This brings the number of deportees to fifty-six million. These forms of deportation rely on threats and coercion created at the federal, state, and local levels, using large-scale publicity campaigns, the fear of immigration raids, and detentions to cost-effectively push people out of the country. Here, Adam Goodman traces a comprehensive history of American deportation policies from 1882 to the present and near future. He shows that ome of the country's largest deportation operations expelled hundreds of thousands of people almost exclusively through the use of voluntary departures and through carefully-planned fear campaigns that terrified undocumented immigrants through newspaper, radio, and television publicity. These deportation efforts have disproportionately targeted Mexican immigrants, who make up half of non-citizens but 90% of deportees. Goodman examines the political economy of these deportation operations, arguing that they run on private transportation companies, corrupt public-private relations, and the creation of fear-based internal borders for long-term undocumented residents. He grounds his conclusions in over four years of research in English- and Spanish-language archives and twenty-five oral histories conducted with both immigration officials and immigrants-revealing for the first time the true magnitude and deep historical roots of anti-immigrant policy in the United Statesws that s

Download or read book A Line of Blood and Dirt written by Benjamin Hoy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-US border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians never behaved as such on the ground. Both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. The border's length undermined each nation's attempts at control. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines They aimed to stop journeys before they even began.