← Introduction to Ethnic Studies outline

Week 11 · Chapter

Chapter 11 — Asian American and Pacific Islander Experiences I: Exclusion and Incarceration

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 7 (analyze Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences, from exclusion and the naturalization cases through the incarceration of Japanese Americans and redress, the 1965 law, the Asian American movement, the model-minority image and its critique, refugee resettlement, and Native Hawaiian history) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, the quiz, and the workshop all build on it.

In plain language

This chapter follows Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigrants and their American-born children from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to a 1988 law that apologized for a wartime wrong. Congress passed laws of exclusion (laws that barred a group, named by national origin, from entering or from becoming a citizen). The Supreme Court decided who was a citizen by birth and who could become one through naturalization (the legal process by which a person born in another country becomes a citizen). In 1942 a presidential order led to the incarceration (imprisonment in guarded camps) of people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, and decades later came redress (a government's formal act of making amends for a wrong it did). You will learn to read a family's papers beside the dated record and say, in one plain sentence, what they show together.

Why you already care about this

Picture a kitchen drawer in an illustrative family's home. Inside are a birth certificate, an old apartment lease, two photographs, and a letter on government paper. Nobody planned the drawer. Over 40 years, the family kept putting the important papers in the same place.

You probably have a drawer, a folder, or a box like it. Papers like these answer quiet questions: Where was this person born? Who let them rent a home? Who wrote to them, and why? An ethnic studies reader asks one more question: what did the law say about the people named on those papers? This week, the answer runs through Congress, the Supreme Court, an island in San Francisco Bay, and a wartime order of the President.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

explain what the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 did, how it was extended, and when it was repealed, and work out how long exclusion law lasted;
describe the Angel Island Immigration Station and read the poems on its walls as a record the detainees made;
explain birthright citizenship and what United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) held;
explain how Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923) applied the "white person" rule, and what the Immigration Act of 1924 did;
explain Executive Order 9066 (1942) as an order of the President, and say why "incarceration" and "forced removal" describe what happened;
explain what Korematsu v. United States (1944) upheld, what happened in 1983, and what the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 did, and read the archive's E7 excerpt in the field's order.

Carry this sentence with you: A citizen on paper was not always treated as a citizen.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the field's questions and its four core fields. Week 2 defined race, racialization, racial formation, and institutional discrimination. Week 3 taught the theories of belonging. Weeks 4 and 5 traced Native nations, and Weeks 6 and 7 read the laws that made and unmade slavery and segregation. Weeks 9 and 10 read conquest, labor, and movements in Chicana/o and Latina/o history.
This week: the exclusion acts, Angel Island, citizenship by birth and by naturalization, Executive Order 9066, Korematsu v. United States (1944), and redress under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
How they connect: the 14th Amendment (1868) from Week 6 is the clause this week's citizenship case turns on, and Week 2's racial formation explains how a court could decide who counted as white.
Where we're going next: Week 12 continues Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences, with the 1965 immigration law, the Asian American movement, and the Pacific.

Week 6 gave you the key text this chapter leans on. The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause (1868) reads "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States". It was ratified after Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court held that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to the country and sold as slaves was not a citizen. Week 2 gave you racial formation, Omi and Winant's (1986) term for the process by which racial categories are created, lived, changed, and contested, including through law.

A word on names. "Asian American" is a political term coined in 1968, which you meet next week. This chapter names communities by their own names: Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and people born in India. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are their own group, not folded into Asian American, and their history is next week's. For the Second World War, this course says "incarceration" and "forced removal" in its own voice; section 5 explains why.

1. Read the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: a law that named a nation

Imagine a club that posts a new rule on its door: no new members from one particular town. Nobody from that town did anything wrong. The rule names a place of origin, and everyone from it is turned away.

In 1882 Congress wrote a rule like that into federal law.

Exclusion is a law that bars a group, named by national origin, from entering the country or from becoming a citizen.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and barred courts from admitting Chinese immigrants to citizenship. It did not end there. The Geary Act extended it in 1892, the extension was made permanent in 1902, and Congress repealed the exclusion acts in 1943.

Worked example — how long exclusion law lasted. Work out the span from the National Archives' dated record.

The first act. The Chinese Exclusion Act came in 1882.
The repeal. Congress repealed the exclusion acts in 1943.
The span. 1943 − 1882 = 61 years.

In words: the Chinese Exclusion Act came in 1882 and Congress repealed the exclusion acts in 1943, so 1943 − 1882 = 61 years of exclusion law. A Chinese laborer who arrived as a young man before 1882 could live his whole adult life under it.

Now read the act with Week 2's terms. A law that names a national origin is institutional discrimination written into statute: the rule itself produces the unequal treatment, whether or not any one official dislikes anyone. Every official who applied the 1882 act applied the same rule.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a rule at a school or job that applied to one group by where its members came from. Who wrote it, and who carried it out?
(b) Why might a law that was meant to last ten years end up lasting 61? Name one question you would ask of the record.

Misconception check. Students often think exclusion ended with the 1882 act, as if it were a ten-year pause. That is tempting, because the act's own text said ten years. But the Geary Act extended it in 1892, the extension was made permanent in 1902, and repeal came only in 1943. The cure: read a law's later history, not only its first text.

2. Visit the Angel Island Immigration Station: walls that kept a record

Think about a waiting room you have sat in for a long time, perhaps at a clinic or a government office. People leave small marks there: initials on a table, a note on a board. Those marks are a record nobody official wrote.

The Angel Island Immigration Station sat on an island in San Francisco Bay. It opened in 1910 and closed after a fire in 1940.

Worked example — the station's years. Work out how long it ran.

Opened. 1910.
Closed after a fire. 1940.
The span. 1940 − 1910 = 30 years.

In words: the Angel Island Immigration Station opened in 1910 and closed after a fire in 1940, a span of 30 years, all of it inside the era of exclusion law.

The National Park Service states that the station processed up to one million Asian and other immigrants, about 250,000 of them Chinese and about 150,000 Japanese. This course teaches those figures in words and never keys them, because they are estimates. Detainees carved poems into the barracks walls.

Read the walls in the field's order. What they say: the poems are the detainees' own words. Who made them: people held at the station, not the officials who processed them. Whom they affected: the writers and the later detainees who read them. What they leave out: a carved poem rarely carries a full name, a date, or the official reason for a person's detention. What a comparison adds: the government kept its own files on each arrival, and the walls kept a second record beside them.

Here is an honesty note about evidence. The official files and the poems answer different questions. The files say what the government decided about a person. The walls say what waiting under exclusion felt like to the people waiting.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) If you had to leave one line on a wall for the next person in a long wait, what would it say, and why?
(b) Why might a historian value a carved poem with no name on it? What can it show that a government file cannot?

Misconception check. Students often think Angel Island processed only Chinese immigrants. That is tempting, because the station is best known for the Chinese exclusion era. But the National Park Service states it processed Asian and other immigrants, including about 150,000 Japanese. The cure: read the station as a gate for many groups, shaped most by exclusion law.

3. Explain birthright citizenship: the Wong Kim Ark case

Picture the first day of class at an illustrative high school. The teacher reads the roll call: names from many languages, some of which the teacher mispronounces. Every student on the list was born in the same city. How the name sounds says nothing about whether the student is a citizen.

Birthright citizenship is citizenship gained by being born in the country.

In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court held that Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment (1868). The Court's reason was that his parents had a permanent domicile and residence in the United States. His parents could not become citizens under the exclusion law. He was a citizen anyway, because he was born here.

Worked example — placing the case on the citizenship thread. Use Dataset F, the course's thread on who could become a citizen.

The denial. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to the country and sold as slaves was not a citizen.
The clause. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 and made all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens.
The case. United States v. Wong Kim Ark came in 1898, so 1898 − 1868 = 30 years after the clause.

In words: the clause ratified 30 years earlier, after Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) denied citizenship to Black Americans, now made the son of excluded immigrants a citizen. One clause, won after the Civil War, protected a second group three decades later.

That is the comparison the field asks you to make. Black Americans' fight over citizenship produced the 14th Amendment. The same words then reached a Chinese American son of immigrants who were barred from naturalizing. Week 9's Hernandez v. Texas (1954) also read the 14th Amendment's protection as reaching beyond a Black-and-white "two-class theory".

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Name one document in your own life that shows where you were born. Who uses it, and for what?
(b) Why might it matter that a citizenship rule depends on place of birth rather than on a parent's status? Give one reason.

Misconception check. Students often think the 14th Amendment is only about Black citizens. That is tempting, because it was ratified after the Civil War to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). But its citizenship and equal protection clauses are used by every later group in this course, and Wong Kim Ark (1898) is one of the first. The cure: follow a clause forward and see whom else it reached.

4. Compare Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act: who could become a citizen, and who could enter

Think about a form with only two boxes, "yes" and "no", for a question whose honest answer is "it depends". Whoever reads the form decides what each box means. That is what happened when courts had to read two words in the naturalization law.

Naturalization is the legal process by which a person born in another country becomes a citizen.

The first naturalization law, of 1790, limited naturalization to an alien "being a free white person". In 1870 Congress extended it to persons of African nativity and descent. Everyone else born abroad stayed outside the door, so courts had to decide who counted as "white".

In Ozawa v. United States (1922), the Court denied naturalization to Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, on the ground that he was not a "white person".
In United States v. Thind (1923), the Court held that "white person" was to be read as the common man understood it and denied naturalization to Bhagat Singh Thind, born in India.

Then Congress closed the entry door too. The Immigration Act of 1924 completely excluded immigrants from Asia.

Worked example — three kinds of law, side by side. Put this week's dates on one line.

Who may enter. The Chinese Exclusion Act came in 1882, and the Immigration Act of 1924 completely excluded immigrants from Asia: 1924 − 1882 = 42 years after the first exclusion act.
Who is a citizen by birth. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) held that a child born here to Chinese parents was a citizen.
Who may become one. Ozawa v. United States came in 1922 and United States v. Thind in 1923, so 1923 − 1922 = 1 year apart.

In words: by 1924, birth, naturalization, and entry were three separate doors. A child born here to Asian immigrants came through the first one, while naturalization and entry were both shut to immigrants from Asia.

Read the two cases with Week 2's racial formation. A court deciding who counts as "white" is a racial category being made through law. In Thind (1923) the Court said the words were to be read as the common man understood them, which is a social reading, not a biological measurement. A limitation to keep in view: this chapter states only what the National Archives' summary pins about each holding, and the full opinions say more.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a word on a form you have filled out that could be read more than one way. Who decided what it meant?
(b) Why might a court's reading of two words in a 1790 law matter to someone's grandchildren? Name one effect.

Misconception check. Students often think race is a fixed, natural category that courts only looked up. That is tempting, because the law used the words "white person" as if their meaning were settled. But in Thind (1923) the Court read the words as the common man understood them, a social definition. The cure: read a racial category in law as something a society made and changed.

5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use

Imagine a school principal's memo that orders "certain students" to clear their lockers by Friday. The memo never says which students. Then the staff decides, and every student of one background is told to leave. The memo's words were neutral; the way it was used was not.

An executive order is a written order issued by the President to direct the work of the federal government; it is not a law passed by Congress.

Executive Order 9066 (1942) was such an order. The order never names a group, yet under it people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forcibly removed and incarcerated, most of them U.S. citizens. The National Archives gives about 122,000 people, nearly 70,000 of them citizens, and the National Park Service about 120,000. Because the sources give different totals, this course teaches the total in words and keys only that most were citizens.

Worked example — citizens by birth, removed. Count from the citizenship case.

The case. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) held that a child born here to Chinese parents was a citizen.
The order. Executive Order 9066 came in 1942.
The gap. 1942 − 1898 = 44 years after Wong Kim Ark settled that a child born here to Chinese parents was a citizen.

In words: 44 years after the Court settled citizenship by birth for a child of excluded immigrants, an order of the President was used to remove citizens by birth from their homes. Most of the people removed were exactly the kind of citizen Wong Kim Ark described.

Now the words. Read them slowly, because they carry the history.

Incarceration is the imprisonment of people in guarded camps or prisons. This course uses it for the Second World War imprisonment of Japanese Americans.
Internment was the government's term at the time. In the international law of war it means detaining enemy noncitizens, so it does not describe imprisoning citizens. The National Park Service makes this point in its own guide to the terms.
Forced removal means moving people out of their homes by government order against their will. This course uses it instead of "evacuation", the government's word at the time.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of a time an official word made something sound milder than it was. Which word would you have used instead, and why?
(b) Why might it matter that the order never names a group? Explain what that does and does not change about how it was used.

Misconception check. Students often think Executive Order 9066 reached only noncitizens, and that Congress passed it. Both are tempting, because "internment" sounds like a law-of-war measure against enemy noncitizens. But the order was an order of the President, not a law, and most of the people removed and incarcerated under it were U.S. citizens. The cure: name the order by its number and year, and say "most were citizens" every time.

6. Read Korematsu and the record that answered it

Think of a referee's call that stands for decades, even after the replay shows it was wrong. The scoreboard never changes, but the record around it does. A court case can work the same way.

In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion order by a 6–3 vote. Fred Korematsu had been convicted, and his appeal brought the order before the Court. In 1983, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction.

Worked example — the conviction overturned. Work out the gap.

The decision. Korematsu v. United States came in 1944.
The ruling. A federal judge overturned Korematsu's conviction in 1983.
The gap. 1983 − 1944 = 39 years.

In words: Korematsu v. United States came in 1944 and the ruling that overturned Korematsu's conviction in 1983, so 1983 − 1944 = 39 years passed before his conviction was cleared.

The same year, a federal commission answered the deeper question of why the order was issued. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported in Personal Justice Denied (1983) that the decision to issue the order was shaped by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership". Notice that the commission's own name uses the older words, "relocation" and "internment"; that is the government's term at the time, inside a proper name.

Read the finding in the field's order. What it says: the order came from prejudice, fear, and failed leadership. Who made it: a commission of the federal government itself. Whom it affected: every person removed under the order and their families. What it leaves out: a report's summary cannot carry each family's loss. What a comparison adds: in Week 7, the Supreme Court itself held in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"; here the 1983 correction came through a lower court and a federal commission, not through the Court that decided the case.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Why might a government's own commission carry weight that an outside critic's report would not? Name one reason.
(b) Think of a decision at your school or job that was later admitted to be wrong. What changed after the admission, and what stayed the same?

Misconception check. Students often think the 1983 ruling overturned the Supreme Court's 1944 decision. That is tempting, because both carry Fred Korematsu's name. But the 1983 ruling, by a federal judge in San Francisco, overturned his conviction; it did not reverse the Court's 1944 decision. The cure: say whose ruling, and what it overturned.

7. Define redress and read E7: two papers in one drawer

Return to the kitchen drawer from the start of the chapter. A birth certificate proves where a person was born. A letter on government paper can prove something else: that the government admitted a wrong. Kept together, the two papers can tell a story neither tells alone.

Redress is a government's formal act of making amends for a wrong it did, through an apology, a payment, or a return of what was taken.

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 apologized and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person who had been incarcerated.

The course's running archive (Dataset A) is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection. Its excerpts are constructed for this course, identified by role and decade, and never presented as a real person's words. Here is E7: a retired teacher whose parents were incarcerated in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s.

"My parents were teenagers when the order came in 1942, and both were born in this country. The family lost the lease on the farm. After the 1988 law, each of them received a letter of apology from the government and the payment. My mother kept the letter in the same drawer as her birth certificate. She said the two papers together finally told the whole story." (E7, illustrative)

Worked example — reading E7 in the field's order. Walk the five questions every reading asks, and work the dates as you go.

What it says. The parents were teenagers in 1942 and both were born in this country. The family lost the lease on the farm. After the 1988 law, each parent received a letter of apology and the payment.
Who made it. It is a first-person account recorded about five decades after the order, which tells how one family kept the record of what happened; the dated record tells what the order, the case, and the 1988 law did.
Whom it affected. Two parents, born in this country, so citizens by birth; their family, who lost the farm lease; and the teacher, who kept the story.
What it leaves out. It names no camp, no town, and no year of release, and it does not say what the farm lease was worth, so its dates are checked against the order (1942) and the 1988 law. The order came in 1942 and the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, so 1988 − 1942 = 46 years.
What a comparison adds. The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause (1868) was ratified after Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) denied citizenship to Black Americans, and the Court read the same clause in Wong Kim Ark (1898) to make a son of Chinese parents a citizen. In 1942 that citizenship by birth did not stop the forced removal of E7's parents.

One more piece of arithmetic. Each surviving person received 20,000 dollars, so a family with two surviving parents, like E7's, received 2 × 20,000 = 40,000 dollars in all.

In words: E7 is an illustrative account of a family incarcerated under Executive Order 9066 (1942). In it, the birth certificate shows the parents were citizens by birth and the letter of apology under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 shows the government admitting the wrong 46 years later, so the two papers together tell the whole story.

Here is a caveat about what the payment did. It was the same 20,000 dollars for each surviving person, whatever a family had lost, and people who died before the law received nothing under it. The comparison across groups ends in one sentence too: across both groups, citizenship written into law was the ground people stood on, and in both it was overridden in practice.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Why might the mother keep the apology letter in the same drawer as her birth certificate? What does each paper prove?
(b) Is an apology without a payment still redress? Explain your view using the definition above.

Misconception check. Students often think redress paid back what each family lost. That is tempting, because a payment sounds like repayment. But the 1988 law paid the same 20,000 dollars to each surviving person, and E7's family lost a farm lease the excerpt never values. The cure: read redress as an apology and an acknowledgment, and ask what it does and does not restore.

Key terms

Exclusion — A law that bars a group, named by national origin, from entering the country or from becoming a citizen; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law of this kind. (first used: 1. Read the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: a law that named a nation)
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — The federal law that suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and barred courts from admitting Chinese immigrants to citizenship; the Geary Act extended it in 1892, the extension was made permanent in 1902, and Congress repealed the exclusion acts in 1943. (first used: 1. Read the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: a law that named a nation)
Angel Island Immigration Station — The federal immigration station in San Francisco Bay that opened in 1910 and closed after a fire in 1940; it processed up to one million Asian and other immigrants, and detainees carved poems into its barracks walls. (first used: 2. Visit the Angel Island Immigration Station: walls that kept a record)
Birthright citizenship — Citizenship gained by being born in the country, under the 14th Amendment's clause that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens. (first used: 3. Explain birthright citizenship: the Wong Kim Ark case)
United States v. Wong Kim Ark — The 1898 Supreme Court decision holding that Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who had a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, was a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment. (first used: 3. Explain birthright citizenship: the Wong Kim Ark case)
Naturalization — The legal process by which a person born in another country becomes a citizen; the first naturalization law, of 1790, limited it to a free white person, and in 1870 Congress extended it to persons of African nativity and descent. (first used: 4. Compare Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act: who could become a citizen, and who could enter)
Ozawa v. United States — The 1922 Supreme Court decision that denied naturalization to Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, on the ground that he was not a white person under the naturalization law. (first used: 4. Compare Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act: who could become a citizen, and who could enter)
United States v. Thind — The 1923 Supreme Court decision holding that the words white person in the naturalization law were to be read as the common man understood them, which denied naturalization to Bhagat Singh Thind, born in India. (first used: 4. Compare Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act: who could become a citizen, and who could enter)
Immigration Act of 1924 — The federal immigration law, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, that set national-origins quotas and completely excluded immigrants from Asia. (first used: 4. Compare Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act: who could become a citizen, and who could enter)
Executive order — A written order issued by the President to direct the work of the federal government; it is not a law passed by Congress. (first used: 5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use)
Executive Order 9066 — The 1942 order of the President, not a law passed by Congress, under which people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were forcibly removed and incarcerated, most of them U.S. citizens; the order itself names no group. (first used: 5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use)
Incarceration — The imprisonment of people in guarded camps or prisons; the course uses it for the Second World War imprisonment of Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. (first used: 5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use)
Internment — In the international law of war, the detention of enemy noncitizens in wartime; it was also the government's term at the time for the camps, which held mostly U.S. citizens, so the course explains it rather than using it in its own voice. (first used: 5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use)
Forced removal — Moving people out of their homes by government order against their will; the course uses it in place of evacuation, the government's word at the time for the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. (first used: 5. Explain Executive Order 9066: an order, not a law, and the words we use)
Korematsu v. United States — The 1944 Supreme Court decision that upheld the exclusion order against people of Japanese ancestry by a 6–3 vote; in 1983 a federal judge in San Francisco overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction. (first used: 6. Read Korematsu and the record that answered it)
Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians — The federal commission whose 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, found that the decision to issue Executive Order 9066 was shaped by race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. (first used: 6. Read Korematsu and the record that answered it)
Redress — A government's formal act of making amends for a wrong it did, through an apology, a payment, or a return of what was taken. (first used: 7. Define redress and read E7: two papers in one drawer)
Civil Liberties Act of 1988 — The federal law that apologized for the incarceration of Japanese Americans and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person who had been incarcerated. (first used: 7. Define redress and read E7: two papers in one drawer)

Summary

The 1882 act barred Chinese laborers and Chinese naturalization; exclusion law lasted 61 years, to 1943.
Angel Island ran 30 years, and its carved poems are a record the detainees made.
Wong Kim Ark (1898): a child born here is a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment.
Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) applied the "white person" rule; the 1924 act shut entry from Asia.
Executive Order 9066 (1942) was an order, not a law; most people removed were citizens.
Say "incarceration" and "forced removal"; "internment" was the government's term.
The 1983 ruling overturned Korematsu's conviction, not the Court's 1944 decision.
The 1988 law apologized and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative neighborhood newspaper (not a real one) printed for 18 years, stopped for 4 years, and then printed for 27 more years. How many years passed from its first issue to its last?
A classmate writes, "Executive Order 9066 was a law Congress passed to intern enemy aliens." Name what is wrong and rewrite the sentence.
In an illustrative family, a daughter was born in the country in the 1910s to two parents who lived here permanently but were barred from naturalizing. Was she a citizen? Name the case that settled it and the clause it read.
A study note says, "In 1983 the Supreme Court's Korematsu decision was overturned." Explain what is wrong and fix it.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Add the three spans: 18 + 4 + 27 = 49 years. The newspaper's first and last issues were 49 years apart, including the 4 years it stopped. This is a fresh, illustrative case, not one of this week's dated events.
The sentence has three errors. Executive Order 9066 was an order of the President, not a law Congress passed; it was used against people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, not only enemy noncitizens; and "intern" is the government's term at the time, not the course's. A fixed sentence: "Executive Order 9066 (1942), an order of the President, was used to forcibly remove and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, most of them U.S. citizens."
Yes. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) held that a child born here to Chinese parents who had a permanent domicile and residence in the United States was a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause (1868). Her parents' bar from naturalization did not change her own citizenship by birth.
The 1983 ruling did not overturn the Supreme Court's decision. A federal judge in San Francisco overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction in 1983, 39 years after the 1944 decision. A fixed note: "In 1983 a federal judge overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction; the Supreme Court's 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States was not reversed by that ruling."

Next up in this module: the lecture, the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week, you read the 1965 law that abolished the national-origins quota rule the 1924 act built.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com