Lecture: Asian American and Pacific Islander Experiences I: Exclusion and Incarceration
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 11
Opening
Picture a kitchen drawer in a family's home. Inside are a birth certificate, an old lease, a couple of photographs, and a letter on government paper. Nobody planned that drawer. Over the years, the family kept putting the important papers in the same place. You may have a drawer like it, or a folder, or a shoebox. In this lecture, I want you to ask what the law said about the people named on papers like those.
Here's where we are. In Week 2 you met racial formation, the process by which racial categories are created, lived, changed, and contested, including through law. In Week 6 you read the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and its citizenship clause. And across Weeks 9 and 10 you read how conquest, labor, and the courts shaped belonging for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities.
This week we turn to Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigrants and their American-born children. We'll walk through seven ideas: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Angel Island Immigration Station, citizenship by birth, the naturalization cases and the 1924 act, Executive Order 9066, the Korematsu case, and redress. One word about names before we start. "Asian American" is a political term coined in 1968, and you'll meet it next week. In this lecture I name communities by their own names. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are their own group, and their history is next week's too.
1. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
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. The word for it is 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 suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. It also barred courts from admitting Chinese immigrants to citizenship.
Here's the part people miss. Ten years was only the beginning. The Geary Act extended it in 1892. The extension was made permanent in 1902. And Congress didn't repeal the exclusion acts until 1943. So count it: take 1882 away from 1943, and you get 61 years of exclusion law. That's most of a lifetime.
Now read it with a tool from Week 2. A law that names a national origin is institutional discrimination written into statute. The rule itself produces the unequal treatment. No single official has to dislike anyone for the result to be unequal, because every official applies the same rule.
Pause and try this. A classmate says Chinese exclusion lasted ten years. Using the year 1943, what's wrong with that?
Take a breath and say your fix out loud.
Here's the answer. The 1882 act said ten years, but it was extended in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and repealed only in 1943. That's 61 years of exclusion law, so you read a law's later history, not only its first text.
2. Angel Island and the walls
Think about a waiting room where you sat for a long time. Maybe it was a clinic or a government office. People leave small marks in places like that: initials on a table, a note pinned to a board. Those marks are a record that 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. That's 30 years, and every one of them fell inside the era of exclusion law. The National Park Service says the station processed Asian and other immigrants, among them about 250,000 Chinese. We say figures like that in words, with their source, because they're estimates.
And here's what makes Angel Island matter to a reader of records. Detainees carved poems into the barracks walls. Let's read those walls in the field's order. What do they say? They're the detainees' own words. Who made them? The people being held, not the officials processing them. What do they leave out? A carved poem rarely carries a full name, a date, or the official reason a person was held. And what does a comparison add? The government kept its own files on each arrival. The walls kept a second record beside those files.
So you end up with two kinds of evidence. The files say what the government decided about a person. The walls say what waiting under exclusion felt like to the person waiting.
Pause and try this. Name one thing the poems on the walls can tell you that a government file cannot.
Think about who held the pen in each case.
Here's the answer. The poems tell you how detention felt to the people inside it, in their own words. A government file records a decision made about a person; the wall records the person's own voice.
3. Citizenship by birth: Wong Kim Ark
Picture the first day of class at a high school. The teacher reads the roll call, and the names come from many languages. The teacher mispronounces a few of them. Every student on that list was born in the same city. How a name sounds says nothing about whether a student is a citizen.
That's the plain idea behind birthright citizenship: citizenship gained by being born in the country. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided in 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. The 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.
Now let's place that on the course's citizenship thread. In Week 6 you read Dred Scott v. Sandford, from 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. Those are the Court's words, not ours. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, answered that decision with its citizenship clause. Then, 30 years later, the Court read that same clause in Wong Kim Ark.
So here's the comparison across groups. A clause won after the Civil War, after a fight over Black citizenship, reached the son of excluded Chinese immigrants three decades later. That's why the field says the 14th Amendment isn't only about one group. Its words were used by group after group.
Pause and try this. Wong Kim Ark's parents couldn't naturalize. Why was he still a citizen?
Hold the word "birth" in your mind for a second.
Here's the answer. He was born in the United States, and the Court held in 1898 that the 14th Amendment made him a citizen by birth. His parents' status didn't decide his own citizenship.
4. Ozawa, Thind, and the 1924 act
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's what happened when the 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, from 1790, limited it 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 that door. So courts had to decide who counted as "white".
In Ozawa v. United States, in 1922, the Court denied naturalization to Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, on the ground that he was not a "white person". One year later, in United States v. Thind, in 1923, the Court held that "white person" was to be read as the common man understood it. It denied naturalization to Bhagat Singh Thind, born in India.
Read those two cases with racial formation from Week 2. A court deciding who counts as white is a racial category being made through law. And notice what Thind says about how the words should be read: as the common man understood them. That's a social reading, not a biological measurement.
Then Congress shut the entry door too. The Immigration Act of 1924 completely excluded immigrants from Asia. That came 42 years after the first exclusion act. So by 1924 you have three separate doors. Entry was shut. Naturalization was shut. And birth, thanks to Wong Kim Ark, was the one door still open, but only to children born here.
Pause and try this. Which of the three doors did Ozawa and Thind close: entry, birth, or naturalization?
Picture the three doors and pick one.
Here's the answer. Naturalization. Both men were born abroad and asked to become citizens, and the Court denied both under the "white person" rule. The 1924 act closed entry, and Wong Kim Ark kept birth open.
5. Executive Order 9066 and the words we use
Imagine a school principal sends a memo that orders "certain students" to clear their lockers. The memo never says which students. Then the staff decides, and every student of one background is told to leave. The memo's words sounded 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 came in 1942. 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. The National Park Service gives about 120,000. Because the sources differ, we say the total in words, and the fact we hold onto is this: most were citizens.
Count from the citizenship case. Wong Kim Ark came in 1898, and the order came in 1942. That's 44 years after the Court settled that a child born here to Chinese parents was a citizen. Most of the people removed were exactly that kind of citizen, born here.
Now the words, because the words carry the history. Incarceration is the imprisonment of people in guarded camps or prisons, and it's the word this course uses. Internment was the government's term at the time. In the international law of war, it means detaining enemy noncitizens, so it doesn't describe imprisoning citizens. And this course says forced removal, moving people out of their homes by government order against their will, instead of the government's word, "evacuation".
Pause and try this. Someone writes that Congress passed a law to intern enemy aliens in 1942. Name two things wrong with that sentence.
Take a moment and find both.
Here's the answer. Executive Order 9066 was an order of the President, not a law passed by Congress. And most of the people removed and incarcerated under it were U.S. citizens, not enemy noncitizens, which is why "internment" doesn't fit.
6. Korematsu and the record that answered it
Think of a referee's call that stands for years, even after the replay shows it was wrong. The scoreboard never changes, but the record around the call does. A court case can work like that.
In Korematsu v. United States, in 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion order by a vote of 6 to 3. Fred Korematsu had been convicted, and his appeal brought the order before the Court. Then, in 1983, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction. Take 1944 away from 1983, and you get 39 years before his conviction was cleared.
That same year, 1983, 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, that the decision to issue the order was shaped by "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership". Notice the commission's own name uses the older words, relocation and internment. That's the government's term at the time, inside a proper name.
Let's read the finding the way we read everything. It says the order came from prejudice, fear, and failed leadership. A commission of the federal government itself made it, which gives it real weight. And what does it leave out? A summary finding can't carry each family's loss. That's where the archive comes in, in the next section.
Pause and try this. Did the 1983 ruling reverse the Supreme Court's 1944 decision?
Think about who made the 1983 ruling before you answer.
Here's the answer. No. A federal judge in San Francisco overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction in 1983. That cleared his conviction, but it didn't reverse the Supreme Court's 1944 decision, so you always say whose ruling and what it overturned.
7. Redress and two papers in one drawer
Let's go back to that kitchen drawer. 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, two papers can tell a story neither one 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.
Now the archive. The course archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, built for this course, and none of its excerpts is a real person's words. Excerpt E7 comes from a retired teacher whose parents were incarcerated in the 1940s, interviewed in the 1990s. The teacher says the 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 parent received a letter of apology and the payment. The mother kept the letter in the same drawer as her birth certificate. She said the two papers together "finally told the whole story."
Walk it in the field's order. It says the parents were citizens by birth and were removed anyway. A narrator made it, decades later, telling how one family kept the record. It affected two parents, their family, and the teacher who kept the story. It leaves out the camp, the town, and what the lease was worth, so you check its dates against the record: from the order in 1942 to the law in 1988 is 46 years. And each surviving parent received 20,000 dollars, so the family received 40,000 dollars in all.
Then the comparison. The same citizenship clause that answered Dred Scott made Wong Kim Ark a citizen, and it made E7's parents citizens too. In 1942, that citizenship didn't stop their forced removal. Across both groups, citizenship written into law was the ground people stood on, and in both it was overridden in practice.
Pause and try this. Why did the mother say the birth certificate and the apology letter told the whole story together?
Picture the two papers side by side.
Here's the answer. The birth certificate shows the parents were citizens by birth, and the letter shows the government admitting the wrong 46 years after the order. One paper proves who they were; the other proves what was done to them.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 began 61 years of exclusion law, ending with repeal in 1943. Angel Island ran 30 years, and its walls hold a record the detainees made. Wong Kim Ark, in 1898, made a child born here a citizen by birth under the 14th Amendment. Ozawa and Thind closed naturalization under the "white person" rule, and the 1924 act closed entry from Asia. Executive Order 9066, an order and not a law, was used to remove and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry, most of them citizens. Korematsu upheld the order in 1944, and a federal judge overturned Korematsu's conviction in 1983. And the 1988 law apologized and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person.
Later in this module, the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz let you work with these ideas yourself. The Community History Workshop then puts E7 on the timeline in your own words. Next week, in Week 12, the course continues with Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences: reopening, movement, and the Pacific, starting with the immigration law that abolished the quota system the 1924 act built.
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