Tracking the Yellow Peril: The INS and Chinese Immigrants in the Midwest
- Author: Peggy Spitzer Christoff
- SKU: 1966
- ISBN: 0897254104
- Our Price:
$29.95
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Description:
288pp, 6" X 9", over 300 photos of immigrants, mostly women, Every Name Index; perfect bound. 2001
"I almost can't express how exciting it was to view the initial set of case files for our family. Browsing through the testimony transcripts was pretty mind blowing, like being a fly on the wall! Many thanks to you, and your scholarship, for opening up this era for us."- Pamela
In the 19th century race to connect America's East and West coasts by railroad, Chinese laborers and other recent immigrants played a major role, did the hardest work, and suffered the worst losses by death, disease, and injury. Gratitude, however, was not the order of the day. Prejudice against "Yellow Peril" of Chinese immigration grew steadily, until in 1882 America passed its first laws aimed at excluding them. In varing permutations, the Chinese Exclusion Laws remained in place from 1882 until 1943, when they were finally abandoned.
The Immigration Service (now the Immigration and Naturalization Service or INS) bore the major brunt of enforcing the various and changing regulations, most aimed at excluding Chinese laborers but offering better access to Chinese professionals and businessmen, and to wives and children of earlier immigrants. By the early 1900s the INS had established a specific Chinese Bureau to administer those exclusion laws aimed solely against the Chinese and, after 1924, the new quota system designed for them. While the Chinese Exclusion Laws were repealed in 1943, it wasn't until 1965 that the quota system was finally abolished and that Chinese were permitted entry on the same basis as other immigrants.
In this book the author focuses on those Chinesse women who wished to settle in America's Midwest during the so-called Exclusion Period (1882-1943). She examines in depth the ways that both men and women and their children entered and departed America; both students and professionals in American schools as well as public charges. Her book addresses in particular the plight of Chinese women as well as Chinese laborers, who were the explicit targets of the Exclusion Laws, and their reactions to those laws.
Readers, whether of Chinese descent or not, will find find this a fascinating study of the behavior of Chinese immigrants, of the INS and its agents, and of those serving as brokers between the two groups. There was a wide variety of behaviour, good and bad, devious and direct, on both sides of the battle. Highly recommended for all students of immigrant movements anywhere in the world.
