If you could tell one story about the plight of Asian Americans in the US, what would it be?

The Chinese Exclusion Act. It was passed on 1882 and was in effect for 61 years until it was finally repealed in 1943 by the Magnuson Act.

To this day, the Chinese Exclusion Act remains the first and only law that banned a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States.

There was also the Immigration Act of 1924, also called the Asian Exclusion Act. It was originally aimed at targeting immigrants from suspected communist-leaning countries like Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Jewish diaspora, but it also when more Asian immigrants began arriving to California, it was expanded to shut out all immigration from Asia.

So for 19 years, no one from any part of Asia -- Korea, Cambodia, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, India, Burma, and any other Asian country that wasn't Russia -- could immigrate to the United States or become a naturalized citizen. Not even the Philippines, which was an American colony at the time, was allowed to send emigrants.

I think these acts are the ultimate source of our problems. They've bolstered the perpetual stereotype which prevents us from being seen as "real" Americans. They've also hampered the development of a pan-Asian American culture that reaches across specific ethnic lines. It's hard to develop pan-Asian American solidarity when when most of your demographic is only two generations deep.

The Japanese American interment, Vincent Chin, prescriptive stereotypes in the workplace, seeing Asians as "white" (affirmative action) and as outsiders (bamboo ceiling) interchangeably to uphold white supremacy. . . If I had to identify observable, tangible culprits instead of ethereal concepts like racism and Yellow Peril, I'd say that all of our current struggles can ultimately be traced back to the immigration acts.

/r/asianamerican Thread