From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924
to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United
States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige
demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not
the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of
fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining
the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that
involved some of the most powerful public figures in American
politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this
opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist
policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that
began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to
the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then
has shaped the memory of past discrimination.
In this first
book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues
that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism;
they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for
the twenty-first century’s tightly integrated Pacific world.