Setting the Stage

Japanese migration to the U.S. mainland began in earnest in 1869. Farmers, student laborers, political exiles, and thousands of others arrived to work on railroads, in lumber mills, in canneries, and on farms. Amid this immigration, Congress passed the 1875 Page Act. The first federal law to restrict immigration, it set a standard of excluding immigrants based on their race, national origin, gender, and class.

Even so, over 180,000 Japanese came to the U.S. mainland, and 200,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawai’i between 1885 and 1924. On the mainland, Japanese Americans became the target of racial discrimination. Drawing on pre-existing anti-Chinese sentiments, organized labor, newspaper editors, and politicians discriminated against the Japanese, calling them “unassimilable.”

In the 1920s, major legislation restricted immigration amidst fears that immigrants would bring with them poverty, disease, and so-called “hostile” ideas like anarchism and Catholicism. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 abolished Asian immigration while setting strict quotas to limit the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. These policies worked to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” They would define U.S. immigration policy for the next three decades.