Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future Read Online Free PDF

building in this land a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.’” Fischer further wrote, “Saum Song Bo wondered whether this statute against the Chinese or the Statue to Liberty will be the more lasting monument.” 6
    The Exclusion Act went even further by restricting any Chinese from becoming citizens, making their status as immigrants permanent and intending to prevent their assimilation into society and culture. The law essentially created a nation within a nation, attempting to exclude any Chinese from the opportunity to share in American prosperity.
    That same year, Congress also banned “any convict, lunatic, idiot, criminals, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge” under the 1882 Immigration Act.
    From this point onward, for more than forty years, the United States continued to impose restrictions. Eventually, even white Europeans, who since the nation’s founding immigrated freely, felt restrictions, but not like what Asians and Africans felt.
    In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) with an overwhelming majority. This act added to the number of undesirables banned from entering the country, including but not limited to “homosexuals,” “idiots,” “feeble-minded persons,” “criminals,” “epileptics,” “insane persons,” “alcoholics,” “professional beggars,” all persons “mentally or physically defective,” polygamists, and anarchists. Furthermore, it barred all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate. The most controversial part of the law was the section that designated an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” a region that included much of Asia and the Pacific Islands from which people could not immigrate. Previously, only the Chinese had been excluded from admission to the country.
    Then, the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded all classes of Chinese immigrants as well as Asians in general. It limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The law was aimed at further restricting the southern and eastern Europeans, mainly Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s, as well as prohibiting the immigration of Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians. Congressional opposition was minimal.
    It was not until 1943 that Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Certainly the specter of what had started in 1941 with Hitler’s “Final Solution” played into the change in U.S. immigration policy. However, by this time tens of thousands of Japanese Americans, many U.S. citizens by birth, had been confined to internment camps because the United States was at war with Japan.
     
    They sought to have their citizenship restored but were denied and almost sent back to Japan. A Justice Department official, reading their case and their reason for wanting their citizenship, allowed them to remain in the United States. However, they did not have their citizenship restored until 1968.
    Itaru and Shizuko Ina were both born in the United States, yet in 1941 they were among the many Japanese Americans who lost their homes and businesses. They were rounded up and shipped to what the government termed internment camps but what Japanese Americans, and even President Roosevelt, called concentration camps.
    Shizuko was four months pregnant when she and Itaru boarded a Greyhound bus that took them to Topaz. They were first taken to a horse race track for processing, where they were forced to live in a stall. By the time they reached Topaz, where the arid and dusty climate made noses bleed, Itaru had become indignant at their treatment.
    He began to fight for his and his family’s civil rights and made a speech, arguing the military took the internees’ constitutional rights based on discrimination. “We should be treated equal to the free people,” he said. That branded