Asian American Day of Remembrance
By Phil Tajitsu Nash

The recent indictment of nuclear scientist Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the new Congressional hearings focusing on former DNC fundraiser John Huang’s role in the campaign finance scandals of 1996, and the anti-Asian hysteria that is being generated as a result of these actions convinces me that we should mark tomorrow, Dec. 17, as the first annual Asian American Day of Remembrance.

Fifty-six years earlier on that day, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Though it’s not 1943 anymore, the occasion reminds us of the unfortunate indeterminate place we continue to occupy in America’s racial and political discourse.

Until an Asian American is sworn in as president of the United States, each of us should take a few moments on Dec. 17 of each year to remember how far we have come and how far we have to go to reach political parity.

On Dec. 17, 1943, Congress passed “An Act to Repeal the Chinese Exclusions Act, to Establish Quotas, and for Other Purposes.” It allowed Chinese people already in the United States to become naturalized citizens and set an annual quota of 105 new Chinese immigrants. The act came barely a week after Senate Joint Resolution 93, which granted independence to the Philippines whenever the Japanese were defeated and normal conditions were restored to the island nation. It also came two weeks after the issuance of the U.S. military’s Military Order No. 4, which exempted Koreans in America from “enemy alien” status. Thus, Korean Americans were released from the trap of guilt by association , because Korea had been considered a colony of Japan since 1910.

So it was especially ironic that the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act continued the second-class status that the original had implemented.

Before 1882, immigration was largely regulated on a state-by-state basis. That year, Congress stepped in with a federal Immigration Act that banned the admission of “lunatics, idiots, convicts, persons likely to become public charges.”

The companion Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed the same year, added Chinese to the list of people barred from immigration, with only a few skilled laborers and merchants excepted. This was the first time that citizens of one nation had been singled out during this time of wholesale discrimination. Though the Chinese Exclusion Act had a 10- year duration, the prohibition on Chinese immigration was extended in 1892 and then made “permanent” in 1902.

This “exclusion” had several interesting ramifications. A few Chinese immigrants continued to come to the United States, claiming that they had been born to Chinese American fathers in China but that the registration of their birth records had been destroyed in the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Others went to Canada, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

To replace the Chinese American laborers in the fields and factories, immigrants of Japanese, Filipino, and Indian heritage were brought in throughout the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fast forward to 1943. The outcome of the war in the Pacific was far from certain. Japanese militarists had scored some propaganda points by pointing out, quite correctly, that Asian nations were siding with the United States when the United States would not even let people from those countries immigrate. To correct this, Filipino Americans were promised freedom after the war and other Asian immigrants were given a small break.

Still, the quotas of Asian immigrants remained only a fraction of the number allowed from European countries.

In 1946, for example, the Luce-Cellar Bill allowed resident Asian Indians to become American citizens, but capped future immigration at 100 people per year.

The message for Asian Americans from these actions in 1943 was clear: We will be nice enough so that you will help us fight Japan, but we still don’t want too many like you in our white man’s country.

While subsequent immigration law changes in 1952 and 1965 opened the door to greater immigration from Asia, anti-miscegenation laws, job discrimination laws and other anti-Asian American barriers were not lowered in any meaningful way until the advent of affirmative action and civil rights initiatives in the past three decades.

Those celebrating the end of the century and the millennium like to see progress moving in a straight line toward -- as the nation’s premier hero, Superman, would say -- “truth, justice, and the American way.”

Unfortunately, the indictment of Wen Ho Lee and the search for Asian and Asian American scapegoats that are sure to accompany Congressional hearings featuring Democratic Party fundraiser John Huang are a reminder that progress is usually slow, uneven and accompanied by backward slides. Whether Huang or Lee is actually guilty of what they have been charged with, the fact that broader allegations are already being levied against China and Chinese Americans is troubling.

The Justice Department decided in April not to prosecute former CIA director John M. Deutch after CIA technicians found classified materials stored on Deutch’s unsecure laptop computer at his home. Why isn’t he being prosecuted?

Government officials and newspapers of record are using the old code words, “sinister,” “Chinese espionage” and “disinformation,” when referring to the Lee case, even as federal prosecutors concede there is no evidence that he passed secrets to China.

Cold War theories of Chinese untrustworthiness are finding a new life in headlines such as the Washington Post’s Dec. 12 headline, “China Prefers the Sand to the Moles: Experts Say Beijing Mines Open Sources, Digging Out Secrets Grain by Grain.”

By taking the time to reflect on this 56th anniversary of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, we can remind ourselves and the majority of Asian Americans who came here after 1943 that not only are we not the “Model Minority,” but we’ve never been treated that way, either.

We have been treated as second-class citizens throughout our history here. In many cases, we have only gained privileged status as an ill-conceived divide-and-conquer reaction to the righteous demands of African Americans and others.

While it is counterproductive to see ourselves defined only as a community of victims, it is short-sighted to forget that true parity has not yet been achieved. Only our concerted actions, as individuals and as a community, can change this.