How the Yellow Peril Became Brown: The 1965 Immigration Act and the Remaking of Racial Illegality in the US

The 1965 Immigration Act is often celebrated for how it transformed the face of US society through reforms of immigration policies that ended overt racial discrimination.  Asian immigrants in particular gained legal immigration rights  through skilled employment preferences to the fastest growing racial group which is also widely perceived as “model minorities” with above average educations, household incomes, and employment in professional, technical, and white-collar fields.  This transformation of Asian Americans paralleled the illegalization of previously routine, annual journeys by hundreds of thousands of workers from neighboring countries, most visibly from Mexico and now Central America. This legal shift has produced high numbers of undocumented immigrants who are significantly integrated into US society, presenting perhaps the most divisive and unresolved challenges for our democracy.  To understand the fraught contradictions besetting contemporary US immigration, we must consider how the 1965 law “flipped” the racial anxieties that once targeted Asians—which configured Chinese as the first illegal immigrants—and focused hostilities toward Mexicans and Latinos as “brown” perils. 

This is the Cheng Family Lecture.