May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

The 2010 U.S. Census counted over 15 million Asian Pacific Americans. The major groups are people of Chinese (3.8 million), Filipino (3.4), Asian Indian (3.2 million), Vietnamese (1.7 million), Korean (1.7 million), and/or Japanese (1.3 million) heritage. Smaller populations include people of Cambodian, Bangladeshi, Thai, Pakistani, Laotian, or Hmong heritage.

Asian Pacific American history is marked both by lasting accomplishments and harsh discrimination. In 1850-1880, over 100,000 Chinese, mostly men, came to the West Coast, where they built railroads and constructed the levees and canals that transformed swampy central California into a commercial agricultural paradise.

In response, racist whites used violence, specific taxation, and other discriminatory laws to drive Chinese away from mines and fisheries, off valuable farmland, and out of cities. A typical example took place in Bonners Ferry in 1892. Urged on by Herald editorials that described Chinese as “the most objectional class of people” and bearers of “loathsome diseases,” armed thugs forced all Chinese residents to leave town. From 1882 to 1943, the U.S. laws banned immigration from China.

In the 1880s, sugar planters in Hawaii began recruiting workers from Japan, some of whom continued on to the West Coast in search of farmland. White supremacists quickly passed discriminatory laws, including bans on Japanese land ownership, naturalization, and then immigration. The Anti-Asiatic League used the Pearl Harbor attack, in 1941, as an excuse to demand total Japanese removal from the USA and Canada.

Federal investigators found that people of Japanese descent (Nikkei) in the USA were remarkably loyal to the U.S. government. Nevertheless, in 1942, with President Franklin Roosevelt’s approval, but without due legal process, the military confined 117,000 Nikkei, 2/3 of them U.S. citizens (Nisei), in 10 concentration camps. Likewise, the Canadian government imprisoned or relocated 22,000 Nikkei residents of British Columbia. During two years of imprisonment, the Nikkei lost homes, businesses, friends, and social status.

The Minidoka camp, in southern Idaho, held approximately 9,000 Nikkei, including Monica Sone, a young woman from Seattle, who described the experience in her well-known memoir, Nisei Daughter. The Kooskia camp, in northern Idaho, held 250 prisoners who constructed part of Highway 12. Many Canadian camps were located in the Kootenay region.

In a great irony, the U.S. military recruited or drafted 33,000 young men from the camps. Some 14,000 served in the all-Nisei 442nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in Italy and Germany, liberated several Nazi concentration camps, and became the most decorated military unit in U.S. history. In 1988, the federal government finally admitted wrong doing and paid $20,000 to each Nikkei ex-prisoner still living.

Early immigration from the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam was war-related. After the U.S. military conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1913, Filipinos began moving to the West Coast to work in agriculture. In 1951-64, as a result of U.S. involvement in the Korean War, approximately 18,000 Koreans moved—as brides, adopted children, and college students—to the USA. After final defeat in Vietnam in 1975, U.S. forces evacuated 130,000 Vietnamese allies to U.S. soil. In 1978-82, the U.S. accepted 280,000 more refugees from war-torn Vietnam. Most settled in California or coastal Texas. Those who became commercial fishermen endured violent intimidation by white supremacists.

Just as 19th-century Chinese workers boosted the California economy, Asian immigrants are doing it again in the 21st-century. Since 1965, U.S. immigration policy has encouraged workers with special skills to move to the USA. Currently, 18% of California nurses are of Filipino descent, and the high-tech Silicon Valley workforce in California is 70% immigrant, with scientists and engineers from India (26%) and China (14%) leading the way.

Asian Pacific Americans work in all levels of government and military, as heads of major corporations, and throughout academia and entertainment. Names that come quickly to mind include Yo-Yo Ma, Maya Lin, Amy Tam, Ichiro Suzuki, and Tiger Woods, and recent presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang. And popular Asian Pacific foods spice up U.S. cuisine.

Yet Asian Pacific Americans still face discrimination. In fact, hate crimes against these U.S. citizens are on the rise, as they are being blamed for “bringing the virus.” This fits with the shameful U.S. tradition of scapegoating particular ethnic groups as disease bearers. Germans were blamed for yellow fever, Irish for cholera, European Jews for typhoid, Central Americans for “tremendous infectious disease pouring across the border.”

The Boundary County Human Rights Task Force reminds you that viruses are not interested in ethnicity and national boundaries. Asian Pacific Americans should be recognized for their great contributions to U.S. society and respected as neighbors and fellow citizens, not stereotyped and scapegoated. Indeed, community cooperation and empathy are needed now more than ever, as we act to keep COVID-19 from spreading and to help those harmed by the economic downturn.

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Timothy Braatz is a professor of history and nonviolence at Saddleback College. Previously, he taught at Southern Utah University and Arizona State University. He has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Arizona State, and is the author of several books, including “Peace Lessons” and “From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck.” Locally, he wrote and directed the dramatic scenes for Vicki Thompson’s recent productions, “A Common Beat” and “Stardust!”