The American-Born Japanese and the World Crisis

Abstract

We may begin by stating three fundamental factors which in their interrelationship and when set into our scheme of economic competition are the basis of the minority group status of the Japanese immigrants in America. It is also these three factors which serve to relate the American-born Japanese to the present world crisis. To be considered first is the factor of race. It has been used as a discriminating category for land ownership, for naturalization, and for regulating immigration. In 1913 California passed the first of the anti-alien land laws, prohibiting aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land. Other states followed later with similar laws. In 1922 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that members of the “Mongolian race or the Malay race” could not be naturalized. The final legal disability placed upon the Japanese on a basis of race was denying them the right of any further immigration. This was established by the National Immigration Act of 1924, often called the “Exclusion Act.” Other groups face social problems because of discrimination based upon racial features, but in the case of the Japanese, when race is combined with the other two factors, it gains unique significance. The second factor of fundamental importance is that of the Japanese ethnic heritage, of which a central point of concern was the Japanese family system. As early as 1900 the Americans in San Francisco were demanding exclusion, but then the immigrants were mainly single males, as the sex ratio of 2,369.9 males for every hundred females shows, but by 1910 this had dropped to 694.1.

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