Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era Through World War II

Elliott Young's goals are achieved in this book. He aims to expand an earlier project on the Chinese in Cuba into a broader analysis of Chinese diaspora in Cuba, Peru, Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Though the notion of the “illegal alien” has extended throughout the Americas, it was first used in the United States, upon the arrival to California and other states of the subjects of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). They were restricted by immigration laws based exclusively on their ethnicity (pp. 7–8). This action generated a large US immigration bureaucracy whose main job was to keep Chinese migrants as perpetual aliens. When commenting on this historical background, Young offers a detailed explanation for how Chinese were made aliens throughout the Americas from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Rather than focusing solely on the back-and-forth migration between China and...