Asian exclusion connotes a uniformity of immigration regulation that conflates the piecemeal process by which limits on Asian migration actually emerged in white settler societies and some Central and South American nations.1 As early as 1862, the US Congress began by banning the importation of “coolies,” then prostitutes in 1875, before severely limiting legal entries by Chinese, defined by race to a few exempt classes in 1882. Japanese restriction resulted from a 1908 negotiated agreement whereby the Japanese government limited emigration by laborers. In 1917, Congress banned immigration from a “barred zone” that covered most of Middle, South, and Southeast Asia but not the Philippines, a US colony, or Japan and Korea. Not until the 1924 Immigration Act were all Asians, except for Filipinos, uniformly excluded as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Even after Filipinos came under restriction with the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, they received an annual entry quota of...
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