Chinese Immigrant Chinese Immigration to

Chinese Immigrant Chinese Immigration to the United States: 1970-2000 The United States' stance towards Chinese immigration has a very checkered history, with a great dependence on the labor provided by Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century and yet with harsh reactionary quotas limiting Asian immigration in the latter part of that century.

During World War II, though primarily Japanese individuals were forcibly interned in federal "camps," general anti-Asian sentiments rose throughout the country, leading to increased difficulties both for those trying to immigrate from Asia to the United States and for those individuals and families that managed to make it through. China's own political and historical course during the twentieth century also limited immigration form this country, as the socialist and totalitarian regime that still dominates Chinese society and government strictly limits migration quotas out of the country.

In 1965, however, the United States passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which finally eliminated the discriminatory nineteenth-century quotas that favored European immigrants over Asians (Chen 2010). This caused a major upswing in the number of Chinese immigrants throughout the 1970s, which was also a period whne the Chinese government was showing increased liberalization, as well (Chen 2010; Li & Lee 2005).

In some ways, however, this increased liberalization in China had a negative effect on immigration to the United States; while it had always been the destination of choice for legal and illegal Chinese immigrants, more liberalization meant more choices, and may Chinese began emigrating to other countries during the 1970s as well as the United States (Li & Lee 2005). The same basic trend in Chinese immigration continued in the 1980s, and as the economy was fairly decent during this decade and Chinese liberalization continued, legal immigration picked up.

A major problem during this decade, however, was the smuggling of illegal Chinese immigrants into the United States (Kyle & Koslowski 2001; Chin 1999). These problems persist to this day, but were especially prevalent in the 1980s; Chinese immigrants were brought into the country illegally by smugglers that often sold them into slavery in the underworld of American society, or that delivered them penniless, starving, and often barely alive (or not alive at all) to fend for themselves (Kyle & Koslowski 2001; Chen 1999).

Horror stories became a reason to avoid emigrating to the United States, but both legal and illegal immigration from China to America continued to rise during this decade. An ongoing problem that would-be Chinese immigrants have faced, including through the 1990s and into the current decades, is the control of both internal and external migration by the Chinese government (Au & Henderson 2005).

This, coupled with an immigration policy that many still view as restrictive of Chinese immigration (though on amore subtle and therefore more insidious level than the previous quota system) have been the major negative forces in Chinese immigration to the United States over the latter decades of he twentieth century (Ting 1995). Still, Chinese immigration has continued to rise, and.