Yellow Peril

Economic Threat

The yellow peril image and discourse allowed for the racialization of xenophobia, codified through racist laws and harsh discrimination toward Asian immigrants. The abolition of slavery was met with an initially warm welcome of immigrants from China and other Asian countries. Asian men served as a pool of cheap labor in the expanding U.S. industrial capitalist economy. However, working side by side with European immigrants, Chinese laborers were soon viewed as economic threats to white working-class men, as well as sexual threats to their women.

Many Chinese laborers had no choice but to leave their families behind in China and live in “bachelor societies,” geographically located in ghettos associated with crime and vice. Antimiscegenation laws made it illegal for nonwhite men to marry white women, while the moral implications of the Page Act of 1875 made it difficult, if not impossible, for Chinese women to migrate to the United States unless they could prove they were not prostitutes. In contrast, women from European countries were able to migrate with their husbands and families.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law to restrict immigration from a specific country (in this case, China). Subsequent laws were passed in 1917, 1924, and 1934 to eliminate immigration from India, Japan (and Korea), and the Philippines, respectively. Meanwhile, life was cruel for Asian immigrants in a fledgling country that viewed them as unassimilable and conniving. The Naturalization Act of 1870 restricted citizenship to whites and blacks, until the 1898 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark granted citizenship to an American-born child of Chinese parents. Moreover, the Alien Land and Property Acts of 1913, 1920, and 1923 barred individuals ineligible for citizenship from owning property.

By the middle of the 20th century, the yellow peril, once personified by the ubiquitous image of Fu Manchu, was replaced by the image of the treacherous “dirty Jap” and “gook.” U.S. involvement in World War II, the Korean War, and the [Page 2209]Vietnam War positioned Asians as military threats to Western society. In addition, any U.S. conflict with Asian countries made Asian Americans especially vulnerable to heightened racial discrimination. The yellow peril stereotype did not allow for distinctions to be made between Asians and Asians Americans, nor differences between different generations and nationalities to be considered.

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