Sinophobia

For my personal pilgrimage, I would want to travel to Angel Island, where my great-great grandfather had to pass through in order to immigrate to America. As a result, it holds deep significance to my family and me, as well as a large amount of Asian-Americans living in the Bay Area. Angel Island is an island in San Francisco Bay just east of Tiburon. There are hiking trails around its mountain, Mount Caroline Livermore, as well as beaches and a variety of natural plants. In order to reach the island, one needs to take a ferry from San Francisco or Tiburon. Although Angel Island is beautiful today, it doesn’t have such a pretty past. Around the early 20th century, Angel Island was an immigration station, where many immigrants entering from the west coast had to pass through in order to enter America. If those immigrants were from Europe, they could pass through easily, but those immigrants who were not white, such as Asians and others, were detained. The relevant years for my great-great grandfather’s story took place between 1910 - 1940, when Angel Island was still operating and detaining Asian-Americans. However, in order to gain a fuller picture, one must go back thirty years earlier when the Chinese Exclusion Act had been signed by Congress. There was anti-Chinese sentiment in the country due to the large mass of immigrating Chinese and the large amount of jobs they took. The act had essentially barred any Chinese from immigrating to the States, and was the first…

Republican-led House of Representatives passed legislation freezing Obama’s program to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. Both parties pleaded national security reasons for their posturing, despite the US’s stringent and multilayered screening process for foreign nationals. Jeb Bush, younger sibling of George W. and a presidential candidate for 2017 himself, further roiled the choppy sea of partisan politics by noting that some Syrians were welcome in the US, provided they were…

neighboring nations such as Indonesia. Many of these Chinese people were members of the upper classes and were able to take control of businesses and in Indonesia. It was recorded that, “…Chinese shopkeepers, traders, and usurers remained the main source of credit for the Indonesian people…This meant that the average Chinese was far better off than the average Indonesian, and that there was a…number of very wealth Chinese, in contrast to the very few wealthy Indonesians” The influx of Chinese…