Immigration Act Of 1965 Essay

448 Words2 Pages

The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the national origins quota system that had composed American immigration policy since the 1920s, replacing with three immigration principles of family reunification, need for skilled workers, and the admission refugee. Before the immigration act of 1965 many Japanese and Chinese faced racism and discrimination upon when they arrived to the united states. The reason why many Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians race left their hometowns was either to live a better life or they left because of the opium war that devastated their country. Once they arrived to the united states they had nothing and were basically employed in hard labor jobs and work for minimum wages such as miners, plantations, farming, fishermen and railroads because those are jobs Americans would not consider working.

During the 1900’s there was a lot of racism going on in the United States. Japanese, Asian, Koreans, Chinese, and Filipino were discriminated because they were outsiders in American society. Japanese and other ethnic people who applied for a citizenship their application were denied and weren’t allowed to get their citizenship because they were not considered white. For example, the case of “Ozawa V. United States” (124) in this case shows how Ozawa claimed he is …show more content…

They didn’t get any respect for their efforts from the society. They had to face a series of racial discrimination from the White people. Chinese were disfranchised during this time. According to the textbook, Chinese were classified as “alien’s ineligible to citizenship”, which means that Chinese could stay in American as aliens and they were not given any right to speak out for themselves and were not able to naturalize. They couldn’t attend in courts and testify because they were untrusted