Making Repeal Meaningful

Abstract

This chapter explores how Asian American advocates negotiated the growing marginalization of Asians and Asia within the immigration debates between 1952 and 1965. If the McCarran-Walter campaign marked a peak in Asian Americans’ influence amid unprecedented U.S. intervention in East Asia, the revision efforts that followed relegated Asians, and by extension Asian Americans, to the periphery of the national conversation on immigration. This chapter examines Chinese and Japanese Americans’ efforts to include Asians in 1950s refugee admissions, experiments in interethnic cooperation, and role in shaping the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Hawaii’s admission as the nation’s fiftieth state and the election of the first U.S. congresspersons of Chinese and Japanese descent helped institutionalize Asian Americans’ political voice in Washington, DC, with important ramifications for 1960s immigration reform.