Where did the racism come from?
The oppression of Asians did not start with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 but rather much earlier. In 1882 Congress passed and President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law was extended another 10 years in 1892 and made permanent in 1902. In 1907, the U.S. struck a deal with Japan to stem the tide of Japanese immigration to the United States. During the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants from Japan could not become citizens of the United States. Without citizenship they could not legally own land. Despite these controls, by 1940 nearly 130,000 Japanese lived in the United States, 113,000 on the West Coast. But the racism toward Asians reached new heights during the war. After the Japanese armed forces bombed Pearl Harbor, a wave of racist hysteria swept the United States. The issue of Time magazine following Pearl Harbor exclaimed: Over the U.S. and its history, there was a great unans
