Chinese Student Migration to the United States: Exclusion and Its Exemptions

In this paper, I complicate recent trends in Asian American Studies scholarship which emphasize the critical role of Chinese exclusion in framing national formations of racial ideology, immigration law, and bureaucracy. The US first attempted serious immigration restriction when it targeted Chinese as a race as intrinsically inferior and inassimilable, as articulated in the Chinese Exclusion Laws (1882-1943). The legal and bureaucratic structures developed to attempt their exclusion and segregation lie deeply embedded in contemporary problems of racial inequality and border controls. Here, however, I seek to
highlight how those classes of Chinese exempted from exclusion—specifically students, also provide the foundations for the selective aspects of immigration restriction that feature prominently in contemporary laws. Chinese students always retained the right to enter the US and were always more warmly received: in homes, classrooms, social gatherings, and athletic events. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt, other foreign policy leaders, and pro-Chinese missionaries and educators, promoted the idea that educating Chinese in America was an inexpensive means of training China future elite to be friendly toward the United States. And so Chinese students evolved in status from being exemptions to the exclusion laws, to welcomed temporary residents participating in educational exchanges, and to acceptably assimilable white-collar and professional immigrant-workers after the Communist Revolution made their return impossible. This evolution in student rights to enter and then to remain, and their growing value to the United States that this reflects, demonstrates the intertwining of US foreign policy agendas with its immigration policies toward China and Chinese, and eventually other once excluded immigrant nationalities.