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  • History
  • Ellen Wu, chair, Vivek Bald, and Richard Kim

The major intervention of Madeline Y. Hsu's The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015) is its reorientation of conventional wisdom in Asian American Studies regarding "exclusion." The familiar telling of this story is that the United States took a draconian approach to limiting the entry and settlement of workers from across the Pacific between 1875 (or, more commonly, 1882) and 1965.

While this is not untrue, Hsu convincingly beckons us to reconsider this dominant paradigm by showing how the logic of "selection" has always operated alongside that of restriction. Stalwart proponents of selection—including missionaries, educators, internationalists, businesspeople, and career diplomats—steadily championed the exemption of special classes of Chinese from the reach of the exclusion acts. From the late 19th century through the late 20th century, they succeeded in creating "gateways" that permitted students, intellectuals, and elite refugees to come to and eventually stay in the United States. Lawmakers agreed because they saw Chinese "brains" as advantageous for the strengthening of US-Asia relations and the growth of the US economy. The effect of her research is to explode the hegemonic "1965 divide" in Asian American Studies by showing very persuasively how exclusion and inclusion have functioned in tandem before and after 1965.

This history is both timely and relevant. By focusing on "knowledge circulation" between China and the United States, she situates the current boom of Chinese international students on US college campuses within a long and complex interplay of immigration policy, foreign policy, and economic policy. In unearthing this trajectory from an impressive array of Englishand Chinese-language primary sources, Hsu integrates the [End Page 463] important experiences of students, intellectuals, and refugees (individuals often fit more than one category over their course of their lives) to unseat "exclusion" in favor of a more nuanced and nimble framework.

There is something very powerful—and something that rings very true—about looking at the laborer/undesirable alien and the student/knowledge professional in the same frame as part of ongoing processes of "selection." This points to the kind of trap that South Asian and Muslim Americans found themselves ensnared in during the 2016 election season, with Trump demonizing their communities while Clinton held up the "Gold Star" Khan family as symbols of loyal and patriotic Americanism. Vilification and valorization, in other words, do not characterize distinct racial management regimes but work hand in hand. The Good Immigrants crucially hones in on one group in a way that compellingly elucidates the dynamics faced by so many others throughout Asian American history.

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