Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy 1850–1990 by Bill Ong Hing (review)

186 Canadian Review of American Stu.dies and the leaders had military backgrounds. Had Greenfield looked at them, I don't think he would have discovered the same narrative tradition. On the contrary, my reading of Franklin suggest his narrative and experience fit snugly into the Lewis and Clark/Pike/Fremont pattern, a circumstance that arises because of common professional backgrounds and state objectives. Still another way to have ensured greater parallelism between all the various participants in the tradition, would have been to examine some fur-trade accounts from what is today United States territory. Having said this, I should like to repeat what an important book Narrating Discovery is, both to American and Canadian Studies. It is innovative, stimulating, and well-researched. At the same time, the difficulties with continuity in Greenfield's tradition might caution us against being too dismissive of concerns that nationality be considered even in writing prior to official nationhood. Richard C. Davis University of Calgary Bill Ong Hing. Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy 1850-1990. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 340. Tables, figures, and appendices. Hing, a professor of law at Stanford who previously practised immigration law in San Francisco's Chinatown, is convinced, quite correctly I believe, that immigration laws have shaped Asian American communities. As he puts it: "An understanding of the evolution of Asian America commences with an appreciation of the history of immigration policies and laws and of the political and social forces that motivated them 1 ' (18). This brief work-the text is only one hundred and eighty-nine pages-is divided into five chapters and an epilogue, and followed by appendices, most of them excerpted documents, more than seventy pages of often discursive notes, and a bibliography of seventeen pages. After a brief overview of what Hing calls "two contrasting schemes ... immigration policies affecting Asians before and after 1965" (18), longer chapters treat Asian America before and after 1965, refugee law and policy as it affected the Vietnamese American community-read Southeast Asia, a chapter treating Asian American Book Reviews 187 educational performance, political participation and identity, and an epi logue. Hing is at his best when he explains how current immigration law works; he illustrates the social effects of the laws well, often with illuminating examples from his own practise. But when he explores history, politics, demography, education, or attempts social science analysis, the results are often erroneous, sometimes grossly so. Hing complains, at times unfairly, about the stereotyping of Asian Americans, yet he indulges in broad-brush stereotyping himself. Two examples will suffice: he quotes the nativist historian, Otis Graham-an academic spokesman for the restrictionist Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform [FAIR]-and then comments, "while not all scholars subscribe to Graham's stereotypic images of Asians" (9), when in fact, few serious students of immigration hold his extreme views. He describes a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) as "deliberately designed to advantage non-Asians" (7). Actually, the provision was adopted, largely at the urging of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, to aid lnsh and other Europeans. Neither Africans nor Latin Americans benefitted. To view the immigration flows to the United States, as Hing does, as consisting of Asians and "non-Asians" is to distort the picture badly. Similarly, because he concentrates almost single-mindedly on the effects on Asians, he misses some of the real significance of what seemed to be the only anti-Asian legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example, must be seen not only as a racist measure directed against Chinese, but also as a turning point in American immigration policy, the hinge on which the "golden door" began to swing almost shut. Similarly, its repeal, in 1943, was the hinge on which the door began to swing open again. Despite his legal training, he ignores and misstates many matters of law. Most surprising, to me, is his failure to analyze the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment, its establishment of a national citizenship, and its insistence, now under attack, that all persons born on American soil are American citizens. This was crucial in the lives of Asian Americans...