Strangers From A Different Shore: Chapter 8

Comparing and contrasting the experiences of the Asian Indian immigrants with those of the Korean immigrants, one finds that each group dealt with the issue of homeland occupation differently.  With the Koreans, it incited rage, and racial prejudice against other Japanese immigrants.  Takaki makes no mention of this ever being a problem with Asian Indian immigrants, instead describing their grief.

Isolating factors, mainly dress, clashed with their otherwise "caucasian" appearance, giving rise to the question of how they should be treated.  Were they "white," and did they deserve the same rights as a white man?

"…only a small fraction of the Asian-Indian immigrants were actually believers in Hinduism."  The point is established that many Asian Indian immigrants were the subjects of religious stereotyping.  Due to inexperience and "foreign fear," ignorance of the values and beliefs of other cultures was very prevalent in American society.

For all Asian-based ethnicities that immigrated, more or less, there was racial prejudice and discrimination.  One of the most critical issues then which contributed much to the the racial prejudice and discrimination was a serious lack of effective immigration policy.  It seems that with each new ethnicity, the government implemented the policy after a surge in immigration has already taken place, distressing immigrants who were affected by the policies, such as not being able to bring their families too the US from overseas.  The surges permitted by the failure to have effective immigration policies in place beforehand also lead to social rejection of the new arrivals, and by extension, anyone that followed that was related in some manner to them, by appearance or otherwise.  They went from being "Celestials" to what many white laborers perceived as a large-scale threat to employment.  The same thing is happening today, with ineffective immigration / implementation of immigration policies resulting in large numbers of Latin Americans immigrating illegally and taking up lower-level work harvesting crops, resulting in the widespread but erroneous assumption that they are "stealing" American jobs.  The social rejection of Asians in the 20th century and Latin Americans in the 21st century can be traced back to a failure in immigration policy.