California Senator Carol Liu, who is Chinese-American, acknowledges her father and grandfather did not have to endure the ordeal of thousands of Asians and Pacific Islanders who entered the United States through Angel Island in the first half of the twentieth century.
But as one in a long line of scholars, she shares those immigrants’ regard for education as the all-American pathway to improving one’s station in life. After all, that is how her great-grandfather, Liu Yu-Bin, came to be in the court of the Emperor of China. And how her father came to train pilots for the war.
“My dad … is the product of a long line of intellectuals,” said Liu, a Democrat whose 21st district encompasses parts of Burbank, Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale and the Chinatown neighborhood, and who sits on the Senate education committee and chairs the budget subcommittee No. 1 on education. “There was a great-grandfather (Liu Yu-Bin) who was extremely bright in his village. There used to be an imperial examination that people in the country had to take. Every region, every village, sent a scholar to take the exam and to represent them. My great-grandfather was a representative from his area, and he was successful. He was not number one, but he was number two in the entire country. This great-grandfather became part of the imperial court, and eventually he became governor of his province in China.”
Liu, who after a career as an educator became the first Asian American woman elected to the California State Senate, is scheduled to give the welcoming remarks for Dr. Judy Yung at Sunday’s Caughey Foundation lecture at the Autry, What You Don’t Know About Angel Island. The talk is an examination of the role of Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, as the most important immigration entry point on the U.S. West Coast during the first half of the twentieth century, and how attitudes about immigration then echo current discussions on the subject today.
“The Angel Island Immigration Station turned away countless newcomers and deported thousands of U.S. residents who were considered risks to the nation or had entered the country with fraudulent papers,” Yung and her colleague, Erika Lee, wrote in a 2010 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. “For those who were denied entry because of race and class-biased exclusion laws, Angel Island showed America at its worst as a gate-keeping nation. But that wasn’t the only Angel Island story. The immigration station was also the first stop for thousands of Chinese, Japanese, South Asians and Filipinos who were admitted into the country and made homes here, working as farmhands, small-business owners and laborers. Koreans, Russians and Mexicans passed through the station and found refuge from political persecution and revolutionary chaos in their homelands.”
Indeed, Yung says, by the time that the Statue of Liberty was being dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886, the country already had on the books its first immigration statute based on race and national origin: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In fact, Angel Island, sometimes referred to as the “Ellis Island of the West Coast,” was no such thing in terms of its purpose, she says, because although the building plans borrowed from its New York counterpart, it was designed specifically to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act.
“It was modeled after Ellis Island in term of location,” she said. “The architect went to Ellis Island and copied all the buildings and the facilities. But it’s very different, in terms of operation, it’s very different .… Most of the people coming through Ellis Island were Europeans. There were no restrictive laws at that time against people coming from any of the European countries.”
And over the years, that welcoming attitude expressed on Lady Liberty’s pedestal, the one about “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” would retreat in favor of more exclusionary laws aimed at Southern and Eastern Europeans as well as Asians. Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 in response to building anti-immigrant sentiment against Southern and Eastern Europeans.
“They felt that the U.S. was becoming too crowded and the economic conditions were turning worse, plus they worried that these immigrants were taking jobs from those who had been born here,” Yung said. “They worried that they were going to contaminate the white race. These ‘foreigners and undesirable immigrants’ who were perceived as low-lifes were coming in and taking jobs away.”
Yung sees a parallel between American attitudes toward immigrants then and now. Only now they are directed at a different group: Mexicans and Latin Americans.
“If you have restrictive, exclusionary policies to try to keep some groups out, those groups find a way to come in illegally,” she said. “We need to keep up with the immigration and working needs of this country.”
She explained that in 1965, Congress made changes to immigration laws that finally repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and allowed many Asians to come to the United States under a family unification philosophy. Unfortunately, for the first time, it also set caps on immigration from places like Mexico.
“We fixed the system in 1965,” Yung said. “We should think of doing the same thing today … We’re leaning toward more restriction and exclusion rather than giving harbor and refuge to immigrants.”
Yung said restrictive immigration laws passed by individual states recently are contributing to a crisis at the top and bottom ends of the labor ladder that could harm the United States in the long run.
Those laws, and a general anti-immigrant sentiment, are also contributing to a trend among foreign young professionals educated here to return to their home countries to power those economies, rather than staying here.
“The economy is going to get better, it has to,” she said. “And when it does, we’re going to need those workers. We give them student visas but we don’t want them to stay. That’s kind of dumb .… Everyone in this country is a descendant of immigrants. We won’t be the country we are today without immigrants. We should keep that in mind.”
For Liu’s great-grandfather, a young man raised in the north of China near Beijing at the end of the nineteenth century, education was an advantage that gave him a leg up after he emigrated.
And that respect for knowledge was passed down through her grandfather, C.C. Liu, to her father, Barry C. Liu, who received a privileged English-style education that allowed him to be bilingual. He learned to fly planes in a military academy, and after emigrating to the United States, trained Chinese nationals as pilots for the U.S. military during World War II. And he paved the way for his daughter’s achievements.
“This country is a fabulous place to be because in this country it’s so open and you can be whoever yo want to be,” Liu said. “It allows you to develop. Many countries have a closed society. It’s very difficult to improve yourself. But this country is so much more open about accepting you for who you are, and that’s the greatness of it.”
At least, that is the ideal. Yung hopes it can become a reality for the new immigrants of today.