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Asian American Politics: Law, Participation, and Policy. Edited by Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2003.
Since the 1960s, the Asian population in the United States has experienced unparalleled growth and diversity. Asian Americans have made significant inroads in the economy, but politically, they wield little influence and remain vulnerable. The recent hostility directed against John Huang and Wen Ho Lee testifies to the ongoing political weakness of Asian Americans. In addition, because of stereotypical perceptions of Asian American disinterest in politics in popular discourse, mainstream politicians have paid little attention to Asian Americans and their needs. Challenging these widely held notions of Asian American political apathy, in this timely volume, editors Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai have put together a broad range of documents and essays that address both the historical and contemporary political activities of Asian Americans. This volume highlights the role that Asian Americans have played and continue to play in American politics, and identifies the political obstacles and challenges they face in contemporary U.S. society.
The chapters in Part I of this four-part book offer prominent Supreme Court rulings that record Asian American struggles for equal protection rights (Yick Wo v. Hopkins; Korematsu v. United States) and naturalization rights (Takao Ozawa v. United States; United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind). These major rulings demonstrate that contrary to the often-made assumption that Asian Americans, as noncitizens, had little recourse to and/or made little effort to challenge discrimination in official forums, Asian Americans did, in fact, take their grievances to the courts to confront the state-sanctioned discrimination they faced. By collecting these cases and placing them in this book's first section, Nakanishi and Lai effectively underscore both the historic resistance efforts of Asians in the United States and the participation of the courts in shaping Asian American politics.
Part II turns to analysis of two major immigration policies that had immense impact on the fortunes of Asian Americans: the 1924 Immigration Act and the 1965 Immigration Act. The essay by Lee Makela draws attention to the politics behind the 1924 legislation. It fascinatingly details how domestic politics, more...