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Asian Americans have greatly benefited from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which opened the door to entry into the United States by eliminating both national-origin quotas and long-standing policies of Asian exclusion. Departing sharply from California's "Anti-Coolie Act" of 1862, and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and subsequent extensions, the 1965 act finally brought more than one hundred years of official anti-Asian legislation to a close. During that period, Asian Americans were unduly taxed, restricted in movement, deprived of property ownership and voting enfranchisement, denied habeas corpus, driven from their homes by anti-Chinese riots, and imprisoned in internment camps by their own government (Tichenor 2002; Ngai 2004, Daniels 2004; Haney-López 2006b, Pfaelzer 2007). Supporting these racist policies was a clear construction of Asian Americans as coolies, a degraded race of "godless opium addicts, prostitutes, and gamblers" (Tichenor 2007, p. 7). Since 1965, however, Asian immigrants have arrived in unprecedented numbers. In 2005, more than 12 million Asian Americans lived in the United States.
With the change in federal immigration policy, the dominant trope for Asian Americans has shifted dramatically from coolie to model minority. In "America's 'Model Minority,'" Louis Winnick articulates the construction of a new "yellow peril," one which is invading the corporations and gated communities of the United States:
The flood in recent decades of Asian immigrants to the U.S. was planned by no one, and would likely have been forestalled had a lingeringly racist Congress foreseen it.... This errant immigration policy, however, turned out to be a golden blunder, serendipity writ large. By inadvertence and over uncharted pathways, it brought to the United States millions of new workers, all with an unappeasable hunger for jobs and multitudes with eminently marketable skills, advanced education, and unbounded career ambitions (Winnick 1990, p. 22).
Though situated in an economic position 180 degrees from that of the day-laboring coolie, Asian Americans nevertheless remain racially marked and continue to be viewed as threatening. The change in the social construction of Asian Americans is striking in terms of both the attribution of qualities based on race, and the speed at which the transformation has occurred. How have Asian Americans gone from coolie to model minority