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The high unemployment rate, political insecurity, and military dictatorship caused massive numbers of Koreans to immigrate to the United States in the 1960s through the early 1980s. Their children, largely known as the “second generation,” ( gyopo in Korean) compose the present-day Korean-American community.
Since the 1960s, immigration from the Korean peninsula to the United States has increased dramatically, driven by political, economic, and military relations between South Korea and the United States.
While Koreans migrated to the American-occupied islands of Hawai’i in the early 20th century as sugar plantation laborers, Japanese imperial rule (1910–1945) and racially exclusive immigration policy curtailed Korean migration to the United States until the end of World War II.
As this chapter demonstrates, us Korean migrants had a central role in the Korean independence movement of the early twentieth century and in the peninsula’s contested transition to self-government after World War II.
- Gold Rush Lures New Wave of Immigrants
- Page Act, Chinese Exclusion Act Restrict Immigration
- White Coal Miners Target Chinese Workers
- Japanese Internment
- Asian-American Firsts in Congress
- Advances in Labor Rights
- Asian Americans in Architecture, Film
- Sources
May 7, 1843: A 14-year-old fisherman named Manjirobecomes the first official U.S. Japanese immigrant after being adopted by American Capt. William Whitfield who rescued the boy and his crew after a shipwreck 300 miles from Japan's coast. Years later, Manjiro returned to his home country, where he was named a samurai and worked as a political emissa...
March 3, 1875: The Page Act of 1875 is enacted, prohibiting the recruitment of laborers from “China, Japan or any Oriental country” who were not brought to the United States of their own will or who were brought for “lewd and immoral purposes.” The law explicitly bars “the importation of women for the purposes of prostitution.” The act, based on st...
September 2, 1885: Angered that they’re taking away “white” jobs, white coal miners attack Chinese laborers in the Wyoming territory during what comes to be known as the Rock Springs Massacre. Twenty-eight Chinese are killed, with 15 more injured by the mob, which also looted and set fire to all of the homes in the area’s Chinatown. Federal troops ...
December 7, 1941: The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearing Japanese immigrants or those with Japanese ancestry had taken part in planning the attack, issues an executive order that forces more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into internment camps. According to the National A...
January 3, 1957: Dalip Saund of California is sworn in as a U.S. Representative, becoming the first Asian-American, first Indian American and first Sikh to serve in Congress. An immigrant from India, he became an American citizen in 1949, eventually earning a Ph.D. and being elected as a judge before serving three terms in the House. According to t...
September 8, 1965: Facing the threat of pay cuts and demanding improved working conditions, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, made up mostly of Filipino farmworkers, begins the five-year-long Delano Grape strike in California that prompts a global grape boycott. Led by Filipino-American Larry Itliong, the workers are soon joined by Ces...
November 13, 1982: The Vietnam War Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C. Designed by Maya Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, the simple, black-granite wall is inscribed with 57,939 names of Americans killed in the conflict. Lin, as an architecture student at Yale, bested more than 1,400 entries in a national competition to design the memo...
Key facts about Asian origin groups in the U.S., Pew Research CenterAsian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress: First Arrivals, First Reactions, U.S. House of RepresentativesImmigration and Relocation in U.S. History, Library of CongressU.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, National Park ServiceThe latest wave of Korean immigration to the United States began after Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which allowed entire families to immigrate at once, and granted Korean students and professionals the right to apply for U.S. citizenship.
Dr. Sunoo tells of the history of Korean immigration to the United States, of all the early immigrants struggles and hardships and efforts and successes in paving the way for the Korean immigrant community in America today.
