A new study led by sociologist Sunmin Kim sheds light on the origins of the "model minority" myth that stereotypes Asian Americans as high-achieving and successful.
To evade racist immigration laws, most Korean migrants entering the U.S. in the early 20th century kept up a long-term identity as students.
In a study published this fall in Ethnic and Racial Studies, sociology professor Sunmin Kim traces the stories of several of these migrants as they moved from the U.S. education system and workforce and wrangled with immigration officials. Their individual stories highlight the difficulties faced by Korean migrants, and how these challenges were impacted by social class and gender.
"Virtually every Korean migrant told immigration officials that they were going to attend a college in the U.S.," says Kim, a senior author of the study. "We think this dynamic is the reason why the Korean American community, or Asian American community as a whole, came to respect the figure of students in their community."
Kim co-authored the study with Carolyn Choi, who held a postdoctoral fellowship in Asian American studies at Dartmouth and is now an assistant professor of American Studies at Princeton University.
The 1917 Immigration Act prevented Asian migrants from entering the U.S. unless they could prove that they were merchants, diplomats, or students. The policy was founded in racial prejudice, says Kim.
"White policy makers and the public alike thought all Asian culture was 'too different' from American culture and regarded Asians as fundamentally unfit for life in the United States," he says. "Thus they implemented race-based wholesale exclusion with a few exceptions, because diplomatic and trade ties with Asia were still valuable."
While most Chinese migrants entered the U.S. as merchants during this period, Korean migrants were more likely to enter the country as students—in part due to the influence of missionary schools in Korea. But after 1924, it was illegal for former international students to remain in the U.S. after finishing their education, which meant that Korean student migrants had to deal with continual surveillance.
To uncover the lives of these early Korean migrants, the researchers leveraged 331 digitized files from the National Archives at San Francisco that span from the early 1910s to the 1940s. Kim and Choi were aided by undergraduate research assistants Joseph Chong '22 and Amy Park '23, who sorted through and summarized the files.
"Joseph and Amy did a great job of carefully reading through all the files and discovering the stories that spoke to them," says Kim. "By chance, all of the people involved in this project are of Korean descent, so it became very much a community project. We got a great kick out of it, and it also made all of us feel more attached to the Korean community."
Though it's impossible to know how many migrants were turned away, the files reveal a great deal about the experiences of successful migrants. At the San Francisco immigration port, the would-be student migrants were scrutinized based on their physical appearance, questioned regarding their financial means, and subjected to a random knowledge test. They were also made to sign a legal clause saying that they intended to be "bona fide" students.
"They looked in their hands to see whether they had pale, smooth hands or the rough hands of a laborer, and they looked at their records and the amount of money they had, because if you're a student, you're more likely to be coming from a well-off family," says Kim. "The Korean migrants who successfully arrived in the U.S. were the ones who were able to put forward this performance of being an upper-class person, and that became their persona as they stayed in the U.S. for decades."
In the following months and years, immigration officials would check up on the migrants to make sure they were still studying full-time, as legally required. The migrants could be deported if they were instead found to be working, but some, like Hahn Hong, managed to talk their way out of deportation by claiming "hard times" and maintaining their intention to return to school. Others, like Tyung Soon, managed to disappear.
"I would not characterize them as lying or committing forgery in terms of their legal status, because everyone had an aspiration to study in U.S. colleges, though whether that was a realistic aspiration or not is a different matter," says Kim. "In the files, you see people coming in and claiming to be students, and then transitioning to work, while telling themselves and the immigration authorities and the people around them that they are still students, even though they are working full time around the clock."
Unmarried women faced more investigations than men due to fears of interracial relationships and the prevailing racist stereotype of Asian women as "hypersexual". To escape this gendered scrutiny, some women, like Ryang Kim, entered into marriages with Asian migrant men, after which their cases were closed.
"We want to tell the story about how abstract and arbitrary immigration law can be and push back against this overly criminalizing understanding of immigration that many people have," says Kim. "In today's perception, many of these people were clearly illegal immigrants, but they became the foundation of the very vibrant Korean-American community in the United States."
The paper offers an alternative theory for the origins of the "model minority" myth, which was previously thought to originate from the Chinese American community's response to the Red Scare of the 1950s. Kim argues that because being a student was one of the only modes of existence allowed to Asian migrants within the regime of Asian exclusion, everyone came to believe that they were students, regardless of what they did in their everyday lives.
"It's troubling to think that your community values and cherishes what is essentially a trauma from the racist past without properly accounting for it," says Kim, "especially because we are once again witnessing attempts to sharply divide model minorities and illegal immigrants and scapegoat the latter."