Asian Pacific American Law Journal

In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act—one of the earliest federal immigration laws in the United States—beginning a long period of federal immigration law that facilitated heavy scrutiny of Chinese immigrants and excluded most Chinese people from the U.S. From then until nearly a century later, Chinese exclusion was federal law. Even as millions of European immigrants arrived, settled, and naturalized, the vast majority of would-be Chinese immigrants were systematically barred from coming to the U.S.

In addition to passing a series of highly restrictive race-based laws to carry out Chinese exclusion, the U.S. also built and operated a massive government apparatus to document and surveil Chinese Americans. Treated as perpetual outsiders, the few Chinese people who were permitted to migrate to the U.S. were categorically photographed, measured, interrogated, and required to prove their right to exist in the United States through extensive documentation and external validation by white witnesses. Many Chinese Americans suffered constant invasions of their privacy that generated perpetual fears and significant harms over the course of entire lifetimes. These measures not only restricted Chinese Americans’ movement and livelihood but also reinforced a racialized framework of suspicion.

This Article offers a comprehensive overview of surveillance under Chinese exclusion in the U.S. and draws connections between past and present, situating Chinese exclusion surveillance within the broader history of state surveillance targeting marginalized populations. In doing so, it sheds light on the longstanding use of privacy erosion as a tool of racial oppression, and highlights harms and themes of surveillance under Chinese exclusion that echo into the present day.

The U.S. government’s treatment of TikTok and other Chinese-adjacent tech struggles
to maintain objectivity and belies the Sinophobia that lingers within the political hegemony.
The U.S. is no stranger to Anti-Asian sentiments and policies. This Article will give an
overview of America’s historic mistreatment of Asians, both foreign and natural-born,
before analyzing the government’s treatment of short-form video media giant TikTok and
telecommunications company Huawei. This analysis will seek to differentiate legitimate
security concerns and measures from inequitable ones in either justification or
administration.

This Article hypothesizes that the creation of the West San Gabriel Valley ethnoburb was caused by both white flight and disproportionate Asian demand for housing generated by the desire to cluster by choice. To test this hypothesis, this Article will use census data from 1970-2009 to analyze the correlations between the influx of Asian residents and the changes in median home value in a given tract in the San Gabriel Valley in accordance with the Economic Theory of White Flight, which will be elaborated on in later section. The findings of this analysis will then be corroborated with observations and reports produced at the time of this racial transition. Finally, this Article seeks to comparatively examine the relatively quick entry of Asian residents and the comparatively slow entry of Black residents in the area, arguing that an exigent factor underlying the expediated entry of Asian residents is the racial positioning of the "Model Minority" resident.

In recent years, activists have campaigned across the country for schools to
incorporate ethnic studies into their curricula. For example, in 2021, California Governor
Gavin Newsom signed a new law mandating an ethnic studies graduation requirement for
all high school students, starting with the class of 2030. While this movement has greatly
benefited students by exposing them to multicultural perspectives, misconceptions, such as
the model minority stereotype often assigned to Asian Americans, still pervade school
curricula. The stereotype portrays Asian Americans as having more of a hard-working
mentality and a propensity for achieving socioeconomic success, compared to other ethnic
groups. This is especially important in a state like California, which is home to nearly a
third of the country’s Asian population and twenty-one Asian ethnic groups. School
curriculum standards must move away from an essentialist point of view, which assumes
that Asian Americans have a uniform experience, and explore the intersectional oppressions
that impact the Asian American community. For example, Asian American students in Berkeley High School only learned about Chinese and Japanese culture and never discussed
Southeast Asian history, such as the wartime conflict in Laos. Schools should also recruit
and support Asian American educators, as these teachers’ cultural knowledge and racialized
experiences will bring the revised curriculum to life. Changes to California’s curriculum
can serve as a model for the rest of the nation at a time when the model minority myth is
manipulated by legislators to suggest that Asian Americans have overcome racism to
achieve socioeconomic success and fuel the anti-critical race theory movement, that
suppresses learning about racial oppression in schools altogether.