Envisioning an Immigrant Invasion: California in the 1910s or the United States in 2025?

“What will happen to California’s economy without Japanese labor?” queried a supporter of unrestricted immigration. “But they are taking American jobs,” replied the anti-immigrant stalwart, “and they don’t assimilate.” Twenty-first-century college students recently uttered these statements while role-playing early twentieth-century debates about Japanese immigrants in California. Hearing these arguments highlighted uncomfortable parallels between those debates and the 2024 presidential campaign. Over the past eight years, mainstream anti-immigrant rhetoric has transformed from one focused on post-9/11 national security concerns to an openly nativist, race-based rhetoric that envisions U.S. culture under attack from outside forces. As many historians have noted, nativism and xenophobia have reared their heads frequently in our nation’s history and remain a potent force in American politics.¹ Many of Donald Trump’s talking points bear a strong resemblance to the anti-Japanese rhetoric that dominated California politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That rhetoric propelled the passage of discriminatory laws and culminated in the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Given that under the first Trump administration thousands of immigrant children ended up separated from their parents, living in cages, it is imperative that we heed these parallels. As the case of California’s anti-Japanese movement reveals, inflammatory rhetoric can lead to devastating policies.

“The United States is now an occupied country,” Trump told supporters at a rally last fall, drumming up support for his vision of an immigrant-free United States.² Today, that invasion, according to Trump, is one of undocumented (in his terms “illegal”) immigrants. Over a century ago, the “invasion” was Asian—a population then “ineligible for citizenship” according to U.S. naturalization laws.³ In the summer of 1920 the San Francisco Examiner implored its readers to imagine a California countryside, “desolate through the yellow flood of Japanese immigration,” replacing “American civilization” with “swarming Asiatics living in hovels and adoring the Mikado of Japan as a ‘Living God,’ and young white men crowded off the farms by grubbing Japanese.”⁴ The Los Angeles Times promised its readers that “the residents of California are not going to surrender to their yellow invaders without a struggle.”⁵ These statements were issued in the context of a renewed anti-Japanese campaign that included a proposal to strengthen the state’s Alien Land Law and San Franciscan James Phelan’s bid for reelection to the Senate in which he promised to “Keep California White.” Although they did not reelect Phelan, 75 percent of California voters voted to expand the 1913 Alien Land Law to ensure that Japanese immigrants could not lease or own agricultural land in the state.⁶ Four years later, the Johnson–Reed Act not only enacted strict immigration quotas designed to limit the entry of southern and eastern Europeans but also expanded the “Asiatic Barred Zone” to prohibit all Asian immigration. At that moment the campaign against immigrants that began with violent attacks on Chinese communities across the West in the 1870s culminated in a law that drastically reshaped U.S. immigration policy.⁷

Japanese laborers began to emigrate in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, first to Hawai‘i, and then to the West Coast. White plantation owners welcomed them to Hawai‘i, but the harsh labor conditions drove many to try their luck on the mainland after annexation. In California, union leaders and politicians seeking scapegoats quickly transferred the anti-Chinese sentiment of the 1870s to the Japanese, claiming they were an unassimilable threat to the nation and a source of unfair economic competition. Like the Chinese before them, Japanese immigrants took jobs that White American men refused, working long hours at often back-breaking labor. Once Japanese immigrant farmers accrued enough capital to begin leasing or purchasing land, their innovative farming techniques and hard work made them a target for frustrated White Californians, who were all too willing to believe politicians like Phelan who portrayed their Japanese neighbors as the shock troops of an impending invasion. Japan’s victory in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War exacerbated the situation, as startled Americans tried to imagine an Asian power capable of military victory over a European nation.

It was in this context that the San Francisco Chronicle published a spate of articles in early 1905 portraying Japanese immigrants as an invasion force, preparing California for an eventual takeover by Japan. The themes of this anti-Japanese rhetoric sound all too familiar to those of us living in the twenty-first-century United States. “Japan does not send us her best, but her worst,” reported the Chronicle in March.⁸ Although opponents were quick to state that “the Japanese are not an inferior race,” they reminded White Californians that “they are not of our race, not of our blood [italics mine].”⁹ Thus, they should be “kept out” of the state at all costs.¹⁰ Reflecting this heightened rhetoric, the California state legislature voted unanimously that “unrestricted Japanese immigration is a menace to the state.”¹¹ To further the goal of preventing Japanese entry, hundreds of resentful White San Franciscans gathered in May to found the Japanese Exclusion League.¹² In that mass meeting, labor leader Olaf Tveitmoe roused support by reminding the crowd: “It is true we desire protection to American labor not only by tariff laws, but through legislation that will prohibit the importation of the cheap man that makes cheap products. But it is more than a question of protection—it is a question of civilization.”¹³ The exclusion league would go on to drum up support across the state, and eventually the nation, against this imagined economic and cultural “invasion.”

The situation reached a crisis point in the fall of 1906 when the San Francisco School Board voted to segregate the city’s Japanese students into the preexisting Oriental School. This local affair turned international as President Theodore Roosevelt pressured city officials to rescind the resolution, recognizing its threat to U.S.–Japan relations. To spare Japan the humiliation of a federal law banning Japanese immigrants, Roosevelt worked with Japanese officials to negotiate a series of compromises that would come to be called the Gentlemen’s Agreement. San Francisco officials agreed not to segregate Japanese children, and Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers. But to the horror of exclusionists, the Japanese immigrant population increased in the next decade as Japanese men brought over their wives—often as picture brides—and they began to have children. Those children were, thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the United States. Nativists seized on the growth of Japanese families and communities across the state to vilify picture brides as immoral and to paint Japanese women as subservient breeders forced to toil in the fields.

Japanese immigrants’ legal status rendered them vulnerable, as they remained ineligible for citizenship until the 1952 McCarran–Walter Act abolished racial requirements for naturalization. State governments targeted them with discriminatory laws like California’s Alien Land Laws, and nativists seized upon issues of naturalization and citizenship. James Phelan began his 1920 bid for the Senate by calling for an end to birthright citizenship for the Japanese. Although the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case affirmed birthright citizenship for Asians, nativists continued to push the idea of denaturalization of the Nisei generation. The idea was not unprecedented, given that the Expatriation Act of 1907 forced citizen women who married noncitizen men to give up their citizenship. Although the 1922 Cable Act, passed after women won suffrage, restored some women’s citizenship, it did not do so for women married to men “ineligible for citizenship.” In other words, citizen women, regardless of race, who married Asian immigrant men became stateless until the law was revoked in 1936.

Today, the legal status of the children of undocumented immigrants is under attack, as President Trump has promised to revoke their birthright citizenship. Moreover, his proposed deportation plan targets not just undocumented immigrants, but also those here with Temporary Protected Status, which he threatens to rescind.¹⁴ Nativists are again deploying residency and citizenship as a weapon to exclude those deemed as both economic and racial threats. When Trump told crowds in New Hampshire that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country…they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” his words echoed those of a hundred years before.¹⁵ Early twentieth-century California was rife with eugenicists, ranging from Stanford president David Starr Jordan to horticulturist Luther Burbank, and their ideas informed debates on immigration and other social policies. Although Jordan deeply respected elite Japanese culture, he maintained a fervently Social Darwinist attitude, noting in 1906 that “an influx of people of less intelligence, less self-reliance and less patriotism than our own whether these people come from China, Japan, Poland, Africa, or anywhere else, is a source of grave danger to the Republic.”¹⁶ While more elegantly phrased than Trump’s declaration—“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums…you know, insane asylums: that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff”—Jordan similarly placed Americans in opposition to an imagined influx of degenerates.¹⁷

California’s anti-Japanese movement was not the first nativist movement in the United States, nor were its rhetorical strategies unique. It did, however, seriously strain relations with Japan, contributing to the tensions that culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Its victories, from the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement to the Alien Land Laws, which were adapted by other neighboring states, denied significant economic opportunities to ethnically Japanese residents of the western United States. And its ultimate victory—the incarceration of 120,000 ethnically Japanese residents during World War II—is now recognized as a blatant betrayal of the nation’s founding principles. Trump’s increasingly nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and his election victory should not be seen as aberrations, but rather as another chapter in the ongoing American debate about whom to include within the body politic.