Gary R. Hess

The Forgotten Asian Americans: The East Indian Community in the United States

BETWEEN 1820 AND 1972, some 70,140 immigrants from India entered the United States. This immigration has been concentrated in two distinct phases. Between 1907 and 1920, approximately 6,400 Indians, mostly agricultural workers, were admitted and settled predominantly in California. Their modest numbers, by contrast with the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, did not protect the Hindus, as immigrants from India were generally called, from the anti-Asian sentiment especially prevalent in California. Their Asian origin alone engendered fear of a Hindu invasion and demands for their exclusion and for reduction of their political and economic rights. Poorly educated, untrained in any skills, and ignorant of American society, the preponderance of these early East Indian immigrants were ill-equipped to cope with the situation they encountered in the United States. They quickly became and generally remained an alienated minority near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.

The "Hindu" in America: Immigration and Naturalization Policies and India, 1917-1946

THE EFFECT Of United States immigration and naturalization policies on relations with China and Japan from the late nineteenth century through World War II has received much attention from historians. American treatment of immigrants from the other major Asian country, India, has understandably been ignored due to the absence of any controversies with the imperial government of India. Yet the inclusion of the few thousand Indian immigrants within the anti-Oriental movement that became national policy during the World War I era was a constant irritant in the promotion of understanding between the United States and India, particularly with the Indian nationalists. At a time of general American indifference to Asian nationalism, the racially inspired immigration and naturalization policies of the United States were seen by Indians as the most tangible evidence of American public and official attitudes toward India. Within the limits imposed by British imperialism, the Indians protested and retaliated against the United States. Leaders of the Indian community in America, supported by

Global Expansion and Regional Balances: The Emerging Scholarship on United States Relations with India and Pakistan

United States policy in South Asia from World War II to the present has generally been determined by global strategic calculations. The substantial growth of American influence has profoundly affected regional developments, and the United States has been the principal external politicaleconomic-military force in South Asia, although in the last twenty years it has been effectively challenged by the Soviet Union. Like United States relations with much of the Third