Tracing War Bride Legislation and the Racial Construction of Asian Immigrants

Abstract

Many historical studies of Asian immigration in the United States focus on the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965, since this Act led to a dramatic increase of Asian immigration and significantly revised former immigration policies. However, war bride legislation—laws governing the immigration of the foreign-born wives of American servicemen—represents an interesting area of political and legal analysis. Between the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which established highly restrictive national-origin quotas and the 1965 INA, thousands of Asian women immigrated to the United States as war brides, unrestricted by quotas. Their immigration represents a complex period of history during which the category of “immigrant” was consistently revised, racialized, and expanded. My paper surveys the history of these Acts and Amendments and argues that this legislation aimed to replace the perpetual foreigner myth with a gendered and “colorblind” myth about immigrant spouses—a precursor to the model minority myth.