ing efforts. A number of factors caused this change, the most important of which was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (1965).
The three major groups of Asians who immigrated to America before World War II were the Pilipinos, who were the largest group and migrated here primarily to fill plantation labor and domestic service jobs, mostly in the West, after 1903. They were exempt from the quotas of the immigration laws and are still the largest Asian American group in the United States (24.2 percent in 1994 (Tyson A8). Most Chinese who came were contract laborers recruited to work on the railroads and in other servile capacities from the 1840s onwards. Those who stayed were largely confined to low income Chinatowns in cities like San Francisco, and New York. The Japanese began arriving in the 1890s and gravitated largely to truck farming, gardening and small merchant activities. They were less numerous than the Pilipinos or the Chinese but by the outbreak of World War II, the majority of them had achieved at least lower middle class status. All three groups encountered severe discrimination. After a series of exclusionary immigration acts culminating in the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, immigration of Asians to America slowed to a trickle. During World War II, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, 64 percent of whom were American citizens, were incarcerated as a security measure and as a result of public hysteria in relocation camps in the West and suffered financial losses estimated at $400 million (Bell 27).
The 1965 act removed race and color as bases for exclusion. Quotas were set for all countries which were to be filled on the basis of the education and skills and number of relatives in the United States of prospective admittees. The result was a dramatic increase in the influx of Asian Americans. Asian Americans rose as a percent of all immigrants from six percent between 1951 and 1960 to 428,000 (30 percent) i...