One in every 200 men is direct descendants of Genghis Khan, according to an astonishing discovery by a team of international geneticists. As the Mongol Empire stretched from Central Europe to the Sea of Japan, conquering town by town, raiding cities by cities, tens of thousands of female captives were forced into sexual subjugation; many were, in fact, taken by Khan himself as concubines. What a striking resemblance to the American presence in Asia during the late twentieth century. As the disputable name of “the American Empire” extended across the Pacific to Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines through entanglements of major regional warfare, “Amerasians” emerged as the new-generation dominant source of Asian immigration to the United States. Act by act, the Americans intended to clean up the burdens they have created in these areas; wave by wave, the Asian immigrants erode away the twentieth-century American Nativism. 

 

1953 marked the end of the 3-year power brawl between the United States and the Soviet Union on the battleground of the Korean peninsula after Japan withdrew its colonial power in 1945. 15,000 Koreans immigrated to the United States between 1950 and 1964 as a result of this war. Along with the U.S. military presence in South Korea before, during, and after the Korean War, forging military bases everywhere in the country, the camptown economy peaked as brothels were built and funded by the Korean government, providing sexual services to U.S. soldiers. Camptown prostitution and related businesses contributed to nearly 25 percent of the Korean GNP, according to a 2002 study by Katharine Moon, a professor at Wellesley College. Fatherless orphans, if not as side-effects of these commercial transactions, were abandoned, prompting An Act for the Relief of Certain Korean War Orphans in 1955 for international adoption organizations such as Holt International in Korea to send around 13,000 Korean children per year to American families from 1955 to 1977. The War Brides Act of 1945 further boosts the numbers by legalizing the migration of wives married to U.S. servicemen in Korea. 70,000 Korean women had crossed the U.S. border by 1980 as war brides.

 

The United States continued to intervene and contain the communist power in the Vietnam War, after succeeded in stabilizing the Korean peninsula, until its defeat in 1975. As the communist North Vietnam government resides towards the end of the Vietnam War, more humanitarian crises and displacements had ever since doubled the number of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States every decade between 1980 and 2000, exceeding 1.3 million in 2017. Operation Babylift in 1975, which evacuated over 3,300 infants and children that were predominantly seen as the descendants of prostitutes and G.I.s due to the massive commercial sex industry during wartime out of South Vietnam at the end of the War, Operation New Life in 1975, which transported 130,000 Vietnamese refugees to Guam and later resettled in the U.S., and the Amerasian Homecoming Act in 1988, which gave preferential immigration status to over 67,000 Amerasians relatives to enter the United States, played a major role within. The intentions behind these most successful humanitarian operations that were specifically targeted at the South Vietnamese (leaving “dust of life” behind in a communist state) – whether it’s the U.S. government’s sudden realization of its obligations in resolving the post-war agonies or the need to justify its motive in joining the War to the unpopular voters back in the motherland with photos of innocent war orphans – remains in question; nevertheless, they were responsible for the 2 million people of Vietnamese ancestry, 350,000 people of Cambodian ancestry, and 200,000 people of Laotian ancestry living in the United States by 2010.

 

 Filipino immigration to the United States can be traced back to the origin of the American presence in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War ended in 1898 with U.S. victory. Nurses and missionaries from the United States came in the early twentieth century as nursing mentors to build infrastructures for medical education to train the local Filipino women to serve the U.S. navy. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and the Fullbright-Hays Act of 1961 further gave birth to the Exchange Visitor Program, originally intended to combat Soviet propaganda by introducing U.S. democracy to more foreigners, that not only granted Filipino nurses to study and acquire professional experiences in the United States but also made clear to the Filipinos that the shortage of high-income (sometimes 20 times of the wage they receive back in the Philippines) nursing positions was their ultimate destination: Filipino nurses were entering the U.S. in thousands after the Immigration Act of 1965 with over 150,000 Filipino nurses were employed since 1960. This is not all. American WWII veterans stationed in the Philippines brought back Filipino wives and children; 250,000 Filipinos who fought in the U.S. military during WWII brought their wives and children to the U.S.; the annual quota of 100 Filipino immigrants to the U.S. under the Luce-Celler Bill of 1946 became the major source of the migration. By 2018, Filipino immigrants had exceeded 2 million.

 

These Asian immigration patterns seem to portray a common factor – waves of immigrants, either voluntary or involuntary, arrived at the United States after the United States knocked on their doors, often leaving burdens, ruins, and the distant American Dream behind. The extensive number of Asian immigrants and their voices further contribute to the revolutionary Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula and removed racially-discriminated immigration policies. In addition to the paramount purpose of immigration since this act – family reunification of war brides and war orphans with their G.I. fathers – many Asians came to the U.S. to seek for a higher standard of living: over 32,000 Koreans had migrated to the U.S. annually from 1976 to 1990 to strive for job opportunities and escape political insecurity; many former government employees and Vietnamese refugees escaped the political and economic instability under the communist government; highly skilled Filipino professionals who had taken their advantage of fluent English after entering the U.S. aimed for expertise in large demand. What they will later face, however, are racial discrimination, cultural and language barriers, and securing their status and their jobs in this multiracial society of America.​