Assignment #4

(<---The picture to the right is a statue of "King Pan". I'll get into more detail about the significance of this person in later blogs.)


Hey everyone and welcome to another week in blogging!! In my previous blog, I actually found some interesting facts about the Iu-Mien people which I never thought I'd find coming into this research which was pretty cool to say the least. Although I wasn't too pleased to hear about my people's incompetence behavior in the 1920's, I still found it to be useful information because it's always good to hear other people's view on you and/or your own race. I'm interested as to know if these explorers who studied my people are still alive so I could possibly contact them and do a interview. Not to sound like a complete douche, but with the time that they first started studying the Iu-Mien people I highly doubt they're still alive today but who knows right?
OK now that I got that off my back, let me explain what I did this week. This was suppose to be the time where I go out and really dig deep into finding out things that nobody ever knew of , or even new history. I failed miserably in this as I was suppose to go to the Hayward Area Historical Society today, but my car's tires did not cooperate with me! I'll definitely try to check it out this weekend for my next post. Fortunately I had a backup plan earlier in the week for this very reason. I had checked out four books in Cal State East Bay's library on Asian Immigration which I thought to be very helpful. My primary focus for this week was to talk about Southeast Asian Immigration to the U.S with an deep emphasis on post-Vietnam War immigration. As Professor Ivey pointed out, the Iu-Mien people are a small minority of all those who immigrated to the U.S and the period in which they came to the U.S fits directly into the post-Vietnam War era which ended in 1975.
In the book "Asians in America: The History and Immigration of Asian Americans", it states in the introduction that since the Vietnam War, new Southeast Asian populations have become a part of the American cultural mosaic. They include the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lao, Hmong, and Iu-Mien (I'm starting to find out that Mien people are recognized in history books, hopefully more to come). The book also states that approximately 700,000 Indochinese have immigrated and settled in various parts of the country. I'm assuming they're talking about the year 1998, since that's when this book was published. It's also important to know that there were certain laws passed before the 1965 Immigration Act that were imposed on Asians that wanted to immigrate to the U.S. Such laws consisting of The Immigration Act of 1924 (specifically targeting the Koreans) and The National Origins Quota Act of 1921 were imposed with the motive of keeping as much immigrants from coming to the U.S as possible. The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act on Asian American immigration to the U.S allowed for a massive increase in immigrants coming to the U.S as pointed out in the book. In it states that in the pre-1965 period, Asian immigration accounted for only about 8 percent of the total immigrant population, about 22,000 per year. From 1965-1981..there was a substantial increase from each Asian country except Japan. In the most recent period, about 235,000 Asian immigrants, about 43 percent of the total immigrant population, entered the United States each year. While I was reading this book and the statistics it provided, I just couldn't help but wonder if the 1965 act was never passed and the fall of Saigon never happened, where I would've been today? It's funny how things work themselves out, and how previous laws were put in place to prevent certain people from coming here to better their lives.
So I was thinking that since assignments 4,5 and 6 are all the same, I'll leave blog #4 at this to save up the rest of the information for the next two blogs. I plan on finding out more and more about Southeast Asian immigration and how Mien people along with other races were treated in California. I hope to be more specific and make it the Bay Area if possible. And YES, I will be checking out the Hayward Area Historical Society soon enough so you can scold me now.