Immigration and Sino–U.S. Foreign Relations

Tuesday, 16 Nov 2021 at 6:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union

Through the lens of Chinese immigration and its regulation, this lecture explores key values and approaches applied by the U.S. government in managing racial and cultural diversity in its population and how immigration policy interacts with economic and international relations priorities.  As a racial minority associated with a major world power and economy, Chinese American and immigrant experiences reveal major shifts in U.S. conceptions of democracy and its place in the world.  

Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies eight years (2006-2014). She was president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas. She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000). Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies.