Just hours into his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order stating that children born in the United States would no longer be automatically granted citizenship if their parents were not lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens, upending more than a century and a half of precedent.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Michael Luo, Doubleday, 560 pp., $35, April 2025
Trump’s order and the resulting court cases have renewed focus on birthright citizenship, a principle enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States.”
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the case and limited federal judges’ ability to pause Trump’s executive orders. Though it did not rule on the constitutionality of the order to end birthright citizenship, the decision may still shape how U.S. citizenship is granted.
A response to concerns around citizenship and equal rights for freed slaves following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment became critical for the Chinese in the United States, most notably in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
Ark, a Chinese American, was returning from overseas travel when he was denied reentry into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country. But because Ark was born in the United States, he argued that he was a citizen. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, thus establishing that anyone born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, is a citizen at birth.
Ark’s story is just one of many about the lives, struggles, and achievements of Chinese immigrants to the United States in the new book Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo, an executive editor at the New Yorker. Luo’s book grew out of a 2021 article he wrote about Chinese expulsion from the American West in the late 19th century, written in response to the rise in anti-Asian sentiment and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A group of Chinese students arrive in Seattle, circa 1925. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Strangers in the Land begins with the arrivals of the first Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, driven by a combination of political tumult in China and the discovery of gold in California. At the time, political leaders celebrated the immigrants’ presence; during his 1852 State of the State address, California Gov. John McDougal called for more Chinese to come, believing that they could be a source of cheap labor. Many businessmen viewed Chinese immigrants as part of a “golden age” of U.S.-China trade. Within a few years, however, goodwill declined, as the Chinese were thought to be unable to assimilate and, later, a threat to the economic livelihood of their white counterparts.
The scope of Luo’s book is massive and its recounting of history impressively detailed, with an overarching focus on demonstrating “how the United States responded to the influx of tens of thousands of people from a distant land, who spoke a different language, had different beliefs and customs, and did not fit into the country’s existing racial stratification.”
Chapter by chapter, Luo reveals how anti-Chinese attitudes germinated from labor market anxieties among the white working class, eventually infiltrating the courts. In People v. Hall (1854), the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese testimony against a white person was inadmissible. Political candidates and leaders capitalized on anti-Chinese sentiment: Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen’s Party of California, frequently delivered violent speeches against the Chinese, whom he characterized as a “race of cheap working slaves.” In 1878, the Workingmen’s Party ran in California’s second constitutional convention with the slogan, “The Chinese Must Go!” which became a rallying cry for anti-Chinese movements across the country.
Violence is an unfortunate but glaring theme throughout Strangers in the Land. Luo details how, in the years surrounding the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, massacres, lynchings, and arson were used to drive out Chinese communities throughout the American West.
One such incident occurred in Truckee, California, where a robust Chinese community formed amid the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. After a fire of questionable origins destroyed Truckee’s Chinatown, a lawyer named Charles F. McGlashan led a movement to methodically remove the Chinese by boycotting businesses that employed Chinese workers. As a result, hundreds of Truckee’s remaining Chinese residents relocated. This expulsion of Chinese residents provided a template for other towns to copy, called the “Truckee Method.”
Other instances resulted in mass casualties. In the Snake River massacre, horse thieves ambushed a camp of Chinese miners in eastern Oregon. The gang killed more than 30 people, mutilated their bodies, and dumped them in the river.
An illustration published in Harper’s Weekly in 1885 depicts a massacre of Chinese laborers carried out by white coal miners.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Luo does not spare us from the horrors, writing with clear, unwavering prose. In the chapter on Wyoming’s Rock Springs massacre, in which a mob of white miners killed and wounded dozens of Chinese workers, he describes the carnage found in the burned-out cellars of the town’s Chinese quarter: “Some of the victims had wrapped wet cloths over their heads and burrowed into the earthen walls, trying to escape the smoke and flames. Hogs feasted on a corpse that they had dragged from the ruins.”
Indeed, it was difficult to read about these events. But such explicit horror feels necessary, especially when capturing an ugly history that remains relatively unknown. Strangers in the Land is an effort to ensure such documentation not only exists but is preserved and remembered.
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Strangers in the Land does not solely focus on the misfortunes of the Chinese but also their persistence. The Chinese fought back: They armed themselves; organized via benevolent associations and mutual aid companies; advocated for themselves in court; and founded their own newspapers and print media—including San Francisco’s Chung Sai Yat Po, a Chinese-language newspaper, and Chinese Press, a weekly English-language tabloid.
The book is a meticulous triumph of research and testimony, and its greatest strength is its attention to the individuals of this history—both known and unknown. The audience is privy to not just their stories, but also their voices and letters, walking alongside them as Luo traces the arc of their lives.
Luo introduces Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from Yale University, who later had his citizenship revoked and eventually died “without a country”; Wong Chin Foo, a journalist and activist, who founded the Chinese Equal Rights League to fight against Chinese expulsion; Fong Sec, a 13-year-old boy who had trash thrown at him upon arriving to the United States; and Joe and Mary Tape, who fought against segregation in the California school system.
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A man with a long braid wears a headset as he works. A young boy leans on a sill next to him. Another man is in the background. - Chinese workers at the telephone exchange in San Francisco, circa 1904. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
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Jail bars and an archway frame a group of men. - Chinese immigrants arrested in New Jersey in 1934. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Some readers may find the myriad personal stories here gratuitous, but as Luo writes, “The individual stories of the earliest Chinese arrivals in America have mostly slipped through historians’ grasps.” This book, alongside others such as The Chinese Must Go by Beth Lew-Williams, Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon H. Chang, Angel Island by Erika Lee and Judy Yung, and Driven Out by Jean Pfaelzer, firmly asserts Chinese humanity in a history that has sought to exclude it.
After a century of violent and uneasy relations with Chinese immigrants, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943—largely due to the United States’ desire to strengthen ties with China against Japan during World War II—and replaced it with a strict quota system that allowed only 105 immigrants from China each year. In the years that followed, the United States was swept up in the fervor of McCarthyism that created, as Luo writes, a “double jeopardy, specific to Chinese American immigrants, in which they endured scrutiny on both sides of the Pacific.”
After the Civil Rights Movement, the United States abolished the quota system with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This unleashed “a tide of immigration … and set in motion a demographic transformation of the country that is still unfolding today,” Luo writes. Since then, about a quarter of immigrants to the United States have been Asian, making them the country’s fastest-growing ethnic population today.
However, as Luo notes, though millions of Chinese immigrants have been granted U.S. citizenship over the years, true belonging has remained elusive.
A leaflet titled “The Democratic Chinese Exclusion Law” (1882) is seen on display at an exhibit titled “California Dreams: San Francisco, a Portrait” in Germany in 2019.Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images
It is impossible to read the history recounted in Strangers in the Land and separate it from the Trump administration’s attitudes and messaging on immigration: They’re taking our jobs, they’re a threat to our way of life, they’re unassimilable, they’re dangerous.
This language of exclusion and nativism is not new, but it’s worth noting that much of it was shaped in reaction to the Chinese presence in the United States. Though there were other waves of immigrants to the United States during the 19th century, the Chinese were specifically reviled due to their status as low-wage laborers, putting them in direct economic competition with white workers following the depression of 1873. The Chinese were also considered a cultural threat to U.S. society, perceived as disease-ridden, untrustworthy, immoral—the opposite of the Western world’s purported values.
Strangers in the Land ends on an uncertain note, which feels apt, given the precarious standing of Chinese Americans in the current geopolitical climate. Though many of the Trump administration’s policies target China and Chinese nationals specifically, history shows that it is people of Chinese descent already living in the United States who will ultimately bear the consequences: suspicion, castigation, and oftentimes violence.
With this book, Luo asks what makes a real American, ultimately demonstrating the ever-shifting goalposts of how to answer the question.
In the introduction, he recounts an incident in 2016 when a woman brushed past his family on the streets of Manhattan, yelling, “Go back to China!” The experience made Luo wonder if his children would ever feel like they belonged in this country. It is the kind of scenario I personally know all too well: As a child, walking with my family along the streets of our Texas suburb, a passenger in a car drove past and yelled, “Go back to where you came from!”
At the time, I could not understand the origins of that sentiment; I thought it was our fault for drawing such a reaction. But it’s merely a tired permutation of “The Chinese Must Go!” and the long history of violent opposition faced by Chinese immigrants in the United States.
By bringing light to this history, Strangers in the Land suggests to Americans today that this political force is older, darker, and more enduring than we even know.
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