ABSTRACT
The “nonwhite” and “nonblack” citizens represent a diversity of background and appearance, culture and character that has greatly enriched the United States. But this very diversity has also played into the long-held views of those wary of people who are quite unlike themselves, who, in Ronald Takaki’s graphic phrase, have come to America “from different shores.” The Japanese were a half step behind the Chinese at each phase of their early settlement on the US mainland. The first Japanese settlers came to Pacific shores in 1869, twenty-one years after the first Chinese landed on the American mainland. In late 1970s the world was alarmed by reports of “boat people” who had escaped from Vietnam but were having difficulty finding places of asylum on the shores of neighboring countries. Perhaps second only to the native “Indian” peoples of what became the United States as the oldest Americans, the Mexicans are hardly migrants, at least in the modern sense.
