Taiwanese American - Immigration History

Immigration History

Prior to the 1950s emigration from Taiwan was negligible. During Taiwan's early history, the island was populated by Austronesian aboriginals and in the 17th and 18th centuries it served as a destination point for migrating Chinese, primarily Hoklos and Hakka. In 1895, Japan took over control of Taiwan following Japan's victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese war. Japanese control severely curtailed any movement off the island in the interest of containing dissent against the Japanese Empire.

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, opportunities for immigration from Taiwan to the United States were virtually nonexistent before the 1950s. Previously, in the 1840s when American companies began recruiting cheap, accessible labor from Asia to develop Hawaii and the frontier West, Taiwan was too small to be a target for recruiters.

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took control of mainland China, and the remnant armies of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-Shek retreated to Taiwan. Because of the Cold War, the United States continued to recognize the Kuomintang-led Republic of China as the sole legitimate government of all of China from 1949 until 1979. As a result, immigration from Taiwan was counted under within the same quota for both mainland China and Taiwan. However, because the Communists banned emigration to the United States until 1977, this quota for immigrants from China was almost exclusively filled by immigrants from Taiwan. After the national origins system was relaxed and repealed by Immigration Acts in 1952 and 1965, many Taiwanese people came to the United States, forming the first wave of Taiwanese immigration. Their entry into the United States was facilitated by the immigration act of 1965, which created a system in which persons with professional skills and family ties in the United States were given preferential status, regardless of the nation of origin.

In 1979, the United States broke diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, while the Taiwan Relations Act gave Taiwan a separate immigration quota from that of mainland China.

Before the late 1960s, Taiwanese immigrants to the United States tended to be waishengren (mainlanders) who were people that immigrated to Taiwan with the Kuomintang after the fall of mainland China to the Communists. Later immigrants tended to increasingly be benshengren, whose ancestors had lived on Taiwan before 1949. With improving economic and political conditions in Taiwan, Taiwanese immigration to the United States began to subside in the early-1980s.