US law targeted Asian people for nearly a century. The Page Act of 1875 restricted Chinese women from immigrating. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers, the first federal law to bar a group by nationality. During World War II, Executive Order 9066 led to the forced incarceration of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them US citizens.
Violence has followed a pattern of scapegoating. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in Detroit by two white autoworkers amid anger over Japanese car imports. His killers received probation and a fine, which helped spark the Asian American civil rights movement.
During the pandemic, political leaders and media tied the virus to China. Stop AAPI Hate received 10,905 reports of hate incidents from March 2020 through December 2021. In March 2021, a gunman killed eight people at Atlanta-area spas, six of them Asian women. Congress passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in May 2021. The model minority myth makes this racism harder to see by implying Asian Americans do not face it.