To clarify, how were non-blacks/non-whites treated during apartheid in South Africa and during the Black/White divide in the USA?
I can answer this for Chinese immigrants. There was a influx of Chinese laborers between ~1840 and 1882. Many of them helped with the First Transcontinental Railroad. While they weren't treated as badly as blacks at the time (freeman or enslaved), they still weren't treated particularly well. There were laws that protected wages and the like, but they essentially filled the niche that modern illegal migrant workers from Mexico do. Companies tended to like them since they were generally low wage, but the general population referred to the influx as the "yellow peril". This led to the federal govt passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which is the only legislation to specifically bar immigration based on race in the US. Since this was a 10 year act, it was extended indefinitely with the Greary Act in 1892. There was also legislation in place which denied Chinese men the right to marry whites. In 1924, legislation was enacted that completely barred citizenship for all Asians (previous to 1924, immigrants already in the US could be naturalized under the Naturalization Act (1790)), extended anti-miscegenation and prevented owning land. The Magnusson Act officially repealed the limits on immigration and citizenship while other regional laws barring marriage, ownership of property, etc were slowly lifted up to and after that point. There were still quotas on immigration until the Immigration and Nationality Law (1965), but those were exercised against all high inflow, non-European nations and not necessarily targeted at the Chinese, or Asians in general.
EDIT: Thanks to /u/artrw for pointing out the visa situation after the repeal of the exclusion acts.
This is a huge question that I'm not prepared to answer in full, especially from my phone. However, the general rule is that they weren't treated well in the US. Treatment did vary by 'race' and location though though. A Chinese woman living in the Frontier in Arizona or Utah would have most likely either been a prostitute or a laundry woman. If she was fortunate enough to have a well to-do husband, she would have been kept out of public sight instead. And of course segregation affected more than just women. Tombstone debated segregating all of the hundred or so Asians in the town into their own ghetto during the 1870s. They were disenfranchised from participating in trade and owning land. The mining companies that moved in later segregated even more, with sliding pay scales and job opportunities based race. All of these things also affected Hispanic people in the former Mexican territories as well. In the process of incorporation, Mexican landowners were stripped of their land and the areas resold to settlers, often turning well off families destitute in the process. Xenophobia was also a strong factor in treatment of Hispanics, especially in light of cultural, linguistic, and religious differences. For many people, mexicans and Hispanics were only one step up from Native Americans, America's "others." Culturally and ethnically distinct from "European stock", natives were often considered incompatible with the American and European ways of life. This essentially led to the exclusion of natives from wider America and their partitioning into the reservation system. The government schools attempted to eliminate native culture for decades and culturally assimilate them into America. However, voting rights, property rights, and political enfranchisement of every sort was denied to natives in many areas until quite recently.
These weren't the only groups to face social disparities in America. At various points everyone from Irish immigrants to greek immigrants to Japanese immigrants to Spanish immigrants have been subject to discrimination of various colors. The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics goes into a reasonably comprehensive overview of the status of all of these groups in America.
Foreign visitors get treated well if they look "foreign enough". A Sri Lankan named Chandra Dharma Sena Gooneratne wrote in the 1920's: "Any Asiatic can evade the whole issue of color in America by winding a few yards of linen around his head," Desai quotes Gooneratne as saying. "A turban makes anyone an Indian."'
Later a black Lutheran minister named Rev. Jesse Routté visited his family in Alabama in the 40's, he said "I was Jim Crowed here, Jim Crowed there, Jim Crowed all over the place. And I didn't like being Jim Crowed." So the next time he visited Alabama, he got a turban and robe and spoke in Swedish accent he learned from Swedish Lutheran theology school and everyone treated him like royalty thinking he is a foreign visitor. Here's a newspaper clipping with a photograph, and here's a New York Times clipping. At a fancy restaurant he asked the staff what would happen if a "Negro gentleman comes in here and sits down to eat." The reply: "No negro would dare to come in here to eat." "I just stroked my chin and ordered my dessert," he said.
During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, there was a diplomatic flare-up between the US and Japan over the treatment of Japanese immigrants in California. There were race riots in San Francisco in 1907 (this was in part attributed to fears over labor competition). Schools were segregated and the government of Japan lodged an official protest over this treatment and was a sticking point in any immigration deal that was being worked on. They eventually worked out a system that restricted how many could migrate (and schools were in part desegregated due to a deal being hammered out with the mayor of San Francisco), but it was tense enough that some senators were calling for the outbreak of hostilities.
Source: Theodore Rex
In the case of South Carolina, not only was there a twice segregated school system but a third as well for Native Americans. Even after Brown v. Board and the Civil Rights Act, it took further work on the ground by activists to get this third system of segregated schooling integrated. You can see on this flier for Victoria De Lee, a prominent SC activist, that her work included the integration of Native American schools in 1970.
Previously the red children had been relegated to segregated schooling in a dilapidated ungraded school building "reserved" for Indian children
I can only answer this from the South African perspective. South Africa basically divided the population up into races categorically. It defined as:
The Asian group meant people from Asia on the whole, which encompassed both Indian and Oriental people. South Africa had some Oriental population (mainly working in the mines or train lines) but over all it had a huge Indian population who had come across as indentured labourers during the British Raj. This population is so huge in fact that Durban has the largest amount of Indian people outside of the subcontinent...
South Africa went about segregating on a large scale, whole districts were declared by use of a particular racial group. Doing this the National Party went about making a scale that basically gave the best resources and amenities to the Whites, then to the Asians then to the Coloureds and then to the Blacks.
There is a picture here of the prison menu at Robben Island during it's time as a functional prison which shows different meals given to different races, with better meals going to the "Coloureds and Asiates"
Another significant point is the Tricameral Parliament. Between 1984 and 1994 South Africa changed it's parliamentary system as it realised the need to end Apartheid. In doing this it gave rudimentary political powers to Asian and Coloured people. The Black population got zero representation.
That mostly sums up the way they received treatment; not great, nowhere near the level White people had, but better than Black people.
Sources:
(I'm not quite sure if those sources are good enough, let me know and I can find more. Most of my knowledge comes from South African history going through it's schooling system and from the constant bombardment of what happened by the media...)
WRT to South Asians in the United States, I am happy to share what I know, but it is limited. Generally speaking, there have been individual visitors like students and "Maharishis" for centuries and small communities of South Asians in the United States for a little over 100 years. This includes Punjabi farmers in California and Bengali sea merchants who jumped ship and settled in places like New York. They were discriminated against as people of color.
Despite that South Asians were technically "caucasian" by the scientific racism of the early 20th century, obvious racism trumped the scientific claims. The Supreme Court ruling in Bhagat Singh Thind held that while South Asians were technically considered "caucasian" the "common" understanding of them was that they were not white and therefore not eligible to be naturalized. Thind, and all South Asians, were ruled ineligible to be citizens.
Another interesting tidbit is that there were a fair number of South Asian nationalists in the United States in the fight for decolonization of British India. The Ghadar Party, the most famous of these, operated in North America in the early 20th century.
If you're interested in further resources on South Asian American history, this digital archive is really good.
