This is right up my alley--Asian American history intersecting with Cold War and immigration policy is just so fascinating at mid century.

Asia has had a difficult and complex position in the imagination of the U.S. government and the broader American public. The notion of a "Yellow Peril" leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 was the predominant assumption of the time. However, Asia gets a face-lift in the 1930s. American missionaries achieved broader success in portraying China in particular as a sympathetic, if still inferior land worthy of US aid and support. The Good Earth by Pearl Buck was insanely popular at the time for a reason--American audiences were lapping up the fictional story of a sympathetic Chinese peasant with an entrepreneurial spirit. With the start of WWII and Japan emerging as the ultimate enemy, this did heighten American hostility towards Asians in general. But official rhetoric also required portraying allied Asians in a sympathetic light. If the Japanese Empire was the ultimate evil, the Chinese nationalists were the suffering little brothers who needed US support. And the racism baked into the Pacific theater of the war was complex: American officials generally viewed Japanese Americans, even while interned and denied citizenship rights, as having the potential to demonstrate their loyalty and overriding "American" qualities. Japanese American veterans, fighting in segregated units, become the stuff of legend, a product of both US government publicity and Japanese American efforts to try and overcome the overwhelming hostility of the moment. Simply put, there were "good" Asians and "bad" Asians. With the end of WWII and Japan as an occupied nation that US planners quickly saw as a necessary bulwark against Communism, the US language surrounding Japanese shifted from Japan as a savage, barbaric land, and instead Japanese as obedient, cooperative people led astray by fanatical militarists.

WWII and the Cold War also put US policy towards its minorities in a sharper light. US officials were eager to prove Japanese Empire accusations of America as a racist nation wrong, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations generally considered civil rights issues to be a PR disaster at a moment the nation was supposedly the beacon of liberal democracy.

All of this means that immigration restrictions towards Asians was out of date. The blanket nativism and racism towards Asia no longer fit the moment--racism absolutely still existed, but certain Asians could be sympathetic subjects if geopolitical value and their personal qualities aligned. The plight of English-speaking, Christian Asians who struggled to get past US immigration bureaucracy frequently appeared in news and media sources during the 1950s. Asia increasingly appeared in US media through popular musicals and films like The King and I, Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara, South Pacific, and Flower Drum Song, all of which portrayed Asians sympathetically.

The 1940s and 50s was a moment when the virulent racism of the past against Asians, especially notions of inferiority via blood, failed to meet the imagination of what US-Asian relations should be. The US was to be a multicultural liberal democracy, albeit with Protestant, Caucasian characteristics, that nonetheless required a revamped immigration policy that could leave the opportunity for Asians to sit underneath the US umbrella as leader of the Free World during the Cold War.

For further reading, I highly recommend Cold War Orientalism by Christina Klein, Impossible Subjects by Mae Ngai, and the Good Immigrants by Madeline Hsu.