Although Indonesia’s ties with the United States have historically been limited, the Southeast Asian nation has a special connection with the forty-fourth president of the United States.

Indonesia is made up of a large number of populated islands located south of Southeast Asia’s Malay Peninsula.

This federal law upheld the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave preference to individuals of northern and western European lineage.

The Immigration Act of 1917 was the first federal law to impose a general restriction on immigration in the form of a literacy test.

This law created the Dillingham Commission to collect data used in future immigration laws, further narrowed Asian immigration, limited Muslim immigration, and expanded the definition of undesirable women immigrants.

A notable scholar of semantics, Hayakawa also had a political career. He represented California in the U.S. Senate, where he launched a movement to establish English as the official language of the United States by introducing the English Language Amendment in 1981.

During the mid- to late nineteenth century, the fares Chinese immigrants crossing the Pacific Ocean to the United States paid ranged from fifteen to forty-five dollars—amounts that few Chinese workers could afford.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a labor shortage in the western United States led to creation of a contract labor system to help the mining and railroad industries attract cheap immigrant labor to the United States.