Two hundred years ago, Indianapolis was a village where English, German, French, and native Lenape was spoken in the log cabins and among the trees of the dark forest. Eighty years later, a daily worker “Parade of All Nations” — Serbs and Syrians, Hungarians and Romanians, Irish and Germans, Lithuanians and Greeks — marched through the gates of the iron works in Haughville and Kingan’s meat packing house “chattering in a tongue different from that of his neighbor beside him.” Today, Indianapolis is a cosmopolitan city where more than 85 languages are spoken by its residents. Many of the immigrants speaking these languages, until recent years, are among nationalities who, at times, were previously excluded and unwelcome from experiencing American liberty.
Asian immigration to Indianapolis began with the first recorded Chinese resident Wah Lee, a single man, who came to the Hoosier capital in 1873 and established a laundry at 113 S. Illinois St. He was soon joined by a few of his countrymen who also opened laundries along Washington St, Massachusetts Ave, and Kentucky Ave, the 1880 United States census recording ten Chinese in the city. While the Chinese residents of Indianapolis were few in number and their laundries were not “troublesome competitors” to the steam laundries, Chinese labor in other parts of the United States, especially in California, was often viewed with hostility. This prejudice resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prohibiting the immigration of any Chinese person for ten years and barring the naturalization of Chinese already in the United States. Visitors were excepted.
Anti-Chinese bias persisted and a decade later the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892 not only continued the ban on immigration, but compelled those already in the United States, including the twenty-one residents of Indianapolis, to carry a permit, with a photo, at all times. Failure to have the ID could result in immediate deportation. This law became permanent in 1902, only to be repealed in 1943 when the Republic of China was an ally of the United States during World War II. After 61 years, Chinese immigration resumed although limited under the 1924 Immigration Act to 105 annual visas. Resident Chinese could also apply for naturalization.
With the ban on immigration, a small number of Chinese made their way to Indianapolis over the years from other American cities. Moy Kee, an interpreter and successful entrepreneur, came to the city in the mid-1890s from Chicago. He was the only naturalized Chinese resident, and his wife was the only Chinese woman in Indianapolis. Moy Kee opened a Chinese Tea Store, 139 Massachusetts Ave., and later a Chinese Restaurant, 506 E. Washington St. He was the host when Prince Pu Lun visited Indianapolis in 1904, and the prince conferred the Fifth Rank of nobility on Moy Kee in recognition of his status as “Mayor of the Chinese.
Unlike the Chinese, there were initially no limitations on Japanese immigration. Ikko Matsumoto was an early Japanese resident of Indianapolis, coming to the city in 1892. He partnered with George Dyer in jewelry manufacturing before establishing his own jewelry shop at 17½ S. Meridian St. About a dozen years later, Ikuta Takito opened a Japanese fine art goods store at 411 Massachusetts Ave. However, few Japanese came to the city after the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 when Japan agreed not to allow immigration of laborers to America in exchange for the United States not imposing restrictions on Japanese immigrants already in the country. By the time of the 1910 federal census, only ten Japanese were residing in Indianapolis.
The 1890s also found the arrival of the first Syrian Arabs in Indianapolis. They were Christians and settled in an area known as the Syrian Quarter along Willard St., a densely inhabited neighborhood where Lucas Oil Stadium now stands. Among the early immigrants were Solomon David, a peddler, and David Freije, also a peddler who later operated a grocery at 348 N. Pine St. The Syrian community grew in numbers, and the 1910 federal census recorded more than 1,000 individuals residing in the city.
A few Asian immigrants came to Indianapolis, if only temporarily, to attend Butler College, an affiliated institution of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) located in Irvington. American missionaries in China and Japan told potential students of Butler and of those who came for post graduate studies were Alexander Ying Lee, T. K. Dju, Li Ru Hung, and Dr. Simaro Rubota. The Indiana Dental College also accepted Dr. Seimaro Kubota as a student.
After years of newspapers and magazines warning of the “yellow peril,” hostility towards Asians from American nativists continued even though immigration from China and Japan had virtually ceased. This extreme racism brought about the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, which prohibited all Asian immigration to the United States — from the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent to Southeast Asia and Polynesia (except the Philippines, a territory of the United States at the time). It also barred all Asian immigrants in United States from citizenship and stripped citizenship from those already naturalized. The law also required all adult immigrants to pass a literacy test and imposed an $8 (2024: $200) per person head tax on all immigrants to deter immigration and cover to the cost of those “who might become a public burden.” Further limitations came with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 which created the National Origins Formula, favoring western and northern Europeans by restricting the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States to two percent of the total number of people of each ethnic group in the country based on the 1890 census.
A tragic result of these restrictive immigration policies was the fate of German Jews seeking refuge from Nazi persecution only to be turned away from American shores because of the quota scheme. Despite restrictive immigration, people “yearning to breathe free” made their way to America. Mexicans fleeing revolution, Hungarians escaping crushing Soviet oppression, and Cubans breaking free from a despotic tyranny received sanctuary.
The Immigration & Naturalization Act of 1965 abolished the National Origins Formula, replacing it with preference categories. Family relationships and skill-based preferences provided those from non-European countries with greater opportunities to come to the United States. Others sought humanitarian relief as refugees and asylum seekers. In recent years, 35 million people have applications pending to legally enter the United States, but with caps on valid entry slightly over one million people are admitted annually. Over the past five decades, Indianapolis has benefited from its diverse ethnic population, celebrated annually at the International Festival with cultural displays and demonstrations featuring dress, art, music, dance, and vibrant sounds of languages from Spanish, Portuguese, and French to French Creole and Tagalog to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, to Swahili and Yoruba to Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali, to German, Russian and Ukrainian to Arabic and Farsi.
