Lesson Plan - Turned Away

Download Teaching Strategies

Before teaching this article, download and review our Strategies for Teaching About Discrimination.

Build Background Knowledge

Provide this task for students to complete as they watch the video “Coming to America: From East and West”: What are some of the reasons immigrants decided to come to the U.S.? Prepare to take notes about that and set up a T-chart to take notes about Ellis Island and Angel Island. After watching, discuss reasons for immigration and compare the immigration stations.

Preview Vocabulary

Use the online Skill Builder Words to Know to preteach the domain-specific terms citizen, civilian, Congress, deport, desegregation, economy, ethnic, repeal, strike, World War II, and xenophobia. Have students refer to the Skill Builder as they read.

Read the Article

Read the article aloud or have students read it independently or in pairs. As students read, direct them to mark any surprising information with an exclamation point and any information they’re confused about with a question mark.

Answer Close-Reading Questions

Have students write their responses, or use the Close-Reading Questions to guide a discussion.

• Why did Calvin Ong leave China in 1937? What was his journey like? (Key Details)
Ong left China to join his father in the U.S. He wanted to start a new life. He hoped to get an education and a job that could help his family. Ong traveled by boat across the Pacific Ocean. The journey took 18 days, and he had to share a room with four strangers.

• Summarize the section “Unfairly Blamed.” (Summarizing)
The first wave of immigrants from China began during the California Gold Rush of the 1840s. Many Chinese immigrants worked difficult and demanding jobs, including building the transcontinental railroad. Chinese workers were paid less than White workers and had to pay for their own food and housing. When the U.S. economy collapsed in the 1870s and jobs became hard to find, many White people unfairly blamed Chinese workers. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. law to restrict immigration based on a person’s race or country of origin. Angel Island was opened in 1910 to help enforce the law. Over the next 30 years, about 175,000 people from China, as well as people from Japan, India, Russia, and other countries, arrived at the station. About one in five were sent home.

• Why was Ong deported? How did he get a second chance to come to the U.S.? (Cause and Effect)
Ong was deported because he could not answer the purposefully tricky questions that the immigration officials asked him. Since his answers did not match his father’s, the officials concluded that Ong and his father weren’t actually related and deported Ong. After Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Ong tried to come to the U.S. again in 1949. He was detained in a different immigration center for six months before he was allowed to go live with his father.

• What evidence supports the idea that “Asian Americans continue to face discrimination”? (Text Evidence)
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have faced verbal harassment and physical violence. Experts says this increase in attacks has come from people falsely blaming Covid-19 on people of Asian descent, even though a person’s race has nothing to do with how the disease spreads.

• How does the sidebar “Standing Up for Equality” support the article? (Text Features)
The sidebar provides three examples of how Asian Americans have stood up for their rights over the years. In 1885, Mamie Tape’s parents won a court case against the school district that had refused to let her attend a local school because she was Chinese. In 1942, Fred Korematsu protested the imprisonment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. In 1965, Larry Itliong helped organize the Delano Grape Strike, which helped raise pay for Asian American farmworkers.

• What might Angel Island official Edward Tepporn mean when he says “When we forget to learn from history, we’re unfortunately doomed to repeat it”? (Making Meaning)
Tepporn is reflecting on the long history of discrimination against Asians and other immigrants in the U.S. He might mean that if we don’t learn about mistakes that people made in the past, we will end up making those same mistakes again. Tepporn doesn’t want the discrimination that took place at Angel Island to be repeated in the future.

• Choose one of the images in the article to analyze. How does it help you understand the article? (Visual Literacy)
Responses will vary.

Write an Informative Essay

Use the Informative Writing Toolkit to help students respond to the “Write About It!” prompt at the end of the article. The kit will guide students through every step of the writing process, from brainstorming to publishing.

Assess Comprehension

Assign the 10-question Know the News quiz, available in PDF and interactive forms. You can also use Quiz Wizard to assess comprehension of this article and three others from the issue.