The mainland Japanese for the most part kept warily to themselves. many of them toiling with exemplary efficiency on their family fruit and vegetable farms. Insular and quiescent. they were also internally riven by age and legal status. Their elders. the forty thousand firstgeneration immigrant Japanese. or Issel. were generally over the age of fifty and debarred from citizenship by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. a statutory impediment that perversely exposed them to the accusation that as noncitizens they were poorly assimilated into American society. A majority of their children. the eighty thousand secondgeneration Nisei. were under the age of eighteen. Born in the United States. they were also citizens.
Identified stereotypes
Generalization that mainland Japanese 'kept warily to themselves' and were 'insular and quiescent'.