The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act was a law, passed by U.S. Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, that had a significant impact on the influx of South Asian immigrants to the United States, as well as other Asian ethnicities. This legislation changed the way visas were issued, prioritizing specific skills or family reunification based on national origin (Rahma & Paik, 2017). Initially, many skilled South Asian professionals migrated to urban areas with their families under the preference system. The first influx of immigrants comprised well-educated individuals, predominantly including physicians, engineers, and lawyers, who came to the United States initially as students. The Polytechnic University of New York University was a prime location to pursue an undergraduate education due to the groundbreaking research in polymer research (American Chemical Society, 2024).

As I looked through the yearbooks in the 1970s, I started to recognize South Asian names and darker-skinned faces as opposed to looking at Poly materials from the 1960s. At this time, there were no student clubs or organizations. This method of just choosing faces from the yearbook could be inaccurate and can neglect individuals who are multi-racial. But I felt it necessary to still show this to show the first instances of South Asians at Poly. In the above portraits, I selected students from the Polywog (1974). 

You may notice that three of the names (“Richard,” “Joanne,” “Albert”) are English-sounding. It was common amongst Asian immigrants to adopt an Anglo-Saxon or “American” first name for assimilation purposes (Gibson, 2022). You might also notice that there is one perceivably femme individual amongst the six images. This further reiterates the narrative of STEM being a male-dominated field. In a study about women engineers college experiences in 1970s, Asian women constituted only 2% meaning South Asian women would have made up less than 2% of female engineering students (Ettinger et al., 2018)