She is the director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland and is an elected Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

[2] Born in Columbia, Missouri, Hsu spent her childhood between her maternal grandparents' home in Arkansas and where her father found employment in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

[5] Hsu taught at San Francisco State University from 1996 to 2006, before taking a post at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, where she served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies (2006–2014) and was Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History and Asian American Studies.

During World War II, their high levels of education and attainments made them attractive as “good” immigrants.

This shift to “brain drain” policies became permanent with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which consolidated the transformation of many Asians, and especially Chinese, from “yellow peril” to "model minorities".