When the project was first started, there was virtually no scholarship available on this subject matter. A distinguished Board of Advisors was formed to help shape and inform the primary research and oral interviews.
Sharon Hom, J.D.
 Sharon Hom, Professor of Law, at City University of New York (CUNY) Law School, was a Fulbright Professor at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, China, where she conducted several interviews with Chinese American who now reside in the China. Hom has contributed to the research and analysis of the legal cases both in the U.S. and China. She is the editor of Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays and Poetry.
Peter Kwong, Ph.D.
 Peter Kwong is the Director of Asian American Studies at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. His groundbreaking book, Chinatown, NY: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950, examined Chinatown's working-class population. Kwong is also the author of The New Chinatown, published by Hill and Wang.
Victor Nee, Ph.D.
 Victor Nee is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University and is the author of Longtime Californ', a pioneering study of the Chinese American community in San Francisco, which used oral history techniques to provide background and general information for his work. Professor Nee is an expert on immigration /ethnicity and Chinese society.
Ellen Schrecker, Ph.D.
 Ellen Schrecker, Ph.D., is Professor of American History at Yeshiva University. Widely recognized as a leading expert on the McCarthy era, she is the author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, and a classroom reader, The Age of McCarthyism: A Short History with Documents . Her knowledge of the Cold War period provided invaluable research and analyses to the project. Dr. Schrecker studied the FBI and Immigration files received under the Freedom of Information Act.

Since 1998, Dr. Schrecker has been the editor of Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. In 1983, she edited, with Craig Kaplan, Regulating the Intellectuals: Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, and has taught at Harvard, Princeton, New York University, the New School, and Columbia University.

Ling-Chi Wang, Ph.D.
 L. Ling-chi Wang was born and raised in Xiamen, Fujian, China and Hong Kong. An interdisciplinary scholar, he holds degrees in Music, Religion, and Semitic Languages and Literature. He has written extensively on affirmative action, Chinese American identity, and Asian American access to higher education, and has edited volumes of Chinese poetry as well as a definitive volume of essays on the Chinese diaspora experience. An expert on Chinese American history, he is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. In the film, Ling-chi Wang provides an historical context for the situation of Chinese Americans during the McCarthy era. He explains that historically the United States has been open to all immigrants, aside from "prostitutes, lepers, and morons", and that, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, the Chinese were added to that list. He talks about the legacy of anti-Chinese discrimination that remains with us to date.