Looking at the
Asian geography, one sees vast land area holding 61% of the world’s largest
population. They are new immigrants to this country. Four out of five Asians
counted in the 1990 census had immigrated to the US since 1970. The comprise
half of the legal immigrants in the 1980s.
Though of diverse
language backgrounds, they share a commonality in cultural heritage and
physical traits. Many of the recent immigrants are illiterate even in their
own language, e.g. Laotians and Cambodians and have no professional skills to
market for jobs. However, they have a propensity to survive, especially those
who came from large cities of Asia.
Return to Top
2.
The Old Country
A
traveler in East Asia in the mid-1960s would have seen little evidence of
the miraculous economic growth that was to come in the remainder of the
century. Instead, he would have seen one grim landscape after another. These
were war-torn lands, mostly under the sway of dictatorships, impoverished
despite a long tradition of trading and technology. In Japan, the bomb
damage from World War II was mostly repaired, with the exception of central
Hiroshima. Korea was still recovering from the 1950-1953 war, which had
destroyed much of this long-impoverished country. China was ruled by a
dictatorial Communist regime that killed millions during its “Great Leap
Forward” from 1958-1960. North Vietnam lived under a Communist
dictatorship, and South Vietnam was at
war against Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese troops.
Neighboring Laos had effectively been taken over by Communists in 1961;
Cambodia had an independent neutral government, which would be overrun by
the murderous Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. The Philippines had a democratic
government but it was riddled with corruption and in 1969 would see
dictatorship imposed by Ferdinand Marcos.
Most people in
these Asian countries still lived in the countryside, in villages with
ramshackle houses, dependent on unreliable farms for their sustenance. Mass
movement from the countryside to the cities was only beginning and in China
was blocked by a totalitarian regime. The economic growth that would propel
so much of Asia into advanced economic status by 2000 was already under way
in some countries, but only in Japan was it widely noticed. Many these
counties saw growth blocked by the depredations of war and the tyranny of
Communist regimes.
These lands of
East and Southeast Asia produced some 5 million immigrants to the US from
1965 to 1997.For our purposes, no coverage will be given South Asians
because they do not share the similar cultural heritage of East and
Southeast Asia. They also do not share the experiences of war, turmoil and
Communism that, in different ways, shaped the lives of the peoples of East
and Southeast Asia for much of the 20th century. Most of the
people of this region—China, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore, the overseas
Chinese who dominate the economies of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the
Philippines—share what Francis Fukuyama calls a “relatively homogeneous
Chinese economic culture.”
Return to Top
Some would object
that these countries differ among themselves as much as the countries of
Western Europe do, and that Asians are a less homogeneous group. The
resemblance between Asians and Jews is not as close as those between blacks
and Irish, and between Latinos ad Italians. But there are enough
similarities among the various groups of East and Southeast Asians and
enough similarities between the experiences of immigrant Asians and
immigrant Jews to make this examination worthwhile.
The guiding
culture for almost the whole of this region is Chinese. Chinese culture is
ancient, with roots that go as far back as European culture, with great
material accomplishments and a sense of its own centrally and intrinsic
superiority. The cultures of Japan, Korea and Vietnam are in many ways
offshoots of Chinese culture. Central to this culture is the written
language of Chinese ideographs, which are the basis also of Japanese
writing. Although no common language is spoken in China, the regional
languages all use the same written characters. Literacy is highly valued in
the Chinese culture, and the elite Mandarin bureaucracy used competitive
examinations to fill its positions.
Uniting the
culture the heritage of Confucius, which emphasizes all duty to family. The
central core of this ethical teaching was the apotheosis of the family—in
Chinese, the jia—as the social
relationship to which all others are subordinate. Duty to family trumped all
other duties, including obligations to emperor, Heaven, or any other source
of temporal or divine authority. The East and Southeast Asians of the middle
and later 20t century saw as their goal the survival of their families and
kinship groups amid war and dictatorships.
Return to Top
Until very
recently, the large majority of East and Southeast Asians were peasants, but
they were not barred from the commercial marketplace. The mandarin
governments ordinarily provided the stability for successful market
transactions and for the accumulation of property. Civil war, Japanese
invasion, and Communist dictatorship hindered the workings of the market,
but commercial habits of mind persisted, reasserting themselves when Deng
Xiaoping loosened Mao Zedong’s Communist controls. The commercial ethic
has been especially strong among the overseas Chinese, who came mostly from
the south coastal provinces of Gaungdong and Fujian. They have built
small-scale businesses with family ownership and network connections, which
in some cases have become very large businesses.
Such firms are
the norm in Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapore, and overseas Chinese, though
heavily outnumbered, account for most of the gross domestic product of
Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, and much of it in Vietnam.
As Joel Kritkin writes, the overseas Chinese have “dominated many
critical commercial niches as traders, artisans and skilled workers, often
filling the ‘middleman’ role between the dominant elite—made up of
European merchants, plantation owners, and colonial officials—and the
masses of native agriculturalists. Cut off from their native land, much like
the Jews, they had little alternative but to engage in such activities as
trading and money lending.” They have been resented for their economic
success, and persecuted for ethnic separateness, most notably when more than
1 million Chinese ethnics wee massacred in Indonesia in 1965.
Return to Top
The experience of
East and Southeast Asians over the first two-thirds of the 20th
century was one of chronic insecurity. China was racked by revolution and
civil wars from 1911 to 1937; it was attacked and in large part occupied by
the Japanese from 1937 to 1945; after the Communist victory in 1949 came the
Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and
1970s which killed millions and uprooted millions more. Japan occupied, and
ruled brutally, Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, Korea from 1910 to 1945, and
Vietnam from 1942 to 1945. War divided and devastated Korea from 1950 to
1953, and Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. After 1949, overseas Chinese, while
often prosperous, were cut off from their ties with China and were always at
risk of persecution. But despite these woes, Asian habits of mind—the
centrality of family, the respect for literacy, commercial
competence—persisted.
Many East and
Southeast Asians fled their native countries, particularly in the two
decades after World War II, and many more would have done so had they been
able. How many would have immigrated to the US is something no one can know.
Due to anti-Asian prejudice the US passed laws that almost entirely barred
Asian immigrants from this country.
Return to Top
3.
The Journey
The
massive Asian immigration to the US was triggered not by an event in Asia
but, inadvertently, by the Immigration Act of 1965. For many years,
representatives of heavily ethnic big city congressional districts had
sought to repeal the 1924 immigration act’s restrictive quotas on southern
and eastern Europeans. Thousands of their constituents’ relatives applied
for entry, and under the quota system almost all would have to wait years
until spaces opened up. But their proposals to increase quotas were defeated
by overwhelming margins. Kennedy did not press the issue as president;
instead he submitted a bill that would phase out national quotas but retain
an overall limit of 156,700 immigrants a year.
The man chiefly
responsible for the Immigration Act of 1965 was Lyndon Johnson. He came to
office determined to pass what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he
saw immigration reform as another civil rights issue; national quotas to him
were “alien to the American
Dream.” In 1964 he mentioned the issue in his state of the union address,
and in 1965 he made it a major priority, telling House Speaker John
McCormick, “There is no piece of legislation before the Congress that in
terms of decency and equity is more demanding of passage than the
immigration bill.” Without Johnson’s support, it probably would not have
passed.
Return to Top
The bill that
passed Congress that Johnson signed before the Statue of Liberty and with
Ellis Island in the background raised the limit on total immigration to
290,000, with 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere; raised the quota for
every nation to 20,000; expanded family unification provisions (which
effectively allowed many more immigrants than the quotas provided); and
rescinded all provisions that discriminated against Asians.
Johnson and just
about everyone else apparently assumed that since immigrants had always come
from Europe, they must always come from Europe. But the Europe of 1965 did
not resemble the Europe that had produced the waves of immigration from 1846
to 1924. In the twenty years since World War II, western Europe had grown
affluent, and immigration from its poorer regions were almost entirely
toward more affluent parts of Europe. But many countries in East and
Southeast Asia were advancing from underdeveloped farming to industrial
economies, and individuals in areas left behind were ready to move
elsewhere. One country, Japan, had already developed an advanced economy,
and migration to the US from Japan since 1965 has been of no greater
magnitude than from the advanced countries of Western Europe (just over
100,000 immigrants from 1965 to 1997). To be sure, Communist dictatorships
prevented people from leaving China, North Korea and North Vietnam. But
others would flee to get out of the way of threatened Communist advance or
persecution.
Return to Top
Immigration to
the US at first accelerated slowly, then increased dramatically in the 1970s
and 1980s, as family unification provisions allowed most countries to send
far more than their quotas, and increased again in the 1990s. From 1965 to
1997, 840,000 immigrants came from China, Taiwan and Hongkong. The number of
immigrants from South Korea was 491,000, with the rate of immigration
dropping off sharply after 1987, when the military government was replaced
by an elected civilian government and the Korean economy began to grow (per
capita income reached $10,000 in 1995). Immigration from the Philippines was
975,000, the largest from Southeast Asia, though only a little ahead of
Vietnam’s 757,000. Laos produced 183,000 immigrants—mostly refugees from
a backward country; Cambodia, 128,000; Thailand, 100,000. Immigration from
Indonesia and Malaysia was much lower. Of the many immigrants from the
Philippines, Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia, a high percentage were
ethnic Chinese, although it is not clear exactly how many.
Immigration from
some countries will likely diminish as their economies grow, as already has
from Japan and South Korea, but there is a vast reservoir of Asians, in
China and elsewhere, who are potential immigrants. The current high rate of
Asian immigration seems likely to continue for many years.
Return to Top
4.
The New Country
Unlike
Latinos, Asians have not lived in the US from time immemorial, unless one
counts native Hawaiians who part of the census classification of “Asians
and Pacific Islanders.” Chinese laborers, 90 of them males, came to
California after the Gold Rush of 1849; they were 9% of the state’s
population in 1870 and 1880, but their numbers dropped after the nativist-inspired
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For years these bachelor immigrants were
concentrated in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, New York, Boston and
Chicago. Between 1884 and 1906, some 300,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawaii
and California to work as agricultural laborers, but many were sojourners
who returned to Japan. California politicians demanded a Japanese Exclusion
Act. Then the 1924 immigration act cut off Asian immigration completely,
except from the Philippines which was a US territory at the time.
As a
result, only a little more than 1% of people living in the US in 1965 were
of Asian descent. Prior to 1945 anti-Asian prejudice in this country was
prevalent and often vitriolic. The Chinese Exclusion Act and the
Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan show that when Asians migrated in large
numbers they encountered hatred of a depth and virulence difficult to
imagine today. Some 80,000 Japanese-Americans were uprooted from California,
many of them vegetable farmers who lost their land; only 40,000 returned to
the state after internment ended in 1945, and they were greeted with
"“threats, vandalism, arson, and minor outrages,"”in the words
of John Gunther.
Return to Top
Such
attitudes became much less common in the twenty years after World War II.
Racial prejudice declined generally in those years, and the well publicized
record of the Japanese-American military units, among the most heavily
decorated in history—and the fact that the sons of internment camp
detainees petitioned for the right to serve—inspired widespread
admiration. By the late 1960s, Asians were being called the “model
minority,” a term used in 1966 New
York Times Magazine article in which the author argued that, through
their own efforts, without government aid, Japanese-Americans had become
model citizens. This characterization has come to be resented by leaders in
many Asian-American organizations, who are inclined to focus on the problems
and any discrimination faced by those in whose name they speak.
The 1% of
Americans of Asian descent in 1965 were soon heavily outnumbered by the new
Asian immigrants and their children. Asians tended to head to large cities
and metropolitan areas. Most Chinese immigrants went to New York, to
Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. Later the “new Chinatowns” developed in
Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in recent years Chinese
immigrants have typically started off in Manhattan and then headed quickly
to Flushing or Sunset Park. (The number 7 subway line in Queens, which
terminates in Flushing, is known as “the Orient Express.”) These new
Chinatowns are crowded neighborhoods, with apartments where men sleep three
to a room and overcrowded schools.
Return to Top
California
has become the second most common destination of the Chinese. In the San
Francisco Bay area, Chinese immigrants have moved in large numbers to the
ocean-facing neighborhoods of Richmond and Sunset, to the adjacent suburbs
of Daly City and Pacific, and, among scientists and techies, to Silicon
Valley. In Los Angeles County, many Chinese have headed t Monterrey Park
that by 1990 was 63% Chinese. They have also moved in large numbers to
nearby Alhambra, Rosemead, Diamond Bar, and Hacienda Heights, and the nearby
high-income suburbs of San Marino and South Pasadena.
Like the
Chinese, many Korean immigrants have come from a commercial background.
Nearly half of Korean immigrants in the 1970s had worked in professional and
technical jobs in Korea. Although only about 20% of the Korean population is
Christian, almost half of Korean immigrants are Christians. The favorite
destination for Korean immigrants has been Los Angeles, whose Koreatown
neighborhood became internationally known when black rioters destroyed
hundreds of stores in the 1992 riot. They have also immigrated in large
numbers to New York and to metropolitan Washington, and in lesser numbers to
other large cities.
Return to Top
Many
Filipino immigrants, meanwhile, have come looking for low-wage work, but a
number of nurses and other medical professionals have immigrated as well.
They have gone in the largest numbers to California and Hawaii. There are
particularly large Filipino communities northeast of San Francisco Bay, in
the towns of Vallejo, Pittsburg and Martinez.
The first
wave of Vietnamese immigrants came after the fall of Saigon in 1975; most of
the 130,000 who fled to America were middle class. Another 400,000 boat
people followed, as did 20,000 who arrived by land (having fled on foot to
Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s), and these immigrants were not necessarily
middle class. The number one destination for Vietnamese immigrants has been
California, with a large concentration around “Little
Saigon”—Westminster and Garden Grove in Orange County. Many Vietnamese
have also gone to Texas—at first fishermen plying their trade on the Gulf
of Mexico, then others in larger numbers to Houston.
Return to Top
Most
immigrants and refugees from Laos have been Hmong, an aboriginal people with
little or no experience with urban life. Their biggest concentrations are in
Fresno, California and Minneapolis. The most frequent destination of
Cambodian immigrants has been the old mill town and now high-tech town of
Lowell, MA.
In 1998
the Census Bureau estimated that there were 10 million “Asians and Pacific
Islanders” in the US, ten times as many as in 1965 and 4% of the total
population. California has 4 million Asians, 12% of its population; Hawaii
has 756,000, nearly two-thirds of its population.
Return to Top
5.
Work
There
are considerable differences among various nationalities. Koreans have been
very entrepreneurial. Surveys of Korean immigrants have shown that 45% in
Los Angeles and Orange Counties and over 50% in New York City are
self-employed (the national average is just 7%). Many Chinese immigrants
have started off working in garment, toy or other factories located in
Chinatowns. Some groups with little experience with commerce, notably the
Hmong, have formed few businesses and have high rates of unemployment.
Others have tended to hold relatively low-skill and low-paying jobs.
For the
most part Asians have worked hard—their male workforce participation rate,
75 percent, is almost precisely the same as the national average—and have
very often become business owners. Examples are familiar; the Korean
groceries of New York, the Chinese apparel factories of Los Angeles, the
Vietnamese convenience stores of Orange County. Success is not guaranteed
and is sometimes resented: Korean stores were the target of many Los Angeles
rioters in 1992, as well as of much-publicized (by Rev. Al Sharpton) boycott
in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1993. But success has been the story
more often than failure.
Return to Top
One key
to Asian entrepreneurial success is a practice brought over from Asia—the
rotating credit association, using “ethnic resources and solidarity in the
accumulation of start-up capital.” The Chinese hui
and the Korean keh consist of
a dozen or more members selected from among kin and people from the same
village or lineage. Each month every member contributes a certain amount to
a common pool, which is then given to one member, who typically uses it to
buy a small business or a house.
These
businesses in turn have provided jobs to new immigrants, even those with
limited or no English. In the 1980s 41% of Koreans in the New York area ran
small businesses and 80% of Korean immigrants in New York and 90% in Los
Angeles worked in Korean-owned firms. A high proportion of Chinese
immigrants in the 1980s worked in Chinese-owned restaurants, garment
factories, grocery stores, and other small businesses; in New York’s
Chinatown, some 450 restaurants employ about 15,000 people, mostly men, and
500 garment factories employ about 20,000 women, almost all Chinese.
Return to Top
Despite
the continual arrival of large number of poor immigrants, Asians’ income
levels are well above the national average. In 1997 the median household
income among Asians was 22% higher than the national average. This is all
the more astonishing in that about 70% of Asians are foreign-born. Even
among Vietnamese, who are more likely than average to rely on public
assistance, median household incomes had reached the national average by
1990. Unemployment among Korean and Chinese immigrants seems t be very
uncommon.
6.
Education
The
Confucian tradition placed a high value on education and literacy, and the
mandarin system of choosing government officials by competitive examination,
used in Korea as well as China, meant that education was an economic asset
in Asian society. So Asians arrived in America with a high regard for
education. Most early Korean immigrants had already graduated from college
in Korea, and many Korean and Chinese immigrated precisely because they
wanted their children to get a degree at an American university. In NYC in
1990, 20% of post-1965 Chinese immigrants were college graduates and another
16% had some college education. The figures were even higher among
Koreans—31% college graduates and 21% with some college. Among Filipinos,
63% were college graduates and another 22% had some college.
Return to Top
In
their drive for education, Asian immigrants often avoid the trouble-plagued
central city public schools and instead struggle to buy the least expensive
houses in high-ranking suburban school districts. Asian-Americans have
avoided the perils of “bilingual” education (although it was a
Chinese-American who brought the Supreme Court case which produced the
requirement that some accommodation be made t foreign-language students).
And the performance of the children of Asian immigrants in school has been
spectacular. They are only 4% of the nation’s population, but in 1995 the
made up 14% of those scoring 700 or better on the verbal SAT and 28% of
those scoring over 750 on the math SAT. They have won places at academically
selective high schools in astonishing proportions.
The
result is that Asians in the US are very highly educated. They have so well
in high school that in 1998 they accounted for 19% of the students at
Harvard, 28% at MIT, 22% at Stanford, 39% at UC-Berkeley, 38% at UCLA, and
10% at U. of Michigan, despite the school’s preference for state residents
in a state with relatively few Asians. Some students come directly from
Asian countries to attend American universities. Students of Chinese descent
accounted for one-third of foreign students in American doctoral programs in
science and engineering by 1990. Taiwanese alone accounted for one in four
candidates for doctorates in electrical engineering in the US in 1990.
Return to Top
7.
Family
Obligation
to family is the strongest tenet of the Confucian heritage common to most
Asians in America. In this tradition, the relationship between father and
son is paramount. Under this tradition, property is inherited equally by
sons. Daughters are less valued and become part—usually a very subordinate
part—of their husbands’ families when they marry. These features made
sense in societies where taxation was often high and always arbitrary, where
the state provided few services and no system of social security (in most
Confucian societies the state still does not). Family obligation extends far
beyond the nuclear family to those of the same village or who share a common
lineage, which in some cases is traced back a thousand years. Although
obligations to members of the immediate family are much stronger, the sense
of obligation is strong enough to ensure the success of the hui
or keh rotating credit association.
Naturally,
the tradition of family obligation has weakened somewhat among Asians in
America. Has weakened somewhat among Asians in America. Most Asian children
do not grow up in all-Asian neighborhoods, and they attend schools with many
non-Asian children. Some come to resent or challenge the subordination of
children to parents that is central to Confucian culture, to resist demands
that they marry other Asians. But for the moment, Asian families in America
seem unusually strong.
Return to Top
According
to the 1990 census, only 5% of Asian households were headed by women with
children under 18, slightly below the national average of 6%; the
corresponding figures for blacks and Hispanics were 19% and 12%,
respectively. Ninety percent of Chinese children and 83% of Southeast Asian
children lived in two-parent families, as compared to 85% of white children
and 47% of black children. White Americans of the 1940s, whose suspicion of
and hatred for Asians were so fierce, would surely be astonished to learn
that Asian-Americans today are more faithfully living up to their own family
vales than their own descendants are.
8.
Religion
Confucianism
is a secular tradition, and most Asians are not religiously observant in the
same ways that American Christians are. Many Asians arrived here as
Christians, including half the Korean immigrants and a considerable number
of Vietnamese and Taiwanese. About 80% of the Vietnamese in Orange
County’s Little Saigon are Buddhists and 20% are Catholics. Eighty percent
of Filipinos in Daly City are Catholics. Christian missionaries, most of
them Americans, in the early 20th century produced many converts
in China and Korea, and presumably these Christians are more likely than
non-Christians to regard America as a congenial home. Korean and other Asian
churches preach a rigorous doctrine, and they probably reinforce the strong
work habits and family loyalties that are also part of the Asian heritage.
Return to Top
9.
Politics
Like
other immigrants, Asians’ politics have been shaped by the countries from
which they have come and the part of the US where they live. Until recently,
most Asians came from countries whose governments were dictatorial,
authoritarian, or totalitarian (e.g. China and Vietnam)—governments that
were at best callously indifferent to their citizens and at worst murderous.
These backgrounds have left them with little experience in political and
civic behavior.
Post-1965
Asian immigrants have entered American politics gingerly, eager to
participate but wary of prejudice. The Japanese-Americans of Hawaii have
been at the center of the formidable Democratic machine that has run the
state government for the past four decades. The economically downscale
Filipinos have also voted heavily Democratic. In contrast, Korean,
Vietnamese and to a lesser extent, Chinese immigrants, have tended to vote
Republican.
Return to Top
Asian
voters, with their experience of oppressive government and their
entrepreneurial drive, do not seem to be attracted to socialism, as so many
Jewish immigrants and their children were. The liberal state in
America—with is anti-Asian quotas and its indifference to the victims of
ghetto rioting—in some ways appears to have been not the friend but the
adversary of Asian immigrants. Despite the cries of Asian-American activists
on campus, the voting figures suggest that relatively few Asians see
themselves as “people of color” fighting oppression and discrimination;
they vote much more like whites than like blacks.
10.
Convergence
Most
Asians do not immediately blend into the larger society. Many have
difficulty with the English language, especially the elderly parents brought
over by their sons. But a considerable proportion of Asians than Hispanics
return to their native land, and a much higher percentage seek
naturalization as citizens. Many Asian-American Parents try to raise their
children with respect for their Asian culture, but those efforts are not
always successful. Intermarriage rates tend to be high. Among the Japanese,
long settled in the US, the rate was over 50% as long as the 1970s, and it
appears to be rising among other groups. Current estimates are that 30% to
50% of the children of Asian immigrants marry non-Asians.
Return to Top
As
Tamar Jacoby put it, “In cities across the country, Asians are charting
[a] course, defining a vision of integration that allows for ethnic
differences—sharp, flavorful, persistent differences—at home, but does
not make too much of them in public life. It is an ideal that asks for
tolerance, but not a public preoccupation with ethnicity.
It comes with pride, but not a self-fulfilling prophecy of
alienation, and it leaves to individuals to balance their ethnicity and
their citizenship.”*
*From
Michael Barone, The New Americans (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing
Inc, 2001), pp.249-274.
11.
Changing Demographics and Asian Small Business
The US
population is now becoming multiracial, with 26% composed of minorities.
Nationwide, more than 10 million say they are Asian-Americans, and nearly 12
million claim some Asian ancestry, according to the 2000 census, the first
to allow people to check more than one race. The higher figure is a 72%
increase over the number of people who checked that category in 1990.
There
are now 2.7 million minority business enterprises (MBEs), responsible for
89.9 million employees, with total combined revenues of $5.4 trillion, out
of the nation’s 20.8 million companies. The top ten states which have the
largest number of firms owed by Asians: 1) California (313,048 = 12% of
total firms in the state); 2) New York (123,258 = 8%); 3) Texas (60,226 =
4%); 4) Hawaii (50,634 = 54%); 5) New Jersey (41,443 = 6%);
6) Illinois (36,857 = 4%); 7) Florida (33,769 = 3%); 8) Washington
(23,309 = 5%); Virginia (22,441 = 5%); 10) Maryland (22,169 = 6%).
Return to Top
