Nation of Immigrants: An Overview of Asians Who Live in the United States

To attempt to provide a survey of Asians who reside in the United States is a daunting task because of the sheer quantity of people groups who identify as Asian. According to the United States Census Bureau,

“Asian” refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes people who indicated their race(s) as “Asian” or reported entries such as “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” “Japanese,” “Vietnamese,” and “Other Asian” or provided other detailed Asian responses.[1]

The above description demonstrates it is impossible to generalize Asian Americans.[2] A much more reasonable goal for this post is to provide an overview of Asian immigration to the United States, as well as a rough sketch of challenges that exist when members of a particular group interact with one another.

            Although the Asian presence in the Americas began as early as the 1540s in what is now Acapulco, Mexico,[3] they did not appear in the United States in great numbers until the 1850s.[4] The first Asian immigrants predominantly were Chinese, and labored in gold mines, agricultural jobs, and factories.[5] Because of their unfamiliarity with the Asian continent, citizens of the United States often used the terms Chinese and Mongolian interchangeably.[6]

Over time, peoples from other Asian countries began to immigrate as well, their point of entry usually being the Western United States. Japanese nationals began to arrive en masse in the 1890s.[7] Sikh Indians made their appearance a decade later.[8] Koreans took advantage of the doors that The Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1965 opened,[9] and 1975 ushered in a movement of Vietnamese nationals.[10] Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong peoples soon followed.[11] These latter wave patterns included countless refugees who sought to flee the dangers of destabilized homelands. 

Although many Americans suppose that the majority of migrants who chose to make the United States their home originate from Latin America, this assumption is untrue. In 1970, only 0.7 percent of Americans (1.4 million) claimed Asian heritage.[12] By 2000, Asians comprised 3.6 percent of the population, and that number rose to 4.8 percent in 2010. The net gain of 14.6 million Asians in ten years amounted to a 43 percent increase, which means that Asians boasted the fastest rate of growth in the United States.[13] In 2015, 5.1 percent (16.2 million) of the United States population was Asian.[14] At present, the largest Asian populations in the United States are from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, Korea, and Vietnam.[15]

The above data indicates that to be Asian American can mean many different things, depending on one’s place of origin and one’s worldview roots.[16] To complicate matters, 50 percent of Asian Americans “marry outside their race or ethnic group,”[17] producing an astounding number of ethnic configurations. Some populations of multiethnic people have become so numerous they have adopted unique portmanteau denonyms to describe themselves.[18]

In addition to challenges to unity that arise from multiple points of origin, first and second-generation Asians who live in the same household tend to have drastically different worldviews. Benjamin C. Shin and Sheryl Takagi Silzer addressed this conflict:

First-generation Asians are perplexed by the fact that Americanized Asians are very informal in their actions and in the way they act and dress, the way they view the world, and how they speak. The Americanized Asians are confused by the hierarchal structure of the first generation, the social expectations of their family and others, and being treated like children even though they are adults. Generally, neither generation is aware of how their own culture influences contribute to these different expectations. Therefore, they are unable to address or resolve the misunderstandings in a biblical way in order to experience God’s grace more fully.[19]

In other words, it is impossible to distill the lives of Asian American into one experience. Asians who call the United States home hail from numerous countries and cultures, and first and second-generation Asians do not necessarily see eye to eye on every issue. People of Asian extraction are an important part of the fabric of the United States, a country that continues to be a nation of immigrants to progressively more people groups.

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[1] Karen R. Humes, Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010: 2010 Census Briefs,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf (accessed February 27, 2018).

[2] Amos Yong, “Race and Racialization in a Post-Racist Evangelicalism: A View from Asian America,” in Aliens in the Promised Land: Why Minority Leadership is Overlooked in White Christian Churches and Institutions (New Jersey: P&R, 2013), 46.

[3] Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), Kindle Electronic Edition: Location 1793.

[4] Kate Hooper and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” January 28, 2015, Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ chinese-immigrants-united-states (accessed February 27, 2018).

[5] “Chines Immigration and the Chines Exclusion Acts,” Department of States, United States of America, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration (accessed February 27, 2018).

[6] Leti Volpp, “American Mestizo: Filipinos and Anti-Miscegenation Laws in California,” in Mixed Race America and Law: A Reader, ed. Kevin R. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 86.

[7] Chang-Jin Moon, “Year of Immigration and Socioeconomic Status: A Comparative Study of Three Populations in California,” Social Indicators Research 18.2 (May 1986): 133.

[8] Juan L. Gonzales Jr., “Asian Indian Immigration Patters: The Origins of the Sikh Community in California,” The International Migration Review 20.1 (Spring 1986): 42.

[9] Franklin Goza, “Differential Income Attainment among Asians in the United States, 1960 to 1980,” International Review of Modern Sociology 20.1 (Spring 1990): 2; Moon, “Year of Immigration,” 129.

[10] Darrell Montero, “Vietnamese Refugees in America: Toward a Theory of Spontaneous International Migrations,” International Migration Review 13.4 (Winter 1979): 624-25.

[11] Amy Zaharlick and Jean Brainard, “Demographic Characteristics, Ethnicity and the Resettlement of Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 16.3/4 (Fall-Winter 1987): 328.

[12] Sharon M. Lee and Keiko Yamanaka, “Patterns of Asian American Intermarriage and Marital Assimilation,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 21.2 (Summer 1990): 287.

[13] Karen R. Humes, Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010: 2010 Census Briefs,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf (accessed February 27, 2017).

[14] “ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates: 2011-2015 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, United States Census Bureau, https://factfinder.census.gov/ faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk (accessed February 27, 2018).

[15] Sudipta Das, “Life in a Salad Bowl: Marriage, Family Life, and Economic Choices in Asian-American Communities in the United States,” Race, Gender, & Class 13.1/2 (2006): 248.

[16] Benjamin Shin and Sheryl Takagi Silzer, Tapestry of Grace: Untangling the Cultural Complexities in Asian American Life and Ministry, with a foreword by John C. Kim (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 3.

[17] Vincent L. Ferrandino, “Challenges for 21^st-Century Elementary School Principals,” The Phi Delta Kappan 82.6 (February 2001): 441.

[18] For instance, in San Diego, thousands of people who are the descendants of Mexican and Filipino pairings refer to themselves as Mexipinos. See Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sand Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

[19] Shin and Silzer, Tapestry of Grace, 105.