DQW5

8 Asian Americans

 Listen to  Chapter 8  on MySocLab

· 8-1 Identify the role of diversity among Asian Americans.

· 8-2 List and describe the characteristics of political activity and pan-Asian identity.

· 8-3 Examine and explain the culture of Chinese Americans.

· 8-4 Summarize the characteristics of Asian Indians.

· 8-5 Explain the four distinct periods of Filipino immigration.

· 8-6 Address the current picture of Korean Americans today.

· 8-7 Examine the various characteristics of Japanese American identity and explain the consequences of the wartime evacuation.

· 8-8 Identify the challenges for Southeast Asian Americans in the United States.

· 8-9 Discuss the embodiment of cultural diversity in Hawaii.

If the diversity of racial and ethnic groups is not yet apparent in this book, one need only look at the diversity among those collectively labeled Asian Americans. Consider Priscilla Chan, who at the age of 27 in May of 2012 was married and had sushi and Mexican food served at the reception. Both her parents, ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who arrived in the United States via refugee camps in the 1970s, worked such long hours in Boston restaurants that her grandmothers, who spoke no English, raised her. Born in the United States, Priscilla graduated from Harvard majoring in biology and later taught grade school while attending medical school. Of special interest is that she married a non-Asian (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) and thus is an example of the 29 percent of recent Asian American newlyweds who marry non-Asians.

Then, one could look at football in Texas. Friday night lights is synonymous with Texas high school football, but at one school, many of the players were born on the Pacific island of Tonga. As 6-foot-2, 297-pound Trinity High offensive tackle Uatakini Cocker takes the line, he screams, “Mate ma’a Tonga,” which means “I will die for Tonga.” He is one of sixteen Tongan Americans playing for the school. The school has won the state football championship three of the last six years and was runner-up in another year. Trinity is located in Euless, which adjoins the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, where Tongans in the early 1970s first started working. The success among some of these first immigrants initiated a pattern of  chain immigration , whereby Tongan immigrants sponsor later immigrants. Euless boasts about 4,000 people either born in Tonga or their descendants.

Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo is a happening place. Debbie Hazama, 35, a homemaker with three children, drove with her husband from the suburbs because not many Japanese Americans live where she does and she wants her children “to stay connected.” Little Tokyo threw a day-long party of Asian hip-hop along with traditional martial arts demonstrations to gather Japanese Americans scattered across Southern California. During one festival, a 24-year-old South Pasadena woman grabbed a heavy mallet and took a swing at a drum, just as she had practiced for months. Nicole Miyako Cherry, the daughter of a Japanese American mother and a White American father, previously had little interest in her Japanese roots except for wearing a kimono for Halloween as a youngster. Yet in the last couple of years, she became interested in all things Japanese, including visiting Japan. Looking to her future as a social work therapist, she says she would like her own children to learn Japanese, go to Japanese festivals, play in Japanese sports leagues, and have Japanese first names.

Consider “The 100 Years Living Club,” a group of elderly immigrants from India who gather at a mall in Fremont, California. These elders may talk about the latest community news, cheap flights to Delhi, or their latest run-in with their daughter-in-law.

Then there is Vietnamese American Tuan Nguyren, age 54, who tends to 80 areas in rural South Carolina overseeing 160,000 chickens. His wife lives 50 miles away where she operates a nail salon. They get together about once a week, and the main topic of conversation is how they are putting their four daughters through college. Making a poultry farm succeed is hard work and Nguyren has mentored other Vietnamese Americans who have struggled with the effort (Brown  2009 ; Copeland  2011 ; Daily Mail  2012 ; Euless Historical Preservation Committee  2011 ; Holson and Bilton  2012 ; Longman  2008 ; Pew Social and Demographic Trends  2012 :5; Small  2011 ; Watanabe  2007 : B13).

Immigration to the United States is more than quaint turn-of-the-century black-and-white photos taken at Ellis Island. Immigration, race, and ethnicity are being lived out among people of all ages, and for no collective group is this truer than for Asian Americans who live throughout the United States yet are not evenly distributed across the states ( Figure 8.1 ).

Figure 8.1 Where Most Asian Pacific Islanders Live

Sources: Census 2010 data in Hixson, Hepler, and Kim  2012 : Tables 2.5; Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, and Shahid 2012: Tables 2, 3.

We first turn our attention in this chapter to the diversity of Asian Americans and then to the issue of Asian identity. We then consider in greater depth the major groups in order of size—Chinese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Southeast Asians, and Japanese. The chapter concludes by examining the coexistence of a uniquely mixed group of peoples—the people of Hawai’i—among whom Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders form the numerical majority.

Diversity Among Asian Americans

The successive waves of immigrants to the United States from the continent of Asia comprise a large number of nationalities and cultures. In addition to the seven groups listed in  Figure 8.2 , the U.S. Bureau of the Census enumerates 47 groups, including Iwo Jimian, Native Hawaiian, Pakistani, and Samoan. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, like other racial and ethnic groups, are not evenly distributed across the United States ( Figure 8.2 ). Asian Americans also include ethnic groups, such as the Hmong, that do not correspond to any one nation. Collectively, Asian Americans in 2010 numbered about 15 million—a 43 percent increase over 2000, compared with an overall population increase of only 9.7 percent. This is a larger increase than Latinos experienced during the first decade of the twenty-first century (Hixson, Hepler, and Kim  2012 ; Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, and Shahid 2012).

Given this diversity among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, several generalizations made earlier about Native Americans also can apply to Asian Americans. Both groups are a collection of diverse peoples with distinct linguistic, social, and geographic backgrounds. As reflected in  Table 8.1 , even limiting the analysis to the six largest groups shows quite a range in the proportion of foreign born, attainment of a college degree, proficiency in English, and poverty rate.

Figure 8.2 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Note: Lists all specific groups with more than 750,000.

Source: See  Figure 8.1 .

Before we look in detail at the Asian American experience, we first need to deconstruct an image often held of Asian Americans as a group. They are viewed as the model minority—some kind of perfect, model minority. They constitute a  model minority  because, although they have experienced prejudice and discrimination, they seem to have succeeded economically, socially, and educationally without resorting to political or violent confrontations with Whites. We consider this view in greater detail in the next chapter when we consider how racism has changed, or not changed, in the United States. For now, we consider the complexity of social identity within the Asian American community.

 Read the Document on MySocLab: Grouping All Asians Together Could Be Bad for Health

TABLE 8.1 Asian Origin groups

Group	Foreign Born	Bachelor’s Degree	Proficient in English	Poverty Rate
Chinese Americans	76	51	52	14
Asian Indians	87	70	76	9
Filipino Americans	69	47	48	6
Vietnamese Americans	84	26	41	15
Korean Americans	78	53	64	15
Japanese Americans	32	46	82	8
General U.S. Population	16	28	90	13

Note: Based on 2012 national survey. Poverty rate based on 2010 income.

Source: Pew Social and Demographic Trends 2012: 13, 30, 33, 37, 41, 44, 47, 50.

Political Activity and Pan-Asian Identity

Against this backdrop of prejudice, discrimination, and a search for identity, it is no surprise to see Asian Americans seeking to recognize themselves. Historically, Asian Americans have followed the pattern of other immigrant groups: They bring social organizations, associations, and clubs from the homeland and later develop groups to respond to the special needs identified in the United States.

Rather than being docile, as Asian Americans are often labeled, they have organized in labor unions, played a significant role in campus protests, and been active in immigration rights issues. Recently, given a boost by anti-alien feelings after 9/11, Asian Americans staged demonstrations in several cities in an effort to persuade people to become citizens and register to vote (Chang  2007 ).

For newly arrived Asians, grassroots organizations and political parties are a new concept. With the exception of Asian Indians, the immigrants come from nations where political participation was unheard of or looked on with skepticism and sometimes fear. Using the sizable Chinese American community as an example, we can see why Asian Americans have been slow to achieve political mobilization. At least six factors have been identified that explain why Chinese Americans—and, to a large extent, Asian Americans in general—have not been more active in politics:

· 1. To become a candidate means to take risks, invite criticism, be assertive, and be willing to extol one’s virtues. These traits are alien to Chinese culture.

· 2. Older people remember when discrimination was blatant, and they tell others to be quiet and not attract attention.

· 3. Many recent immigrants have no experience with democracy and arrive with a general distrust of government.

· 4. Like many new immigrant groups, Chinese Americans have concentrated on getting ahead economically and educating their children rather than thinking in terms of the larger community.

· 5. The brightest students tend to pursue careers in business and science rather than law or public administration and, therefore, are not prepared to enter politics.

· 6. Chinatowns notwithstanding, Chinese and other Asian American groups are dispersed and cannot control the election of even local candidates.

The Voting Rights Act requires Asian language materials in cities and counties where either 5 percent or 10,000 voting-age citizens speak the same native Asian language and have limited English proficiency. Following the release of the 2010 Census, that act now applies to cities in Alaska, California, Hawai’i, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Washington (Pratt  2012 ).

Democrats and Republicans are increasingly regarding Asian Americans as a growing political force in the United States. For some time, the Republicans and Democrats seemed to evenly share the electorate. Yet increasingly, Asian American voters have backed the Democratic Party. In 2012, President Obama received a 73 percent backing in his bid for re-election. National survey data in 2012 showed that about 50 percent of Asian Americans lean toward the Democrats, compared to only 28 percent favoring the Republicans (Edison Research  2012 ; Pew Social and Demographic Trends  2012 ).

Despite the diversity among groups of Asian Americans and Asian Pacific Islanders, they have been treated as a monolithic group for generations. Out of similar experiences have come panethnic identities in which people share a self-image, as do African Americans or Whites of European descent. As noted in  Chapter 1 ,  panethnicity  is the development of solidarity between ethnic subgroups. Are Asian Americans finding a panethnic identity?

It is true that in the United States, extremely different Asian nationalities have been lumped together in past discrimination and current stereotypes. The majority of research documents that Asian Americans identify by their own nationality group, but it also indicates that most sometimes think of themselves as Asian American. Some observers contend that a move toward pan-Asian identity represents a step in assimilation by downplaying cultural differences (Espiritu  1992 ; Wong, Ramakrishnan, Lee, and Junn 2011).

Read the Document on MySocLab: Asian and African Values: The Problem of Human Rights

Pan-Asian identity often serves to solidify and strengthen organizing at the grassroots level when Asian Americans are trying to bring about change in neighborhoods and communities where they are outnumbered and underrepresented in the corridors of political power. From this perspective, pan-Asian unity is necessary and urgent for all Asian groups (Cheng and Yang  2000 ; Mitra  2008 ; Võ  2004 ).

Chinese Americans

China, the most populous country in the world, has been a source of immigrants for centuries. Many nations have a sizable Chinese population whose history can be traced back more than five generations. The United States is such a nation. Even before the great migration from Europe began in the 1880s, more than 100,000 Chinese already lived in the United States. Today, Chinese Americans number more than 3.3 million.

Before and after the Chinese Exclusion Act, settlers attacked Chinese enclaves throughout the West on 183 separate occasions, driving the immigrants eastward, where they created Chinatowns, some of which still are thriving today. This engraving depicts the Denver riot of 1880, which culminated in one Chinese man being hanged. The lynchers were identified but released the next year. There was no restoration for the damage done by the estimated mob of 3,000 men (Ellis  2004 ; Pfaelzer  2007 ).

Early Settlement Patterns

From its beginning, Chinese immigration has aroused conflicting views among Americans. In one sense, Chinese immigration was welcome because it brought needed hardworking laborers to these shores. At the same time, it was unwelcome because the Chinese also brought an alien culture that the European settlers were unwilling to tolerate. People in the western United States also had a perception of economic competition, and the Chinese newcomers proved to be convenient and powerless scapegoats. As detailed in  Chapter 4 , the anti-Chinese mood led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was not repealed until 1943. Even then, the group that lobbied for repeal, the Citizens’ Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, encountered the old racist arguments against Chinese immigration (Pfaelzer  2007 ).

Gradually, the Chinese were permitted to enter the United States after 1943. In the beginning, the annual limit was 105. Then several thousand wives of servicemen were admitted, and college students were later allowed to remain after finishing their education. Not until after the 1965 Immigration Act did Chinese immigrants arrive again in large numbers, almost doubling the Chinese American community. Immigration continues to exert a major influence on the growth of the Chinese American population. It has approached 100,000 annually. The influx was so great in the 1990s that the number of new arrivals in that decade exceeded the total number of Chinese Americans present in 1980.

As the underside of immigration, illegal immigration is also functioning in the Chinese American community. The lure of perceived better jobs and a better life leads overseas Chinese to seek alternative routes to immigration if legal procedures are unavailable. The impact of illegal entry in some areas of the country can be significant. For example, every month in 2002, 340 illegal Chinese immigrants were apprehended at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and taken to a rural jail (Starks  2002 ).

A small but socially significant component of Chinese in the United States are those who have been adopted by American non–Chinese couples. Beginning in 1991, China loosened its adoption laws to address the growing number of children, particularly girls, who were abandoned under the country’s one-child policy. This policy strongly encourages couples to have only one child; having more children can impede promotions and even force a household to accept a less-roomy dwelling. The numbers of adopted Chinese were small, but in recent years, about 7,000 have been adopted annually. This policy was tightened significantly in 2008 by the Chinese government, reducing the number of annual adoptions. Although most adoptees are still young, they and their adopting parents face the complex issues of cultural and social identity. Organized efforts now exist to reconnect these children with their roots in China, but for most of their lives, they are adjusting to being Chinese American in a non-Chinese American family (Department of State  2008b ; Olemetson  2005 ).

 Explore the Activity on MySocLab: Chinese, Indian and Pacific Island Americans

It also is important to appreciate that even Chinese American is a collective term. There is diversity within this group represented by nationality (China versus Taiwan, for example), language, and region of origin. It is not unusual for a church serving a Chinese American community to have five separate services, each in a different dialect. These divisions can be quite sharply expressed. For example, near the traditional Chinatown of New York City, a small neighborhood has emerged of Chinese from China’s Fujian Province. In this area, job postings include annotations in Chinese that translate as “no north,” meaning people from the provinces north of Fujian are not welcome. Throughout the United States, some Chinese Americans also divide along pro-China and pro-Taiwan allegiances (Guest  2003 ; Lau 2008; Louie  2004 ; Sachs  2001 ).

Occupational Profile of Chinese Americans

By many benchmarks, Chinese Americans are doing well. As a group, they have higher levels of formal schooling and household income compared to all Asian Americans and even to White non-Hispanics. Note, however, that the Chinese American poverty rate is high—an issue we return to later.

As we might expect, given the high income levels, half of all Chinese Americans serve in management, professional, and related occupations, compared to only a third of the general population. This reflects two patterns: first, entrepreneurial development by Chinese Americans who start their own businesses and, second, the immigration of skilled overseas Chinese as well as Chinese students who chose to remain in the United States following the completion of their advanced degrees (Bureau of the Census  2007a ).

The background of the contemporary Chinese American labor force lies in Chinatown. For generations, Chinese Americans were largely barred from working elsewhere. The Chinese Exclusion Act was only one example of discriminatory legislation. Many laws were passed that made it difficult or more expensive for Chinese Americans to enter certain occupations. Whites did not object to Chinese in domestic service occupations or in the laundry trade because most White men were uninterested in such menial, low-paying work. When given the chance to enter better jobs, as they were in wartime, Chinese Americans jumped at the opportunities. Where such opportunities were absent, however, many Chinese Americans sought the relative safety of Chinatown. The tourist industry and the restaurants dependent on it grew out of the need to employ the growing numbers of idle workers in Chinatown.

Chinatowns Today

Chinatowns represent a paradox. The casual observer or tourist sees them as thriving areas of business and amusement, bright in color and lights, exotic in sounds and sights. Behind this facade, however, they have large poor populations and face the problems associated with all slums. Older Chinatowns were often located in deteriorating sections of cities, but increasingly they are springing up in new neighborhoods and even in the suburbs such as Monterey Park outside Los Angeles. In the older enclaves, the problems of Chinatowns include the entire range of social ills that affect low-income areas, but some have even greater difficulties because the glitter sometimes conceals the problems from outsiders and even social planners. A unique characteristic of Chinatowns, one that distinguishes them from other ethnic enclaves, is the variety of social organizations they encompass (Liu and Geron  2008 ).

Organizational Life

The Chinese in this country have a rich history of organizational membership, much of it carried over from China. Chief among such associations are the clans, or tsu; the benevolent associations, or hui kuan; and the secret societies, or tongs.

The clans, or  tsu , that operate in Chinatown have their origins in the Chinese practice in which families with common ancestors unite. At first, immigrant Chinese continued to affiliate themselves with those sharing a family name, even if a blood relationship was absent. Social scientists agree that the influence of clans is declining as young Chinese become increasingly acculturated. The clans in the past provided mutual assistance, a function increasingly taken on by government agencies. The strength of the clans, although diminished today, still points to the extended family’s important role for Chinese Americans. Social scientists have found parent–child relationships stronger and more harmonious than those among non–Chinese Americans. Just as the clans have become less significant, however, so has the family structure changed. The differences between family life in Chinese and non-Chinese homes are narrowing with each new generation.

The benevolent associations, or  hui kuan  (or hui guan), help their members adjust to a new life. Rather than being organized along kinship ties like the clans, hui kuan membership is based on the person’s district of origin in China. Besides extending help with adjustment, the hui kuan lend money to and settle disputes between their members. They have thereby exercised wide control over their members. The various hui kuan are traditionally, in turn, part of an unofficial government in each city called the Chinese Six Companies, a name later changed to the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA). The president of the CCBA is sometimes called the mayor of a Chinatown. The CCBA often protects newly arrived immigrants from the effects of racism. The organization works actively to promote political involvement among Chinese Americans and to support the democracy movement within the People’s Republic of China. Some members of the Chinese community have resented, and still resent, the CCBA’s authoritarian ways and its attempt to speak as the sole voice of Chinatown.

The Chinese have also organized in  tongs , or secret societies. The secret societies’ membership is determined not by family or locale but by interest. Some have been political, attempting to resolve the dispute over which China (the People’s Republic of China or Taiwan) is the legitimate government, and others have protested the exploitation of Chinese workers. Other tongs provide illegal goods and services, such as drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Because they are secret, it is difficult to determine accurately the power of tongs today. Most observers concur that their influence has dwindled over the last 60 years and that their functions, even the illegal ones, have been taken over by elements less closely tied to Chinatown.

Some conclusions can be reached about these various social organizations. They serve as pillars of the Chinese American community but are less visible outside the traditional older Chinatowns. Metropolitan Chinese American communities see the increasing significance of nonprofit organizations that work between the ethnic community and the larger society, including the local, state, and federal government (Adams  2006 ; Soo  1999 ; Tong  2000 ; Zhao  2002 ; Zhou  2009 ).

Social Problems

It is a myth that Chinese Americans and Chinatowns have no problems. We saw some indication of that in the data in  Table 8.1  Although overall household income levels ran 20 percent ahead of White non-Hispanics, the poverty of Chinese Americans as a group was 14 percent, compared to only 8.8 percent of Whites. Obviously, many Chinese Americans are doing well, but a significant group is doing poorly.

The false impression of Chinese American success grows out of our tendency to stereotype groups as being all one way or the other, as well as the Chinese people’s tendency to keep their problems within their community. The false image is also reinforced by the desire to maintain tourism. The tourist industry is a double-edged sword. It provides needed jobs, even if some of them pay substandard wages. But it also forces Chinatown to keep its problems quiet and not seek outside assistance, lest tourists hear of social problems and stop coming. Slums do not attract tourists. This parallel between Chinese Americans and Native Americans finds both groups depending on the tourist industry even at the cost of hiding problems (Light, Sabagh, Bozorgmehr, and Der-Martirosian  1994 ).

In the late 1960s, White society became aware that all was not right in the Chinatowns. This awareness grew not because living conditions suddenly deteriorated in Chinese American settlements but because the various community organizations could no longer maintain the facade that hid Chinatowns’ social ills. Despite Chinese Americans’ remarkable achievements as a group, the inhabitants were suffering by most socioeconomic measures. Poor health, high suicide rates, rundown housing, rising crime rates, poor working conditions, inadequate care for the elderly, and the weak union representation of laborers were a few of the documented problems (Liu and Geron  2008 ).

Life in Chinatown may seem lively to an outsider, but beyond the neon signs, the picture can be quite different. Chinatown in New York City remained a prime site of sweatshops well into the 1990s. Dozens of women labor over sewing machines, often above restaurants. These small businesses, often in the garment industry, consist of workers sewing twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, and earning about $200 weekly—well below minimum wage. The workers, most of whom are women, can be victimized because they are either illegal immigrants who may owe labor to the smugglers who brought them into the United States, or they are legal residents yet unable to find better employment (Finder  1994 ; Kwong  1994 ).

The attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 made the marginal economy of New York’s Chinatown even shakier. Although not located near the World Trade Center, the economy was close enough to the devastation to feel the drop in customary tourism and a significant decline in shipments to the garment industry. Initially, emergency relief groups ruled out assistance to Chinatown, but within a couple of months, agencies opened up offices in Chinatown. Within two months, 42,000 people had received relief because 60 percent of businesses had cut staff. Like many other minority neighborhoods, New York City’s Chinatown may be economically viable, but it always is susceptible to severe economic setbacks that most other areas could withstand much more easily. From 2000 to 2010, Chinatown’s population in Manhattan dropped by 9 percent—the first decline ever. Notably, the proportion of foreign born also declined (Asian American Federation  2008 ; Lee  2001 ; Tsui  2011 ).

Festivals and events serve to focus the members of the Chinese American community, who now live often far apart from one another. Shown here is a dragon boat race in Seattle, Washington.

Increasingly, Chinese neither live nor work in Chinatowns; most have escaped them or have never experienced their social ills. Chinatown remains important for many of those who now live outside its borders, although less so than in the past. For many Chinese, movement out of Chinatown is a sign of success. Upon moving out, however, they soon encounter discriminatory real estate practices and White parents’ fears about their children playing with Chinese American youths.

The movement of Chinese Americans out of Chinatowns parallels the movement of White ethnics out of similar enclaves. It signals the upward mobility of Chinese Americans, coupled with their growing acceptance by the rest of the population. This mobility and acceptance are especially evident in the presence of Chinese Americans in managerial and professional occupations.

Even with their problems and constant influx of new arrivals, we should not forget that first and foremost, Chinatowns are communities of people. Originally, in the nineteenth century, they emerged because the Chinese arriving in the United States had no other area in which they were allowed to settle. Today, Chinatowns represent cultural decompression chambers for new arrivals and an important symbolic focus for long-term residents. Even among many younger Chinese Americans, these ethnic enclaves serve as a source of identity.

Family Life

Family life is the major force that shapes all immigrant groups’ experience in the United States. Generally, with assimilation, cultural behavior becomes less distinctive. Family life and religious practices are no exceptions. For Chinese Americans, the latest immigration wave has helped preserve some of the old ways, but traditional cultural patterns have undergone change even in the People’s Republic of China, so the situation is very fluid.

The contemporary Chinese American family often is indistinguishable from its White counterpart except that it is victimized by prejudice and discrimination. Older Chinese Americans and new arrivals often are dismayed by the more American behavior patterns of Chinese American youths. Change in family life is one of the most difficult cultural changes to accept. Children questioning parental authority, which Americans grudgingly accept, is a painful experience for the tradition-oriented Chinese. The 2011 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom by legal scholar Amy Chua touched off heated discussions regarding her indictment of parents indulging their children and her focus on strong parental guidance in children’s activities and interests.

Where acculturation has taken hold less strongly among Chinese Americans, the legacy of China remains. Parental authority, especially the father’s, is more absolute, and the extended family is more important than is typical in White middle-class families. Divorce is rare, and attitudes about sexual behavior tend to be strict because the Chinese generally frown on public expressions of emotion. We noted earlier that Chinese immigrant women in Chinatown endure a harsh existence. A related problem beginning to surface is domestic violence. Although the available data do not indicate that Asian American men are any more abusive than men in other groups, their wives, as a rule, are less willing to talk about their plight and to seek help. The nation’s first shelter for Asian women was established in Los Angeles in 1981, but the problem is increasingly being recognized in more cities (Banerjee  2000 ; Tong  2000 ).

Another problem for Chinese Americans is the rise in gang activity since the mid-1970s. Battles between opposing gangs have taken their toll, including the lives of some innocent bystanders. Some trace the gangs to the tongs and, thus, consider them an aspect, admittedly destructive, of the cultural traditions some groups are trying to maintain. However, a more realistic interpretation is that Chinese American youths from the lower classes are not part of the model minority. Upward mobility is not in their future. Alienated, angry, and with prospects of low-wage work in restaurants and laundries, they turn to gangs such as the Ghost Shadows and Flying Dragons and force Chinese American shopkeepers to give them extortion money (Chin  1996 ; Takaki  1998 ).

Asian Indians

The second-largest Asian American group (after Chinese Americans) is composed of immigrants from India and their descendants and numbers over 2.8 million. Sometimes immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka also are included in this group.

Immigration

Like several other Asian immigrant groups, Asian Indians (or East Indians) are recent immigrants. Only 17,000 total came from 1820 to 1965, with the majority of those arriving before 1917. These pioneers were subjected to some of the same anti-Asian measures that restricted Chinese immigration. For example, the Supreme Court (1923) ruled that Asian Indians could not become naturalized citizens because they were not White and therefore were excluded under the 1917 law that applied to all natives of Asia. This prohibition continued until 1946.

Immigration law, although dropping nationality preferences, gave priority to the skilled, so the Asian Indians arriving in the 1960s through the 1980s tended to be urban, educated, and English-speaking. More than twice the proportion of Asian Indians aged 25 and older had a college degree, compared with the general population. These families experienced a smooth transition from life in India to life in the United States. They usually settled in urban areas or near universities or medical centers. Initially, they flocked to the Northeast, but by 1990, California had edged out New York as the state with the largest concentration of Asian Indians. The growth of Silicon Valley’s information technology industry furthered the increase of Asian Indian professionals in Northern California (Bureau of the Census  2007a ).

 Watch the Video on MySocLab: Dubai Labor

More recent immigrants, sponsored by earlier immigrant relatives, are displaying less facility with English, and the training they have tends to be less easily adapted to the U.S. workplace. They are more likely to work in service industries, usually with members of their extended families. They also often take positions that many Americans reject because of the long hours, the seven-day workweek, and vulnerability to crime. Consequently, Asian Indians are as likely to be cab drivers or managers of motels or convenience stores as they are to be physicians or college professors. Asian Indians see the service industries as transitional jobs to acclimatize them to the United States and to give them the money they need to become more economically self-reliant (Kalita  2003 ; Levitt  2004 ; Varadarajan  1999 ).

The Current Picture

It is difficult to generalize about Asian Indians because, like all other Asian Americans, they reflect a diverse population. With more than 1.2 billion people in 2011, India will be the most populous nation in the world by 2025. Diversity governs every area. The Indian government recognizes 18 official languages, each with its own cultural heritage. Some can be written in more than one type of script. Hindus are the majority in India and also among the immigrants to the United States, but significant religious minorities include Sikhs, Muslims, Jains, and Zoroastrians.

Religion among Asian Indians presents an interesting picture. Among initial immigrants, religious orthodoxy often is stronger than it is in India. Immigrants try to practice the Hindu and Muslim faiths true to their practices in India rather than join the Caribbean versions of these major faiths already established in the United States by other immigrant groups. They also recognize local practices; 73 percent of the Hindus in the United States celebrate Christmas.

Although other Indian traditions are maintained, older immigrants see challenges not only from U.S. culture but also from pop culture from India, which is imported through motion pictures and magazines. It is a dynamic situation as the Asian Indian population moves into the twenty-first century (Kurien  2004 , 2007; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life  2012 ; Rangaswamy  2005 ).

Maintaining traditions within the family household is a major challenge for Asian Indian immigrants to the United States. These ties remain strong, and many Asian Indians see themselves as more connected to their relatives 10,000 miles away than Americans are to their kinfolk fewer than a hundred miles away. Parents are concerned about the erosion of traditional family authority among the desi.  Desi  (pronounced “DAY-see”) is a colloquial name for people who trace their ancestry to South Asia, especially India.

Asian Indian children, dressed like their peers, go to fast-food restaurants and eat hamburgers while out on their own, yet Hindus and many Asian Indian Muslims are vegetarian by practice. Sons do not feel the responsibility to the family that tradition dictates. Daughters, whose occupation and marriage could, in India, be closely controlled by the family, assert their right to choose work and, in an even more dramatic break from tradition, select their husbands.

In Research Focus, we consider one cultural practice faced by Asian Indian and other immigrant groups that is not a part of American mainstream culture: arranged marriages.

Filipino Americans

Little has been written about the Filipinos, although they are the third-largest Asian American group in the United States, with 2.5 million people living here. Social science literature considers them Asians for geographic reasons, but physically and culturally, they also reflect centuries of Spanish colonial rule and the more recent U.S. colonial and occupation governments.

Immigration Patterns

Immigration from the Philippines has been documented since the eighteenth century; it was relatively small but significant enough to create a “Manila Village” along the Louisiana coast around 1750. Increasing numbers of Filipino immigrants came as American nationals when, in 1899, the United States gained possession of the Philippine Islands at the conclusion of the Spanish–American War. In 1934, the islands gained commonwealth status. The Philippines gained their independence in 1948 and with it lost their unrestricted immigration rights. Despite the close ties that remained, immigration was sharply restricted to only 50-100 people annually until the 1965 Immigration Act lifted these quotas. Before the restrictions were removed, pineapple growers in Hawai’i lobbied successfully to import Filipino workers to the islands.

 Research Focus: Arranged Marriages in America

The question becomes not does he or she love me, but who do my parents want me to marry? An  arranged marriage  is when others choose the marital partners not based on any preexisting mutual attraction. Indeed, typically in arranged marriages, the couple does not even know one another.

The idea of arranged marriages seems strange to most youth growing up in the United States culture that romanticizes finding Mr. or Ms. Right. In an arranged marriage, the bride and groom start off on neutral ground, with no expectations of each other. Then understanding develops between them as the relationship matures. The couple selected is assumed to be compatible because they are chosen from very similar social, economic, and cultural backgrounds.

Historically, arranged marriages are not unusual and even today are common in many parts of Asia and Africa. In cultures where arranged marriage is common, young people tend to be socialized to expect and look forward to such unions.

Even among young people who theoretically accepted parental mate selection, the rise of new technology has altered the playing field. Texting and Skype facilitate getting to know a potential mate even before being formally introduced. New Internet sites allow parents to create a profile for their child by drawing upon large databases to facilitate narrowing of potential brides or grooms.

But what happens in cultures that send very different messages? For example, immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria may desire that their children enter an arranged union, but their children are growing up in a culture where most of their schoolmates are obsessed with dating as a prelude to marriage and endlessly discuss the latest episodes of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

Studies of young people, in countries such as Canada and the United States, whose parents still cling to the tradition of arranging their children’s marriages, document the challenges this represents. Many young people do still embrace the tradition of their parents. As one first-year female Princeton student of Asian Indian ancestry puts it, “In a lot of ways, it’s easier. I don’t have pressure to look for a boyfriend” (Herschthal  2004 ). Young people like her will look to their parents and other relatives to finalize a mate or even accept a match with a partner who has been selected in the country of their parents. Change has brought with it some variations because the expectation for formally arranged marriages has been modified to assisted marriages in which parents identify a limited number of possible mates based on what is referred to as “bio-data”—screening for caste, family background, and geography. Children get final veto power but rarely head out on their own when seeking a mate. Young men and women may date on their own, but when it comes to marrying, they limit themselves to a narrow field of eligibles brought to them by their parents. The combination of arranged and assisted marriages has meant that Asian Indian immigrants have the highest rates of ethnic endogamy of any major immigrant group in the United States—about 90 percent ingroup marriage.

Sources: Bellafante  2005 ; Herschthal  2004 ; Talbani and Hasanali  2000 ; Tarabay 2008; Voo  2008 ; Zaidi and Shuraydi  2002 .

Listen to the Audio on MySocLab: Defending and Attacking Polygamy in Saudi Arabia

Besides serving as colonial subjects of the United States, Filipinos played another role in this country. The U.S. military accepted Filipinos in selected positions. In particular, the Navy put Filipino citizens to work in kitchens. Filipino veterans of World War II believed that their U.S. citizenship would be expedited. This proved untrue; the problem was only partially resolved by a 1994 federal court ruling. However, it was not until a special presidential action in 2009 that Filipino American veterans received compensation to partially acknowledge their service in World War II (Padilla 2008a; Perry and Simon  2009 ).

Filipino immigration can be divided into four distinct periods:

· 1. The first generation, which immigrated in the 1920s, was mostly male and employed in agricultural labor.

· 2. A second group, which also arrived in the early twentieth century, immigrated to Hawai’i to serve as contract workers on Hawai’i’s sugar plantations.

· 3. The post–World War II arrivals included many war veterans and wives of U.S. soldiers.

· 4. The newest immigrants, who include many professionals (physicians, nurses, and others), arrived under the 1965 Immigration Act. More than 40 percent of Filipino Americans have immigrated since 1990 (Bureau of the Census  2007a ; Min  2006 ; Posadas  1999 ).

Filipino American World War II veterans protested in 1997 for full veterans’ benefits for Filipinos who served in World War II.

As in other Asian groups, the people are diverse. Besides these stages of immigration, the Filipinos also can be defined by various states of immigration (different languages, regions of origin, and religions), distinctions that sharply separate people in their homeland as well. In the Philippines and among Filipino immigrants to the United States, eight distinct languages with an estimated 200 dialects are spoken. Yet assimilation is under way; a 1995 survey showed that 47 percent of younger Filipino Americans speak only English and do not speak Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippine people (Bonus  2000 ; Kang  1996 ; Pido  1986 ).

The Current Picture

The Filipino population increased dramatically when restrictions on immigration were eased in 1965. More than two-thirds of the new arrivals qualified for entry as professional and technical workers, but like Koreans, they have often worked at jobs ranked below those they left in the Philippines. Surprisingly, U.S.-born Filipinos often have less formal schooling and lower job status than the newer arrivals. They come from poorer families that are unable to afford higher education, and they have been relegated to unskilled work, including migrant farmwork. Their poor economic background means that they have little start-up capital for businesses. Therefore, unlike other Asian American groups, Filipinos have not developed small business bases such as retail or service outlets that capitalize on their ethnic culture.

A significant segment of the immigration from the Philippines, however, constitutes a more professional educated class in the area of health professionals. Although a positive human resource for the United States, it has long been a brain drain on the medical establishment of the Philippines. This is apparent when we consider areas in the United States that reflect Filipino settlement in the last 40 years. For example, in metropolitan Chicago, Filipino Americans have household incomes 30 percent higher than the general population and higher than that of Asian Indians. When the United States ceased giving preference to physicians from abroad, doctors in the Philippines began to enter the United States retrained as nurses, which dramatically illustrates the incredible income differences between the United States and the Philippines. They also send significant money back as remittances to help members of the extended family (DeParle  2007 ; Espiritu and Wolf  2001 ; Lau  2006 ; Zarembro  2004 ).

Despite their numbers, no significant single national Filipino social organization has formed for several reasons. First, Filipinos’ strong loyalty to family (sa pamilya) and church, particularly Roman Catholicism, works against time-consuming efforts to create organizations that include a broad spectrum of the Filipino community. Second, their diversity makes forming ties here problematic. Divisions along regional, religious, and linguistic lines present in the Philippines persist in the United States. Third, although Filipinos have organized many groups, they tend to be club-like or fraternal. They do not seek to represent the general Filipino population and, therefore, remain largely invisible to Anglos. Fourth, although Filipinos initially stayed close to events in their homeland, they show every sign of seeking involvement in broader non-Filipino organizations and avoiding group exclusiveness. Three-quarters of Filipino America are citizens, which is a larger proportion than most Asian American groups. The two political terms of Filipino American Benjamin Cayetano as governor of Hawai’i from 1994 to 2002 are an example of such involvement in mainstream political organizations (Bonus  2000 ; Kang  1996 ; Lau  2006 ; Padilla 2008a; Posadas  1999 ).

Korean Americans

The population of Korean Americans, with more than 1.4 million (see  Figure 8.2 ), is now the fifth-largest Asian American group, yet Korean Americans often are overlooked in studies in favor of groups such as Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, who have a longer historical tradition in the United States.

Historical Background

Today’s Korean American community is the result of three waves of immigration. The initial wave of a little more than 7,000 immigrants came to the United States between 1903 and 1910, when laborers migrated to Hawai’i. Under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korean migration was halted except for a few hundred “picture brides” allowed to join their prospective husbands.

In 1948, Sammy Lee, born of Korean immigrants, became the first Asian American to win a gold medal at the Olympics. It was not an easy path to victory because he faced prejudice and discrimination in Southern California. He was able to practice in the public pool only one day a week—the day on which the water was immediately drained and refilled. The rest of the time he was forced to dive into a pile of sand.

The second wave took place during and after the Korean War, accounting for about 14,000 immigrants from 1951 through 1964. Most of these immigrants were war orphans and wives of American servicemen. Little research has been done on these first two periods of immigration.

The third wave was initiated by the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which made it much easier for Koreans to immigrate. In the four years before the passage of the act, Koreans accounted for only seven of every 1,000 immigrants. In the first four years after the act’s passage, 38 of every 1,000 immigrants to the United States were Korean. This third wave, which continues today, reflects the admission priorities set up in the 1965 immigration law. These immigrants have been well educated and have arrived in the United States with professional skills. More than 40 percent of Korean Americans have arrived in the United States since 1990, but by 2011 immigration had slowed to a trickle of fewer than 5,000 annually (Dolnick  2011 ; Kim and Yoo  2008 ; Min  2006 ).

Korean Americans have established many Christian churches in the United States with 61 percent affiliated with Protestant denominations such as the Presbyterians and Methodists (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life  2012 ).

However, many of the most recent immigrants must at least initially settle for positions of lower responsibility than those they held in Korea and must pass through a period of economic adjustment and even disenchantment for several years. These problems documented the pain of adjustment: stress, loneliness, alcoholism, family strife, and mental disorders. Korean American immigrants who accompanied their parents to the United States when young now occupy a middle, marginal position between the cultures of Korea and the United States. They have also been called the  ilchomose , or “1.5 generation.” Today, they are middle-aged, remain bilingual and bicultural, and tend to form the professional class in the Korean American community (Hurh  1998 ; K. Kim  2006 ).

The Current Picture

Today’s young Korean Americans face many of the cultural conflicts common to any initial generation born in a new country. The parents may speak the native tongue, but the signs on the road to opportunity are in the English language, and the road itself runs through U.S. culture. It is difficult to maintain a sense of Korean culture in the United States; the host society is not particularly helpful. Although the United States fought a war there and U.S. troops remain in South Korea, Korean culture is foreign to contemporary Americans. In the few studies of attitudes toward Koreans, White Americans respond with vague, negative attitudes or simply lump Korean Americans with other Asian groups.

 Read the Document on MySocLab: Intimacy at a Distance, Korean American Style: Invited Korean Elderly and Their Married Children

Studies by social scientists indicate that Korean Americans face many problems typical for immigrants, such as difficulties with language—79 percent of Korean Americans over age 5 do not speak English at home. In Los Angeles, home to the largest concentration, more than 100 churches have only Korean-language services, and local television stations feature several hours of Korean programs. The Korean immigrants’ high level of education should help them cope with the challenge. Although Korean Americans stress conventional Western schooling as a means to success, Korean schools also have been established in major cities. Typically operated on Saturday afternoons, they offer classes in Korean history, customs, music, and language to help students maintain their cultural identity (Bureau of the Census  2007a ; Hurh and Kim 1984; Johnson, Rios, Drewery, Ennis, and Kim  2010 ).

Korean American women commonly participate in the labor force, as do many other Asian American women. About 60 percent of U.S.-born Korean American women and half the women born abroad work in the labor force. These figures may not seem striking compared with the data for White women, but the cultural differences make the figures more significant. Korean women come here from a family system with established, well-defined marital roles: the woman is expected to serve as homemaker and mother only. Although these roles are carried over to the United States, because of their husbands’ struggles to establish themselves, women are pressed to help support their families financially as well.

Many Korean American men begin small service or retail businesses and gradually involve their wives in the business. Wages do not matter because the household mobilizes to make a profitable enterprise out of a marginal business. Under economic pressure, Korean American women must move away from traditional cultural roles. However, the move is only partial; studies show that despite the high rate of participation in the labor force by Korean immigrant wives, first-generation immigrant couples continue in sharply divided gender roles in other aspects of daily living.

Korean American businesses are seldom major operations; most are small. They do benefit from a special form of development capital (or cash) used to subsidize businesses called a  kye  (pronounced “kay”). Korean Americans pool their money through the kye, an association that grants members money on a rotating basis to allow them to gain access to additional capital. Kyes depend on trust and are not protected by laws or insurance, as bank loans are. Kyes work as follows: Say, for example, that 12 people agree to contribute $500 a year. Then, once a year, one of these individuals receives $6,000. Few records are kept, because the entire system is built on trust and friendship. Rotating credit associations are not unique to Korean Americans; West Indians and Ethiopians have used them in the United States, for example. Not all Korean business entrepreneurs use the kye, but it does represent a significant source of capital. Ironically, these so-called mom-and-pop entrepreneurs, as they encounter success, feel competitive pressure from national chains that come into their areas after Korean American businesses have created a consumer market (Reckard 2007; Watanabe  2007 ).

In the early 1990s, nationwide attention was given to the friction between Korean Americans and other subordinate groups, primarily African Americans but also Hispanics. In New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Korean American merchants confronted African Americans who were allegedly robbing them. The African American neighborhood groups sometimes responded with hostility to what they perceived as the disrespect and arrogance of the Korean American entrepreneurs toward their Black customers. Such friction is not new; earlier generations of Jewish, Italian, and Arab merchants encountered similar hostility from what to outsiders seems an unlikely source—another oppressed subordinate group. The contemporary conflict was dramatized in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do the Right Thing, in which African Americans and Korean Americans clashed. The situation arose because Korean Americans are the latest immigrant group prepared to cater to the needs of the inner city and, as of 2011, own 70 percent of small grocery stores in New York City, which has been abandoned by business owners who have moved up the economic ladder (Dolnick  2011 ; Hurh  1998 ; N. Kim  2008 ; New American Media 2007).

Among Korean Americans, the church is the most visible organization holding the group together. Half of the immigrants were affiliated with Christian churches before immigrating. One study of Koreans in Chicago and Los Angeles found that 70 percent were affiliated with Korean ethnic churches, mostly Presbyterian, with small numbers of Catholics and Methodists. Korean ethnic churches are the fastest-growing segment of the Presbyterian and Methodist faiths. The church performs an important function, apart from its religious one, in giving Korean Americans a sense of attachment and a practical way to meet other Korean Americans. The churches are much more than simply sites for religious services; they assume multiple secular roles for the Korean community. As the second generation seeks a church with which to affiliate as adults, they may find the ethnic church and its Korean-language services less attractive, but for now, the fellowship in which Korean Americans participate is both spiritual and ethnic (Kim and Pyle 2004; Kwon, Kem, and Warner 2001).

Japanese Americans

The nineteenth century was a period of sweeping social change for Japan: it brought the end of feudalism and the beginning of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Only a few pioneering Japanese came to the United States before 1885 because Japan prohibited emigration. After 1885, the numbers remained small relative to the great immigration from Europe at the time.

 Explore the Activity on MySocLab: Japanese Americans

Early Japanese Immigration

With little consideration of the specific situation, the American government began to apply to Japan the same prohibitions it applied to China. The early feelings of anti-Asian prejudice were directed at the Japanese as well. The Japanese who immigrated into the United States in the 1890s took jobs as laborers at low wages under poor working conditions. Their industriousness in such circumstances made them popular with employers but unpopular with unions and other employees.

Japanese Americans distinguish sharply between themselves according to the number of generations a person’s family has been in the United States. Generally, each succeeding generation is more acculturated, and each is successively less likely to know Japanese. The  Issei  (pronounced “EE-say”) are the first generation, the immigrants born in Japan. Their children, the  Nisei  (“NEE-say”), are American born. The third generation, the  Sansei  (“SAHN-say”), must go back to their grandparents to reach their roots in Japan. The  Yonsei  (“YOHN-say”) are the fourth generation. Because Japanese immigration is recent, these four terms describe almost the entire contemporary Japanese American population. Some Nisei are sent by their parents to Japan for schooling and to have marriages arranged, after which they return to the United States. Japanese Americans expect such people, called  Kibei  (“kee-bay”), to be less acculturated than other Nisei. These terms sometimes are used loosely, and occasionally Nisei is used to describe all Japanese Americans. However, we use them here as they were intended to differentiate the four generational groups (Yamashiro  2008 ).

The Japanese arrived just as bigotry toward the Chinese had been legislated in the harsh Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. For a time after the act, powerful business interests on the West Coast welcomed the Issei. They replaced the dwindling number of Chinese laborers in some industries, especially agriculture. In time, however, anti-Japanese feelings grew out of the anti-Chinese movement. The same Whites who disliked the Chinese made the same charges about Japanese Americans. Eventually, a stereotype developed of Japanese Americans as lazy, dishonest, and untrustworthy.

The attack on Japanese Americans concentrated on limiting their ability to earn a living. In 1913, California enacted the Alien Land Act; amendments to the act in 1920 made it still stricter. The act prohibited anyone who was ineligible for citizenship from owning land and limited leases to three years. The anti-Japanese laws permanently influenced the form that Japanese American business enterprise was to take. In California, the land laws drove the Issei into cities. In the cities, however, government and union restrictions prevented large numbers from obtaining the available jobs, leaving self-employment as the only option. Japanese, more than other groups, ran hotels, grocery stores, and other medium-sized businesses. Although this specialty limited their opportunities to advance, it did give urban Japanese Americans a marginal position in the expanding economy of the cities (Robinson  2001 ).

The Wartime Evacuation

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II and marked a painful tragedy for the Issei and Nisei. Almost immediately, public pressure mounted to “do something” about the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Many White Americans feared that if Japan attacked the mainland, Japanese Americans would fight on behalf of Japan, making a successful invasion a real possibility. Pearl Harbor was followed by successful Japanese invasions of one Pacific island after another, and a Japanese submarine attacked a California oil tank complex early in 1943.

Rumors mixed with racism rather than facts explain the events that followed. Japanese Americans in Hawai’i were alleged to have cooperated in the attack on Pearl Harbor by using signaling devices to assist the pilots from Japan. Front-page attention was given to pronouncements by the U.S. Navy secretary that Japanese Americans had the greatest responsibility for Pearl Harbor. Newspapers covered in detail FBI arrests of Japanese Americans allegedly engaging in sabotage to assist the attackers. They were accused of poisoning drinking water, cutting patterns in sugarcane fields to form arrows directing enemy pilots to targets, and blocking traffic along highways to the harbor. None of these charges were substantiated, despite thorough investigations. It made no difference. In the 1940s, the treachery of the Japanese Americans was a foregone conclusion regardless of evidence to the contrary (Kashima  2003 ; Kimura  1988 ; Lind 1946; ten Brock, Barnhart, and Matson  1954 ).

Executive Order 9066

On February 13, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It defined strategic military areas in the United States and authorized the removal from those areas of any people considered threats to national security. The events that followed were tragically simple. All people on the West Coast of at least one-eighth Japanese ancestry were taken to assembly centers for transfer to evacuation camps. These camps are identified in  Figure 8.3 . This order covered 90 percent of the 126,000 Japanese Americans on the mainland. Of those evacuated, two-thirds were citizens, and three-fourths were under age 25. Ultimately, 120,000 Japanese Americans were in the camps. Of mainland Japanese Americans, 113,000 were evacuated, but to those were added 1,118 evacuated from Hawai’i, 219 voluntary residents (White spouses, typically), and, most poignantly of all, the 5,981 who were born in the camps (Robinson 2001; Takaki 1998).

The evacuation order did not arise from any court action. No trials took place. No indictments were issued. Merely having a Japanese great-grandparent was enough to mark a person for involuntary confinement. The evacuation was carried out with little difficulty. For Japanese Americans to have fled or militantly defied the order would only have confirmed the suspicions of their fellow Americans. There was little visible objection initially from the Japanese Americans. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which had been founded by the Nisei as a self-help organization in 1924, even decided not to arrange a court test of the evacuation order. The JACL felt that cooperating with the military might lead to sympathetic consideration later when tensions subsided (Iwamasa  2008b ).

Figure 8.3 Japanese American Internment Camps

Japanese Americans were first ordered to report to assembly centers, from which, after a few weeks or months, they were resettled in internment camps or relocation centers.

Source: National Park Service 2012.

Even before reaching the camps, the  evacuees , as Japanese Americans being forced to resettle came to be called officially, paid a price for their ancestry. They were instructed to carry only personal items. No provision was made for shipping their household goods. The federal government took a few steps to safeguard the belongings they left behind, but the evacuees assumed all risks and agreed to turn over their property for an indeterminate length of time. These Japanese Americans were destroyed economically. Merchants, farmers, and business owners had to sell all their property at any price they could get. Precise figures of the loss in dollars are difficult to obtain, but after the war, the Federal Reserve Bank estimated it to be $400 million. To place this amount in perspective, in 2010 dollars, the economic damages sustained, excluding personal income, would be more than $3.6 billion (Bureau of the Census 2011a: 473; Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians  1982a ,  1982b ; Hosokawa  1969 ; Thomas and Nishimoto  1946 ).

The Camps

Ten camps were established in seven states. Were they actually concentration camps? Obviously, they were not concentration camps constructed for the murderous purposes of those in Nazi Germany, but such a positive comparison is no compliment to the United States. To refer to them by their official designation as relocation centers ignores these facts: The Japanese Americans did not go there voluntarily; they had been charged with no crime; and they could not leave without official approval.

Japanese Americans were able to work at wage labor in the camps. The maximum wage was set at $19 a month, which meant that camp work could not possibly recoup the losses incurred by evacuation. The evacuees had to depend on the government for food and shelter, a situation they had not experienced in prewar civilian life. More devastating than the economic damage of camp life was the psychological damage. Guilty of no crime, the Japanese Americans moved through a monotonous daily routine with no chance of changing the situation. Forced community life, with such shared activities as eating in mess halls, weakened the strong family ties that Japanese Americans, especially the Issei, took so seriously (Kitsuse and Broom  1956 ).

Amid the economic and psychological devastation, the camps began to take on some resemblance to U.S. cities of a similar size. High schools were established, complete with cheerleaders and yearbooks. Ironically, Fourth of July parades were held, with camp-organized Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops marching past proud parents. But the barbed wire remained, and the Japanese Americans were asked to prove their loyalty.

A loyalty test was administered in 1943 on a form all had to fill out: the Application for Leave Clearance. Many of the Japanese Americans were undecided on how to respond to two questions:

·  No. 27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

·  No. 28. Will you swear to abide by the laws of the United States and to take no action, which would in any way interfere with the war effort of the United States? (Daniels 1972:113)

The ambiguity of the questions left many internees confused about how to respond. For example, if Issei said yes to the second question, would they then lose their Japanese citizenship and be left stateless? The Issei would be ending allegiance to Japan but were unable, at the time, to gain U.S. citizenship. Similarly, would Nisei who responded yes be suggesting that they had been supporters of Japan? For whatever reasons, 6,700 Issei and Nisei, many because of their unacceptable responses to these questions, were transferred to the high-security camp at Tule Lake for the duration of the war (Bigelow  1992 ).

Overwhelmingly, Japanese Americans showed loyalty to the government that had created the camps. In general, security in the camps was not a problem. The U.S. Army, which had overseen the removal of the Japanese Americans, recognized the value of the Japanese Americans as translators in the war ahead. About 6,000 Nisei were recruited to work as interpreters and translators, and by 1943, a special combat unit of 23,000 Nisei volunteers had been created to fight in Europe. The predominantly Nisei unit was unmatched, and it concluded the war as the most decorated of all American units.

Japanese American behavior in the concentration camps can be seen only as reaffirming their loyalty. True, some internees refused to sign an oath, but that was hardly a treasonous act. More typical were the tens of thousands of evacuees who contributed to the U.S. war effort.

A few Japanese Americans resisted the evacuation and internment. Several cases arising out of the evacuation and detention reached the U.S. Supreme Court during the war. Amazingly, the Court upheld lower court decisions on Japanese Americans without even raising the constitutionality of the whole plan. Essentially, the Court upheld the idea of an entire race’s collective guilt. Finally, after hearing Mitsuye Endo v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled, on December 18, 1944, that the detainment was unconstitutional and consequently the defendant (and presumably all evacuees) must be granted freedom. Two weeks later, Japanese Americans were allowed to return to their homes for the first time in three years, and the camps were finally closed in 1946.

The immediate postwar climate was not pro–Japanese American. Whites terrorized returning evacuees in attacks similar to those against Blacks a generation earlier. Labor unions called for work stoppages when Japanese Americans reported for work. Fortunately, the most blatant expression of anti-Japanese feeling disappeared rather quickly. Japan stopped being a threat as the atomic bomb blasts destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For the many evacuees who lost relatives and friends in the bombings, however, it must have been a high price to pay for marginal acceptance (Iwamasa  2008a ; Robinson  2001 ,  2009 ).

Japanese Americans gather in an annual “Lest We Forget” ceremony at the Manzanar internment camp in northern California.

The Evacuation: What Does It Mean?

The social significance of the wartime evacuation has often been treated as a historical exercise, but in the wake of the stigmatizing of Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11, singling out people of Japanese descent almost 70 years ago takes on new meaning. Japanese American playwright Chay Yew reflected recently, “You think you can walk away from history and it taps you on the back” (Boehm 2004:E2). We do not know yet the consequences of the current focus on identifying potential disloyal Americans, but we do have some perspective on stigmatizing Japanese Americans during and after World War II.

The evacuation policy cost the U.S. taxpayers a quarter of a billion dollars in construction, transportation, and military expenses. Japanese Americans, as already noted, effectively lost at least several billion dollars. These are only the tangible costs to the nation. The relocation was not justifiable on any security grounds. No verified act of espionage or sabotage by a Japanese American was recorded. How could it happen?

Racism cannot be ignored as an explanation. Japanese Americans were placed in camps, but German Americans and Italian Americans were largely ignored. Many of those whose decisions brought about the evacuation were of German and Italian ancestry. The fact was that the Japanese were expendable. Placing them in camps posed no hardship for the rest of society, and, in fact, other Americans profited by their misfortune. That Japanese Americans were evacuated because they were seen as expendable is evident from the decision not to evacuate Hawai’i’s Japanese. In Hawai’i, the Japanese were an integral part of the society; removing them would have destroyed the islands economically (Kimura  1988 ; Robinson  2009 ).

Some people argue that the Japanese lack of resistance made internment possible. This seems a weak effort to transfer guilt—to blame the victim. In the 1960s, some Sansei and Yonsei were concerned about the alleged timidity of their parents and grandparents when faced with evacuation orders. However, many evacuees, if not most, probably did not really believe what was happening. “It just cannot be that bad,” they may have thought. At worst, the evacuees can be accused of being naive. But even if they did see clearly how devastating the order would be, what alternatives were open to them? None.

The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1981 held hearings on whether additional reparations should be paid to evacuees or their heirs. The final commission recommendation in 1983 was that the government formally apologize and give $20,000 tax-free to each of the approximately 82,000 surviving internees. Congress began hearings in 1986 on the bill authorizing these steps, and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which authorized the payments. The payments, however, were slow in coming because other federal expenditures had higher priority. Meanwhile, the aging internees were dying at a rate of 200 a month. In 1990, the first checks were finally issued, accompanied by President Bush’s letter of apology. Many Japanese Americans were disappointed by and critical of the begrudging nature of the compensation and the length of time it had taken to receive it (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians  1982a ,  1982b ; Department of Justice  2000 ; Haak  1970 ; Kitano  1976 ; Robinson  2012 ; Takezawa  1991 ).

Perhaps actor George Takei, of Star Trek fame in the role of Lieutenant Sulu, sums up best the wartime legacy of the evacuation of Japanese Americans. As a child, he had lived with his parents in the Tule Lake, California, camp. In 1996, on the fiftieth anniversary of the camp’s closing and five years before 9/11 would turn the nation’s attention elsewhere, he reflected on his arrival at the camp. “America betrayed American ideals at this camp. We must not have national amnesia; we must remember this” (Lin  1996 :10).

The Economic Picture

The socioeconomic status of Japanese Americans as a group is different from that of other Asian Americans. Japanese Americans as a group are even more educated and enjoy even higher incomes than Chinese Americans as well as White Americans (refer to  Table 8.1 ). In contrast to other Asian Americans, the Japanese American community is more settled and less affected by new arrivals from the home country.

The camps left a legacy with economic implications; the Japanese American community of the 1950s was very different from that of the 1930s. Japanese Americans were more widely scattered. In 1940, 89 percent lived on the West Coast. By 1950, only 58 percent of the population had returned to the West Coast. Another difference was that a smaller proportion than before was Issei. The Nisei and even later generations accounted for 63 percent of the Japanese population. By moving beyond the West Coast, Japanese Americans seemed less of a threat than if they had remained concentrated. Furthermore, by dispersing, Japanese American businesspeople had to develop ties to the larger economy rather than do business mostly with other Japanese Americans. Although ethnic businesses can be valuable initially, those who limit their dealings to those from the same country may limit their economic potential (Oliver and Shapiro  1996 :46).

After the war, some Japanese Americans continued to experience hardship. Some remained on the West Coast and farmed as sharecroppers in a role similar to that of the freed slaves after the Civil War. Sharecropping involved working the land of others, who provided shelter, seeds, and equipment and who also shared any profits at the time of harvest. The Japanese Americans used the practice to gradually get back into farming after being stripped of their land during World War II (Parrish  1995 ).

However, perhaps the most dramatic development has been the upward mobility that Japanese Americans collectively and individually have accomplished. By occupational and academic standards, two indicators of success, Japanese Americans are doing very well. The educational attainment of Japanese Americans as a group, as well as their family earnings, is higher than that of Whites, but caution should be used in interpreting such group data. Obviously, large numbers of Asian Americans, as well as Whites, have little formal schooling and are employed in poor jobs. Furthermore, Japanese Americans are concentrated in areas of the United States such as Hawai’i, California, Washington, New York, and Illinois, where wages and the cost of living are far above the national average. Also, the proportion of Japanese American families with multiple wage earners is higher than that of White families. Nevertheless, the overall picture for Japanese Americans is remarkable, especially for a racial minority that had been discriminated against so openly and so recently (Inoue  1989 ; Kitano 1980; Nishi  1995 ).

The Japanese American story does not end with another account of oppression and hardship. Today, Japanese Americans have achieved success by almost any standard. However, we must qualify the progress that Newsweek ( 1971 ) once billed as their “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites.” First, it is easy to forget that several generations of Japanese Americans achieved what they did by overcoming barriers that U.S. society had created, not because they had been welcomed. However, many, if not most, have become acculturated. Nevertheless, successful Japanese Americans still are not wholeheartedly accepted into the dominant group’s inner circle of social clubs and fraternal organizations. Second, Japanese Americans today may represent a stronger indictment of society than economically oppressed African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. Whites can use few excuses apart from racism to explain why they continue to look on Japanese Americans as different—as “them.”

Family Life

The contradictory pulls of tradition and rapid change that are characteristic of Chinese Americans are very strong among Japanese Americans today. Surviving Issei see their grandchildren as very nontraditional. Change in family life is one of the most difficult cultural changes for any immigrant to accept in the younger generations.

As cultural traditions fade, the contemporary Japanese American family seems to continue the success story. The divorce rate has been low, although it is probably rising. Similar conclusions apply to crime, delinquency, and reported mental illness. Data on all types of social disorganization show that Japanese Americans have a lower incidence of such behavior than all other minorities; it also is lower than that of Whites. Japanese Americans find it possible to be good Japanese and good Americans simultaneously. Japanese culture demands high ingroup unity, politeness, and respect for authority, and duty to community—all traits that are highly acceptable to middle-class Americans. Basically, psychological research has concluded that Japanese Americans share the high-achievement orientation held by many middle-class White Americans. However, one might expect that as Japanese Americans continue to acculturate, the breakdown in traditional Japanese behavior will be accompanied by a rise in social deviance (Nishi  1995 ).

Asian Americans, like members of other racial and ethnic minorities, often express concerns about the indignities that other groups experience as well as themselves. Here, the Japanese American cartoonist Tak Toyoshima portrays this in his comic strip that he calls Secret Asian Man.

In the last 40 years, a somewhat different family pattern has emerged in what can almost be regarded as a second Japanese community forming. As Japan’s economic engine took off in the latter part of the twentieth century, corporate Japan sought opportunities abroad. Because of its large automobile market, the United States economy became one destination. Top-level executives and their families were relocated to look after these enterprises. This has created a small but significant community of Japanese in the United States. Although they are unlikely to stay, they are creating a presence that is difficult to miss. Several private schools have been established since 1966 in the United States, in which children follow Japanese curriculum and retain their native language and culture. Saturday school is maintained for Japanese American parents whose children attend public school during the week. Although these private academies are removed from the broader culture, they help facilitate the nearby creation of authentic markets and Japanese bookstores. Researchers are interested to see what might be the lasting social implications of these households from Japan (Dolnick and Semple  2011 ; Lewis  2008 ; Twohey  2007 ).

Southeast Asian Americans

The people of Southeast Asia—Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians—were part of the former French Indochinese Union. Southeast Asian is an umbrella term used for convenience; the peoples of these areas are ethnically and linguistically diverse. Ethnic Laotians constitute only half of the Laotian people, for example; a significant number of Mon-Khmer, Yao, and Hmong form minorities. Numbering more than 2.2 million in 2010, Vietnamese Americans are the largest group, with more than 1.5 million members, or about 15 percent of the total Asian American population (Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, and Shahid 2012).

The Refugees

The problem of U.S. involvement in Indochina did not end when all U.S. personnel were withdrawn from South Vietnam in 1975. The final tragedy was the reluctant welcome Americans and people of other nations gave to the refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. One week after the evacuation of Vietnam in April 1975, a Gallup poll reported that 54 percent of Americans were against giving sanctuary to the Asian refugees, with 36 percent in favor and 11 percent undecided. The primary objection to Vietnamese immigration was that it would further increase unemployment (Schaefer and Schaefer  1975 ).

Many Americans offered to house refugees in their homes, but others declared that the United States had too many Asians already and was in danger of losing its “national character.” This attitude toward the Indochinese has been characteristic of the feeling that Harvard sociologist David Riesman called the  gook syndrome . Gook is a derogatory term for an Asian, and the syndrome refers to the tendency to stereotype these people in the worst possible light. Riesman believed that the American news media created an unflattering image of the South Vietnamese and their government, leading the American people to believe they were not worth saving (Luce  1975 ).

The initial 135,000 Vietnamese refugees who fled in 1975 were joined by more than a million running from the later fighting and religious persecution that plagued Indochina. The United States accepted about half of the refugees, some of them the so-called boat people, primarily Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese background, who took to the ocean in overcrowded vessels, hoping that some ship would pick them up and offer sanctuary. Hundreds of thousands were placed in other nations or remain in overcrowded refugee camps administered by the United Nations.

The Current Picture

Like other immigrants, the refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia face a difficult adjustment. Few expect to return to their homelands for visits, and fewer expect to return permanently. Therefore, many look to the United States as their permanent home and the home of their children. However, the adult immigrants still accept jobs well below their former occupational positions in Southeast Asia; geographic mobility has been accompanied by downward social mobility. For example, only a small fraction of refugees employed as managers in Vietnam have been employed in similar positions in the United States.

Language also is a factor in adjustment by the refugees; a person trained as a manager cannot hold that position in the United States until he or she is fairly fluent in English. The available data indicate that refugees from Vietnam have increased their earnings rapidly, often by working long hours. Partly because Southeast Asians comprise significantly different subgroups, assimilation and acceptance are not likely to occur at the same rate for all.

Although most refugee children spoke no English upon their arrival here, they have done extremely well in school. Studies indicate that immigrant parents place great emphasis on education and are pleased by the prospect of their children going to college—something rare in their homelands. It remains to be seen whether this motivation will decline as members of the next young generation look more to their American peers as role models.

The picture for young Southeast Asians in the United States is not completely pleasant. Crime is present in almost all ethnic groups, but some observers fear that in this group it has two very ugly aspects. Some of the crime may represent reprisals for the war: anti-Communists and Communist sympathizers who continue their conflicts here. At the same time, gangs are emerging as young people seek the support of close-knit groups even if they engage in illegal and violent activities. Of course, this pattern is similar to that followed by all groups in the United States. Indeed, defiance of authority can be regarded as a sign of assimilation. Another unpleasant but well-documented aspect of the current picture is the series of violent episodes directed at Southeast Asians by Whites and others expressing resentment over their employment or even their mere presence (Alvord  2000 ; K. Chu  2010 ; Zhou and Bankston  1998 ).

In 1995, the United States initiated normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which is leading to more movement between the nations. Gradually, Vietnamese Americans are returning to visit but generally not to take up permanent residence.  Viet Kieu , Vietnamese living abroad, are making the return—some 500,000 in 2010 compared to 270,000 in 1996. Generational issues are also emerging as time passes. In Vietnamese communities from California to Virginia, splits emerge over a powerful symbol—under what flag to unite a nationality. Merchants, home residents, and college Vietnamese student organizations take a stand by whether they decide to display the yellow-with-red-bars flag of the now-defunct South Vietnam, sometimes called the “heritage flag,” or the red-with-yellow-star flag of the current (and Communist) Vietnam (Tran  2008 ).

Meanwhile, for the more than 1.5 million Vietnamese Americans who remain, settlement patterns here vary. Little Saigons can be found in major cities in the United States long after the former South Vietnam capital of Saigon became Ho Chi Min City. Like many other immigrant groups in the second generation, some Vietnamese have moved into suburbs where residential patterns tend to be rather dispersed, but one can still spot mini-malls with Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores—some even sporting a sloping red-tiled roof. Other Vietnamese Americans remain in rural areas—for example, the Gulf Coast fishermen who were rendered homeless by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Perhaps one sign of how settled Vietnamese Americans have become is that some of the same organizations that helped the refugees learn English are now helping younger Vietnamese Americans learn Vietnamese (Anguilar-SanJuan 2009; Pfeifer  2008b ; Triev  2009 ).

Case Study: A Hmong Community

Wausau (population 38,000) is a community in rural Wisconsin that is best known, perhaps, for the insurance company bearing its name. To sociologists, it is distinctive for its sizable Hmong (pronounced “Mong”) population. The Hmong come from rural areas of Laos and Vietnam, where they were recruited to work for the CIA during the Vietnam War. This association made life difficult for them after the United States pulled out. Hence, many immigrated, and the United States has maintained a relatively open policy to their becoming permanent residents. Wausau finds itself with the greatest percentage of Hmong of any city in Wisconsin. Hmong and a few other Southeast Asians account for 11 percent of the city’s population and about 18 percent of its public school students (Christensen  2012 ).

The Hmong, who numbered 248,000 as of 2010, immigrated to the United States from Laos and Vietnam after the end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam in April 1975. The transition for the Hmong was difficult because they were typically farmers with little formal education. Poverty levels have been high and home ownership has been uncommon. Hmong have tended to form tight-knit groups organized around community leaders. Nationwide divisions exist along generational lines as well as dialect spoken and whether they are veterans of military service. Typically, Hmong Americans maintain strong cultural traditions surrounding marriage and funerals. Some are giving up Hmong traditional worship of spirits for Christian faiths. Perhaps reflecting their entry into mainstream culture, Hmong culture and the challenges faced by the Hmong in the United States were explored in Clint Eastwood’s 2008 fictional film Gran Torino (Pfeifer 2008a).

Like other refugees from South Asia at the time, the first Hmong came to Wausau at the invitation of religious groups. Others followed as they found the surrounding agricultural lands were places they could find work. This created a pipeline of chain immigration to communities like Wausau. As introduced earlier, chain immigration refers to an immigrant who sponsors several other immigrants who, on their arrival, may sponsor still more. Even with sponsors or relatives, coming from a very rural peasant society, the immigrants faced dramatic adjustment upon arrival in the industrialized United States (Vang  2010 ).

In the 2008 motion picture Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood portrays a bitter retired autoworker. He is initially suspicious of his Hmong neighbors in Detroit but comes to appreciate their willingness to help and their strong family values.

Wausau school officials believed that progress in teaching the Hmong English was stymied because the newcomers continued to associate with each other and spoke only their native tongue. In the fall of 1993, the Wausau school board decided to distribute the Hmong and other poor students more evenly by restructuring its elementary schools in a scheme that required two-way busing.

Recalls of elected officials are rare in the United States, but in December 1993, opponents of the busing plan organized a special election that led to the removal of the five board members. This left the Wausau board with a majority who opposed the busing plan that had integrated Asian American youngsters into mostly White elementary schools. By 2011, neighborhood schools continued to play an important role in Wausau so that among elementary schools, the proportion of Hmong children ranged from less than 1 to 38 percent (School Digger  2011 ; Seibert  2002 ).

How events will unfold in Wausau is unclear. However, positive signs are identifiable in Wausau and other centers of Hmong life in the United States. Immigrants and their children are moving into nonagricultural occupations. Enrollment in citizenship classes is growing. Public healthcare programs directed at the Hmong community are widely publicized. The Wausau Area Hmong Mutual Association, funded by a federal grant and the local United Way, offers housing assistance. Although many of these immigrants struggle to make a go of it economically, large numbers have been able to move off public assistance. Language barriers and lack of formal schooling still are encountered by older Hmong residents, but the younger generation is emerging to face some of the same identity and assimilation questions experienced by other Asian American groups. To help facilitate the adjustment, some Wausau residents are learning Hmong through a special program at a local college (Dally  2011 ; Menchaca  2008 ; Peckham  2002 ).

Hawai’i and Its People

The entire state of Hawai’i appears to be the complete embodiment of cultural diversity. Nevertheless, despite a dramatic blending of different races living together, prejudice, discrimination, and pressure to assimilate are very much present in Hawai’i. As we will see, life on the island is much closer to that in the rest of the country than to the ideal of a pluralistic society. Hawai’i’s population is unquestionably diverse, as shown in  Figure 8.4 .

To grasp contemporary social relationships, we must first understand the historical circumstances that brought the following races together on the islands: the native Hawaiians, the  kanaka maoli  (meaning “real or true people”), the various Asian peoples, and the  Haoles  (pronounced “hah-oh-lehs”), the term often used to refer to Whites in Hawai’i (Ledward  2008 , Okamura  2008 ).

Figure 8.4 Hawai’i: Racial Composition

Source: American Community Survey  2010 : Tables B02006, B03002, Cc02007.

Historical Background

Geographically remote, Hawai’i was initially populated by Polynesian people who had their first contact with Europeans in 1778, when English explorer Captain James Cook arrived. The Hawaiians (who killed Cook) tolerated the subsequent arrival of plantation operators and missionaries. Fortunately, the Hawaiian people were united under a monarchy and received respect from the European immigrants, a respect that developed into a spirit of goodwill. Slavery was never introduced, even during the colonial period, as it was in so many areas of the Western hemisphere. Nevertheless, the effect of the White arrival on the Hawaiians themselves was disastrous. Civil warfare and disease reduced the number of full-blooded natives to fewer than 30,000 by 1900, and the number is probably well under 10,000 now. Meanwhile, large sugarcane plantations imported laborers from China, Portugal, Japan, and, in the early 1900s, the Philippines, Korea, and Puerto Rico.

In 1893, a revolution encouraged by foreign commercial interests overthrew the monarchy. During the revolution, the United States landed troops, and five years later, Hawai’i was annexed as a territory to the United States. The 1900 Organic Act guaranteed racial equality, but foreign rule dealt a devastating psychological blow to the proud Hawaiian people. American rule had mixed effects on relations between the races. Citizenship laws granted civil rights to all those born on the islands, not just the wealthy Haoles. However, the anti-Asian laws still applied, excluding the Chinese and Japanese from political participation.

The twentieth century witnessed Hawai’i’s transition from a plantation frontier to the fiftieth state and an integral part of the national economy. During that transition, Hawai’i became a strategic military outpost, although that role has had only a limited effect on race relations. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor had little influence on Japanese Americans in Hawai’i.

The Current Picture

Hawai’i has achieved some fame for its good race relations. Tourists, who are predominantly White, have come from the mainland and have seen and generally accepted the racial harmony. Admittedly, Waikiki Beach, where large numbers of tourists congregate, is atypical of the islands, but even their tourists cannot ignore the differences in intergroup relations. If they look closely, they will see that the low-wage workers in the resorts and tourist industry tend to be disproportionately of Asian descent (Adler and Adler  2004 ).

One clear indication of the multicultural nature of the islands is the degree of exogamy: marrying outside one’s own group. The outgroup marriage rate varies annually but seems to be stabilizing; about 40 percent of all marriages performed in the state involving residents are exogamous. The rate varies by group, from a low of 32 percent among Haoles to 66 percent among Chinese Americans with about half of Native Hawaiians outmarrying (Office of Hawaiian Affairs  2012 ).

Prejudice and discrimination are not alien to Hawai’i. Attitudinal surveys show definite racial preferences and sensitivity to color differences. Housing surveys taken before the passage of civil rights legislation showed that many people were committed to non-discrimination, but racial preferences were still present. Certain groups sometimes dominate residential neighborhoods, but there are no racial ghettos. The various racial groups are not distributed uniformly among the islands, but they are clustered rather than sharply segregated.

The  sovereignty movement  is the effort by the indigenous people of Hawai’i, the kanala maoli, to secure a measure of self-government and restoration of their lands. The movement’s roots and significance to the people are very similar to the sovereignty efforts by tribal people on the continental United States. The growing sovereignty movement also has sought restoration of the Native Hawaiian land that has been lost to Anglos over the last century, or at least compensation for it. Reaction to the movement has ranged from non-native Hawaiians seeing this as a big land grab and racist to those among the indigenous Hawaiians who see it as just not enough.

The Hawaiian term kanaka maoli, meaning “real or true people,” is gaining use to reaffirm the indigenous people’s special ties to the islands. Sometimes, the Native Hawaiians successfully form alliances with environmental groups that want to halt further commercial development on the islands. In 1996, a Native Hawaiian vote was held, seeking a response to the question, “Shall the Hawaiian people elect delegates to propose a Native Hawaiian government?” The results indicated that 73 percent voting were in favor of such a government structure. Since then, the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs has sought to create a registry of Hawaiians that is only about halfway to having all the estimated 200,000 people of significant Hawaiian descent on the islands come forward. In 2008, a Native Hawaiian independence group seized the historic royal palace in Honolulu to protest the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian government more than a century ago. Although the occupation lasted barely a day, the political discontentment felt by many Native Hawaiians persists (Halualani  2002 ; Magin  2008 ; Okamura  2008 ; Staton 2004).

 Speaking Out: Recognizing Native Hawaiians

(The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act) . . . allows us to take the necessary next step in the reconciliation process. The bill does three things. First, it authorizes an office in the Department of the Interior to serve as a liaison between Native Hawaiians and the United States. Second, it forms an interagency task force chaired by the Departments of Justice and Interior, and composed of officials from federal agencies that administer programs and services impacting Native Hawaiians. Third, it authorizes a process for the reorganization of the Native Hawaiian government for the purposes of a federally recognized government-to-government relationship. Once the Native Hawaiian government is recognized, an inclusive democratic negotiations process representing both Native Hawaiians and non-Native Hawaiians would be established. There are many checks and balances in this process. Any agreements reached would still require the legislative approval of the State and Federal governments.

Opponents have spread misinformation about the bill. Let me be clear on some things that this bill does not do. My bill will not allow for gaming. It does not allow for Hawaii to secede from the United States. It does not allow for private land to be taken. It does not create a reservation in Hawaii.

What this bill does do is allow the people of Hawaii to come together and address issues arising from the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii more than 118 years ago.

It is time to move forward with this legislation. To date, there have been a total of twelve Congressional hearings, including five joint hearings in Hawaii held by the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Natural Resources Committee. Our colleagues in the House have passed versions of this bill three times. We, however, have never had the opportunity to openly debate this bill on its merits in the Senate. We have a strong bill that is supported by Native communities across the United States, by the State of Hawaii, and by the Obama Administration.

Last week, I met with officials and community leaders in the state of Hawaii to share my intention to reintroduce this legislation. I received widespread support. This support was not surprising. A poll conducted by the Honolulu Advertiser in May of last year reported that 66 percent of the people of Hawaii support federal recognition for Native Hawaiians. And 82 percent of Native Hawaiians polled support federal recognition. . . .

I encourage all of my colleagues to stand with me and support this legislation. I welcome any of my colleagues with concerns to speak with me so I can explain how important this bill is for the people of Hawaii. The people of Hawaii have waited for far too long. America has a history of righting past wrongs. The United States has federally recognized government-to-government relationships with 565 tribes across our country. It is time to extend this policy to the Native Hawaiians.

Daniel Akaka

Source: Akaka 2011.

Much of the present discussion about sovereignty has focused over Hawai’i’s congressional delegation seeking passage of the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, or the Akaka Bill, after U.S. Senator Daniel Akaka, the first U.S. Senator of Native Hawaiian ancestry. It would give people of Hawaiian ancestry more say over resources, provide affordable housing, take steps to preserve culture, and create a means by which they could better express their grievances. As of 2011, the measure had passed the House but was never discussed on the floor of the Senate (Akaka 2011). In “Speaking Out”, Senator Akaka tries to set aside some of the criticism of the bill while calling for Congress to take the same step for the kanaka maoli as it has for American Indian tribes on the mainland.

Regardless of the outcome of the sovereignty movement, the multiracial character of the islands will not change quickly, but the identity of the Native Hawaiians has already been overwhelmed. Although they have a rich cultural heritage, they tend to be poor and often view the U.S. occupation as the beginning of their cultural and economic downfall. For centuries, they traditionally placed the earthly remains of their loved ones in isolated caves. However, as these archaeological sites were found by Haoles, the funeral remains made their way to the Bishop Museum, which is the national historical museum located in Honolulu. Now Native Hawaiians are using the Native American Graves and Protection Act to get the remains back and rebury them appropriately (LaDuke  2006 ).

“E Heluuelu Kaqkou,” Nako’hlani Warrington tells her third graders (“Let’s read together”). She has no need to translate because she is teaching at the public immersion school where all instruction is in the Hawaiian language. Not too long ago, it was assumed that only linguistic scholars would speak Hawaiian, but efforts to revive it in general conversation have resulted in its use well beyond “aloha.” In 1983, only 1,500 people were considered native speakers; now native speakers number 68,000. This goes well beyond symbolic ethnicity. Language perpetuity is being combined with a solid grade school education, and a supportive doctoral program in the Hawaiian language was introduced in 2007 (Indian Country Today2007; Kana’iaupuni  2008 ).

Conclusion

Who are the Asian Americans? Asian Americans are a rapidly growing group. Despite striking differences among them, they are often viewed as if they arrived all at once and from one culture. Also, they are often characterized as a successful or model minority. However, individual cases of success and some impressive group data suggest that the diverse group of peoples who make up the Asian American community are not uniformly successful. Indeed, despite high levels of formal schooling, Asian Americans earn far less than Whites with comparable education and continue to be victims of discriminatory employment practices.

As for other racial and ethnic minorities, assimilation seems to be the path most likely to lead to tolerance but not necessarily to acceptance. However, assimilation has a price that is well captured in the Chinese phrase “Zhancao zhugen”: “To eliminate the weeds, one must pull out their roots.” To work for acceptance means to uproot all traces of one’s cultural heritage and former identity (Wang  1991 ).

The diversity within the Asian American community belies the similarity suggested by the pan-ethnic label Asian American. Chinese and Japanese Americans share a history of several generations in the United States. Native Hawaiians lost autonomy to over a century of rule by the United States. Filipinos are veterans of a half-century of direct U.S. colonization and a cooperative role with the military. In contrast, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese are associated in a negative way with three wars. Korean Americans come from a nation that still has a major U.S. military presence and a persisting “cold war” mentality. Korean Americans and Chinese Americans have taken on middleman roles, whereas Filipinos, Asian Indians, and Japanese Americans tend to avoid the ethnic enclave pattern.

SPECTRUM OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS

Not only is diversity central to describing the population of the United States but it also is central to describing who are Asian Americans.

This chapter has begun to answer that question by focusing on four of the larger groups: Asian Indians, Filipino Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, and Korean Americans. Hawai’i is a useful model because its harmonious social relationships cross racial lines. Although it is not an interracial paradise, Hawai’i does illustrate that, given proper historical and economic conditions, continuing conflict is not inevitable.

MySocLab  Study and Review on MySocLab

Looking Back

Summary

· 1. Asian Americans have been active politically through collective action and recently through seeking elected office. They embrace their unique identity but acknowledge their broader pan-Asian identity.

· 2. Although welcomed for their labor in the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants were soon viewed as responsible for economic setbacks experienced by the nation, which culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

· 3. Chinatowns are visible signs of continued growth of the Chinese American population and represent both promise and problems for the immigrants.

· 4. Asian Indians are a diverse group culturally and, although most are Hindu, embrace a number of faiths.

· 5. Filipino Americans have a long historical connection to the United States, with today’s immigrants including both professionals as well as the descendants of those who have served in the U.S. military.

· 6. Southeast Asians’ presence in the United States has typically resulted from waves of refugees. They have created significant settlements throughout the United States and often have dispersed throughout the larger population.

· 7. The Hmong, originally from Laos and Vietnam, are a distinctive ethnic group that took up residence in the United States following their loyal support of the war effort in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

· 8. Korean Americans have settled largely in urban areas, where many have become successful entrepreneurs.

· 9. Immigrants from Japan, like so many others, were permitted to come when they fulfilled an economic niche but were quickly marginalized socially and legally. The internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II is a clear instance of guilt by virtue of race.

· 10. The prosperity of Japanese Americans as a group reflects the willingness to endure post–World War II marginalization and continued investment in formal schooling for their children.

· 11. Hawai’i and its Native Hawaiians present a different multiracial pattern from that of the mainland but not one without both prejudice and discrimination.

Key Terms

arranged marriage,  p. 215

chain immigration,  p. 204

desi,  p. 214

evacuees,  p. 222

gook syndrome,  p. 227

Haoles,  p. 230

hui kuan,  p. 210

ilchomose,  p. 218

Issei,  p. 220

kanaka maoli,  p. 230

Kibei,  p. 220

kye,  p. 219

model minority,  p. 206

Nisei,  p. 220

panethnicity,  p. 207

Sansei,  p. 220

sovereignty movement,  p. 231

tongs,  p. 210

tsu,  p. 210

Viet Kieu,  p. 228

Yonsei,  p. 220

Review Questions

· 1. What critical events or legislative acts increased each Asian American group’s immigration into the United States?

· 2. What are the most significant similarities between the Chinese American and Japanese American experiences? What are the differences?

· 3. To what degree do race relations in Hawai’i offer both promise and a chilling dose of reality to the future of race and ethnicity on the mainland?

Critical Thinking

· 1. What stereotypical images of Asian Americans can you identify in the contemporary media?

· 2. What events can you imagine that might cause the United States to again identify an ethnic group for confinement in some type of internment camps?

· 3. Coming of age is difficult for anyone, given the ambiguities of adolescence in the United States. How is it doubly difficult for the children of immigrants? How do you think the immigrants themselves, such as those from Asia, view this process?

· 4. American Indians, Hispanics, and Asian Americans are all convenient terms to refer to diverse groups of people. Do you see these umbrella terms as being more appropriate for one group than for the others?