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Asian Americans I have stressed in this chapter that our racial–ethnic categories are based more on social considerations than on biological ones. This point is again obvious when we examine the category Asian American. As Figure 9.10 shows, those who are called Asian Americans came to the United States from many nations. With no unifying culture or “race,” why should these people of so many backgrounds be clustered together and assigned a single label? The reason is that others perceive them as a unit. Think about it. What culture or race–ethnicity do Samoans and Vietnamese have in common? Or Laotians and Pakistanis? Or people from Guam and those from China? Those from Japan and those from India? Yet all these groups—and more—are lumped together and called Asian Americans. Apparently, the U.S. government is not satisfied until it is able to pigeonhole everyone into some racial–ethnic category.

Since Asian American is a standard term, however, let’s look at the characteristics of the 13 million people who are lumped together and assigned this label.

A Background of Discrimination. From their first arrival in the United States, Asian Americans confronted discrimination. Lured by gold strikes in the West and an urgent need for unskilled workers to build the railroads, 200,000 Chinese immigrated between 1850 and 1880. When the famous golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, in 1869 to mark the completion of the railroad to the West Coast, white workers prevented Chinese workers from being in the photo—even though Chinese made up 90 percent of Central Pacific Railroad’s labor force (Hsu 1971).

After the railroad was complete, the Chinese took other jobs. Feeling threatened by their cheap labor, Anglos formed vigilante groups to intimidate them. They also used the law. California’s 1850 Foreign Miner’s Act required Chinese (and Latinos) to pay a fee of $20 a month in order to work—when wages were a dollar a day. The California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese could not testify against whites (Carlson and Colburn 1972). In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending all Chinese immigration for ten years. Four years later, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated. The tired, the poor, and the huddled masses it was intended to welcome were obviously not Chinese.

When immigrants from Japan arrived, they encountered spillover bigotry, a stereotype that lumped Asians together, depicting them as sneaky, lazy, and untrustworthy. After Japan at- tacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, conditions grew worse for the 110,000 Japanese Americans who called the United States their home. U.S. authorities feared that Japan would invade the United States and that the Japanese Americans would fight on Japan’s side. They also feared that Japan- ese Americans would sabotage military installations on the West Coast. Although no Japan- ese American had been involved in even a single act of sabotage, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that everyone who was one-eighth Japanese or more be confined in detention centers (called “internment camps”). These people were charged with no crime, and they had no trials. Japanese ancestry was sufficient cause for being imprisoned.

Diversity. As you can see from Tables 9.2 and 9.4 on pages 286 and 288, the income of Asian Americans has outstripped that of all groups, including whites. This has led to the stereotype that all Asian Americans are successful. Are they? Their poverty rate is actually higher than that of whites, as you can also see from Table 9.2. As with Lati- nos, country of origin is significant: Poverty is unusual among Chinese and Japanese Americans, but it clusters among Americans from Southeast Asia. Altogether, between 1 and 2 million Asian Americans live in poverty.

Reasons for Success. The high average income of Asian Americans can be traced to three major factors: family life, educational achievement, and assimilation into mainstream cul- ture. Of all ethnic groups, including whites, Asian American children are the most likely to grow up with two parents and the least likely to be born to a teenage or single mother (Statistical Abstract 2011:Tables 69, 86). (If you want to jump ahead, look at Figure 10.6

Racial–Ethnic Relations in the United States 291

China 24%

Philippines 18%

India 16%

Korea 11%

Vietnam 11%

Japan 8%

Other Countries

12%

FIGURE 9.10 The Country of Origin of Asian Americans

Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 2006:Table 24.