The real turning point in Asian immigration occurred in 1965 during the civil rights movement when US leaders decided to abandon previous racist desires to maintain a primarily all-White republic. The Immigration Act of 1965 provided for annual admission of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western, with 20,000 immigrants per country allowed from the Eastern Hemisphere.146
As we have seen, the legislative action of 1965 dramatically changed the flow of immigration from Asian countries. In the case of India, it allowed for an influx of well-educated, English-speaking adults to come to the US for skilled employment. As of 2010, 87 percent of Asian Indians in the US were foreign-born, and 70 percent of all Asian Indian adults over the age of twenty-five had earned at least a bachelor’s degree, making them more highly educated as a group than other Asians and more than the US population as a whole. Because of their high level of education, median family incomes are also higher—in 2010, the median annual income for Indians was $88,000, much higher than for all Asians ($66,000) and all US households ($49,800). While the majority of Indians in India are Hindus, as of 2012 only about half (51 percent) of Indian immigrants to the US are Hindus; 18 percent identified as Christians and 10 percent are Muslim.147 Pakistanis are also considered part of the Asian American population, linguistically and culturally similar to Indians, and there are also high levels of education among Pakistani immigrants in the US. Because most Pakistanis are Muslim, they are sometimes mistakenly thought to be from the Middle East.148
Another population group often discussed in the context of Asian Americans is the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (NHPI). In the 1990s they were included in the census data with Asians but advocated for their own separate census category, which was granted in 2000. The NHPI population is much smaller than that of other Asian groups—approximately 1.5 million in 2014—and has a very different history relative to the United States. Theirs is not a story of migration but rather one of colonial conquest, particularly in Hawaii. Plantation economies and US military installations in the Pacific have played an important role in the NHPI experience. A highly diverse group, Native Hawaiians make up 41 percent of the NHPI population, followed by Samoans (13 percent), Guamanians or Chamorros (10 percent), Tongans (5 percent), Fijians (3 percent), and Marshallese (2 percent), and 26 percent are from other, much smaller Pacific island origins.149 Relative to the Asian American population, NHPIs have lower levels of educational attainment (20.9 percent have a college degree) and a higher poverty rate (18.4 percent).150
The linguistic, religious, and other cultural diversity of these disparate groups, some of whom have long histories of conflict with one another in Asia—for example, Japan and Korea, Japan and China, China and Vietnam—gives validity to the question posed by Valerie Lee, director of the 1992 Asian American Renaissance Conference: “What do we have in common except for racism and rice?”151 Social scientists Kenyon Chan and Shirley Hune argue that racism is quite enough. Because the treatment of early Asian immigrant communities was so similar and distinctions between them ignored by the dominant culture, the foundation of a group identity was laid.
Racial ideologies defined Pacific immigrants as aliens ineligible for citizenship, unfair economic competitors, and socially unassimilable groups. For the first one hundred years of “Asian America”—the 1840s to the 1940s—the images of each community were racialized and predominantly negative. The Chinese were called “Mongolians” and depicted in the popular press as heathens, gamblers, and opium addicts. The Japanese and Koreans were viewed as the “yellow peril.” Filipinos were derogatorily referred to as “little brown monkeys,” and Asian Indians, most of them Sikhs, were called “ragheads.”152
In the late 1960s, as part of the social transformation of the civil rights era, the concept of a panethnic Asian American identity emerged among second- and third-generation Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American college students. Chan and Hune write: “Racial identity and ethnic consciousness were fundamentally transformed along with the racial order. The polarization of civil rights protests required Asians in America to consider their identity, their self-definition, and their place in racialized America. They discovered that racial quotas and legal inequalities applied to them just as they did to other minorities. ‘Colored’ was clearly defined as anyone nonwhite.”153
Consequently, the terms Asian American and Asian Pacific American emerged as a unifying political construct encompassing all US residents of Asian and Pacific Island ancestry, encouraging individuals to work across ethnic lines for increased economic, political, and social rights. Asian American groups have lobbied for bilingual education, curricular reform, Asian American studies, improved working conditions for garment and restaurant workers, and support for community-based development. They have also opposed media misrepresentations and sought more opportunities for Asian Pacific Americans in theater, film, and television. Racial politics have continued to foster this unifying panethnic identity, though the large influx of new immigrants has changed the character of the Asian American community from the stable third- and fourth-generation community of the 1960s to one now composed largely of newcomers.154
Unpacking the Myth of the Model Minority
“What do you know about Asians?” a young Chinese American woman asks Mark, a young White man of Italian descent. His response: “I’m going to be honest with you. I completely believed the stereotype. Asian people are hard workers, they’re really quiet, they get good grades because they have tons of pressure from their families to get good grades.… Asians are quiet so people can’t have a problem with them.”155
This exchange captures the essence of the current stereotypes about Asian Americans. The “model minority” characterization is a pervasive one. The first public presentation of this idea is generally credited to a 1966 article by William Petersen entitled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” It reviewed the success of Japanese Americans despite the history of discrimination they had endured. A similar article describing the success of Chinese Americans appeared in U.S. News and World Report the same year.156 Both articles used statistics on rising educational attainment and income levels, along with statistics on low rates of reported crime and mental illness, to demonstrate how Asian cultural values had allowed these groups to succeed against the odds.157 Now, more than fifty years later, Asian American youth are routinely depicted in the media as star students (especially in math and science) supported by industrious, entrepreneurial, and upwardly mobile parents.
In their book The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee reflect on how, despite decades of institutional discrimination and racial prejudice, the stereotypes of Asian Americans changed from “undesirables” to “models of success.”158 The answer, they say, lies in the dramatic shift in the immigrant population itself. Unlike the low-skilled laborers who came to California in the nineteenth century, the Chinese immigrants who arrived after 1965 are a “hyperselected” group. They define hyperselectivity as a relative concept that uses two reference groups against which to compare a group of immigrants—the first comparison group being the peers they are leaving behind in their country of origin and the second being the native-born citizens of the host country. When the immigrants have above-average education as compared to their peers at home, they are a “highly selected” group, but when they have above-average education relative to the host country peers as well, they can be described as “hyperselected.” By these criteria, there is no doubt that Chinese immigrants are a hyperselected group. While only 4 percent of adults in China have at least an undergraduate degree, half of Chinese adult immigrants to the US do, and nearly half of the college-educated Chinese immigrants have earned a master’s or doctoral degree as well, mostly from US universities. Not only are they twelve times more likely than Chinese at home to have a college degree, with a college graduation rate of 50 percent, their education rate is far above the college-going rate among the ge
neral US population (28 percent). Because of their higher level of education, they are able to earn above-average incomes in the US.159
By contrast, Vietnamese immigrants are not hyperselected, because their educational attainment does not exceed the general US population’s, but they are highly selected, because 23 percent of Vietnamese immigrant adults have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 5 percent of their peers in Vietnam. While not all Vietnamese are well educated—in fact, a significant portion did not finish high school—the positive perception of Asians as highly educated is cast over them as well.160 “Although Vietnamese immigrants are not hyper-selected as are Chinese immigrants, they benefit from the hyper-selectivity of the Chinese because they are racialized as Asian American; the hyper-selectivity of Chinese immigrants (the largest Asian immigrant population in the United States) drives the general American perception that all Chinese immigrants and all Asian immigrants more generally are highly educated.”161
Compare this perception to the situation of Mexican immigrants. As a group, they are “hyposelected” because on average their educational attainment is lower than their peers’ back in Mexico, and it is also lower than the general population’s in the United States. Though the overall education level of Mexicans in Mexico is relatively high, Americans tend to perceive all Mexicans as poorly educated because of the low selectivity of Mexican immigration. Conversely, Asian Indians are another hyperselected group, creating the perception that Indians as a whole are highly educated, but most Indians in India do not have formal schooling.162 In general, Asian immigrants are likely to be more economically successful upon arrival in the US than Mexican immigrants, for example, because they are coming with more social capital in the form of their advanced education.
Zhou and Lee argue that the hyperselectivity of Asian immigration sets the foundation for Asian immigrant parents and their second-generation children “to create and adopt a specific cultural frame about achievement and success that is supported by public and ethnic resources, reinforced in institutional contexts and buttressed by social psychological processes. Together, these factors explain the Asian American achievement paradox, or the so-called exceptional academic outcomes of Asian Americans.”163 Because so many Asian immigrants have high levels of education, they have the resources to re-create institutions (e.g., businesses, cultural institutions, ethnic organizations) that help them and their fellow Asian immigrants adapt to their new country and help their children succeed in school. Those institutions, once created, benefit not only the hyperselected but also the less-educated of their ethnic community, who may find employment opportunities and supplemental educational resources for their children within the same ethnic community. “Chinese ethnic communities and ethnic newspapers are dotted with signs for Chinese language schools, after-school tutoring, academic enrichment programs, and cultural enrichment programs (such as music, dance, and sports) that arm Chinese immigrants with supplemental skills that help them excel academically.”164 They also bring with them a very specific definition of achievement and success, a “success frame” that includes earning straight As (an A- is described as an “Asian F”), graduating at the top of one’s class, earning a degree at an elite university, and working in one of four high-status professions (medicine, law, engineering, or science).165
This “success frame” is rewarded by teachers and guidance counselors who assume that Asian children are smart, hardworking, and destined to be high-achievers and consequently are more likely to provide them access to the best resources in public schools (gifted and talented programs and honors or Advanced Placement courses) than non-Asian students.166 Unlike the stereotype threat that tends to depress the performance of Black students, Asian students are likely to benefit from “stereotype promise,” the performance-enhancing benefit of being expected to succeed. For example, a second-generation Chinese student offered this example from her junior high school: “Like in math, they [my teachers] would be like, ‘Oh, Nancy, this should be easy for you.’ Just like passing tests out, they would make little comments like, ‘Oh, I expected you to do better.’ Math isn’t my thing, you know. Just because I’m Asian doesn’t mean I’m smart in math.”167
In Nancy’s case, not wanting to disappoint her teacher or her parents, she put in extra effort, with the help of the tutors her parents provided, and eventually was placed in an AP math class in high school. Stereotype promise can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Zhou and Lee found that even Asian students who exhibited mediocre or below-average academic performance were given the benefit of the doubt by teachers and encouraged to improve, and sometimes placed in honors or AP courses without the academic profile usually required for such placement. By contrast, Mexican participants in their study were rarely placed in the honors or AP classes. Asian students in Zhou and Lee’s study sample noticed that the expectations others held for them were not extended to other groups of color. Lily, a 1.5-generation Chinese woman, explained, “Like it’s expected that every Asian goes to college, gets a college degree or more. It’s just, like, they expect you to do well in school. I don’t think it’s expected much, like, say for Mexicans.”168
The “ethnic capital” of the hyperselected Asian community also benefits working-class Chinese and Vietnamese children whose parents have just a grade-school education, because they are able to learn from more highly educated immigrant peers about the importance of being in honors and AP classes for college admissions and how to navigate the school system to get placed at that level. Children of Mexican immigrants noticed that they were not in the same classes as their Asian peers, but because of the lower educational attainment in their ethnic community, they did not have access to the same kind of shared knowledge about maximizing the school resources within their social networks.169
Zhou and Lee identify another factor important to the successful educational outcomes of Asian children: mind-set. “Asian immigrants have been raised in countries where the prevalent belief is that effort, rather than ability, is the most critical ingredient for achievement.… By contrast, native-born American parents believe that their children’s outcomes are more heavily influenced by innate ability.”170 As was discussed in Chapter 4, if you have an “effort” mind-set, you are more likely to persist in the face of academic challenges. Families with an effort mind-set emphasize the value of practice and are more likely to invest in supplemental resources (like tutors) to achieve the desired outcomes.
The downside of high expectations and a belief in the power of effective effort is that those who do not achieve the high standard of success set by their families and teachers describe feelings of failure and see themselves as “ethnoracial outliers” who have to distance themselves from their Asian peers and their ethnic community. One such young man was Adam, the son of highly educated Vietnamese immigrants, who was not able to maintain the high level of academic success that his family expected in high school or in college. By comparison, his brother achieved all aspects of the success frame. Because Adam does not feel successful according to Vietnamese standards, he has distanced himself from his ethnic group, avoiding contact with other Vietnamese. Adam said, “I’m not sure how people see me. If they ask what I am, I say Vietnamese, but I don’t consider myself Vietnamese enough.” His brother, he says, is more truly Vietnamese.171 Similarly, Zhou and Lee report that many 1.5- and second-generation Koreans who have not achieved the key elements of the success frame—graduation from an elite university and a high-status career—are embarrassed by their “failure” and feel a need to disassociate themselves from the Korean American community because they do not feel “authentically Korean or Korean American.”172
Though many children of Asian immigrants have internalized the cultural expectations and the stereotype of stellar academic achievement, only a small percentage attain the culturally specific hallmarks of success, and many deviate widely from them.
Even based on the Immigration and Intergenerational Mob
ility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) data, we find that nearly two-fifths of 1.5 and second generation Chinese do not graduate from college, and half of Vietnamese do not obtain a bachelor’s degree. Yet Asians and non-Asians alike tend to overlook those Asian Americans who do not graduate from college, do not attain the success frame, and do not fit the model minority stereotype. These Asian Americans either go unnoticed or are dismissed as exceptions. The cultural lag keeps the association between ethnoracial status and achievement in place, despite the bevy of disconfirming evidence.173
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 31