The Politics of Asian Americans

Diversity and Community

Pei-te Lien, M. Margaret Conway, Janelle Wong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415934657
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135952297
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Social Sciences

Through the perspectives of mass politics, this book challenges popular misconceptions about Asian Americans as politically apathetic, disloyal, fragmented, unsophisticated and inscrutable by showcasing results of the 2000-01 Multi City Asian American Political Survey.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Research Question and Project Outline

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 11.9 million people in the United States declared themselves Asian (alone or in combination with another race) in 2000. At a growth rate of 72 percent between 1990 and 2000, Asian Americans are among the nation’s fastest growing populations by race.¹ This continues a demographic trend that has been observed since the liberalization of U.S. immigration policies in 1965. What is the political significance of the rapid and continuing rise of the Asian American population at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Which party do they feel closer to? Where do their political interests lie? These questions have garnered increasing attention and scrutiny from journalists and politicians in the United States in recent years, in part due to a series of high-profile events concerning international money laundering and campaign finance violations during the 1996 presidential election, and espionage charges against a Taiwan-born Chinese American nuclear scientist working for the Los Alamos National Lab. Yet the answers to date have been incomplete. Popular accounts of the present and future political impact of Asian Americans remain heavily filtered through the stereotypical lens of Asian Americans as a socioeconomically successful and politically acquiescent “model minority,” or as the perpetually foreign “yellow peril” who show more interest in their Asian homelands than in American society and politics.

Who are Asian Americans? To what extent and in what ways are they becoming socially and politically incorporated? To what extent do they think and act as a collective political body? And with what theoretical and policy implications? Through the perspective of mass politics, we examine the ways in which the contemporary Asian American population is engaged in debates that involve some of the core issues affecting the shape of the American democracy, as well as identify areas where challenges to community empowerment and full participation are most likely to arise. We undertake this task by showcasing the 2000–2001 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey (PNAAPS), the nation’s first multiethnic, multilingual, and multiregional political survey on Asian Americans. This dataset is designed to provide a more comprehensive answer to these central research questions than before. In addition, the PNAAPS achieves a rare feat in contemporary discussions about Asian Americans: It allows ordinary Asian Americans to speak for themselves on vital political questions. For various reasons explained elsewhere and later in the chapter, it has been very difficult to gather survey data that represent the public opinion of Asian Americans in any geopolitical scope or context. The PNAAPS is not, and does not claim to provide, an ideal solution to all of the problems involved in surveying a statistically rare, linguistically diverse, and geographically dispersed population such as Asians. In our view, however, it provides the best possible solution to date for studying the population through survey research.

In this first chapter, after a brief review of the historical and contemporary formation of the population, we present a summary report of descriptive findings to help debunk common mythical perceptions about Asian Americans, and to help reframe theoretical deliberations about the status of the population. Beginning with the second chapter, we examine the contours and sources of ethnic and panethnic (or racial) identities that characterize the contemporary Asian American population. This is followed in other chapters by explorations of the roles of U.S. and non-U.S. socialization, class, gender, ethnicity, immigration generation, homeland contacts, regional context, and political mobilization in the construction of political orientations, partisanship, electoral and nonelectoral participation, and policy preferences. For each issue addressed in the survey, we try to situate the discussion in the larger context of the U.S. census and other data. Importantly, we strive to place the reported statistics and interpretations gathered from this timely survey within the temporal and spatial contexts of discourses on race, ethnicity, gender, and culture in the United States.

In each of the main chapters, we begin with a review of theory and research in both political science and other social science disciplines, as well as in American ethnic studies, that focuses on, or is relevant for, studying Asian American political behavior. We report patterns in Asian American political attitudes and behavior using descriptive statistics from the survey. We then examine these findings with more advanced statistical techniques. To the greatest extent possible, we discuss our research within the extant body of knowledge and compare our findings to large-scale survey data collected over time, such as the American National Election Studies series (ANES, 1952–2000), the Current Population Survey Voter Supplement files (CPSVS, 1990–2000), the Los Angeles Times Poll Survey of Asians in Southern California (LATP, 1992–1997), and the General Social Survey (GSS, 1972–2000). Together, these data provide a unique window through which to view the experience of Asian Americans in the U.S. political system, and promise to yield results unprecedented in their diversity and depth.

Who is “Asian” American? An Evolving Population

Evolving Definitions in the U.S. Census

In a general sense, an Asian American is any Asian who resides in the United States on a permanent or long-term basis, regardless of citizenship or other legal status. The definition of who is an Asian, however, has undergone significant expansion over the last hundred and fifty years because of shifts in the racial and ethnic makeup of the U.S. population and changes in social attitudes and political concerns regarding racial and ethnic minorities. The evolving needs of the federal government for data to better address the growing diversity within minority groups and the multiple identities people may hold regarding their race and ethnicity have also resulted in significant changes in the categorization, collection, and tabulation of race and ethnicity data in the U.S. Census (Edmonston and Schultze, 1995; Lott, 1997; Espiritu and Omi, 2000).

A cursory examination of the historical evolution of the census categories into which Asians have been placed helps illustrate the evolving meanings of the term “Asian” in U.S. society and politics. In 1870, more than twenty years after the discovery of gold in California that initiated the first and significant wave of predominantly male labor migration from Asia, “Chinese” became the first Asian category to appear in the U.S. decennial census. A “Japanese” category was added in 1890, within years after banning the Chinese from entry and the subsequent recruitment of Japanese laborers to work on Hawaiian plantations. The categories for Filipinos, Asian Indians (misnamed as Hindus), and Koreans were added in 1920, but only Filipinos were listed, in addition to Chinese and Japanese, in the 1950 census.² The categories of Hawaiian and part Hawaiian debuted in 1960. “Korean” reemerged as a category in 1970. “Vietnamese” and “Asian Indian” joined the census definition of “Asian,” as did “Guamanian” and “Samoan” for Pacific Islanders, in 1980. In 1990, an umbrella term “Asian or Pacific Islander” and “other Asian or Pacific Islander” was listed, in addition to all the subgroup categories used in 1980.

An “Asian,” as defined in the 2000 Census, is a person “having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam” (Office of Management and Budget, 1997). Census 2000 is the first U.S. census that permits the reporting of more than one race. It also breaks apart the “Asian or Pacific Islander” category used in the 1990 Census into two categories—one called “Asian” and the other called “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” The latter category refers to any person “having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.” For the purposes of this book, we focus on the “Asian alone” portion of the Asian Pacific American experiences. This emphasis does not imply that the experiences of Pacific Islanders or persons with mixed heritage are any less important than the groups we include here. Rather, the choice is based on data limitations.³

By and large, changes in the enumeration of the Asian American population reflect the historical and contemporary formation of the communities in America. This process has been shaped and reshaped by U.S. immigration and other related policies, U.S. race relations, political turmoil and U.S. military engagements in Asia, global labor market conditions, Asian American community activism, and other forces in global economic restructuring (Takaki, 1989; Chan, 1991; Espiritu, 1992; Hing, 1993; Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng, 1994; Okihiro, 1994, 2001; Kitano and Daniels, 1995; Min, 1995; Fong, 1998, 2002; Zhou and Gatewood, 2000; Lien, 2001b). The migration history of Asian groups in the United States clearly varies by major periods and conditions of entry. However, all those who entered prior to 1965 share a common history of overt racial and ethnic discrimination in the application of immigration and citizenship laws, as well and social and economic practices. Some of the most blatant forms of exclusion for Asian Americans were lifted when Congress replaced the racist national origin quota with the hemispheric quota system and created new immigrant preference categories in 1965.

Historical and Contemporary Community Formation— Entering One Group at a Time

The Chinese were the first Asian group that entered in large and persistent numbers. About 52,000 Chinese arrived in 1852 alone. They were lured by the prospects of finding good jobs and fortunes in the western United States. They also arrived to escape homeland problems such as overcrowding, drought, and warfare in southern China. A similar set of push and pull factors explains the early immigration of other Asian groups. Before the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act,⁴ which closed off Chinese labor migration until after the mid-twentieth century,⁵ over 225,000 Chinese laborers arrived. The large and sudden influx of the “heathen Chinese” who were barred from naturalization by law,⁶ coupled with language barriers, economic depression, and tight political party competition, created opportunities for politicians to pass the nation’s first immigration control act based solely on ethnicity. The destruction of birth and citizenship records in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as well as the persistent domestic social and economic problems in the politically fractured Chinese homeland had encouraged a continuous stream of Chinese nationals who often entered the United States—both during and after the exclusion era—in strategic and supra legal or illegal ways (Lai, 1992; Salyer, 1995; Kwong, 1997; Chin, 2000). In the contemporary age of globalization and transnational capitalism, the community is steadily infused by new immigrants; some arrive penniless but many others are professionals or venture capitalists. The generational and economic diversity that characterize Chinese Americans is quite unique even compared with other Asian American groups (Kwong, 1987; Wang, 1995; Lin, 1998).

Labor migration from Japan occurred in earnest around the turn of the twentieth century. It came to a halt with the passage of the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, in which the Japanese government agreed to stop issuing passports to laborers heading for Hawaii and the United States. In return, the U.S. government allowed the entry of family-arranged wives and brides of laborers. Thus, in the years following the Gentlemen’s Agreement and before the prohibition of Japanese women immigration in the 1924 Immigration Act, the Japanese community—in contrast to the Chinese—was able to establish families and assure the continuation of generations of growth in the United States. New immigration resumed in 1952 after the passage of the McCarren-Walter Act, but the miniscule annual quota of 128 was not lifted until 1965. Nevertheless, the horrific internment experience during World War II, incidents of Japan-bashing related to U.S.-Japan trade tensions during the 1980s, and the post war prosperity in the homeland have accounted for the community’s relative lack of new immigration in the second half of the twentieth century (Daniels, 1971, 1988; Weglyn, 1976; Ichioka, 1988; Takaki, 1989). The predominance of the U.S.-born is a distinctive feature of the Japanese population in present-day Asian America.

The first major wave of Korean immigration occurred in 1903 and 1905, when over 7,200 Koreans were recruited for plantation labor in Hawaii. The entry of Koreans was subject to the same restrictions placed on the Japanese after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. Before the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which lifted the minuscule annual quota set for Asian groups in 1924, Koreans entered as political exiles and war brides. Nevertheless, more than three in four of present-day Korean Americans entered the United States only after the late 1960s. Attacks against Korean merchants during the 1992 Los Angeles urban unrest, tense interracial relations between Korean green grocers and their black customers in several other cities, and progress in homeland democratization and economic development have contributed to the slowing down of Korean immigration in the 1990s (Min, 1990, 1995; Abelmann and Lie, 1995; Kim, 2000).

Asian Indians began to immigrate to the United States in large numbers in 1904. Most of the early immigrants came as farmers and laborers; a small portion came as middle-class students, elites, and political refugees. Although the majority of the population in India was Hindu, two thirds of early Indian immigrants were of the Sikh faith. The economic hardships caused by the British colonial rule as well as the prospect of enhancing the Indian independence movement were two important reasons for their emigration. Asian Indian immigration was banned after the creation by U.S. Congress of a “barred zone” in 1917, whereby natives of China, South and Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Pacific and Southeast Asian Islands were targets for exclusion. Like other Asian groups except the Japanese, the majority of the present-day population arrived after 1965 as highly educated and skilled professionals or relatives of these individuals. They are part of the “brain drain” phenomenon resultant from the global economic structuring in the Pacific Rim region after World War II (Liu and Cheng, 1994; Dirlik, 1996).

Twice colonized, first by the Spanish for 350 years and then by the United States between 1898 and 1946, the Philippines became a major supplier of cheap Asian labor in the early twentieth century. The restrictions on Chinese and Japanese labor migration as well as the economic hardship in the colonized Philippines had sent over 28,000 Filipinos to seek employment on Hawaiian sugar plantations between 1907 and 1919. Because women and children were encouraged to migrate as families after the first years, Filipinos in Hawaii were able to form a stable community beginning in the 1920s. Meanwhile, over 45,000 Filipinos arrived on the West Coast to fill the need for agricultural and domestic labor. They soon formed their own unions to protect themselves from the hostility of the white-controlled labor unions. As U.S. nationals, Filipinos were able to escape immigration exclusion against Asians until the early 1930s, when Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which granted commonwealth status to the Philippines but restricted the immigration of Filipinos to fifty persons a year.⁷ Although early Filipino immigration included a relatively larger number of students, women, and children than other Asian groups, the majority members of the present-day Filipino American community are part of the new Asian immigration that has mushroomed after 1965. Like Asian Indians, most entered with a degree of English proficiency that is not available to other East Asian immigrant groups.

The Vietnamese (and other Southeast Asians) are the only major Asian American group that does not have a long history and significant presence in America prior to 1965. It is also the only major Asian American group that enters en masse as political refugees—one of the three preference categories set in the 1965 act besides persons with desirable occupational skills and close relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. In 1975, following the end of the Vietnam War, about 130,000 displaced persons from South Vietnam, many professionals or social and political elites, resettled in the United States. Between 1979 and 1982, another 450,000 Indo-Chinese refugees of much more modest background arrived as a result of civil wars in Cambodia and Laos, border war between Vietnam and China, and natural disasters. More recent immigrants include the mostly biracial children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers, and relatives of resettled refugees. Although arriving in the post-civil rights era, when racial exclusion and discrimination are outlawed, their entry as political refugees suggests that most members have suffered psychological trauma, economic hardship, family disintegration, and social displacement in far more severe ways than any other Asian groups of recent times. To them, economic survival rather than racial discrimination may be a more immediate concern in the host land. The entire community’s relative recency in immigration may help anticipate their higher overall interest in and concern about homeland issues than other Asians. The overrepresentation of those under eighteen among the population also suggests that youth-related problems may be more of a concern to them than to some of the more established and older Asian American groups.

Who are Asian Americans? Confronting Popular Myths

The six major ethnic groups reviewed above represent 87.5 percent of the Asian population in Census 2000. Their voices and experiences are the focus of this study. The preceding review suggests that the present-day Asian American population cannot be readily understood as a coherent community with a singular set of history, culture, identity, and politics. Instead, it is a community with diverse origins and multiple—and oftentimes contradictory—concerns related to the variable times and modes of entry, pace of socioeconomic mobility and current status, length of personal and family history in the United States, English proficiency, international relations between the homelands in Asia, divisive “divide and conquer” labor practices, and other factors unique to each community (Lien, 2001b:42–82). Yet, regardless of the interethnic differences across Asian Amer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Who Am I? Mapping Ethnic Self-Identities
• Chapter 3: Political Orientations: Beliefs and Attitudes About Government
• Chapter 4: Understanding the Contours, Sources, and Impacts of Political Partisanship
• Chapter 5: Political Participation In Electoral and Nonelectoral Settings
• Chapter 6: Where and When Does Gender Matter?
• Chapter 7: Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix: Question Wording and Coding Scheme of the Pilot National Asian American Political Survey
• Endnotes
• References