| Law | Result |
|---|---|
1908 Root-Takahira Agreement |
“Gentlemen’s Agreement” restricts Japanese |
1917 Immigration Act |
Creation of Asiatic Barred Zone and literacy tests |
1921 Emergency Quota Law |
Quota system favoring northwestern Europeans |
1924 Immigration Act |
Quota system further favoring northwestern Europeans and banning aliens ineligible to citizenship |
Table is abridged and slightly modified. Text is largely the same (see p. 86 of the source material). |
|
Week 11
Asian Immigrants in America
SOCI 231
Lecture I: November 13th
Reminders and Updates
Response Memo Deadline
Your eighth response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM today …
Unless …
… you attend the inaugural Cummings Lecture tonight.
Reminders and Updates
The Cummings Lecture
Title
Place, Polarization, and the Future of America’s Political Divisions
Abstract
Click to Expand or Close
Note: Scroll to read entire abstract.
How does place shape America’s polarized politics? Decades of political-economic transformations have reshaped both the kinds of people and the kinds of places that give their support to the Democratic and Republican Parties, hardening political boundaries along lines of race, class, religion, and context. Working-class, ex-urban, and industrial communities that were once the bedrock of the Democratic Party are now the sites of greatest contestation every election cycle, while the affluent suburbs that once fomented conservative activism in the 1950s and 60s are the sites of greatest growth for the Democratic Party. In this talk, sociologist Stephanie Ternullo (Harvard University) will consider the historical causes and contemporary consequences of these shifts in political geography, and the challenges they present for political representation in American elections, including the November 5th presidential election.
Date and Time
Location
Reminders and Updates
Dr. Stephanie Ternullo will join SOCI 229 at 2:45 PM. Feel free to join us, too.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
Final Paper Proposal Deadline
Your final paper proposals are due by 8:00 PM on Friday, November 22nd.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
Guidelines for the final paper proposal can be found here.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
To submit your final paper proposal, click here.
Racialized Assimilation of
Asian Americans —
Jennifer C. Lee and Samuel Kye
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
First, Some Context from the Pew Research Center
Asian Americans recorded the fastest population growth rate among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States between 2000 and 2019. The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81% during that span, from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million.
(Budiman and Ruiz 2021, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
More Context from the Pew Research Center
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
The story of Asian American assimilation has been
framed in relatively sanguine terms.
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
[M]any scholars have consistently viewed the social standing of Asian Americans with remarkable optimism. Asian Americans have been viewed as the flag bearers of new assimilation theory, achieving trajectories considered most proximate to the assimilation of European groups in the past (Alba and Nee 2003). Additionally, they have been viewed as key beneficiaries of America’s ever-increasing diversity due to the continuing erosion of some racial boundaries during the twenty-first century. Rather than being relegated as racialized minorities, Asian Americans appear to be approaching “near white” status as continued acculturation and contact facilitate successful incorporation into American society.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 254, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
There is some empirical basis to these claims. Consider Asian Americans’—
Relatively low levels of bilingualism—and marked predilections for English—by the second generation.
High levels of educational and occupational attainment.
High rates of intermarriage with white Americans.
Together, these patterns appear to signal the declining significance of race and ethnicity in shaping the life outcomes of Asians in America.
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
Yet, a growing literature “… challenges the idea of Asian American assimilation and increasing parity with whites and continues to emphasize the racialization of Asian Americans as
model minorities and perpetual foreigners.”
(Lee and Kye 2016, 254, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
This research is more critical, contending that the average socioeconomic success of Asian Americans is exaggerated and masks the wide variation in educational and occupational outcomes among different Asian ethnic groups … Moreover, the success stories of select Asian groups are not simply due to individual efforts rewarded by a system free of racial inequality, but are in large part a result of American immigration policies that have targeted highly skilled professionals since the 1960s.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 254–55, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
[T]he persistent image of Asians as a model minority obscures the continuing racial subordination of and discrimination against Asian Americans … Despite Asian Americans’ perceived socioeconomic success, studies in multiple disciplines have provided evidence that the Asian American population … is perceived as not fully American, a category that is often saved for those of European descent … Often as a result of this perpetual foreigner stereotype, Asians, no matter how long they have been in the United States, are perceived as unassimilable and in many cases their loyalty to the United States is questioned.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 255, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Fastest Growing Subpopulation
Preliminary Insights from Okura and Karim
Click Image to Expand
Socioeconomic Attainment
The Role of Nativity
As Sakamoto et al. (2009) convincingly argue, the assessment of Asian Americans’ socioeconomic attainment depends critically on the distinction between immigrant and native-born groups. Findings from this literature consistently show that, for the most part, any significant Asian American disadvantage persists only for foreign-born and foreign-educated workers, ultimately suggesting the achievement of labor market parity for native-born and US-educated Asian Americans.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 256, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Nonminority Minorities?
These findings suggest that Asian Americans pose an exception to the majority/minority paradigm —that is, the perspective that whites, as the dominant group, will have higher SES than minority groups … Indeed, having achieved socioeconomic parity with whites, Asian Americans may perhaps be better understood as a “nonminority minority,” or a minority group whose high levels of achievement and accomplishment in the labor market should be acknowledged as characteristics worthy of further study in their own right.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 256, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Within-Group Dispersion and Inequality
This aggregate statistical portrait masks
significant within-group disparities.
Group Discussion I
SES Cleavages Among Asian Americans
In groups of 2-3, discuss how Lee and Kye (2016) summarize or map socioeconomic heterogeneity among Asian Americans—and how they connect their synthesis to boundary dynamics.
Interracial and Interethnic Relationships Among Asians
Intermarriage and Assimilation
Asian Americans have among the highest rates of interracial marriage in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center’s report on newlyweds in 2010, 28% of Asians in the United States married someone of a different race, compared to 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, and 26% of Hispanics … The high rate of intermarriage among Asians, and particularly between Asians and whites, is seen as a signal of the breakdown or blurring of ethnic boundaries and is interpreted as evidence of the assimilation of Asian Americans. When examining trends in intermarriage rates over time, however, scholars have found that the rate of interracial marriage among Asian Americans has actually decreased in the past decade, particularly among foreign-born Asians.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 257, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Intermarriage and Assimilation
More Recent Data From the Pew Research Center
Intermarriage and Assimilation
A Question
Why do you think Asian intermarriage rates have declined?
Intermarriage and Assimilation
Still, Asian American intermarriage rates
remain comparatively high.
Intermarriage and Assimilation
[T]he evidence provided in most studies of predictors of intermarriage exhibits strong undertones of assimilation into, and parity with, the US mainstream. Asian intermarriage is related to subprocesses of acculturation; English proficiency, years in the United States, and generational status have all been shown to increase intermarriage rates … Assimilation theories also explain differences in intermarriage by ethnic groups, which are highest for long-established Japanese groups … Additionally, studies of individuals’ marital preferences indicate decreasing social distance between Asians and whites.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 257, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Intermarriage and Assimilation
However, as Lee and Kye (2016) explain, “[s]ome scholars suggest that despite high levels of intermarriage, marriage patterns still reflect distinct racial boundaries and a racial hierarchy in which
whites are the dominant group.”
Intermarriage and Assimilation
Lee and Kye (2016) identify five reasons why marriage trends among Asian Americans reflect a racialized and highly contingent assimilation pattern—
Intermarriage rates lag behind those of European immigrants.
Uneven or insignificant associations linking socioeconomic and educational attainment to intermarriage among Asians in America.
Asians who intermarry sometimes evince a devaluation of potential Asian partners—and a valorization of whiteness. Conversely, endogamous relationships among Asians in the U.S. often stem from shared experiences of exclusion.
Intermarriage among U.S. Asians is deeply gendered.
Ethnic intermarrige is increasingly common among Asians in the U.S.
Residential Outcomes
Embeddedness in Integrated Neighbourhoods
[M]ost research indicates that Asians remain the least segregated of the major racial/ethnic groups, with segregation levels remaining stable or slightly increasing since 1980 … In general, researchers have largely explained these trends through the framework of the classic spatial assimilation model, which predicts increased integration and suburbanization for immigrant groups with socioeconomic and acculturation gains.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 259, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Embeddedness in Integrated Neighbourhoods
Accordingly, for these groups, and especially for Asian residents, research has shown a strong connection of the residential outcomes of integration and suburban residency with income, educational attainment, labor market status, and home ownership… Upwardly mobile Asian Americans have also successfully attained residence in suburban neighborhoods with racial compositions that are comparable to those of white middle-class neighborhoods, a pattern that is absent for middle-class black residents … Collectively, the established role of social mobility and continued acculturation of Asian Americans in furthering residential gains has proven to be an example of the classic spatial assimilation model, and of assimilation theory more generally (Alba and Nee 2003).
(Lee and Kye 2016, 259–60, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Embeddedness in Integrated Neighbourhoods
Having successfully leveraged class and status gains into residence in quality suburban neighborhoods—and with Asian immigrants increasingly bypassing urban enclaves altogether—Asian Americans appear to have taken a key step toward entering the US mainstream … Thus, although a limited number of enclaves may persist, Asian Americans ultimately appear poised to complete trajectories of structural assimilation, as residence alongside majority groups creates further opportunities for interaction and familiarity with US culture and society.
(Lee and Kye 2016, 260, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Embeddedness in Integrated Neighbourhoods
Some Caveats
The spatial assimilation of Asians in America may not map onto received wisdom. Lee and Kye (2016) point to a few reasons why—
Diminishing associations between suburbanization and acculturation.
In some instances, an inversion of associations linking socioeconomic status to white integration.
The emergence of Asian ethnoburbs.
Meaningful variation among heterogeneous ethnonational communities classified as “Asian” in the U.S.
Group Exercise I
Politics and Mental Health
Group 1
Discuss the political participation of Asians in America. Does the “SES resource theory” help explain participation rates? Why or why not?
Group 2
Do Asian Americans have “good mental health” on balance? Why or why not? Relatedly, is there a “SES gradient” associated with mental health among Asians in America?
Lecture II: November 18th
Reminders and Updates
Response Memo Deadline
Your ninth response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM on Wednesday.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
Final Paper Proposal Deadline
Your final paper proposals are due by 8:00 PM on Friday, November 22nd.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
Guidelines for the final paper proposal can be found here.
Reminders and Updates
Final Paper Proposal
To submit your final paper proposal, click here.
The Asian American
Assimilation Paradox —
Jennifer C. Lee and Dian Sheng
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
Unlike other groups, including Hispanics, that are growing mainly through natural births, the U.S. Asian population is growing primarily through immigration … China and India have long surpassed Mexico as the leading sources of new immigrants to the United States, and by 2055, Asians will surpass Hispanics as the largest immigrant group in the country … Three in five Asians in the United States are immigrants – a figure that increases to four in five among adults – and nine in ten are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The new face of U.S. immigration is Asian, making the study of Asian Americans essential to theory and research on assimilation.
(Lee and Sheng 2024, 68–69, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
Diversity is a hallmark of the U.S. Asian population … Despite their diversity in origins, Asian Americans are, on average, the most highly educated, the highest earning, and the most likely to intermarry of all U.S. ethnoracial groups. More than one-quarter are interracially married, and among the U.S.-born, the share is nearly double that … And at $101,481, their median household income surpasses that of non-Hispanic Whites ($77,999), Hispanics ($57,981), and Blacks ($48,297) … Based on normative measures, Asians have not only successfully assimilated into the American mainstream, but they are remaking it in the process (Alba and Nee 2003).
(Lee and Sheng 2024, 69, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
These figures would have been unimaginable just a century ago.
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
The socioeconomic attainment of Asian Americans in the twenty-first century is remarkable in light of their racial status in the nineteenth. Once deemed filthy, diseased, sub-human, and unassimilable, Asians were denied the rights of citizenship and endured a series of exclusion laws that choked immigration and the growth of the U.S. Asian population. When the United States finally abolished national origins quotas with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, it opened the door to a new wave of Asian immigrants. By privileging the professionally skilled, the change in U.S. immigration law legally engineered a new stream of highly educated Asian immigrants into the United States, thereby elevating the racial status of Asian Americans from ‘unassimilable to exceptional.’
(Lee and Sheng 2024, 69, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
Once again, we see the explanatory power
of immigrant selectivity.
The New Face of U.S. Immigration
Today, the majority of contemporary Asian immigrants are doubly positively selected, or what Lee and Zhou (2015) describe as hyper-selected: they are not only more likely to be college-educated than their non-migrant counterparts from their countries of origin, but they are also more highly educated than the U.S. mean. Their hyper-selectivity places them and their U.S.-born children at favourable starting points in the quest to get ahead … (That being said), their racial mobility has not shielded them from the surge in anti-Asian violence and hate incidents that has touched one in six adults since the wake of COVID-19.
(Lee and Sheng 2024, 69, EMPHASIS ADDED)
An Assimilation Paradox
“Asian Americans’ racial mobility defies theories of racial disadvantage yet their experiences with xenophobia, racism, and anti-Asian violence vex theories of assimilation — pointing to an assimilation paradox.”
(Lee and Sheng 2024, 70, EMPHASIS ADDED)
An Assimilation Paradox
In demystifying this paradox, Lee and Sheng (2024) point to three key factors that have hampered research on Asian American assimilation —
The ahistorical treatment of immigration from Asia.
The tautology of using educational capital acquired elsewhere to measure structural assimilation in the receiving society.
The reliance on normative indicators to measure assimilation in lieu of individuals’ lived experiences or beliefs about the social world.
Group Exercise II
Legacies of Exclusion
Group 1
Lee and Sheng (2024) use two landmark Supreme Court decisions from the 1920s to illustrate the longue durée of Asian exclusion in America. Describe these cases in some detail. What do they reveal about the Asian American assimilation paradox?
Group 2
Lee and Sheng (2024) also posit that the Page Act set the stage for a series of restrictive policies targeting Asians in America. Explain the origins of this act—and how its proponents linked disease, sexuality, morality and race to institutionalize their exclusionary ideas. Broadly speaking, what does this episode reveal about the Asian American assimilation paradox?
Issues of Measurement and Conceptualization
Hyper-Selectivity and Assimilation
How can we measure—or conceptualize—the structural assimilation of a population that comes armed with exceedingly high levels of educational attainment (on average)?
Hyper-Selectivity and Assimilation
Adaptation of Figure 1 from Tran, Lee and Huang (2019).
Hyper-Selectivity and Assimilation
If we don’t account for selectivity, we run the risk of making tautological arguments. If we do adjust for Asian immigrants’ hyper-selectivity, we run the risk of compromising external validity.
Normative Indicators vs Lived Experiences
To measure assimilation across time and space, analysts often zoom-in on a specific set of socioeconomic or structural variables—from labour market outcomes to intermarriage rates—in lieu of capturing how individuals understand themselves and their place in the world.
Normative Indicators vs Lived Experiences
As the experiences of Asian Americans lay bare, these analytic choices can lead to faulty inferences.
Normative Indicators vs Lived Experiences
Adaptation of Figure 2 from Lee and Sheng (2024).
Normative Indicators vs Lived Experiences
A Question
Do these disjunctures—i.e., between Asian Americans’ social mobility and sustained sociocultural exclusion—pose a problem for neo-assimilationism?
Group Exercise III
Asian Americans and the Whitening Literature
In her article, Kim (2016) systematically critiques the idea that Asian Americans will, in due time, become honourary whites.
Let’s unpack her ideas in groups.
Asian Americans and the Whitening Literature
See You Wednesday
References
Note: Scroll to access the entire bibliography
Alba, Richard D., and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Harvard University Press.
Budiman, Aby, and Neil G. Ruiz. 2021. “Asian Americans Are the Fastest-Growing Racial or Ethnic Group in the U.S.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-the-fastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/.
FitzGerald, David Scott, and David A. Cook-Martín. 2014. Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674369665.
Kim, Nadia Y. 2016. “Critical Thoughts on Asian American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature.” In Contemporary Asian America (Third Edition), edited by Min Zhou and Anthony C. Ocampo, 554–75. A Multidisciplinary Reader. New York: NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18040wj.32.
Lee, Jennifer, and Samuel Kye. 2016. “Racialized Assimilation of Asian Americans.” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (Volume 42, 2016): 253–73. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074310.
Lee, Jennifer, and Dian Sheng. 2024. “The Asian American Assimilation Paradox.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 50 (1): 68–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2023.2183965.
Lee, Jennifer, and Min Zhou. 2015. The Asian American Achievement Paradox. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. http://www.jstor.org.amherst.idm.oclc.org/stable/10.7758/9781610448505.
Sakamoto, Arthur, Kimberly A. Goyette, and ChangHwan Kim. 2009. “Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans.” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (Volume 35, 2009): 255–76. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115958.
Tran, Van C., Jennifer Lee, and Tiffany J. Huang. 2019. “Revisiting the Asian Second-Generation Advantage.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (13): 2248–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1579920.