The flood in recent decades of Asian immigrants to the U.S. was planned by no one, and would likely have been forestalled had a lingeringly racist Congress foreseen it. Indeed, the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a collective failure of colossal magnitude in demographic forecasting. The miscalculations were threefold: the actual volume of immigration far exceeded the projected—and desired—level; most of the immigrants came not from Europe as expected, but from the Third World; and of the Third World entrants a high and rising proportion turned out to be Asians who, at the time of the bill’s enactment, were decidedly the least-wanted immigrants.
Thus, from an aggregate of 153,000 in 1951-60, the volume of immigrants from Asia bounded to 428,000 in 1971-80 and is certain to exceed 2.5 million in 1981-90. (By 1988, the last data available, 2.1 million had already been admitted.) Asia, which had accounted for only 6 percent of all admittees in the 50’s, hit 14 percent in the 60’s, 30 percent in the 70’s, and 46 percent in the late 80’s.
One of the main forces driving those startling numbers was the special provision for refugees after Saigon’s downfall in 1975. For at that point, with Indochina in shambles, all considerations of limits evaporated. Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians by the scores of thousands crowded into makeshift boats, braving stormy seas and murderous pirates and every manner of deprivation for the sanctuaries of Thailand and Malaysia or any other piece of land willing to offer an abode, however temporary. Between 1975 and 1986, more than 900,000 Indochinese arrived in America, nearly six times the annual ceiling imposed by the 1965 statute on the entire Eastern Hemisphere and, of course, not subject to that limitation. By now, the aggregate of extra-quota Asian admissions is approaching the million mark.
The volatile ebbs and flows of refugees aside, the largest sending nation was (as it had previously been) the Philippines, accounting for a bit more than 50,000 per year. Next came Korea with nearly 36,000, then Vietnam, India, and mainland China, each with a margin of over 25,000 per year. Were Hong Kong and Taiwan added to the mainland total, Chinese would rival and probably exceed Filipinos.
This errant immigration policy, however, turned out to be a golden blunder, serendipity writ large. By inadvertence and over uncharted pathways, it brought to the United States millions of new workers, all with an unappeasable hunger for jobs and multitudes with eminently marketable skills, advanced education, and unbounded career ambitions. In short, they carried with them the precise qualities that a myriad of the Great Society’s compensatory and manpower-training programs of the 1960’s tried to instill with, to put it gently, indifferent success.
Consider also urban renewal, another Great Society goal. Here again, one of the more beneficial of the new immigration’s social reshapings has been the restoration of life to the decaying and depopulating neighborhoods, the emptied-out churches, schools, and retail streets in so many of America’s ebbing industrial cities. As with the labor supply, demographic renewal achieved much of what the official urban-renewal programs expressly tried and so often failed to do.
It seems that the Law of Unintended Consequences, so malign in most of its workings, occasionally displays a benign face.
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The contrast with the past could not be more striking or more dramatic. In the post-Civil War decades, anti-Orientalism flamed in the Western states, especially in California and Colorado where large numbers of Chinese had been drawn in to work in the mines, lay down the rail tracks, and perform assorted domestic services, including as the now-lamented laundrymen of the cities and the chuckwagon cooks of the Western range. To the miners and laboring classes of the West, the Chinese were unabsorbable, barbaric heathens. (“A town populated by 1,200 souls and two Chinamen,” is a locution that lingers in the memory from a youthful addiction to Western pulps.) In the popular belief, Orientals were opium fiends, with talons for fingernails, ominously drooping moustaches in front, and weird pigtails in back, and possessed of a revolting appetite for rat meat. Worse yet, Chinese were willing to labor long hours (Sundays and holidays included) for lower wages than any proper Christian could survive on, much less be content with.
The Yellow Peril frenzy in the Western states during the latter half of the 19th century left in its wake a bloody trail of lynchings, arson, and forcible expulsions. Atrocities were recorded in more than twoscore towns and mining camps across California and Washington, and a dozen more in Wyoming, Colorado, and Nevada. The perpetrators were often union members, with the Knights of Labor in the van. The frenzy spilled over from workplace to neighborhood. On October 24, 1871, in Los Angeles, where the 1870 census had enumerated a mere 172 Chinese, an agitated mob attacked the local Chinatown and slaughtered 19 Chinese by shooting and hanging. No violence of such ferocity was experienced by any other American ethnic’or religious immigrant group, not by the Catholics at the height of Know-Nothingism, not by American Jews at any time. Only blacks and, in a different way, American Indians, neither of them immigrants, have suffered comparable outrages.
The denouement of all this anger was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the handiwork of a coalition of Western and Southern legislators. It is purported to be the only anti-immigration law ever enacted in the U.S. that bears, without the pretense of a fig leaf, a named nationality in its title. The Chinese Exclusion Act was followed, in 1907-08, by the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which was, of course, the exact inverse of gentlemanly. It sharply restricted the entry of Japanese, who also had been immigrating to California and the West in rising numbers, attracted to truck farming and gardening rather than to mining and industry.1 Then in 1917, the U.S. enacted a general ban against most of Asia—the Asiatic Barred Zone. The gates were closed even more implacably in 1924 by the Oriental Exclusion Act that exempted only the Philippines, with which the U.S. had a special relation (and even it was virtually walled off during the Great Depression).
In short, over the forty years between 1882 and 1924, Congress unequivocally declared that, henceforth, America was not to be a haven for the yellow race. Wherever else the torch on the Statue of Liberty might beckon, it would not be to the Orient. In part the U.S. justified this avowedly racist immigration policy by means of a 1922 Supreme Court decision declaring that the Constitution afforded naturalization rights solely to whites and to free persons of African origin. The syllogism went: since Asians were unmentioned in the Constitution, they were not entitled to citizenship, and if not entitled to citizenship, they were not entitled to admission.
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Among the earliest to point out that character and culture can overcome the most oppressive racial and religious discrimination was William Petersen, a social demographer at the University of California, Berkeley. His argument and findings were later extended and deepened, most powerfully by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. Drawing a parallel that has since become ubiquitous, Petersen took American Asians and American Jews as examples of two formerly marginalized populations, otherwise profoundly different in race, religion, and historical origins:
The gross discrimination, the collective frustrations, to which Chinese and Japanese have been subjected ordinarily result in a pattern of poor education, low income, high crime rate, and unstable family life, with each of these reinforcing all the other components of a self-sustaining slum. Efforts to assist members of such “problem minorities” in achieving parity with the general population have seldom been altogether successful. However, these two minorities themselves broke through the barriers of prejudice and, by such key indices as education and income, surpassed the average levels of native born whites. This anomalous record, like the earlier one of the Jews, challenges the premises from which the etiologies of poverty, crime, illegitimacy, and other social ills are typically deduced. That discrimination is evil in itself is beyond question by the norms of American democracy; the question is whether even the most debilitating discrimination need incapacitate a people if it is not reinforced by other pressures. In the large field of ethnic and race relations, hardly any theory or social policy would remain unchanged if one applied the new insights that the extraordinary success of Japanese and Chinese immigrants suggests.
Petersen was the first to apply to Asian-Americans the honorific, “model minority.” That was yesteryear’s coinage. By now, Asian-Americans have vaulted to a more exalted station-America’s trophy population. Or, in the deft formulation of the sociologist Peter Rose, the pariahs have become paragons. Rapturous tributes hailing these restorers of the immigrants’ dream are a staple of the national and local media, a new breed, dare I say, of “yellow journalism.”
So extreme is this adulation that Asian-American spokesmen have rushed forward, and rightly so, to cool off or dismiss the hyperbolic excesses. They call solemn attention to the many things not going at all well for America’s newest paragons. Beneath a thick crust of scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs are thicker layers of struggling families—peddlers and waiters and office cleaners and sweater stitchers who eke out a bare living by dint of double jobs and the presence of multiple wage earners. There is a growing number of Southeast Asian refugees who have been on welfare since their arrival and who may permanently remain there. There are ungifted Asian youth (“I’ve got a couple of dummies,” complains a high-school teacher, “who don’t know what a decimal is”).
Then there looms the dark underside of immigration—the small-time Asian extortion gangs and big-time Asian drug rings, among the most brutal and vicious in the rackets. They demonstrate, as did other overreaching immigrant groups before them, that ladders to wealth and status often stand on crooked legs.
It would be foolish and irresponsible to slight the profusion of Asian unsuccesses amid the profusion of successes. All mass migrations are accompanied by hardship and privation, generally worse for the most recent arrivals. For many these are lifetime defeats, and they die as unfulfilled as when they came. All that granted, one should remember that across the centuries, America’s unwritten and unsigned “compact” with its immigrants has been addressed not to the first generation, but to the second and third.
Yet among the Asians, even where the first generation is concerned, the stereotype holds. Again the apt comparison is with the Jews. Multitudes of Jewish doctors and lawyers can be matched with multitudes of Jewish workers whose capacities or even aspirations never rose above the taxi wheel, the lunch counter, or the press iron. Albert Einstein and Vladimir Horowitz were contemporaries of Abe Reles and Meyer Lansky. But neither fact remotely refutes the conclusion that the Jewish immigrant experience in America has been a chronicle of extraordinary progress. So too with the Asians.
The 1980 census portrayed in a welter of numbers just how far the former Asian pariahs had come. According to most socioeconomic indicators—income, labor-force participation, education, occupational status, family stability and structure—Asian-Americans were now the equals of, or had surpassed, mainstream America.
Thus, the 1980 tabulations disclosed that median family income of Asian-Americans exceeded that of their host country, $23,000 compared to $19,000. For Japanese-Americans, a majority of whom were native-born and assimilated, the median was half again above the norm, $27,000. Asian Indians, who had entered with every manner of credential including English proficiency, reported an average of $25,000, second only to the long-resident Japanese. For Chinese-Americans and Koreans, the bulk foreign-born, and most of them recent newcomers, the respective figures were $22,600 and $20,500. Only Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, most of them refugees in desperate flight, stood below the national average; by 1986, a new survey would show that even they had overtaken it.
Much the same story was told about occupational status. In 1980, 24 out of every 100 U.S. whites were in the census’s highest job classification—professionals, managers, and executives. In that class, by contrast, were 47 percent of the new Asian Indians, 30 percent of the Chinese, 28 percent of the Japanese, and 22 percent of the Koreans. And even though it is the common plight of émigrés, lacking language and licenses, to descend the job ladder (many a Korean greengrocer was a trained engineer at home and many a Chinese doctor first does duty as a laboratory assistant), those percentages reflect occupations held after arrival, not at the time of departure.
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The achievements of both Jews and Asians are largely the consequence of a common ensemble of cultural values, sufficiently well known to be ingrained in the common parlance. They include an unswerving devotion to family, extended as well as nuclear; the high premiums paid and sacrifices endured for educational advance; the disproportionately low rates of crime and welfare dependency; a well-developed propensity, through thrift and self-denial, toward capital accumulation—that is, the willingness to defer present gratification for future goals; a strong bent toward self-employment that seems to wane among the assimilated generations.
Extending the list are further commonalities. More so than other immigrant groups, both minorities have sought early Americanization, to acquire as rapidly as possible some proficiency in English and legal citizenship. For example, of all immigrants admitted during the decade of the 70’s, 55 percent of the Koreans, 60 percent of the Chinese, and 71 percent of the Indians were naturalized by 1988. (By contrast, for Mexicans, Dominicans, and Cubans, the respective proportions were 12, 21, and 26 percent.) In addition, Asians are quicker to naturalize, with a median post-admission interval of only seven years (compared to twelve years for Mexicans and nine years for South Americans). Traditionally, Asian and Jewish immigrants have also resorted to after-school, private facilities, not the mandated public-school curriculum, to preserve for their children indigenous language and culture. (For the Jews, of course, there was no other option.)
So much for the conventional list of features shared by Asians and Jews. But there are also several important commonalities that seldom appear on this list. The first is that both East European Jews and Asians have flourished far better after emigrating than they did in their smothering countries of origin. The submerged capacities of a striving people rise soonest, and perhaps only, where there is a sufficient dose of economic and political freedom, where governance by caste and command are least, where rewards are distributed by merit and performance instead of ascription and birth. Thus, the Chinese diaspora fared demonstrably better in (pre-1975) South Vietnam and Indonesia than on the Communist Chinese mainland, still better in the benign autocracies of Taiwan and Singapore, exuberantly in economically unbridled Hong Kong, and best of all within the free and stable polities of the United States and Canada.
A second generally overlooked commonality is that the Western diasporas of both Asians and Jews have opened pathways to self-fullfillment for their women, to heights improbable in their lands of origin. Asia’s cultural traditions are bound up with sons, not daughters, for whom marriage and children are often deemed the summum bonum and overeducation a handicap. “My father (an immigrant Chinese laundryman) did not want me to go to college,” writes Dr. Betty Lee Sung, a leading Chinese-American ethnographer. “He said if you go, I will disinherit you. I said, goodbye papa.” America’s unparalleled infrastructure of community colleges, senior colleges, and universities has proffered a cornucopia of higher educational opportunities to aspiring Asian women, almost as an entitlement. Through the portals where passed the daughters of Russian and Polish Jews, to emerge as teachers and social workers and, in the next generation, as doctors, lawyers, and university professors, are passing today in even greater numbers the daughters of the new Asians.
A third transcending experience shared by new Asian and older Jewish migrations to America is a speedy ascent—speedy by history’s time scale—from pariah to paragon status. Both have risen in the general esteem from among the most rejected to among the most respected (though not necessarily beloved) people in the Western world. To be sure, each day’s news reports disclose that hard-core anti-Semites still abound, as do hardcore Asiaphobes. They exist even in places where there are neither Asians nor Jews. But neither phobia is as consequential as before.
The proof of that proposition is not only in the “soft” evidence of enhanced ethnic tolerance registered in public-opinion polls. It is also, and more convincingly, to be found in the harder evidence of mainstream behavior. The American people have afforded both minorities virtually unimpeded access to most neighborhoods, to most corporate boardrooms, and to the ranks of the establishment. To the despair of their elders, both minorities have stepped up the pace of assimilation through intermarriage. The out-marriage rates of second- and third-generation Jews and Asians are exceptionally high and rising.
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In addition to a great willingness to I work, another advantage of the Asian Americans was a good education, beyond that of the U.S. nation as a whole, or other immigrant groups, past or present. Unlike the Jews from the shtetl who came with only a smattering of secular education and their womenfolk with less, Asians brought their diplomas with them. In 1980 (when the majority of Asians had been here less than 10 years), 75 percent reported themselves as high-school graduates, compared to 66 percent for all America. Still more impressive were their credentials in higher education, a rarely satisfied ache for the first generation of Jewish arrivals (and even for a majority of their children). Proportionately, Asian-Americans, native-born and new, possessed twice as many college or advanced degrees as did other Americans, 34 percent compared to 16.
Once here, Asians have performed admirably on all the conventional standardized intelligence and scholastic tests, both undergraduate and graduate, and especially on the numeracy components. In 1989, the average SAT score in mathematics was 525 for Asians compared to 491 for whites and 386 for blacks. Asians, however, did less well than whites on the verbal part, though the differential is almost surely transitory, reflecting the uncertain language footing of the foreign-born. (How quickly this handicap can be overcome is illustrated by a twelve-year-old Cambodian refugee girl who placed second in a regional spelling bee; the word she misspelled was “enchilada.”)
One may be confident of a spreading out from the professions of quantity and space to those of the word. For Asians are now the fastest growing minority in America’s top law schools, and they are likewise making a strong entry into American letters. The roster of acclaimed books in English by assimilated Asian authors continuously lengthens. Among the more prominent are Maxine Hong Kingston, Ved Mehta, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan, and Wendy Wang. These are all serious writers. We will have to wait longer for the comic, some Asian-American S.J. Perelman, or Woody Allen, some Leo Rosten to recount Mr. Parkhill’s travails with the Education of Yuan-Ho Chen and to charm us with the Joys of Mandaringlish.
The meritocratic qualifications of Asian-Americans have thrown into a dither the custodians of affirmative-action programs in higher education. As a federally protected minority, Asian-Americans are, in principle, eligible for special preferences to compensate for underrepresentation. But how should a university respond to an “overrepresented” minority? What compounds academia’s dilemma is that the test of over- or underrepresentation is linked to a given minority’s proportion of the population, not its proportion of the qualified pool.2
Academia’s answer, a blend of defiance, duplicity, and sheepishness, is an array of statistical “controls” (as Henry Rosovsky of Harvard still calls them, carefully eschewing the term “quotas”). Such retreats from merit standards obviously evoke the Jewish quotas at elite schools in the past. Those three-name university presidents of yore shrank from the thought of uncompromised merit admissions; it would inundate their institutions with the coarse, sweaty progeny of Hebrew immigrants, uncouth in diction and pushy in manner. Surely, runs the refrain of today’s deans, were grades our only criteria, we would take more Asians. But we must find room for the well-rounded as well as the studious, for athletes, hobbyists, and community-service stalwarts. Nor can we honorably ignore the children of alumni and donors. Asians rarely fit into such non-scholastic categories, categories irrelevant to educational excellence, presumably the raison d’être of a world-class university.
Yet so overpowering are Asian-Americans’ educational qualifications, and so mounting their volume of protest, that “controls,” ceilings, and quotas act more to retard than to contain their surge into higher education. At Berkeley (which now has an Asian-American provost), the proportion of Asian-heritage admissions has crossed the 33-percent mark. Since the best universities have more or less fixed capacity, rising Asian enrollments must be at the expense of someone else. Interestingly enough, the losers at Berkeley have not been blacks and Hispanics but whites, whose proportion has steadily diminished.3
Not surprisingly, given the academic proclivities of Asian-Americans among the professions, there is a heavy concentration in the scientific and technological disciplines. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, statistics, computer technology, and engineering are the predominant areas of preference. When Asian-Americans stray from the strictly technological specialties, they end up in such disciplines as economics and business administration, both of which are freighted with heavy overlays of mathematics and statistics; and both of which offer impressive rewards to designers and operators of sophisticated computerized models.4
An interesting departure from the number-space concentration is classical music. At the Juilliard School of Music, Asians approximate a third of the enrollment. Increasing numbers of gifted young Asians are also earning reputations in the best concert halls, particularly at the piano and violin, instruments not so long ago virtually a Jewish monopoly. (Classical music, it has been observed, is the popular avocation of scientists and engineers, as Einstein and the amateur quartets at White Sands attest.)
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If the universities and the professions are one route to Asian-American economic success, a second is small business. The self-employment rate of Asian immigrants is an astonishing 33 percent, compared to a 10-percent rate for the general population. In the New York metropolitan area, 41 percent of Korean families operated their own businesses, more than 10,000 in all. In Los Angeles, Koreans, who in 1982 accounted for less than 1 percent of the population, owned 5 percent of all retail stores.
What accounts for the Asian proclivity for a business of one’s own? Social scientists are split between competing theories. One cluster holds that trade is an instinct in the Orient and that self-enterprise manifests a Confucian tenet that it is better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox. A more persuasive view denies “innateness” and cultural heritage and posits an “opportunity” theory. In this latter view, the post-1965 waves of Asian immigrants found an abundance of small-business opportunities in a fast-declining urban America. That was particularly so in the desolate streets of deteriorating neighborhoods, with any number of retail hollows and voids to fill.
The first Korean retail merchants on the blocks of Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Newark, Watts, and similarly depleted black neighborhoods were attracted by the low rents of abandoned stores. Their first wares were not fruit and vegetables, but natural, inexpensive ladies’ wigs, then an item of fashion. From a still pre-industrialized Korea came a steady flow of wigs manufactured from long and pliant Asian hair (supplementary income for poor Korean females) that were particularly favored by black women. The first wave of Korean immigrants peddled the wigs from street stands or door-to-door before accumulating sufficient means to rent a store. The wig industry did not long thrive, however, displaced by cheaper artificial hairpieces.
The Koreans then turned to greengroceries, observing in these unpromising streets promising openings to serve, without excessive up-front investment, an underserved economic market. The small fruit and vegetable shop was the ideal venture for an industrious immigrant with little language or trade credit, a cash business for merchandise replaceable each day in small lots by a predawn trip to the wholesale market. Not much was required in the way of books, since there were usually no employees other than family and compatriots; government reports (and taxes) were minimal. With all hands—wife, children, and the newly landed from Seoul—working from dawn until far into the late night, it was possible to earn a modest profit and even to put something away for a larger venture.
In those slum areas, the Korean merchants also earned something much less pleasing—the hostility of many neighborhood blacks. The recent front-page conflict between blacks and Koreans on Brooklyn’s Church Avenue is merely the latest of a long series of boycotts experienced in Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Blacks angrily protest the Koreans’ failure to employ local help or to take up neighborhood residence. The Koreans are accused further of draining money from the neighborhood without putting anything back, and of treating every black customer as a prospective shoplifter or robber. The Koreans, nothing daunted, reply that they have little need for outside help and that theft and break-ins are so commonplace that defensive behavior is essential. Some believe that black rage is prompted less by Korean offenses than by overt resentment that a pack of immigrants have so quickly and so successfully exploited opportunities that with greater effort and foresight might have gone to blacks. All it takes are the eighteen-hour day and the seven-day week.
Along with retailing, Asian entrepreneurs have captured the garment industry; it is no longer the Jewish but the Asian manufacturer who reigns over the sewing machine. New York’s faltering and California’s burgeoning garment factories represented a splendid opportunity for incoming Chinese and Koreans. Several factors converged to enhance that opportunity. First, as with its vanishing neighborhood retail sector, America’s vanishing ladies-garment industry left a plenitude of market niches for hard-charging, nonfastidious entrepreneurs able to produce goods at competitive costs. Second was the massive transfer of garment manufacture from the U.S. to Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and mainland China. This created an Asian business class conversant with American markets—high fashion included—and with its production and distribution systems. It was no great leap for an emigrating Korean or Chinese factory owner or manager to become a subcontractor in Los Angeles or on New York’s Canal Street.
The third factor was cheap labor and cheap space. Long hours, and a certain indifference to the finer nuances of industrial regulations, were the key to profits no longer possible on New York’s Seventh Avenue. Cheap space was found in the cubbyholes of the antique lofts and hulks of Chinatown and the Lower East Side; there are now more than 500 garment factories there. The industry soon spilled over the bridge into Brooklyn’s old neighborhoods, hitherto unclaimed by the garment sector.
The cheap labor was drawn from a steady flow of Chinese female immigrants—the so-called FOB’s (fresh-off-the-boat)—who began to arrive in great numbers after 1965. Women and girls traded their two-dollar-a-day jobs at the sewing machines of Shanghai and Canton for the five dollars or more an hour in the small factories of Los Angeles and New York.
Together with their Latino immigrant counterparts, Asians now form the backbone of what is left of the U.S. needle trades. To the despair of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the FOB’s are paid by the piece and work under “sweatshop” conditions, though these represent a considerable advance over the places whence they came. At any rate, the FOB’s are a sufficiently productive labor force to preserve the lingering viability of what had once been New York’s premier industry. To a greater degree than was true for the Jewish immigrant females of the 1900’s, these are way-station jobs. The younger women, after acquiring proficiency in English and some savings, frequently move on to college or higher employment.
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As it has been in most times and places, immigrant small business is co-ethnic. But seldom does co-ethnicity manifest itself in such distilled form as with Asians.
The most prominent example of ethnic capitalpooling is the Korean kye, sometimes spelled keh. These are local rotating-credit associations into which members contribute a fixed sum at fixed intervals and from which the contributors can withdraw stated sums to’ start or expand a small enterprise. In Los Angeles, a 1980 study of recent Korean immigrants observed that 80 percent were participants in kyes, and similar studies elsewhere show that a substantial proportion of the membership use the withdrawals only to supplement personal savings as the equity base for bank or trade credit.
More generally, the significant economic bootstraps are the helping hands of extended family and landsleit from homeland village or community. Each Asian business serves as nurturing ground and credit source for the next round of small businessmen.
The Asian-American business proliferates externally as it expands internally. The process is nicely exemplified by another Asian business specialty—motels. Outside of the larger cities, Indians and Pakistanis are progressively transforming the smaller, family-managed hotels and motels into an ethnic “franchise” as ubiquitous as the Korean greengrocery. Writes Thomas Muller, a leading observer of the new immigration:
A common pattern is for the men to work in industry, using their earnings to purchase motels to be operated by their wives and extended families. . . . By 1982 Indians owned over 3,100 hotels and motels across the land, 10 percent of all such establishments in the nation. These entrepreneurs found an economic niche in small motels that, under their previous ownership, could not withstand the competition from chains. Many native-born owners were simply not willing to devote the long hours and hard work necessary to remain in business; most, in fact, were thrilled to find someone willing to take the motels off their hands. Motels are considered good investments by Indians because the entire family can be utilized to run these establishments.
The rescue of faltering motels on the outskirts of Fresno and Sacramento and the resurrection of faltering food shops in the inner cores of Brooklyn and Baltimore are all of the same piece. Both reflect an often neglected economic truth: the basket of economic opportunity has no fixed limit; it is a variable, not a constant. Immigrants may or may not be keener than indigenous urban dwellers in discerning self-employment ventures. But their forte is radically to transform the economist’s “production function,” the equation that specifies the bundle of inputs required to obtain a dollar of output. Into that bundle goes a prodigious quantity of hard work by every family member, with all reconciled to the deferral of rewards.
As the new immigrants revivified the retail and other small-business sectors, they simultaneously revived the decaying areas around their enterprises. Like San Francisco’s, New York’s Chinatown has exploded; were it a separate city, it would count as one of the fastest growing in America. Chinatown now extends from the Manhattan Bridge to north of Houston Street and from Allen Street to west of Broadway. It pulsates with a loud heartbeat, a mass of people in motion not seen for a half-century or more. Los Angeles’s Koreatown and Monterey Park, the Bay Area’s Oakland, Queens’s Flushing (New York’s second Chinatown), and Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue (New York’s third) have this in common: they all represent the comeback of fallen areas, ranging from the already bleak to the irretrievably moribund. St. George’s Church in Flushing, whose congregation had been reduced to 120, now has 400; most of the newcomers are Asian-Americans. In proportion to their enrollment in schools, they tend to raise test scores and college-placement rates and lower dropout rates.
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If a flocking instinct is the first principle of ethno-geography, dispersion is the second. As immigrants assimilate and ascend the income ladder, sooner or later they leave their ghettos to form ethnic satellites in more affluent and heterogeneous surroundings. Provided racial and religious discrimination are no bars, the third geo-ethnic stage is interspersion, immersion into mainstream neighborhoods with a consequent loss of visibility. But unless immigration is permanently cut off, neither the root enclaves nor the satellites ever disappear; they become, as do the bicoastal Chinatowns and Brooklyn’s Polish Greenpoint, the initial staging areas for the newly arrived.
In Asia-America’s progression from pariah to paragon, no change has been more dramatic than the subsidence of racial housing barriers and involuntary segregation. Common observation attests, and studies by Michael White of the Urban Institute confirm, that America’s Asians are considerably more dispersed than its other minorities. The longer the period of residence, the higher is the dispersion index. To be sure, Asia-America is rife with root enclaves, the little Saigons, little Taipeis, Koreatowns, and Chinatowns that stud California and New York. But the velocity of interregional and intrametropolitan dispersal is remarkable. And even within metropolitan concentrations, there is a continuous dispersion to the outer ring of central cities and then to the suburbs.
One reason for the rapid interregional spread is deliberate national policy: the rules governing refugee admissions require dispersion programs lest undue burdens be imposed on the gateway cities. Another is the Asian-American tropism toward higher education. It assures that every university center, even in the smallest urban areas, will have a complement of Asians, the nucleus for further growth. A third centrifugal factor is the Asians’ indefatigable search for fresh opportunities away from saturated Asian enclaves where rents and start-up costs soon soar.
More intriguing than interregional movement is an accelerating intrametropolitan spread from the sheltered enclaves and multiplying satellites to what would have been, a generation ago, hostile environments. Asian-Americans are shunned by few, if any, neighborhoods and, in turn, shun few neighborhoods. The affluent find no resistance in the expensive suburbs surrounding New York City or San Francisco, Seattle, and the District of Columbia. The less affluent go to places regarded as distinctly unchic, including the Bronx and Jersey City. Middle-income Asians have not encountered in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and other Euro-ethnic bastions the hostility that greets blacks. Westchester’s poshest precincts have become a haven for better-off Asians, including golfmad Japanese sojourners on U.S. assignment. Many of the gilded ghettos of Great Neck that since their founding were without more than token numbers of black families (and many villages not even that), now count Asians by the dozens, and each year brings a new group of entrants. New York’s commuter railroads are not yet as Asian as is Queens’s Number 7 subway line (the “Orient Express”). But in time they will be, more conspicuously on the 9:30 and 10:30 P.M. trains than on the 5:30.
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There can be no question, then, that the massive transplant of human beings and human capital from Asia to America has enriched the nation as have few past migrations, and none as quickly or from so humble a beginning.
But a question does arise about this new immigration: if those who now number 7 million are so applauded, what will be the resonance when that number reaches 10 million and eventually 20 million or more? And it almost surely will. For the current migration from Asia is likely to be indefinitely prolonged: after years of ferocious infighting by equally opposed forces, Congress has small appetite to renew the battle by attempting a major revamping of the basic formulas now governing immigration policy and under which Asians have fared so well.
To peer at an America with double or triple its present Asian-ancestry population is to mingle speculation with extrapolation, especially in the area of electoral politics. Consumed by the quest to make their way in business and education and to raise up their extended families, the new Asians have yet to stretch and deepen the regional political base that thrust Asians (mainly Japanese) of an older migration into Congress and the national arena-Hayakawa, Matsunaga, Inouye, Mineta, and others. There is just one Asian member in the Los Angeles City Council and one high-level official in Sacramento; New York City and State have none at all. Nor have Asian-Americans been animated by the galvanic issues that swept America’s Jews to the forefront of national politics—FDR and the Great Depression, Hitler and the Holocaust, civil rights and Israel.
Asian-American political reticence may come to an end with further naturalization and a new acculturated generation. One feature that is destined to change is the nation’s political calculus as California becomes even more of a powerhouse in the Congress and the Electoral College and Asian-Americans become more of a powerhouse in California. Some politically mobilizing issues may also emerge. An outbreak of “yellow-phobia” would be one, and congressional tampering with the family-reunification priorities would be another. More powerful still would be violent internal strife and oppression in South Korea or the Chinese Republic. (Recall the stirrings in our Chinatowns during the Mao-Chiang Kai-Shek civil war.)
Another intriguing question: were Asian-Americans to politicize, where on the political spectrum would they land? The best evidence to date suggests that they are likely to support conservative rather than liberal causes. To be sure, five of the six Asian-ancestry delegates to the House and Senate are Democrats (though no flaming liberals). But both Reagan and Bush did quite well among the newer Asian concentrations, and survey polls indicate that with respect to a series of telltales such as capital punishment, defense expenditures, and affirmative action, the tilt is to the conservative. Thomas Muller points out, too, that considering from where most immigrants escaped, they tend to be generally anti-Communist. Though none are as fiercely so as Cuban and Soviet émigrés, there is little doubt where the preponderance of Asian-Americans stand.
Napoleon once said of China that it would be wise to let that sleeping giant slumber. He warned against the awakening of an exotic nation with an antheap population. He feared its capacity to raise armies in the millions and, reckless of their lives, to alter the world’s balance of power. We now know that submerged in those human “antheaps”—not just in China but in other Asian countries as well-were human individuals, endowed with a high order of ability who required only the air of political and economic freedom to bring it to the fore.
A blessing for them, and a blessing for America.
1 It was from this migration that the Japanese were forced into the post-Pearl Harbor concentration camps, an episode that continues to resonate.
2 Judging from a string of recent decisions re employment and minority “set-aside” regulations, the Supreme Court seems to be veering to a “qualified pool” test. It will be interesting to observe, long after Bakke, whether the Court will revisit higher-education discrimination cases and apply its emerging standard.
3 Not all of the white drop is due to reverse discrimination. The relative size of California's “Anglo” population, as whites are commonly denoted, is steadily shrinking. That is so even after allowing for the honorary Anglo status conferred upon the likes of Armenians, Iranians, Soviet- and American-born Jews, and other ethnicities far removed from British origins. So heavy is the flow into California of non-Anglos-Asians and Hispanics-and so high their fertility, that Anglos are projected to become a minority fifty years from now.
4 No one has satisfactorily explained the Asian aptitude for science, mathematics, engineering, and cognate subjects. There is nothing inherent in Asian culture or history or in the precepts of the principal Asian religions that would have led one to deduce so striking a specialization. On the contrary, the moralistic, contemplative, and mystical elements of Confucianism, Buddhism, and other Asian religions might have bent them, one could speculate, rather, to philosophy and the humanities. But neither, I suppose, could one have predicted that from those shusters and shneiders huddled long days around the sacred writs, wrestling with textual subtleties and unworldly constructs, would spring so many of the superstars of science and mathemetics. The capacities of goal-driven people, when released in permissive societies, have no preconceived limits.
