By Eric Lai and Dennis Arguelles
The 1990s was a period of unprecedented demographic growth for Asian Pacific America. In 1990, the Census counted just 7.23 million Asians and Pacific Islanders. In 2000, the Census found 12.504 million APAs, including those of mixed-race ancestry. That was an increase of nearly 75 percent, faster than all other groups, including Hispanics.
Not only was there growth, but there was change: APAs moved out of traditional strongholds like Hawai‘i, California and New York, to greener patures like Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, driven out by high costs of living or lured by jobs and better weather. Today, more than one-third of the Vietnamese population lives in the South, as do more than one-fifth of the Indian and Korean American populations.
Groups like the Japanese and Koreans saw population growth slow as new immigration dried up; others, like Asian Indians and Filipinos, saw their populations explode, due to immigration quotas raised during the then-booming economy to import skilled foreign workers.
APAs had the highest median family and household incomes, owned the most expensive homes and were the best-educated among all groups, topping even non-Hispanic whites. At the same time, 2000 Census statistics showed that many APAs remained impoverished, unemployed, and less-educated than the average American. The Census also showed conclusively for the first time that Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders had, on the whole, a much different socioeconomic experience than other APAs, and deserved to be treated differently policy-wise.
Maybe most startling, the hapa population — those APAs of mixed race or mixed ethnicity — was counted at 2.1 million, making them the second-largest APA group, behind only the Chinese. With APA outmarriage continuing to grow, and immigration laws possibly being restricted post-Sept. 11, hapas could very well constitute the largest APA group by the 2010 Census.
These and other findings are published for the very first time in The New Face of Asian Pacific America, co-published by AsianWeek and UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, with the Organization of Chinese Americans and the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development (CAPACD). In these excerpts from The New Face, due out in January, we expand upon what is happening with this highly-diverse population.
Eric Lai (elai@asianweek.com) and Dennis Arguelles (dennisa@ucla.edu) are co-editors of the forthcoming book.
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