Asian Americans

The US Census Bureau defines Asian American as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.” According to Pew Research in 2023, Asian Americans were the fastest growing major racial or ethnic group in the United States and comprised 7 percent of the nation's population in 2021. By 2023, more than 23 million Asian Americans, with roots in over twenty countries, were living in the US. In 2025, the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley reported that there were 1.7 million Asian undocumented immigrants in the US in 2022.

Observers note that Census Bureau statistics rely on self reporting and respondents have had the option to identify as more than one race since 2000. Thus, the actual number of Asian Americans may be higher than reported, depending on how mixed-race individuals choose to identify. An Arizona State University research project conducted by the institution’s School of Evolution and Social Change notes that people of Asian ancestry enter mixed-race marriages at the highest rate of any ethnic minority in the United States.

Background

People of Asian origin began to immigrate to the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century. Historians often cite a young Japanese man named Manjiro, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1843, as the first documented Asian immigrant in US history. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, Chinese migrants were arriving in the United States by the thousands. Many settled in California, which was in the throes of its fabled gold rush at the time.

The United States began to recruit large numbers of single, able-bodied males from southern China as the 1850s progressed. They filled roles as contract laborers and played a key role in the construction of the US railroad system. By 1870, Chinese immigrants accounted for approximately one-fifth of California’s entire labor pool. However, in 1876, an economic downturn plunged the US into recession, and California’s Chinese immigrants became the targets of racist, xenophobic, and violent attacks as members of the European American population accused them of stealing jobs from natural-born citizens. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, placing severe restrictions on Chinese immigration by declaring individuals of Chinese origin ineligible for legal long-term or permanent entry to the United States.

The Chinese Exclusion Act resulted in large numbers of laborers arriving from Asian countries not covered by the legislation’s scope. Japanese migrants led this new wave of Asian immigration. They were joined by smaller numbers of Koreans and East Indians. As with earlier immigrants from China, the newly arrived settlers mostly clustered along the coast of California. They primarily filled low-paid labor roles left vacant by Chinese workers, mainly toiling in railroad construction, agriculture, and fishing. Predictably, an anti-Japanese exclusion movement soon followed, promoted in large part by legal, social, and organized labor interest groups. In 1905, the Asiatic Exclusion League was founded in San Francisco, which had emerged as an important asset in the expansion of US influence in the Asia–Pacific region. The city became a flashpoint for flaring anti-Asian tensions during the early decades of the twentieth century. However, the situation was temporarily defused in 1907, when Japan and the United States entered into an informal agreement to restrict migration between the two countries and the number of incoming Asian migrants slowed to a trickle.

Many immigrants of South Asian origin established a presence in the United States via Canada, which recruited thousands of Sikh laborers from the Punjab region of India to help construct the Canadian Pacific Railway. Some of these workers migrated from Canada into the US Pacific Northwest and California, where they mainly took jobs as farm laborers. Another racial panic ensued, prompting the US Congress to add India to the countries covered by the “Asiatic barred zone” defined by the Immigration Act of 1917. The legislation restricted people from expanded regions of Asia from legally immigrating to the United States and established a punitive tax on the few who managed to enter the country.

Filipino immigrants became the last Asian ethnic group exempted from the enhanced constraints established by the Immigration Act of 1917. Young Filipino males took the opportunity to relocate to the West Coast of the United States in large numbers during the 1920s, where they soon met the same xenophobic and exclusionary sentiments previously experienced by Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian laborers. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which set forth a process for the Philippines to shed its status as a US colony to become an independent country, also introduced severe limits on Filipino immigration.

Following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by Japanese forces, Japanese Americans came to be viewed as a threat to American national security. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that resulted in the forced relocation of an estimated 112,000 US residents and citizens of Japanese origin to government assembly centers, which in reality were internment camps. Approximately 70,000 of the targeted individuals were natural-born US citizens. Most remained in these primitive camps until the end of World War II, even as thousands of Japanese Americans served in the US military, including in the highly decorated Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment. Despite the injustice of the internment camps, and the clear loyalty of Japanese Americans to the United States, it was not until decades later that the US government admitted its mistake. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and offered reparation payments of $20,000 to individuals directly affected by the internment policy.

In 1943, the US government repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and replaced it with an immigration quota limiting the eligibility of Chinese nationals to just 105 residence visas per year. The United States would not make further moves to liberalize its immigration policies until the 1960s, when the broader civil rights movement began campaigning against these discriminatory practices. In 1965, in a new immigration act, federal officials removed existing immigration bans targeting specific countries and set an annual immigration quota of 20,000 people per country. After these changes, Asian migrants began to arrive in the United States in large numbers.

The 1960s and 1970s also experienced severe violence and widespread unrest in multiple regions of Southeast Asia, led by US involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–1975). During this era, refugees from countries of origin including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos began a new wave of Asian immigration to the United States. Immigrants from the Indian subcontinent followed in large numbers during a migration wave beginning around 1980. Since that time, Asian Americans have become increasingly integrated into US society. They live throughout the United States, but have mainly grouped in major cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Houston.

Asian Americans Today

Nineteen specific ethnicities account for an overwhelming majority of Asian Americans, according to Pew Research Center. These are Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong, Thai, Laotian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Nepalese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Bhutanese, and Mongolian. Notably, the US Census Bureau definition excludes people of Middle Eastern racial or ethnic descent, even though the Middle East region technically lies within Western Asia. Instead, the Census Bureau groups Middle Easterners in with White Americans.

The Census Bureau first created a category for people of Asian descent in 1870, when the ethnicity “Chinese” debuted on the survey form. Twenty years later, the Census Bureau added “Japanese” as a distinct ethnicity before expanding it to add “Other [Asian]” in 1910. From 1920 to 1960, the “Other” classification was separated into three new groupings: “Filipino,” “Korean,” and “Hindu,” with the latter intended to cover all people with ethnic origins in the Indian subcontinent irrespective of their actual religious affiliation. Later versions of the Census form featured the collective “Asian and Pacific Islander” classification, which included subcategories for “Asian Americans” and “Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders.”

The Census Bureau formally separated “Asian American” and “Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islander” subcategories into their own separate categories for the 2000 census, defining Asian Americans according to the parameters still used in 2020 and including subcategories for “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “Filipino,” “Korean,” “Asian Indian,” “Vietnamese,” and “Other Asian.” The definition of “Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders” exclusively accounts for people whose ethnic origins lie primarily within the geographic region of Oceania, which is usually assigned to Australia (Australasia) when discussing the globe’s seven continents.

These complexities and technicalities appear to impact broader, generalized perceptions of the Asian American identity, especially regarding ethnicities originating in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The National Asian American Survey of 2016 reported that 45 percent of White respondents said a person of Pakistani ethnic background was “not likely to be” Asian, while 42 percent said the same about people from India. Similar trends carried over to responses from people who identified as Asian American: 27 percent said Pakistanis were “not likely to be” Asian or Asian American, and fifteen percent said the same about East Indians.

Pew Research Center data published in 2023 reveals a dynamic, diverse contemporary population of Asian Americans. More than 23 million people who identified as Asian American were living in the United States. Of these, 79 percent belonged to the six main origin groups, which include Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese. The other groups that combine to comprise almost the entirety of the remaining 15 percent include Pakistani, Cambodian, Hmong, Thai, and Laotian. Bangladeshi, Burmese, Nepalese, Indonesian, Sri Lankans, Malaysian, Bhutanese, and Mongolian origin groups together comprise less than 1 percent of the total Asian American population.

Pew also reported in 2023 that of all US residents with Asian origins, 54 percent surveyed in 2021 were born outside the United States. Thirty-four percent of Asian Americans surveyed in 2022 were US-born children of immigrant parents, while another 14 percent are third generation or higher.

Reporting on educational attainment among Asian Americans shows wide disparities. Over half of ethnic Asians older than twenty-five living in the United States in 2021 had at least a bachelor’s degree (54%), with Indian Americans posting the highest rate (75%). By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of Bhutanese, Cambodian, and Laotian Americans held a four-year degree or higher. This gap is partially explained by the characteristics of incoming migrant populations: many Indian immigrants had already completed their higher education when they arrived in the United States. Since 2001, approximately half of all H-1B visas, which require at least a bachelor’s degree, have been issued to citizens of India.

Income levels show similar variation. Overall, Asian Americans had mean household incomes of $85,800 in 2021, significantly exceeding the nationwide average of $61,800. Indian, Filipino, Sri Lankan, and Japanese Americans all typically earned more than the average for all Asian Americans, but Nepalese and Burmese Americans had lower-than-average household incomes of $55,000 and $44,400, respectively.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 global pandemic worsened, multiple news outlets reported sharp increases in anti-Asian discrimination, racism, and hate crimes. In February 2020, The Hill reported that the frequency of such incidents had reached 100 per day, prompting lawmakers to denounce the trend and call for racist action to stop it. This spike in hate crimes also renewed conversations about the long history of anti-Asian racism in the US, and energized efforts to fight against racism, stereotyping, and discrimination against Asian Americans.

More positively, the 2020 presidential election cycle marked multiple noteworthy firsts for Asian American political representation. Two Democrats who vied for their party’s presidential nomination during the primary process claimed Asian heritage: entrepreneur Andrew Yang has Taiwanese origins, and multiracial California senator Kamala Harris is of East Indian and Jamaican ancestry. Harris was subsequently chosen as the running mate of eventual nominee Joe Biden, and she became the first Asian American vice-president in US history when Joe Biden won the presidency in November 2020. Yang ran in New York City's 2021 Democratic mayoral primary and came in fourth place. He left the Democratic Party in October 2021 and founded the Forward Party.

In July 2021, Illinois became the first state in the US to require teaching Asian American history as part of their public school curriculum. The Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History Act (TEAACH) was proposed by the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago, cosponsored by State Representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz and State Senator Ram Villavalam, and passed with a vote of 108 to 10 in the Illinois House. Advocates of the new law noted that Asian American history curricula vary from state to state and district to district across the US and are often limited in scope, focusing on events such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the US internment of Japanese Americans during World War II but not including the significant contributions Asian Americans made to the labor and civil rights movements in the mid-twentieth century, for example. They also found that US history textbooks are also often limited in perspective, presenting the US government as a savior to Asian immigrants rather without also mentioning that the US was an imperialist power that sought Asian wealth and resources through war and other violent means. The new law aims to increase coverage of the diversity of Asian Americans and their contributions to and experiences in the US. Illinois passed TEAACH as the nation debated whether and how the role of racism in US history should be taught in its public schools.

In the 2020s, immigration through the southern border of the United States was a contentious political issue. Much of the focus was on immigrants from Central America. A phenomenon that received a relatively small amount of notice was that significant numbers of Chinese were part of this group of immigrants. In 2023, approximately 37,000 Chinese nationals were detained at the southern border of the United States. These groups of Chinese undertook incredible journeys originating on mainland China, where they typically flew to South American countries such as Ecuador. Chinese migrants then made the dangerous and arduous land trek through the notorious Darien province in Panama, before continuing northward through Mexico and onto the United States. Something also remarkable is that many of these migrants are from the Chinese middle class. This distinguishes them from Central American migrants who make this often-fatal journey due to impoverishment and threats to their physical safety in their home countries.

In 2024, the Migration Information Service reported that 2.9 million Indian immigrants were living in the United States in 2023. Indian immigrants comprised the second-largest foreign-born group in the United States. In fiscal year 2024, US Customs and Border Protection encountered about 90,000 unauthorized Indian migrants at the US-Mexico border, US-Canada border, or an airport. Push factors included high unemployment rates in northern India and political tensions in Punjab.

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