Bridges: Asians rising

SAMMY JULIAN

ASIAN Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.

Furthermore, they are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success.

These were the general findings of a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, a “fact tank” in Washington DC that provides information on the issues and trends shaping the US and the world.

The Pew survey noted that, a century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination. Today, they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.

These milestones of economic success and social assimilation have come to a group that is still majority immigrant. Nearly three-quarters (or 74 percent) of Asian American adults were born abroad; of these, about half say they speak English very well and half say they don’t.

The Pew survey also showed that Asians have already passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the US.

Also, what is striking is the educational credentials of these recent arrivals.

The survey showed that more than six in 10 (or 61 percent) adults aged 25–64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in US history.

Compared with the educational attainment of the population in their country of origin, recent Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group.

Recent Asian immigrants are also about three times as likely as recent immigrants from other parts of the world to receive their green cards — or permanent resident status — on the basis of employer rather than family sponsorship (though family reunification remains the most common legal gateway to the US for Asian immigrants, as it is for all immigrants).

The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans — foreign-born and US-born, adults and children — to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8 percent of the total US population, up from less than one percent in 1965.

By comparison, non-Hispanic whites are 197.5 million or 63.3 percent; Hispanics, 52.0 million or 16.7 percent; and non-Hispanic blacks, 38.3 million or 12.3 percent.

Asian Americans trace their roots to any of dozens of countries in the Far East, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Each country of origin subgroup has its own unique history, culture, language, religious beliefs, economic and demographic traits, social and political values, and pathways into America. (To be continued/PN)