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Will Shetterly's avatar

Asian Americans are a wealthier group than white Americans. The reason is our immigration requirements ensured they had more resources than average Americans of all races.

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Mark Monday's avatar

Except that Asian Americans are not a monolith. What you say may be true for immigrants of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent. It is not true for immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam.

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Will Shetterly's avatar

No one is a monolith. But on average, Asian Americans are richer than other American groups except for Jewish Americans, just as Black Americans are poorer than other American groups except for American Indians.

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Mark Monday's avatar

You make a good point (you always do! I've enjoyed your writing here and on the infernal Medium). But the gap is not a large one between white Americans and Asian Americans as a group. I just looked up data for 2019, so perhaps the gap has widened since then. But in that year, white American average household income was @ 80k. For all Asian Americans, it was 86k.

But if you break it down by ethnicity, only Chinese-, Japanese-, Flipino-, and Indian-Americans had incomes higher than whites. Burmese, Nepalese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Hmong, even Korean-Americans, several others, were all under 80k. When you look at the starkly varying circumstances - i.e. Chinese/Japanese/Korean immigrants are often well-positioned financially prior to immigration while many other ethnicities are not - I do think it is important to not look at "Asian Americans" as a cohesive group. Asian Americans are actually the most economically divided racial group. To quote one of the articles I've just read: "While Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups."

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Will Shetterly's avatar

I completely agree the picture skews when you go past race. ThatтАЩs true of every тАЬraceтАЭ. If I remember correctly, whites in Appalachia are poorer than the average black American. If you look at religion, white Baptists are much, much poorer than white Episcopalians and Jews. I find many measures more useful than race. Religious heritage is tells us much more about a personтАЩs class background than race does.

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Chris Fox's avatar

Unsurprising. Even just from Vietnam, where I've lived since 2010, there are people ranging from city dwellers who are university educated when even high school here is equivalent to an undergraduate degree in the USA ... to ethnicities like Hmong who are barely emerged from the Stone Age. Many of them have never seen a telephone while in the cities even young children have their own cell phones and are technically sophisticated in their use.

I once overheard a woman in a furniture store going off on Vietnamese, how they were, you know, taking our jobs and sponging off welfare, blah blah blah. Then she paused, you could hear it coming, "but they are the hardest-working little people you'll ever see."

There is one guy here who emigrated to the USA with nothing and came back a billionaire and built the foundation of what is now a titanic recycling industry that gives marginal employment to millions. If you leave aluminum near a road it's gone in minutes.

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Leah Rose's avatar

That may be true, but doesn't mean all Asian Americans are wealthy and/or there are no enclaves of poverty within that population. My point was referencing those who live in poverty. From the first paragraph of the link I shared:

"The Columbia [University] study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York CityтАЩs Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the cityтАЩs black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nationтАЩs more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, AsiansтАЩ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand."

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Will Shetterly's avatar

It would be interesting to know if the Asian poor are as isolated as the black poor.

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Leah Rose's avatar

Good question. At least in NYC it seems they are; from the link below:

***************

"They don't want to step forward and admit, 'I'm in a situation where I need some need.' It's a cultural barrier," Kim said.

Advocates say part of the problem is that poverty in the community is often unseen.

"They are the hidden homeless," explained Chris Kui with Asian Americans for Equality.

"They are doubling up and tripling up, living in these cubicles that they share with 10 people within a one-bedroom apartment, for example."

****************

https://abc7news.com/our-america-asian-voices-sang-ki-chun-assemblymember-ron-kim-american-poverty-new-york/10578934/

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Leah Rose's avatar

There's also this:

"What gets fewer headlines though, is the fact that even prior to the pandemic, Asian New Yorkers have been living in poverty, and that poverty among Asian Americans is the fastest-growing in the city. In New York City, the number of Asians living in poverty grew by 44 percent in the last decade and a half, from 170,000 to more than 245,000. The poverty rates for Asian-American communities are 15 to 25% higher than the city average.

"So targeted violence and rapidly increasing poverty have become twin crises, threatening to push a community that has been historically invisible, and too often suffers its poverty in silence, even deeper into the shadows."

https://robinhoodnyc.medium.com/why-asian-american-poverty-doesnt-get-the-attention-it-needs-fea4dc245cef

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Will Shetterly's avatar

That raises three questions:

1. Where are they doing this, in poor Asian areas or mixed areas? Or are they effectively hiding in neighborhoods that aren't poor?

2. How much does it matter that society does not perceive your group as poor?

3. Are the Asian poor primarily descendants of the smaller group of families that have been here for generations or are they from the group that came after exclusion policies ended?

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Chris Fox's avatar

Those impoverished Asians ... do their houses look dilapidated and shabby? No, They're immaculate.

People of European ancestry rarely speak their ancestral language in the second generation. My grandfather came from Germany at age 12, spoke with an accent all his life, and I never heard him speak a word of German. I learned it in high school.

The Chinese who came to America from Toisan Province in the 1840s to work on the railroads still speak Toisan at home, nine generations later. Maybe they've shifted to Cantonese and/or Mandarin, but they still speak Chinese.

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Chris Fox's avatar

No. The reason is culture. Achievement and education are esteemed over here. Teachers are revered.

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