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A review by lpm100
The Making of Asian America: A History by Erika Lee
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Book Review
"The Making of Asian America"
Erika Lee
4/5 stars
"History of several groups that came to America"
*******
I didn't realize, but: I bought this book about 6.5 years ago and I'm just now getting around to reading it.
Of the book:
-402 pages of prose over 17 chapters plus epilogue.
-Average of 22 pages per chapter; {Range 12-31 pps}.
-5 parts: I(Asians in early America); II(Asians during the era of mass migration and Asian exclusion); III(Asian American World War II); IV(Remaking Asian america, post-World War II); V(21st century Asian America)
-Copiously sourced. Includes: repositories, government records, manuscript and digital collections.
-1195 citations total. Just shy of 3 per page. 67/chapter.
-CHARTS WOULD HAVE BEEN HELPFUL for the many numbers that the author gave.
-Need not be read in order.
-The author is from Cantonese stock, but that is not the most common Chinese language and it would have been helpful if she either provided characters or Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin
N.B.- The author includes Asian Indians in her definition of "Asian," though most Americans don't typically think of Indians as "Asian."
*******
This book reminds me of something that Thomas Sowell would write, with its workmanlike prose and yeoman's work of sourcing.
Because of the extensive/overwhelming detail...... for the Short Attention Span Reader I would synopsize the book by its "Big Ideas."
BIG IDEA #1: Slavery is not necessarily about race--it just looks like it is: Africans were not the only slaves in the New World, though they were the first. Indians and Chinese came to replace them later under conditions that were just as bad.
BIG IDEA #2: People who move from one place to another at different times are different things; Chinese were variously and successively: indentured servants, coolies, gold rushers, merchants, and (in present times) professionals. Chinese that come today don't even speak the same language as the first ones who came.
The first Japanese who came were fleeing bad economic conditions in Japan, roughly half a century before Japan became a belligerent military/economic power. Japanese just at the end of the 19th century were mostly Okinawan, because that had just recently been incorporated into Japan
BIG IDEA #3: Trade is what moves people.
BIG IDEA #4: Culture does not exist in a vacuum. It happens all the time that fate crashes people together and they create something new--often through the vehicle of interracial marriage. (I'd never even conceived of a Punjabi-Mexican community before this book.)
BIG IDEA #5: Bad economic conditions abroad are better than worse ones at home. So, a ooley in the United States
BIG IDEA #6: If left alone (as in, try to keep the government out of it), disparate groups of people will find some type of equilibrium.
BIG IDEA #7: If one country makes a (metaphorical) bridge to another country (war, interference in domestic politics, etc)...... People can move in both directions across a bridge. (But for the Vietnam War, we would never have had to deal with language problems in courts brought by Hmong people. But for interference in Cuba, English would still be a spoken language in Miami. But for getting involved with the mess in Somalia, we would never have had Ihlan Omar)
BIG IDEA #8: It seems like these governments never learn. Mistakes get remade in identical fashions at periodic (15 or 20 year) intervals.
BIG IDEA #9: Neutrality and non-alignment is such a good national policy. (Don't know why they can't figure this out in the United states. Maybe BIG IDEA #8?)
BIG IDEA #10: Being a disfavorite minority is fortuitous, and does not last forever. And it changes so quickly, that it'll make your head spin to try to keep up with it all
For that matter: Asians are not even a unique or special case; At first Russia was so "good" that the Rosenbergs got executed for spying on its behalf. Then they were Public Enemy Number One up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then, after Trump got elected they resumed their pre-cold War position.
Chinese Americans were enemies when they were coolies but then they were great friends when they were allies in the war against Japan. Then back to enemies when China became "communist." Japanese Americans were enemies around the time of Pearl Harbor. Then friends when it came time to try to contain Communist China. Then back to enemies when the US Auto industry was being humbled by Japan.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was written probably about 5 or 6 years before Critical Race Theory became the Invasive Mass Hysteria that it is. I have to say that this book is a precursor.
In reality, the most common mixed marriage in the United States is Asian and white. The author's pipe dream (=some Mythical World in which all non-white people band together and treat Whites as a common enemy) notwithstanding.
The great majority of US Asians also emphatically do not like black people. Still. (Indian ladies interested in black guys are about as rare as Astatine. I don't even see any of the fat/ugly ones being scooped up by black guys, as one might expect.)
It's good that the inchoate critical race theory only showed up about 3/4 of the way through the book, otherwise I would have dismissed it out of hand.
This is yet another page in that never-ending volume of Academics Out of Touch With Any Type of Reality.
2. When United States immigration was reformed in 1965, it was like we went from Scylla to Charybdis. Sometimes the backlash against a bad policy leads to an even worse policy: the immigration law for a long time was white only, and then in 1965 it was changed to make the US a dumping ground for the Third world.
3. "The Islamic Peril" (p.386) is emphatically not the same thing as "The Yellow Peril," as much as the author might try to make it so.
Japanese people ended up being good citizens after it was all said and done, but 15 out of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were US citizens. Also, most times that a US soldier has fired on other soldiers, he has been a Muslim (Nidal Hasan, etc).
4. Much of this book could be reinterpreted as labor conflict that has the outward appearance of racism. People who don't want to be undercut out of a job. It has resonances to current times in the United States: White people have moved on to better jobs, and they are not worried about competition from low skilled Latin Americans. The people who end up on the losing end of this are most often black people, but...... They're just black people. (Not important enough to worry about, nor bright enough to even realize what's going on.)
5. The author seems to imagine taking the Black Route (=interpreting every. single. issue. is something that needs to be solved through the political process), but it looks like the great majority of Asian people are not interested in politics.
6. It is profoundly ironic that the US wasted all of that blood and treasure fighting communism in Vietnam, and yet the Vietnamese got enough of Communism when they actually experienced it. Meanwhile, they can't seem to lift a finger to deal with the Marxist tinge of American universities that is educating the next generation of idiots and creating a Fifth Column inside of their own country.
7. Kooky White People are ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE bad news: Communism was definitely a Western idea, but the Third World has suffered more than anybody for it. The Khmer rouge managed to kill 21% of Cambodia in service of trying to create the Ideal Communist Society. Millions and millions of people died in WW2, and it seems like there was no reason for any of it.
8. Just in the Chinese case: they don't seem to be able to get along with anyone, anywhere. (Malaysia. Indonesia.) I wonder is everybody else wrong? Or, could there have been some things on the ground (Stateside) that people of those times saw that we, looking backward, do not?
9. The Japanese are in the United States are a lot less visible because they were dispersed thinly throughout the country after removal from the containment camps. (Incidentally, the 10 lost tribes of Israel were never "lost," but Shalmaneser V of the Assyrian Empire deliberately resettled them thinly throughout the Assyrian empire.)
10. The historical events in this book inadvertently show how much the country has fallen apart. We went from "valorization of the nuclear family and anti-communism" (p.277) to the current situation, where people can flip a coin and decide what gender they will be that day, and people will tie up the court systems to argue for the right of men to go into women's bathrooms, and where everyone is a democratic socialist.
*******
Chapter synopses:
1. The West becomes aware of Asia about the time of Marco Polo. It's "exotic and feminine." Spain/Portugal were the first colonial powers and they were the first vector to move Asians (Filipinos) to the new world. Africans to Spanish America: 300K. 375K to Brazil.
2. The number of Chinese indentured laborers was comparable to the number of African slaves. 142k to Cuba, 90K to Peru.
British East India Company was the vector to move Indians from India to Guyana (238K), Trinidad/Tobago (149K), West Indies (429K), Guadalupe (42K), Jamaica (36.4K), Dutch Guyana (34.4K), and Martinique (25.5K).
20% of all Africans died on The Middle Passage (p.41), compared to about 1/3 of Chinese indentured servants. 50% of Chinese coolies died before their contracts ended in Cuba (p.52).
3. The Gold Rush brought another wave of Chinese people (mostly from Guangdong). When it ended, they became railway workers. They built much of the US railroad at lower prices, as well as doing a lot of land reclamation work. Chinatowns were formed not because of Chinese insularity, but because white people did not want to live around them and chase them there. There were lots of Chinese-White marriages even a century and a half ago--frequently to Irishwomen (p.79). Most Asian immigrants were processed through Angel Island (as opposed to Ellis Island) because they came to the West Coast.
4. The Chinese exclusion act was passed in 1882, and it was mostly about Labor conflict. (White people were tired of being undercut by Chinese.) In Canada, Chinese exclusively were required to pay a head tax, and they got an Exclusion Act. The Mexicans got in on the game and passed their own Exclusion Act, as well as a 1911 massacre of 303 out of 6-700 people. (There is actually a respectably sized Chinese community in Mexico to this day.) They also barred Mexican women marrying Chinese. Most of Latin America also had exclusion laws specifically against them.
5. Okinawa was acquired by Japan only in 1879; Hokkaido 10 years earlier. 200K Japanese to Hawaii; 180K to the Mainland. US immigration law was "white only" from 1790 at least through 1922. Japanese exclusion shadowed Chinese Exclusion in that Latin American countries also did not want them.
6. Koreans are the next group of economic refugees seeking relief from war. They are a lot more likely to be Christian because that was a bulwark against Japanese colonization.
7. Indians (Hindu, Muslim, and Punjabi) came in much smaller numbers, but a lot of them married Mexican women and created a "vibrant Punjabi Mexican community" in San Diego (p.158). History of the Ghadar party. Angel Island rejected 55% of all South Asians (compared to 9% of Chinese).
8. The US conquest of the Philippines took 3 years. 4,500 American soldiers and probably 1 million Filipinos. The migration problem was not the same because Filipinos were considered US nationals, so it was not a question of keeping them out with exclusionary laws. And that explains whyThe Philippines was emancipated by the Tydings-McDuffie Act (around 1934): if they are us nationals, they have free movement, but if they are soon to be an independent country they can be classified as "aliens." 98% of them chose to remain in the United States rather than return to the Philippines.
9. Illegal immigration is at least a century old, and the Mexican border has been a weak point for a long time; the Asian immigrants in this book were doing it long before other Latin Americans. A lot of people also crossed the Canadian border. During this period, 20,000 Chinese were expelled from Mexico's Sonora, alone.
10. During the war, Japanese in Canada and the United States were relocated. (The US was not alone in this policy: Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Columbia, Guatemala, haiti, El Salvador, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Venezuela sent them over to be in United States custody.) Some of the prisoners were used for POW exchanges.
All together, 120,000 Japanese were incarcerated in camps.
11. Further details of Japanese incarceration. Most of the Japanese were loyal, but "others renounced their citizenship to avoid the draft or as a form of descent. A few were goaded into renunciation by pro Japanese militants" (p.241). Altogether, 5,500 Japanese renounced and 1300 of them were sent to Japan. Many of these actions were able to be taken because of the declaration of a state of emergency due to the war. Peru did not want any of his Japanese back, and some were repatriated to Japan and others stayed in the United States and eventually became citizens.
12. With the advent of the Cold War, various (formerly enemy) countries became allies and the fate of US Asians shifted. It's odd that both Filipinos and Chinese signed up in huge numbers for the US military because they thought they were defending their "homelands." (So much for that dual loyalty bit.) Lots of war brides resulted from the post-bellum occupation. Japanese, 67K; Korean, 100K. Korean adoptees, 110K. US immigration was essentially "white only" from the Naturalization Act of 1790 up until 1965.
It seems at this exact moment that blacks became the foil for Asians (or maybe vice versa): "they depended on their own efforts - not a welfare check." (p.278). The author also seems to suggest that Chinese and Japanese are the main attraction and all these other groups are just a sideshow.
13. Since the 1980s, 80% of US immigration has been from Latin America / Asia. Also, the educational quality has gotten lower (p.288). 24% of the Asian population is Chinese; 76% are foreign born; 69% are US citizens. The weak Mexican border is still helpful for illegals.
14. Vietnam War and fallout effects. Creation of millions of refugees, and some people who had cooperated with the US were left with targets on their backs after the US pulled out. Cambodia: "Former military and government officials were executed...... Markets, money, banks, private property were abolished.... Western medicine, schools, and Buddhism.... Merchants and landlords were killed and 2 million residents of Phnom Penh were evacuated." (p. 327)
15. It seems like Hmong boarded planes to the United States as Hmong and alighted as Mexicans. They have had a really rough go. Initially, only 20% were employed, and 85% on public assistance. Most were illiterate, agricultural, and with NO vague experience of living in a city with indoor toilets and electricity. High rates of high school dropout, babymamas all over the place. Lots of young men in gangs. Lower bachelor's degree attainment even than blacks, and 27% of all Hmong families are in poverty.
16. A lot of immigrants send remittances. (No news here) Sometimes the migration is circular. (Also, no news here.) People have always calculated the rate of repatriation of immigrants.) Sometimes people start in one place, go to another and become something new, and move to a third place. This explains how in Los Angeles one getsJapanese Peruvian restaurants, Korean Brazilian associations, and Chinese Brazilian churches.
17. These days, Asians are a model minority and a foil to blacks with their "dysfunctional culture and delinquent family values." (And that's interesting, because Mom and Cambodian actually have higher poverty rates than blacks or Latinos.) The average income of this amalgamation of different ethnicities is higher than that of white people, but the standard deviation is also wider.
Verdict: Worth the price of a second hand copy.
Vocabulary:
criollo
"The Making of Asian America"
Erika Lee
4/5 stars
"History of several groups that came to America"
*******
I didn't realize, but: I bought this book about 6.5 years ago and I'm just now getting around to reading it.
Of the book:
-402 pages of prose over 17 chapters plus epilogue.
-Average of 22 pages per chapter; {Range 12-31 pps}.
-5 parts: I(Asians in early America); II(Asians during the era of mass migration and Asian exclusion); III(Asian American World War II); IV(Remaking Asian america, post-World War II); V(21st century Asian America)
-Copiously sourced. Includes: repositories, government records, manuscript and digital collections.
-1195 citations total. Just shy of 3 per page. 67/chapter.
-CHARTS WOULD HAVE BEEN HELPFUL for the many numbers that the author gave.
-Need not be read in order.
-The author is from Cantonese stock, but that is not the most common Chinese language and it would have been helpful if she either provided characters or Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin
N.B.- The author includes Asian Indians in her definition of "Asian," though most Americans don't typically think of Indians as "Asian."
*******
This book reminds me of something that Thomas Sowell would write, with its workmanlike prose and yeoman's work of sourcing.
Because of the extensive/overwhelming detail...... for the Short Attention Span Reader I would synopsize the book by its "Big Ideas."
BIG IDEA #1: Slavery is not necessarily about race--it just looks like it is: Africans were not the only slaves in the New World, though they were the first. Indians and Chinese came to replace them later under conditions that were just as bad.
BIG IDEA #2: People who move from one place to another at different times are different things; Chinese were variously and successively: indentured servants, coolies, gold rushers, merchants, and (in present times) professionals. Chinese that come today don't even speak the same language as the first ones who came.
The first Japanese who came were fleeing bad economic conditions in Japan, roughly half a century before Japan became a belligerent military/economic power. Japanese just at the end of the 19th century were mostly Okinawan, because that had just recently been incorporated into Japan
BIG IDEA #3: Trade is what moves people.
BIG IDEA #4: Culture does not exist in a vacuum. It happens all the time that fate crashes people together and they create something new--often through the vehicle of interracial marriage. (I'd never even conceived of a Punjabi-Mexican community before this book.)
BIG IDEA #5: Bad economic conditions abroad are better than worse ones at home. So, a ooley in the United States
BIG IDEA #6: If left alone (as in, try to keep the government out of it), disparate groups of people will find some type of equilibrium.
BIG IDEA #7: If one country makes a (metaphorical) bridge to another country (war, interference in domestic politics, etc)...... People can move in both directions across a bridge. (But for the Vietnam War, we would never have had to deal with language problems in courts brought by Hmong people. But for interference in Cuba, English would still be a spoken language in Miami. But for getting involved with the mess in Somalia, we would never have had Ihlan Omar)
BIG IDEA #8: It seems like these governments never learn. Mistakes get remade in identical fashions at periodic (15 or 20 year) intervals.
BIG IDEA #9: Neutrality and non-alignment is such a good national policy. (Don't know why they can't figure this out in the United states. Maybe BIG IDEA #8?)
BIG IDEA #10: Being a disfavorite minority is fortuitous, and does not last forever. And it changes so quickly, that it'll make your head spin to try to keep up with it all
For that matter: Asians are not even a unique or special case; At first Russia was so "good" that the Rosenbergs got executed for spying on its behalf. Then they were Public Enemy Number One up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then, after Trump got elected they resumed their pre-cold War position.
Chinese Americans were enemies when they were coolies but then they were great friends when they were allies in the war against Japan. Then back to enemies when China became "communist." Japanese Americans were enemies around the time of Pearl Harbor. Then friends when it came time to try to contain Communist China. Then back to enemies when the US Auto industry was being humbled by Japan.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. This book was written probably about 5 or 6 years before Critical Race Theory became the Invasive Mass Hysteria that it is. I have to say that this book is a precursor.
In reality, the most common mixed marriage in the United States is Asian and white. The author's pipe dream (=some Mythical World in which all non-white people band together and treat Whites as a common enemy) notwithstanding.
The great majority of US Asians also emphatically do not like black people. Still. (Indian ladies interested in black guys are about as rare as Astatine. I don't even see any of the fat/ugly ones being scooped up by black guys, as one might expect.)
It's good that the inchoate critical race theory only showed up about 3/4 of the way through the book, otherwise I would have dismissed it out of hand.
This is yet another page in that never-ending volume of Academics Out of Touch With Any Type of Reality.
2. When United States immigration was reformed in 1965, it was like we went from Scylla to Charybdis. Sometimes the backlash against a bad policy leads to an even worse policy: the immigration law for a long time was white only, and then in 1965 it was changed to make the US a dumping ground for the Third world.
3. "The Islamic Peril" (p.386) is emphatically not the same thing as "The Yellow Peril," as much as the author might try to make it so.
Japanese people ended up being good citizens after it was all said and done, but 15 out of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were US citizens. Also, most times that a US soldier has fired on other soldiers, he has been a Muslim (Nidal Hasan, etc).
4. Much of this book could be reinterpreted as labor conflict that has the outward appearance of racism. People who don't want to be undercut out of a job. It has resonances to current times in the United States: White people have moved on to better jobs, and they are not worried about competition from low skilled Latin Americans. The people who end up on the losing end of this are most often black people, but...... They're just black people. (Not important enough to worry about, nor bright enough to even realize what's going on.)
5. The author seems to imagine taking the Black Route (=interpreting every. single. issue. is something that needs to be solved through the political process), but it looks like the great majority of Asian people are not interested in politics.
6. It is profoundly ironic that the US wasted all of that blood and treasure fighting communism in Vietnam, and yet the Vietnamese got enough of Communism when they actually experienced it. Meanwhile, they can't seem to lift a finger to deal with the Marxist tinge of American universities that is educating the next generation of idiots and creating a Fifth Column inside of their own country.
7. Kooky White People are ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE bad news: Communism was definitely a Western idea, but the Third World has suffered more than anybody for it. The Khmer rouge managed to kill 21% of Cambodia in service of trying to create the Ideal Communist Society. Millions and millions of people died in WW2, and it seems like there was no reason for any of it.
8. Just in the Chinese case: they don't seem to be able to get along with anyone, anywhere. (Malaysia. Indonesia.) I wonder is everybody else wrong? Or, could there have been some things on the ground (Stateside) that people of those times saw that we, looking backward, do not?
9. The Japanese are in the United States are a lot less visible because they were dispersed thinly throughout the country after removal from the containment camps. (Incidentally, the 10 lost tribes of Israel were never "lost," but Shalmaneser V of the Assyrian Empire deliberately resettled them thinly throughout the Assyrian empire.)
10. The historical events in this book inadvertently show how much the country has fallen apart. We went from "valorization of the nuclear family and anti-communism" (p.277) to the current situation, where people can flip a coin and decide what gender they will be that day, and people will tie up the court systems to argue for the right of men to go into women's bathrooms, and where everyone is a democratic socialist.
*******
Chapter synopses:
1. The West becomes aware of Asia about the time of Marco Polo. It's "exotic and feminine." Spain/Portugal were the first colonial powers and they were the first vector to move Asians (Filipinos) to the new world. Africans to Spanish America: 300K. 375K to Brazil.
2. The number of Chinese indentured laborers was comparable to the number of African slaves. 142k to Cuba, 90K to Peru.
British East India Company was the vector to move Indians from India to Guyana (238K), Trinidad/Tobago (149K), West Indies (429K), Guadalupe (42K), Jamaica (36.4K), Dutch Guyana (34.4K), and Martinique (25.5K).
20% of all Africans died on The Middle Passage (p.41), compared to about 1/3 of Chinese indentured servants. 50% of Chinese coolies died before their contracts ended in Cuba (p.52).
3. The Gold Rush brought another wave of Chinese people (mostly from Guangdong). When it ended, they became railway workers. They built much of the US railroad at lower prices, as well as doing a lot of land reclamation work. Chinatowns were formed not because of Chinese insularity, but because white people did not want to live around them and chase them there. There were lots of Chinese-White marriages even a century and a half ago--frequently to Irishwomen (p.79). Most Asian immigrants were processed through Angel Island (as opposed to Ellis Island) because they came to the West Coast.
4. The Chinese exclusion act was passed in 1882, and it was mostly about Labor conflict. (White people were tired of being undercut by Chinese.) In Canada, Chinese exclusively were required to pay a head tax, and they got an Exclusion Act. The Mexicans got in on the game and passed their own Exclusion Act, as well as a 1911 massacre of 303 out of 6-700 people. (There is actually a respectably sized Chinese community in Mexico to this day.) They also barred Mexican women marrying Chinese. Most of Latin America also had exclusion laws specifically against them.
5. Okinawa was acquired by Japan only in 1879; Hokkaido 10 years earlier. 200K Japanese to Hawaii; 180K to the Mainland. US immigration law was "white only" from 1790 at least through 1922. Japanese exclusion shadowed Chinese Exclusion in that Latin American countries also did not want them.
6. Koreans are the next group of economic refugees seeking relief from war. They are a lot more likely to be Christian because that was a bulwark against Japanese colonization.
7. Indians (Hindu, Muslim, and Punjabi) came in much smaller numbers, but a lot of them married Mexican women and created a "vibrant Punjabi Mexican community" in San Diego (p.158). History of the Ghadar party. Angel Island rejected 55% of all South Asians (compared to 9% of Chinese).
8. The US conquest of the Philippines took 3 years. 4,500 American soldiers and probably 1 million Filipinos. The migration problem was not the same because Filipinos were considered US nationals, so it was not a question of keeping them out with exclusionary laws. And that explains whyThe Philippines was emancipated by the Tydings-McDuffie Act (around 1934): if they are us nationals, they have free movement, but if they are soon to be an independent country they can be classified as "aliens." 98% of them chose to remain in the United States rather than return to the Philippines.
9. Illegal immigration is at least a century old, and the Mexican border has been a weak point for a long time; the Asian immigrants in this book were doing it long before other Latin Americans. A lot of people also crossed the Canadian border. During this period, 20,000 Chinese were expelled from Mexico's Sonora, alone.
10. During the war, Japanese in Canada and the United States were relocated. (The US was not alone in this policy: Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Columbia, Guatemala, haiti, El Salvador, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Venezuela sent them over to be in United States custody.) Some of the prisoners were used for POW exchanges.
All together, 120,000 Japanese were incarcerated in camps.
11. Further details of Japanese incarceration. Most of the Japanese were loyal, but "others renounced their citizenship to avoid the draft or as a form of descent. A few were goaded into renunciation by pro Japanese militants" (p.241). Altogether, 5,500 Japanese renounced and 1300 of them were sent to Japan. Many of these actions were able to be taken because of the declaration of a state of emergency due to the war. Peru did not want any of his Japanese back, and some were repatriated to Japan and others stayed in the United States and eventually became citizens.
12. With the advent of the Cold War, various (formerly enemy) countries became allies and the fate of US Asians shifted. It's odd that both Filipinos and Chinese signed up in huge numbers for the US military because they thought they were defending their "homelands." (So much for that dual loyalty bit.) Lots of war brides resulted from the post-bellum occupation. Japanese, 67K; Korean, 100K. Korean adoptees, 110K. US immigration was essentially "white only" from the Naturalization Act of 1790 up until 1965.
It seems at this exact moment that blacks became the foil for Asians (or maybe vice versa): "they depended on their own efforts - not a welfare check." (p.278). The author also seems to suggest that Chinese and Japanese are the main attraction and all these other groups are just a sideshow.
13. Since the 1980s, 80% of US immigration has been from Latin America / Asia. Also, the educational quality has gotten lower (p.288). 24% of the Asian population is Chinese; 76% are foreign born; 69% are US citizens. The weak Mexican border is still helpful for illegals.
14. Vietnam War and fallout effects. Creation of millions of refugees, and some people who had cooperated with the US were left with targets on their backs after the US pulled out. Cambodia: "Former military and government officials were executed...... Markets, money, banks, private property were abolished.... Western medicine, schools, and Buddhism.... Merchants and landlords were killed and 2 million residents of Phnom Penh were evacuated." (p. 327)
15. It seems like Hmong boarded planes to the United States as Hmong and alighted as Mexicans. They have had a really rough go. Initially, only 20% were employed, and 85% on public assistance. Most were illiterate, agricultural, and with NO vague experience of living in a city with indoor toilets and electricity. High rates of high school dropout, babymamas all over the place. Lots of young men in gangs. Lower bachelor's degree attainment even than blacks, and 27% of all Hmong families are in poverty.
16. A lot of immigrants send remittances. (No news here) Sometimes the migration is circular. (Also, no news here.) People have always calculated the rate of repatriation of immigrants.) Sometimes people start in one place, go to another and become something new, and move to a third place. This explains how in Los Angeles one getsJapanese Peruvian restaurants, Korean Brazilian associations, and Chinese Brazilian churches.
17. These days, Asians are a model minority and a foil to blacks with their "dysfunctional culture and delinquent family values." (And that's interesting, because Mom and Cambodian actually have higher poverty rates than blacks or Latinos.) The average income of this amalgamation of different ethnicities is higher than that of white people, but the standard deviation is also wider.
Verdict: Worth the price of a second hand copy.
Vocabulary:
criollo