Asian Americans and their various votes

These days I’m often asked, “Who will Asian Americans vote for in the presidential election?” There’s a relative dearth of media coverage on Asian American political engagement, due in part to the challenges of polling Asian Americans. The ambiguity surrounding Asian Americans is not a new phenomenon: it’s directly related to the past experiences of Asians in the United States. This long and tangled history is a narrative of marginalization and migration layered with oppression and opportunity.

One interpretation of Asian American history delineates an upwardly mobile progression from 19th-century “yellow peril” to 21st-century “model minority.” Like a traveler who maps an entire forest based on a clear view of a few trees, this line of thinking gets some facts correct but ultimately oversimplifies and misrepresents historical realities.

Early Asian American immigrants to the United States were regarded as cheap labor and culturally inferior. Today, one study shows that Asian Americans are the “best-educated, highest-income, fastest-growing” racial-ethnic group in the country. But data also reveals that Asian Americans are a diverse people representing a multiplicity of cultures, languages, regions, and religious traditions. There is no one archetypal tale that attends to the many stories of immigrants from East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia who came to the United States at different times and for different reasons.