7 ms·

Rise of the Tiger Nation: Asian-American Success

44 points by azth 14y ago

rubashov 14y ago
The debate around the original asian exclusion acts is kind of interesting to read. A lot of articles from the time are reproduced online. The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. The fear was a generally compromised quality of life. Of course all this nuance gets boiled down to mere "toxic racism" by the NYT. I mean it's not like large numbers of asians willing to study huge numbers of hours a week have had any affect on quality of life or opportunities for today's students...
- subsystem 14y ago
  The important word being "compete". As far as I know Americans are fine with poor people working multiple jobs for minimum wage. In fact the sentiment often seems to be that they are not working hard enough. If you want to avoid a "race to the bottom" you raise the bottom.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. Upon Federation in Australia, the first Act of Parliament that passed was the Immigration Act. Its key objective? Keeping out asian, particularly Chinese, workers. Why? Because they would work harder. "Asiatics" were naturally better suited to the North than the white man, you see.
colmvp 14y ago
'Success' As an Asian male, even though I might be highly educated, make a comfortable amount of money, own properties, be a productive citizen (blah blah blah), nothing softens the blow of hearing women (both Asian and non-Asian) saying they'd never date an Asian guy or saying Asian guys aren't attractive. Or seeing advertisements/movies that always show mixed couples as White male - Asian female. Or watching 21st century American movies/TV shows that still typecast Asian men as asexual action stars / comedic relief. If I had to choose between either this 'success' or being a white male with less success, I'd easily choose the latter.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  This basically sucks, but it's the nature of the dating game. People have a right to be attracted to the people they're attracted to, even if that involves excluding an entire race. It's depressing to see all the match questions on OKCupid that say "Do you strongly want your mate to be of the same race as you: Yes", but that's the way it goes. I've also found that there are many white women who say they're not interested in Asian guys, but when the right guy comes along, they suddenly change their mind. I have several white female friends that never considered dating an Asian guy and are now dating/engaged/married to one. My parents were an Asian male and a white female, and I'm dating a white girl.
  - anonri 14y ago
    > It's depressing to see all the match questions on OKCupid that say "Do you strongly want your mate to be of the same race as you: Yes", but that's the way it goes. Yep, you should never rely on online dating as an Asian guy in the West. It's a complete waste of time. > I've also found that there are many white women who say they're not interested in Asian guys, but when the right guy comes along, they suddenly change their mind. The key is to meet women in real life and deemphasize your race as much as possible. Of course, you will still have to be that much better than a white guy in other categories (be personable/funny, be in shape, be wealthy, dress nicely) to make up for your race, but meeting women face-to-face makes it much more difficult for them to just outright dismiss you. This is because that latent racism feels much more acceptable to women when they're sitting alone, in private, in front of their computer. On the other hand, when they're in a public social setting, they (just like everyone else) feel judged by society. For an Asian guy who wants to date white women, that social pressure is the best weapon for combating racism. After breaking past that initial barrier, the rest is up to the individual.
    - nathos 14y ago
      Relevant data from OKCupid: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...
nostrademons 14y ago
I wonder how much of this is because American immigration policy is basically a high-pass filter for Asians. When my dad came over in 1959, pretty much the only way you could immigrate to the U.S. was to be highly educated and work your ass off to impress some organization that would sponsor you. Nowadays it's much the same thing with the H1-B system: one of the largest categories of Asian visas is specifically to bring in highly-educated tech workers. It's no wonder that they and their kids tend to do well; they wouldn't be able to come here if they couldn't.
- sxp 14y ago
  This selection bias is evident when the performance of first generation Asian Americans immigrants is compared with the performance of second and third generation Asian Americans. The drive that pushes poor (by middle-class American standards) immigrants to succeed causes them to push their children to succeed in school. But this drive appears to be diluted over subsequent generations. http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/09/immigrants http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/09/immigrants
- kamaal 14y ago
  Your statement reminds of some colleges here in India which admit only the best students and then claim to produce the best results. The fact is you can build a hub where the best can gather and produce the best results. You can then claim that you will take in the best, because the results or so. This can go on in a never ending cycle.
  - aviraldg 14y ago
    The IITs and IIMs.
  - mamal 14y ago
    @kamaal, it's the same story everywhere. I think you haven't understood it at all.
lalwat 14y ago
I find this as interesting as Katy Perry voting for Obama. There are about 4.2 billion (60%) people living in Asia. If they weren't affecting the U.S. — something would be very odd. I am not surprised that they're doing well as they are not forced to emigrate. EDIT: 'Katy', apparently.
- antidaily 14y ago
  Katy.
kamaal 14y ago
Do Indians count as 'Asians' in the American vocabulary? If yes then I can shed some light on why they become so successful. The people who immigrate to the US are basically as somebody mentioned in this thread can pass the 'American high pass filter'. This is true. For a long time here in India, the only employment arena's were civil services(government jobs) where there was absolutely to growth, Medicine, Or Engineering. But either way you had to depend working on a public sector company, which are basically massive bureaucracies whose whole intention was to run a massive payroll for to provide people with jobs. So you had only a few options in your career as an Indian. Obviously those Indians when they immigrated to the US prospered, there is a big reason for that. Starved for opportunities, growth and wealth here they pounced on anything and everything they got and made very good use of it. Its called 'milking the opportunity', however most people I know have told me although they got what they wanted, 'It was not worth it'- any Indian immigrating to the US is basically immigrating for his kids. His whole life is likely to go towards building that platform for his kids so that they can lead a better life. He has to start from a scratch, he needs to build a family, connections, social circles etc. Nearly everything you can ever imagine has to start from the scratch. And that is difficult you are likely to go into your late forties to early fifties doing that. That scenario is rapidly changing today. Besides, most of the 'developing countries' you can talk of are doing very well today. Recently a relative of mine who has immigrated to US had to fly down due to a family medical emergency. He was shocked and surprised to how much Bangalore has changed just in 12-15 years. He even admitted that reasons why people left India to go the US are quickly drying out. Indian is seeing a unique period in its growth, I mean the youth even a decade back used to look our growth story as a momentary spur and 'Nothing much is going to happen in this country' attitude. That is rapidly changing. More and more people I've met are confident about things here. There are start ups coming up all over the place, People are more open to taking risks. Basically the Indian economy and country as a whole is maturing rather rapidly. Infrastructure development is massive, and I can tell you in another 15-20 years India would have prospered so much it will make current day immigration decisions look bad.
- eshvk 14y ago
  > Do Indians count as 'Asians' in the American vocabulary? If yes then I can shed some light on why they become so successful. No. Asians refers to people from East Asia. The terminology is different in England, I believe.
confluence 14y ago
You mean small selective sampling mixed with faulty reasoning. Immigrants are usually self-selected hard working, smart and relatively rich (otherwise you can't afford to emigrate), risk taking people - because you'd otherwise have a lot of trouble surviving in America. Stating "Asian-American" success, is like stating "Harvard-American" success - your sample is already biased. Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years - and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans. People centric exceptionalism is vastly overrated - what's more important is the wind at their backs (cheap resources/labour/stable society/technology convergence) and the benefits they receive when they are born (rich/schooling/health/connections).
- barry-cotter 14y ago
  Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years -and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans Yeah, just like Americans of Jewish ancestry! A group that came over most poor and not speaking the language very well and with low social capital and mostly did very well, and whose children did very well will revert all the way to average.
  - confluence 14y ago
    The vast majority of that can be explained by randomness, the extreme variance of small samples and inappropriate use of the fundamental attribution error. Minorities live or die not because of anything intrinsic - but merely because of prevailing environmental forces. The "Jewish-success", like the article's "Asian-success", is merely a statistical fluke, just as is the failure of other oppressed minorities throughout the world. No group of people is better or worse than any other. They merely inhabit different environments. Thinking otherwise leads to fundamentally faulty thinking, inappropriate cultural stereotyping and general stupidity. Humans as a species are highly homogenous and population variances can usually be explained through environmental factors and random genetic mutation than by any inherent ability. > Long and Kittles show that indeed, African populations contain about 100% of human genetic diversity, whereas in populations outside of Africa diversity is much reduced, for example in their population from New Guinea only about 70% of human variation is captured. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation > While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way, i.e. that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance: all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_b... So I call bullshit on biologically derived differentiation across human populations by people with poor statistical and genetic understanding. There are ~2 billion Asians - reversion to the mean works highly effectively in these cases as immigration pressures stabilise. Race violates my rule that if it's vague, it's bullshit. Hence racial/cultural/fuzzy explanations for differentiating phenomena are discarded for the crap that they are.
mtmcarter 14y ago
N64 Emulator The N64 premiered throughout mid-1996 seeing that Nintendo’s front side-blue runner while in the first next-age bracket gaming console wars. Is usually was obviously a better run unit when compared with Sony’s Ps3 or perhaps Sega’s Saturn, the N64 usually lagged driving around profits. Nintendo made a decision to advertise the equipment about the merits of its rapid-launching container program plus the small idea that the idea highlighted your 64-tiny bit architectural mastery – regrettably for Manufacturers, individuals were extra astounded by high-volume Mp3 mass media, with-video game dvd sequences and also before-documented soundtracks than rapid running and the sized your machine’s line. http://emulatorzone.bcz.com/ http://emulatorzone.bcz.com/
smugengineer69 14y ago
Typical WSJ red scare claptrap. This paper is seriously still caught in the McCarthy era, especially when it comes to anything at all related to Asia. Sure this article seems positive on the surface, but underneath it all is a deep, abiding, white fear of being overtaken as the dominant racial group.

44 points by azth 14y ago

The debate around the original asian exclusion acts is kind of interesting to read. A lot of articles from the time are reproduced online. The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. The fear was a generally compromised quality of life. Of course all this nuance gets boiled down to mere "toxic racism" by the NYT. I mean it's not like large numbers of asians willing to study huge numbers of hours a week have had any affect on quality of life or opportunities for today's students...

subsystem 14y ago
The important word being "compete". As far as I know Americans are fine with poor people working multiple jobs for minimum wage. In fact the sentiment often seems to be that they are not working hard enough. If you want to avoid a "race to the bottom" you raise the bottom.
jacques_chester 14y ago
> The common sentiment was that white americans didn't want to compete with people willing to work 16 hour days. Upon Federation in Australia, the first Act of Parliament that passed was the Immigration Act. Its key objective? Keeping out asian, particularly Chinese, workers. Why? Because they would work harder. "Asiatics" were naturally better suited to the North than the white man, you see.

colmvp 14y ago

'Success' As an Asian male, even though I might be highly educated, make a comfortable amount of money, own properties, be a productive citizen (blah blah blah), nothing softens the blow of hearing women (both Asian and non-Asian) saying they'd never date an Asian guy or saying Asian guys aren't attractive. Or seeing advertisements/movies that always show mixed couples as White male - Asian female. Or watching 21st century American movies/TV shows that still typecast Asian men as asexual action stars / comedic relief. If I had to choose between either this 'success' or being a white male with less success, I'd easily choose the latter.

nostrademons 14y ago
This basically sucks, but it's the nature of the dating game. People have a right to be attracted to the people they're attracted to, even if that involves excluding an entire race. It's depressing to see all the match questions on OKCupid that say "Do you strongly want your mate to be of the same race as you: Yes", but that's the way it goes. I've also found that there are many white women who say they're not interested in Asian guys, but when the right guy comes along, they suddenly change their mind. I have several white female friends that never considered dating an Asian guy and are now dating/engaged/married to one. My parents were an Asian male and a white female, and I'm dating a white girl.
- anonri 14y ago
  > It's depressing to see all the match questions on OKCupid that say "Do you strongly want your mate to be of the same race as you: Yes", but that's the way it goes. Yep, you should never rely on online dating as an Asian guy in the West. It's a complete waste of time. > I've also found that there are many white women who say they're not interested in Asian guys, but when the right guy comes along, they suddenly change their mind. The key is to meet women in real life and deemphasize your race as much as possible. Of course, you will still have to be that much better than a white guy in other categories (be personable/funny, be in shape, be wealthy, dress nicely) to make up for your race, but meeting women face-to-face makes it much more difficult for them to just outright dismiss you. This is because that latent racism feels much more acceptable to women when they're sitting alone, in private, in front of their computer. On the other hand, when they're in a public social setting, they (just like everyone else) feel judged by society. For an Asian guy who wants to date white women, that social pressure is the best weapon for combating racism. After breaking past that initial barrier, the rest is up to the individual.
  - nathos 14y ago
    Relevant data from OKCupid: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-...

nostrademons 14y ago

I wonder how much of this is because American immigration policy is basically a high-pass filter for Asians. When my dad came over in 1959, pretty much the only way you could immigrate to the U.S. was to be highly educated and work your ass off to impress some organization that would sponsor you. Nowadays it's much the same thing with the H1-B system: one of the largest categories of Asian visas is specifically to bring in highly-educated tech workers. It's no wonder that they and their kids tend to do well; they wouldn't be able to come here if they couldn't.

sxp 14y ago
This selection bias is evident when the performance of first generation Asian Americans immigrants is compared with the performance of second and third generation Asian Americans. The drive that pushes poor (by middle-class American standards) immigrants to succeed causes them to push their children to succeed in school. But this drive appears to be diluted over subsequent generations. http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/09/immigrants http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/09/immigrants
kamaal 14y ago
Your statement reminds of some colleges here in India which admit only the best students and then claim to produce the best results. The fact is you can build a hub where the best can gather and produce the best results. You can then claim that you will take in the best, because the results or so. This can go on in a never ending cycle.
- aviraldg 14y ago
  The IITs and IIMs.
- mamal 14y ago
  @kamaal, it's the same story everywhere. I think you haven't understood it at all.

lalwat 14y ago

I find this as interesting as Katy Perry voting for Obama. There are about 4.2 billion (60%) people living in Asia. If they weren't affecting the U.S. — something would be very odd. I am not surprised that they're doing well as they are not forced to emigrate. EDIT: 'Katy', apparently.

antidaily 14y ago
Katy.

kamaal 14y ago

Do Indians count as 'Asians' in the American vocabulary? If yes then I can shed some light on why they become so successful. The people who immigrate to the US are basically as somebody mentioned in this thread can pass the 'American high pass filter'. This is true. For a long time here in India, the only employment arena's were civil services(government jobs) where there was absolutely to growth, Medicine, Or Engineering. But either way you had to depend working on a public sector company, which are basically massive bureaucracies whose whole intention was to run a massive payroll for to provide people with jobs. So you had only a few options in your career as an Indian. Obviously those Indians when they immigrated to the US prospered, there is a big reason for that. Starved for opportunities, growth and wealth here they pounced on anything and everything they got and made very good use of it. Its called 'milking the opportunity', however most people I know have told me although they got what they wanted, 'It was not worth it'- any Indian immigrating to the US is basically immigrating for his kids. His whole life is likely to go towards building that platform for his kids so that they can lead a better life. He has to start from a scratch, he needs to build a family, connections, social circles etc. Nearly everything you can ever imagine has to start from the scratch. And that is difficult you are likely to go into your late forties to early fifties doing that. That scenario is rapidly changing today. Besides, most of the 'developing countries' you can talk of are doing very well today. Recently a relative of mine who has immigrated to US had to fly down due to a family medical emergency. He was shocked and surprised to how much Bangalore has changed just in 12-15 years. He even admitted that reasons why people left India to go the US are quickly drying out. Indian is seeing a unique period in its growth, I mean the youth even a decade back used to look our growth story as a momentary spur and 'Nothing much is going to happen in this country' attitude. That is rapidly changing. More and more people I've met are confident about things here. There are start ups coming up all over the place, People are more open to taking risks. Basically the Indian economy and country as a whole is maturing rather rapidly. Infrastructure development is massive, and I can tell you in another 15-20 years India would have prospered so much it will make current day immigration decisions look bad.

eshvk 14y ago
> Do Indians count as 'Asians' in the American vocabulary? If yes then I can shed some light on why they become so successful. No. Asians refers to people from East Asia. The terminology is different in England, I believe.

confluence 14y ago

You mean small selective sampling mixed with faulty reasoning. Immigrants are usually self-selected hard working, smart and relatively rich (otherwise you can't afford to emigrate), risk taking people - because you'd otherwise have a lot of trouble surviving in America. Stating "Asian-American" success, is like stating "Harvard-American" success - your sample is already biased. Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years - and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans. People centric exceptionalism is vastly overrated - what's more important is the wind at their backs (cheap resources/labour/stable society/technology convergence) and the benefits they receive when they are born (rich/schooling/health/connections).

barry-cotter 14y ago
Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years -and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans Yeah, just like Americans of Jewish ancestry! A group that came over most poor and not speaking the language very well and with low social capital and mostly did very well, and whose children did very well will revert all the way to average.
- confluence 14y ago
  The vast majority of that can be explained by randomness, the extreme variance of small samples and inappropriate use of the fundamental attribution error. Minorities live or die not because of anything intrinsic - but merely because of prevailing environmental forces. The "Jewish-success", like the article's "Asian-success", is merely a statistical fluke, just as is the failure of other oppressed minorities throughout the world. No group of people is better or worse than any other. They merely inhabit different environments. Thinking otherwise leads to fundamentally faulty thinking, inappropriate cultural stereotyping and general stupidity. Humans as a species are highly homogenous and population variances can usually be explained through environmental factors and random genetic mutation than by any inherent ability. > Long and Kittles show that indeed, African populations contain about 100% of human genetic diversity, whereas in populations outside of Africa diversity is much reduced, for example in their population from New Guinea only about 70% of human variation is captured. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation > While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way, i.e. that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance: all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_b... So I call bullshit on biologically derived differentiation across human populations by people with poor statistical and genetic understanding. There are ~2 billion Asians - reversion to the mean works highly effectively in these cases as immigration pressures stabilise. Race violates my rule that if it's vague, it's bullshit. Hence racial/cultural/fuzzy explanations for differentiating phenomena are discarded for the crap that they are.

mtmcarter 14y ago

N64 Emulator The N64 premiered throughout mid-1996 seeing that Nintendo’s front side-blue runner while in the first next-age bracket gaming console wars. Is usually was obviously a better run unit when compared with Sony’s Ps3 or perhaps Sega’s Saturn, the N64 usually lagged driving around profits. Nintendo made a decision to advertise the equipment about the merits of its rapid-launching container program plus the small idea that the idea highlighted your 64-tiny bit architectural mastery – regrettably for Manufacturers, individuals were extra astounded by high-volume Mp3 mass media, with-video game dvd sequences and also before-documented soundtracks than rapid running and the sized your machine’s line. http://emulatorzone.bcz.com/ http://emulatorzone.bcz.com/

smugengineer69 14y ago

Typical WSJ red scare claptrap. This paper is seriously still caught in the McCarthy era, especially when it comes to anything at all related to Asia. Sure this article seems positive on the surface, but underneath it all is a deep, abiding, white fear of being overtaken as the dominant racial group.