Member 440012

I agree that some asian groups suffered, but for the most part it was a different and temporary suffering (at least in this century). Japanese internment camps were horrific, but otherwise Asian Americans were discriminated against mainly by a refusal to allow them to immigrate. Because Asian immigration was made legal in the 60s the majority of Asian immigrants in the states are recent, within 1-2 generations.

They should benefit from AA - or at least the poor Vietnamese ones who fled here and ended up essentially replicating fishing villages, and the asian families that have lived here for generations. However asian americans tend to be excluded from programs that are looking for underrepresented populations, but there are also plenty of programs that accept them as a minority population. My college definitely counted asian Americans when reporting its minority enrollment numbers, and I've worked at plenty of places that did the same.

Otherwise there's a pretty simple selection effect that happens when you're looking at the Asian American population that's doing stellar here. They aren't just naturally better than everyone else. They work hard but an equally disproportionate number of the ones accepted to medical school have many of the same advantages that we complain about for rich white students.

To come to America legally can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Look back at the charts that I posted previously. One shows that the Asian American population is far more likely than even the white population to have parents with advanced degrees. Another shows that about half of those students are also foreign born. That's a direct effect of our immigration system. Children of immigrants and immigrants themselves tend to be richer and more educated than the general population and then also do better. Our immigration system gives priority to immigration to people who already have advanced degrees, and who are already rich comparatively to the rest of their compatriots. By default, people who move to another country are the most proactive of their people. Meanwhile its harder in a lot of countries to get that advanced degree in the first place. It goes a lot further than the stereotype of the rich foreigner.

A lot of the students who make it to medical school therefore benefit both from educated parents AND from not having to struggle all the way through the US school system. Its the root of the stereotype that "asians are all good at math". Anyone from a foreign system starts doing advanced math in elementary school that we may not see until high school here. So you have to remember that when you try to mass Asian students into a cohesive whole, you're mostly looking at the 1% money or intelligence-wise of something like a 1/3 of the worlds people, and all of North America has a population equal to 5% of the world. We just accept them, then refuse to honor their parents degrees so they end up going back through school and working as nurses, and then wonder why their kids don't perform the same as other kids if you look just at economic levels. Meanwhile even legal immigration from countries that are close to the US are biased in favor of poor, uneducated employees willing to work in kitchens.

There are many studies that have shown that the asian families that have lived here for generations have suffered for it, and ARE discriminated against. For example, while as a whole they make more than the general white population, on a job by job basis, there's a wage gap and low representation at the tops of industry. However it doesn't look like they're being discriminated against because as a result of their immigration they're mildly worse off from above average. It's obvious when you're worse off starting at the bottom of the pile and it matters more practically because there's no place to fall, but the same morally.