



Going the distance

Asians overtake Hispanics as America’s biggest group of new immigrants

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Readers' comments




Excellent. Hard-working immigrants help make America the greatest nation in the world. It is unfortunate that Asian immigration was restricted until the 1960s.


I agree with most of the comments, which state that Asian migrants are more likely to take jobs from Americans than Hispanic migrants.

Hispanic migrants to generalise, are less educated, and feel less pressure to assimilate, in conjunction with the pre-existing stereotypes of Hispanics as gardeners, mechanics or other various low skilled positions, they end up only taking the jobs, many Americans refuse to do

Asians being on average better educated, more likely to assimilate, and facing more beneficial stereotypes such as being labelled "hard working, and smart" can take the more highly skilled jobs, which in the USA are in more demand. These jobs on average are physically less demanding, and pay better, the exact type of jobs most Americans would prefer.

The reason there isn’t an uproar about this is the fact they Asian Americans are not as visible, they are spread out across the states, they adopt USA traditions, speak English, and they tend to socialise outside of their own communities. There the Perfect Migrants, because they become More American than Asian.

Gonzor in reply to iThinker

In the same way that European immigrants flooded and crushed native civilizations?
Moreover, and more importantly, the free movement of peoples is a consitutent part of the much touted free market that the United States -dubiously- claims to have been build on (for a more nuanced approach, read F. List's work). I would point out that the American economy is based on the low cost of this labour force. Why should hard working people be denied a productive role in society because they refuse to abandon their traditions and customs?
Nevertheless, regulation is needed, not in order to prevent the dilution of the "native" culture, but rather to ensure the efficient and sustainable distribution of labour.


Part of the reason Asians are successful in the US is because they assimilate and value education. However, if we want Asians to continue their assimilation, we should slow down the pace of migration through quotas. In the last decade, migration from China and India have been too fast too furious.

As for taking away jobs from natives, migration from India went up 7x in the last 2 decades, from 400,000 in the 80s to 2.8m in 2010, most came in as high tech workers on temporary visa, depressing wages in IT, so yes, they took away many of our good paying jobs. Chinese migration went up 3.5x in the last 2 decades, from 800k to 3.5m in 2010. I assume some got in on F1 student visa in STEM field then H1-B after college, but I've come acrossed many who don't seem to speak much English and do not seem to work in high tech, so Chinese migration is a bit of a mystery to me. How did they get in, esp. the ones who congregate in enthoburbs around LA, San Francisco and Queens/Chinatown, NY and do not seem to venture outside their own little enclaves?

The larger the immigrant group, the slower the assimilation. If immigration from asia, in particular China and India, continues at the present pace, soon they'll turn us into China and India due to much slower assimilation...the very hell they tried to escape from.

iThinker in reply to Cloudwarrior

China and India are incredibly corrupt countries. No one can get rich in these countries without doing something illegal - bribing, taking bribes, stealing IP, cheating on taxes, running ponzi schemes, running toxic polluting factories without incurring clean up cost, you name it. As soon as they made enough money they get the hell out of dodge before they get caught, or get sick from the toxic pollutants their own factories emit into the environment. As far as I'm concerned, these people should be made to stay put and live in the same hell that they helped create. Admitting more of these soulless opportunists will not make America a better place, as evidenced by the Galleon insider trading case on Wall street. Admitting large numbers of them will turn us into the next China or India.


Most Latin American countries are now stable, democratic and increasingly prosperous. It is not surprising that they are starting to stay home or even in the case of many Mexicans return home (immigration from Mexico is now effectively nil due to the number of migrants returning back to Mexico).

The question should be asked, with the increasing prosperity in Asia, why so many would prefer to move to the US which is supposedly (according to many on here) on a short path to economic and societal destruction.


Pew Research Center enjoys world-wide reputation for field-based findings. Nevertheless, the article based on "Going the Distance" has raised a couple of methodology-based questions in my mind.In the first place, the decision to club both authorised & unauthorised migrants together is fraught with the risk of data-distortion, because of the possibility of relatively-low level of credibility of data likely to be generated in respect of any given category of law-breakers, more so alien illegal immigrants. Secondly, if distance is a deciding factor in detering the Asian migrants from returning to their homeland then, sure enough, no migration from Asia to the USA should have taken place in the first instance itself! The fact is that "distance" ceases to be a factor in the decision-taking process once the final decision to migrate has been taken. Moreover, "distance" has lost much of its relevance in the modern era of distance-bridging technology. Discussions on international migration of the authorised variety would do well to keep its distance from this concept.


"whereas Hispanic immigrants, most of whom have less than a college education, are often accused of taking jobs from native-born Americans, Asian immigrants are less likely to face that sort of complaint"

One reason you might think this true is that Asian immigrants have been so concentrated in high tech. Politicians, doctors, lawyers and reporters face no negative impact due to this; indeed, the net effect is largely beneficial to them.

A corollary of this effect is that 2nd and 3rd generation Americans are avoiding science and engineering in school, because the rewards for the effort have declined markedly with the ability to import competition.

Ghentis in reply to uUdoit

There were also far more cases of Japanese-Americans actually performing espionage than there were German or Italian-Americans. I still think the internment camp idea was atrocious, but that was the logic behind it.

I live in an area of South Florida with a lot of Hatian immigrants. Most of them are not an asset to the country and letting them all in after the earthquake just brought the disaster here. That said, the other large immigrant groups that make up the area (Cuban, Jamaican, Brazilian, and East Europeans)are great to have.


Id argue their optimism is misguided regarding their kids doing better than them.How can you forget japanese-americans interment in camps during WW2?
No such plight was in store for Italian or german americans.


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