Emergent Divides: Class and Position among Asian Americans

The United States has had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with its new immigrants, and during the past two decades, that ambivalence has evolved into an ever deeper set of policy contradictions. On the one hand, several prominent commentators have noted that we are living in the midst of a new nativism, a time when politicians and other elites have often referred to immigrants in pejorative terms and have acted politically in ways to reduce immigration overall. Certainly much supports this view: immigration rules have become increasingly harsh, especially against the poor; the southern border has become more militarized; and the United States deports more people every year now than ever before. But on the other hand, proponents of this argument might be missing the other half of the story. More people have entered the United States to work and invest than ever before—entire communities have been built around new professional classes of South Asians, Europeans, mainland Chinese, and Korean immigrants, many for whom national boundaries and immigration restrictions are largely irrelevant, just a nuisance at the international airports through which they travel. These migrants are relatively unencumbered by the new immigration restrictions. In fact, for these classes of persons, Congress has consistently amended immigration rules to make their crossings easier.

In a complex way, we live in an era of flexible citizenship that exists alongside the new nativism, a time when immigration status is at once inconsequential and yet one of the most important of juridical identities. For the skilled and affluent, things could hardly be better; for the unskilled and the undocumented, things could hardly be worse. I argue here that Asian immigrants have felt this contradiction in greater terms than any other immigrant group in the United States over the past two decades. In light of this contradiction, we are approaching a moment when we should reevaluate Asian American studies as a field. In the 1960s, when the term "Asian American" first appeared in political contests over recognition and civil rights, the concept captured a shared life under white supremacist rules in spite of class differences or ethnic diversity among Asian Americans. It was a political term, much like "people of color," that was used to connote a common set of political objectives, even a collective history of racial oppression in the United States.

Over the past 15 years, however, a unique combination of demographic trends—much of it related to three decades of American immigration policy—has threatened the coherence of the concept to such an extent that the material and social distances between Asian Americans has become so pronounced and so obvious that a common political agenda and a common future seem highly unlikely. This essay is merely a preliminary step in measuring these distances, as well as a reminder of how powerfully immigration rules have shaped new political and social realities. The primary objective of this piece is to suggest new areas of research within the field, to look more closely at the emergent divides between Asian Americans, distances (as well as interrelationships) that are based on immigration status, class, and other measures of inequality.

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In Probationary Americans (2005), my brother Edward Park and I gave a detailed account of the fundamental changes in immigration law and policy since 1990. We argued that Congress had changed immigration rules incrementally over the past two decades toward two major policy objectives: to prevent and discourage the migration of the poor, while at the same time allowing for the steady migration of skilled workers. Immi?gration rules were reformed to better reflect a political consensus to reduce the welfare state and to promote the economic development of a post?industrial American economy driven by high technology industries. We gave a legislative history of various pieces of immigration law and policy, and we explored some of the immigration trends associated with these new rules. We treated many of these trends with caution, noting throughout Probationary Americans that the full effect of basic changes to immigration law would not be known for some time.

Yet the most...