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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 2 23 3 The Invisible Immigrants: Asian Indian Settlement Patterns and Racial/Ethnic Identities EMILY H. SKOP AND CLAIRE E. ALTMAN INTRODUCTION Often in vernacular language, all people from the Asian continent are labeled as “Asian.” This taxonomy is a gross overgeneralization of the variation of countries and ethnicities within the vast continent. The Census Bureau defines an Asian as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent” (American Fact Finder, 2004). Yet the Asian population living in the United States is a remarkable collection of individuals in terms of their immigration history, settlement patterns , and human and social capital. Even so, at varying times in American statistics and academics, Asians have been amalgamated into general “Asian,” “white,” or “other” categories. These vague and extensive racial or ethnic labels have been used despite distinct geographic origin, languages, social, and cultural traits. With the emergence of social and racial/ethnic consciousness in the late 1960s and 1970s, subgroups of Asians desired a more specific and representative categorization than the pan-umbrella term “Asian.” As a result , the Census Bureau created a variety of new classifications for the Asian population, including the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese. The new grouping “Asian Indian” also appeared in the 1980 census and defined Asian Indians as “including people who indicated their race as ‘Asian Indian’ or identified themselves as Bengalese, Bharat, Dravidian, East Indian, or Goanese” (Xenos, Barringer, and Levin, 1989, p. 5). The 2000 Census was the first time in the history of the Census that respondents could choose more than one racial category. Even with this monumental alteration in racial self-identification, the Census Bureau reports that in 2000 only 2.4 percent of all Americans reported more than one race (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001). On the other hand, 11.6 percent of the Asian Indian population chose the category “Asian Indian in combination with one or more other races and/or detailed Asian categories” (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002). Many of these individuals are second-generation Indians who are biracial, while others are individuals who chose “in combination” as a form of protest against the whole process of racial classification in the U.S. (Sailer, 2002). As one immigrant put it: “The impulse to call us all ‘Asians,’ using such a broad label to encompass everyone from Koreans to Pakistanis, seems both meaningless and demeaning to me. There’s no utility in lumping together an entire continent of peoples with such different cultures and religions, and refusing to allow for these differences is, I think, unfair and fundamentally colonialist” (Sailer, 2002, p. 2). The many controversies surrounding the racial classification of Asian Indians have a good deal of influence on the immigrant groups’ settlement patterns and racial/ethnic identities. In this chapter, we focus on Asian Indians (and use the “in combination” category). We answer four key questions: What is the history of AsianIndian immigration to the United States? Where do the 1.9 million Asian Indians settle and reside in the United States? How do the immigrants negotiate their racial/ethnic identities? And finally, why do the immigrants re- 310 Emily H. Skop and Claire E. Altman main largely invisible as a racial/ethnic group? Our goal is to understand why racial/ethnic identities and settlement patterns matter, and how these characteristics influence the immigrant adaptation process. ASIAN-INDIAN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES Like many other racial/ethnic groups in the U.S., Asian-Indian immigrants have been subject to America ’s xenophobia, immigration quotas, partisan politics, and/or economic and technical needs. There were few Asian-Indian residents in the U.S. very early (1700s–1800s), but more continuous and steady flows of migration have occurred for the last one hundred years at varying speeds and intensities (Lal, 1999). In 1907, in Bellingham , Washington, a group of Asian Indians were the target of racial riots. During this time the Asiatic Exclusion League tried to inhibit Indian immigration to the States. By 1913, supporters of India’s struggle for independence , primarily Indian students, came into view in the Western United States, especially California, where we still see large populations of Asians today, particularly Asian Indians. Then, the Immigration Act of 1917 disallowed any and all Asians from entering the United States. The court battle US vs. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, established a further deterrent...

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