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This chapter discusses why the American public has a significantly more negative opinion of Mexican immigrants than Asian immigrants. Anti-immigrant sentiment is directed almost exclusively at Mexicans, and Asian immigrants are rarely the target of any public hostility. Mexican immigrants are seen as more disruptive because of their perceived size, their status as predominantly illegal and unskilled immigrant workers, and their apparent unwillingness to assimilate culturally. In contrast, Asians are viewed as a smaller immigrant group that is legal, highly skilled, and better-integrated in American society because of socioeconomic mobility and cultural assimilation. However, the public perception of the disruptive impact of Mexican immigration seems to be exaggerated and Asian immigrants may be more socially and economically disruptive than commonly assumed.

The chapter serves as an initial attempt to survey the field of modern Asian immigrants, as well as the effects of employment patterns on gender relations. It shows that the development of female-intensive industries in the United States—and the corresponding preference for female and racialized labor—has improved the employability of some Asian immigrant women and has placed them as the co-providers or primary providers of their families. Based on the provided data, it is suggested that gender relations can be experienced differently in various structural occupational locations. The chapter shows that today's Asian immigrants are composed of not only low-wage service sector workers, but also significant numbers of white-collar professionals. It also takes a look at three occupational categories and the gender issues found within each group: the wage laborers, the salaried professionals, and the self-employed entrepreneurs.

This chapter discusses the flow of Asian immigrants to Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to analyze the selection in with regard to entrepreneurship and success in running the business. The microdata from the censuses of the three countries are used to compare differences across the ethnic backgrounds that entrepreneurs come from—in particular, Chinese, Indian, and other Asian immigrant groups. A few striking facts emerge from the research. Asian immigrants to all three countries have education levels that are higher than the national average, and in the United States, the education levels of Asian immigrants are particularly high relative to the entire population. Some of the variation in the education of Asian immigrants across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom is likely to be due to immigration policy. Business ownership rates of Asian immigrants in the United States and Canada are similar to the national average, and in the United Kingdom, they are substantially higher than the national average and the highest among all three countries. Businesses owned by the various immigrant groups are found to concentrate in different industries, which may be related to their relative skills and selection.

This chapter focuses on the case of Asian undocumented youth to explain immigrant youth activists’ efforts to unearth the silenced history of Asian undocumented immigration and to place this history in conversation with current immigration debates. As part of these efforts, activists use storytelling strategies to counteract stereotypes of Asian immigrants as solely high-skilled workers and individuals who have come to the United States to attend college, noting that Asians were and continue to be affected by the issue of undocumented immigration. Asian undocumented activists also strategically draw upon their intersectional identities as both Asian and undocumented individuals in Latinx organizing spaces to work alongside members of a group that is largely invoked in the national imaginary in discussions of undocumented immigration. As part of activists’ efforts to push beyond discussions solely of the need for increased representation of Asian and other non-Latinx undocumented activists, this chapter emphasizes the extensive efforts that Asian and Latinx undocumented organizers have undertaken to employ a broad, multiracial approach to framing undocumented identity.

This chapter explores how desi activism reimagines the Indian immigrant location and seeks to mobilize the politics of citizenship around issues of race and class. Using drumnyc.org, the homepage of New York-based organization Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), as a case study, it foregrounds a particular mode of citizenship among South Asian immigrants wherein belonging and rights are negotiated through technologies of race and immigration and through network cultures. The site represents its immigrant members as active political subjects in the U.S. homeland who craft a cultural location for themselves by engaging, resisting, and responding to the disciplinary strategies of the technologized racial state. In doing so, the activists of DRUM reveal how belonging is produced and enacted through the transnational online media and through immigrant, labor, and racial coalitions. Desi is here articulated to labor struggles, racial alliances, and immigrant collectives to produce desi networks as brown, working-class spaces of political leadership.

This chapter explores why the valley became such an important hub of racial and ethnic diversity, especially among recently arrived Asian immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. Beginning with a brief look back at the pathways forged by early Asian American pioneers, the chapter focuses on the sweeping changes that occurred in the region economically, spatially, and socially after World War II. The chapter shows how Asian Americans navigated their new terrain and put down roots in working- and middle-class neighborhoods, in particular underscoring how the Fremont suburb's rapid growth and development were prefaced on the valley's booming innovation economy and Asian Americans' own suburban dreams.

This chapter examines the role that grassroots organizing and leadership development play in tackling social and economic inequalities along multiple axes of difference, including race, gender, immigration status, and language ability. It locates immigrant women workers at the center of social change by focusing on Asian Immigrant Women Advocates's (AIWA) self-reflexive organizing approach. AIWA is a grassroots community-based organization whose mission is to improve the living and working conditions of Asian immigrant women employed in low-paid and socially devalued jobs. AIWA's English-language dominance workshop embodies many of its core principles and organizing philosophy. The chapter analyzes AIWA's theory and method of change as well as its intersectional organizing approach, with particular emphasis on its English-language classes, workplace literacy classes, and Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS). It shows that AIWA produces new kinds of politics, polities, and personalities by placing immigrant women workers at the center of the struggle.

This chapter examines how South Asian immigrants were affected by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which significantly increased the number of deportable offenses and reduced potential deportees' legal rights, and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which recognized and institutionalized violence against women as a law enforcement priority in the United States. More specifically, the chapter considers the logics of exceptional violence and of punishment that are deployed in order to produce violence that is legible to the state. It discusses two components of state responses to domestic violence that directly affect South Asian immigrant survivors: the criminalization of domestic violence and the institutionalization of a legally recognized “battered immigrant woman” in VAWA, along with the limitations that transpire for immigrant survivors of domestic violence who are ineligible for membership in this category. It also explores the implications of both state responses for the advocacy work of the South Asian Women's Organization.

This introductory chapter is concerned with Asian immigrants, specifically Cambodians, Mien, and Laotians. It first discusses the debate surrounding American citizenship before looking at the various concepts of political identity. This is followed by a section on gender differentiation and racial bipolarism. It then discusses the techniques the text uses to examine citizenship and other techniques for self-making and subject-making. The chapter ends with a section on the transition of the Cambodians from the utopian communism introduced by Pol Pot to the advanced liberalism of the United States. A summary of the other chapters is included.

This chapter traces the ways in which Dengue Fever band centralizes the figure of the immigrant in its performance practice, reading the band within the historical and legal context responsible for the racialization of Cambodian immigrants and Cambodian Americans. Given that the Asian-immigrant body in the United States is often racialized as an “illegal” national security risk, lead singer Chhom Nimol Chhom's performance of Asian-immigrant subjectivity onstage complicates the racialization of the Cambodian-immigrant body as always already illegal and thus subject to the intrusive and often violent legal regulation of the state. The band performs repurposed scraps of a forgotten past in order to refuse the politics of imperial amnesia that have shaped Cambodian American racialization from the post-Vietnam War era to the present.

This chapter looks at Seung-Hui Cho and the violence at Virginia Tech to critically interrogate Asian American masculinity and racial formations in relation to contemporary postracial discourses in the American South since 9/11. On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. The media soon dubbed the event the “deadliest shooting rampage in American history,” and news coverage was inundated with uncovering the “madness at Virginia Tech.” What stood out beyond the numbers of murdered individuals in a “school shooting” was the shooter himself, a Korean American whose identity and location as “alien-other” marked him as always already suspicious, dangerous, and outside. The chapter then analyzes the important ways in which Seung-Hui Cho was simultaneously racially othered as an Asian immigrant alien and whitened as disenfranchised male youth.

This chapter examines the paradoxes of patriarchy by drawing on the experiences of South Asian immigrant women in ethnic labor markets. Most South Asian women who work in the South Asian labor market in the United States are engaged in low-wage work within the ethnic labor market, employed by male-owned businesses and with little separation between the private and public spheres. The women and their families often live in same ethnic enclaves where they work. This chapter considers whether South Asian immigrant women's entry into a structurally stratified ethnic labor market creates a paradox in their lives. More specifically, it explores whether employment increases the women's bargaining power within the household and whether the close proximity between work and home facilitates working longer hours for little pay. The chapter reveals the paradoxes of immigration and gendered labor in ethnic enclaves. While the ethnic markets' familial/patrilineal structure creates social capital and a safe space for the South Asian women, it also makes them vulnerable to exploitation in terms of reduced wages and increased work hours.

This chapter examines how numerous companies sought the services of Asian immigrants. Efficiency, availability, and manageability, along with the fact that they would work for lower wages than white workers, made the Chinese an appealing source of labor to railroads and other businesses. Yet they remained desirable only so long as they met expectations of compliance and placidity. Employers would no more accept challenges to authority and prerogative from the Asians than they would from members of any other ethnic group. Although the Chinese escaped association with specific radical ideologies, such as anarchism or socialism, managers did not consider their assertions of agency to be any less subversive. Labor radicalism emanating from any source drew censure for being un-American. To some critics, Chinese immigrants lacked the wherewithal ever to become proper Americans. Their place of origin, sociocultural characteristics, and physical appearance engendered intense bigotry. Racially biased perceptions also came to justify animus on the part of other workers, who saw the Chinese as competitors whose low standards of living, greatly inferior to those of American laborers, enabled them to work for significantly lower wages. Enmity ultimately led to statutory discriminations.

This introductory chapter argues that Asian American literature is traditionally understood as a body of texts written in English that depicts a specific social history in which individuals of various ethnicities faced discrimination due to perceptions and laws that designated them as aliens. Common narratives involve the troubling acculturation process of the Asian immigrant; the intergenerational ruptures between Asian immigrant parents and their more Americanized children; and the problems of defining identity when an Asian American travels back to a land of ethnic origin. The book then challenges the tidy links between authorial ancestry and fictional content, and between identity and form, to expand what is typically thought of as Asian American culture and criticism.

This book explores the labor experiences of immigrant women, primarily Asians and Latinas, engaged in low-wage work in the era of neoliberal globalization. It assesses the impact of neoliberal globalization on the economic, political, and social lives of immigrant women both at home and abroad, as well as the strategies used by these women to deal with labor disruptions—interruptions in immigrant women's labor patterns due to the social and political processes resulting from neoliberal globalization. Labor disruptions encompass both “for-pay” labor and gendered labor within the family and occur in ethnic enclaves and within the informal economy. The book seeks to elucidate how Asian and Latina immigrant women, with the assistance of community-based organizations, organize and mobilize against disruptions caused by neoliberal globalization and the neoliberal state. This introduction reflects on the challenges facing future scholars of labor and migration processes.