RSF authors Jennifer Lee (Columbia University), Karthick Ramakrishnan (University of California, Riverside), and Janelle Wong (University of Maryland) have co-authored a recent paper on Asian Americans and the Census. Their article appears in a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, edited by former RSF visiting scholars Richard Alba (CUNY Graduate Center) and Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University), that analyzes the challenges of collecting accurate data on race and ethnicity in the Census at a time of rapid demographic change in the U.S. The issue gathers papers presented at a conference held at the Russell Sage Foundation in December 2016, titled “What the Census Bureau Needs to Know to Improve Ethnic, Racial, and Immigration Statistics.”

Today Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the U.S. and are projected by the Census Bureau to make up 14% of the American population by 2065. The authors note that unlike other racial groups in the U.S., most Asian Americans are immigrants, with two out of every three born outside the U.S. Immigration also continues to drive over 60% of Asian American population growth (compared to 22% for Latinos) and the significant diversity among these immigrants’ national origins affects patterns of ethnic and racial identification. As the authors point out, individuals of Asian descent are much more likely to identify by their national origins (for example, Korean, Chinese, or Indian) than they are to identify as “Asian American.”

The vast differences between the national origins and migration histories of Asians in the U.S. manifest in divergent socioeconomic outcomes. “While some [Asian immigrants] arrive as poorly educated refugees from war torn countries,” the authors write, “others migrate through employer sponsored H-1B visas.” As a result, there are significant disparities between national-origin groups on measures such as household income, educational attainment, poverty levels, and political participation. For example, while 72% of Indians and 53% of Chinese hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, less than 15% of Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong have a bachelor’s, and are less likely than African Americans or Latinos to have a high school degree. Similarly, national-origin groups such as Burmese and Bhutanese have very high rates of limited English proficiency, while other groups, such as Indians, have low rates.

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Because such disparities among national-origin groups are often eclipsed by statistics on Asian Americans overall—for example, statistics that suggest that Asian Americans are the highest-educated racial group in the country—the authors advocate data disaggregation, or collecting and reporting detailed national-origin data among Asian Americans. They note that on the Census, this could take the form of combining a check box for race with a write-in field for respondents’ national origins. Prior studies have found that pairing a check box with a write-in field increases response rates and produces the most consistency between self-reporting race and ethnicity in subsequent interviews. As the authors conclude, “Collecting and reporting detailed national origin data among Asian Americans are critical for better designing federal policies and more equitably allocating federal resources, especially for members of disadvantaged Asian ethnic groups.”

Read the full report.