The fastest-growing racial minority in America, Asians are nearly as segregated from
The fastest-growing racial minority in America, Asians are nearly as segregated from white Americans as African Americans and other groups.
Although the experience of African Americans leads many to equate segregation with a lack of socioeconomic success, Asians in America have largely achieved social and financial success while living separately from whites, often in residential neighborhoods deemed “separate but equal” — if not better.
With the exception of Vietnamese immigrants, largely on the West Coast, most Asian Americans live in areas with a higher mean income and proportion of college graduates, including Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, and Koreans. When separating Asians into six main groups, every ethnicity but Japanese is more segregated from whites than Asians as an entirety, while the two largest sub-groups, Chinese and Indians, are as segregated as Hispanics, with Vietnamese as separate from whites as African Americans.
Once concentrated in Chinatowns of major U.S. cities, more than 18 million Asian American residents live throughout the country, although with larger concentrations in urban areas such as New York City and along the West Coast. The Asian population has more than doubled during the past generation, with the Indian population growing the fastest of the fastest, nearly four times its size in 1990. With the exception of Japanese Americans, most American Asians were born in foreign countries, with more than three of every four Koreans in 2010 born overseas — compared to only 4.5 percent of the white population.