Asian-Americans are now the country\u2019s best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial group. With that the Wall Street Journal wrote an article entitled \u201cRise of the Tiger Nation,\u201d which attempts to parallel the success of Asian Americans with American Jews.<\/B> They share both the distinction and the occasional burden of immigrant success. You can read the full article here. Author Lee Siegel uses examples like NBA\u2019s Jeremy Lin to Survivor\u2019s Yul Kwon to illustrate the visibility of Asian Americans. The piece offer several distinctions that helps and hurt opportunities for Asian Americans including the Chinese Exclusion Act, internment camps, and religion.<\/B> From the article, \u201cAsian-Americans have followed the opposite trajectory from Jewish-Americans.<\/B>
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\nToxic racism and then prohibitions against immigration prevented them from rising in American society for nearly a century. And then they did so with unique alacrity. Jewish immigrants, whether in the 19th century, in the 1930s as refugees from Hitler or in the 1980s as refugees from the Soviet Union, came here for the most part without a penny to their name. Today, Asian-Americans arrive in America more highly educated, and more prosperous, than any other immigrant group.\u201d <\/B>The article is an interesting read, but the parallelism aren\u2019t quite on point. Like missing the wave of Chinese Cultural Revolution, where immigrants came over leaving everything behind in China.<\/B> The author does conclude on in interesting note. \u201cYet the astounding success of Asian-Americans raises the dark question of how long they will be able to resist attracting the furies of fear and envy, especially during times of economic stress, or of economic and political conflict with countries like China, where the preponderance of Asian-Americans still come from. If China does one day become an explicit antagonist, it seems likely that the anxiety among Chinese-Americans will be even more intense than that of American Jews every time the allegiances of the American-Jewish lobby are questioned.\u201d<\/B><\/p>\n