Salzburg Global Fellow Wai Wah Chin believes that immigration, merit, and shared values hold more meaning than identity classifications
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Wai Wah Chin, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
The cultural, social, and ideological maps of America are very complex and dynamic. The classifications of Asian American and Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) are too incoherent as tools for understanding them.
With 57% of Asian Americans foreign-born, the immigrant experience might serve as a better tool than “identity”, which is often a code word for presumed unity in history, geography, or melanin.
But immigration status is still not monolithic. Depending on context, a Taiwanese immigrant might share a great deal with an immigrant from Ukraine, but very little with an immigrant from Pakistan, or vice versa. Most immigrants tend to believe in the American Dream, with its freedom to choose, achieve by one’s own merit, and keep the fruits of achieving. But that still is a tendency, not a universality, whose prioritization in a community varies by the challenges specific to that community.
Despite the incoherence of the “Asian American” label, there was a great deal of discussion in the summer of 2024 about “Asian Americans” moving ideologically to the right. That, however, turned out to be merely a reflection of the entire country. In the November 2024 elections, every group other than older white women – men, women, young, old, black, white, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, even the Amish – moved right. Despite non-stop efforts to divide and disparage, shared concerns, rather than polarizing “identity", moved voting.
For so-called Asian Americans, similarly for all Americans, the disconnect was stark between their lives and values and those of the “social justice” elite who purported to speak for them. While that elite harped on injustices of decades or even over a century ago, the grassroots and majority found those hollow and irrelevant. These communities have more pressing concerns to worry about than to appropriate the sufferings of long-departed people, often of totally foreign communities from which they did not even descend.
It is particularly ironic to many Asian Americans that the elite regularly serves up to them one of their favorites, the Chinese Exclusion Act of nearly 150 years ago, ignoring the Act’s fundamental transgression of excluding people by race because they worked too hard too well. This remains relevant today when it comes to exclusion in education in general and college admissions in particular. Until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, Asian Americans were excluded from Harvard University and other elite schools for working too hard too well – and the elite fought to the last inch to defend that exclusion of Asian Americans.
Although the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard case was filed on behalf of Asian American applicants, the plaintiff did not seek redress for discrimination in the form of compensatory favoritism for only Asian American applicants. Instead, the plaintiff asked that all applicants be evaluated only based on their merit, regardless of race or ethnicity. So when the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s Asian exclusion was unconstitutional, polls showed that this decision was supported by all Americans – whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians alike.
Once again, this showed that so-called Asian Americans shape the cultural, social, and ideological map of America today by being Americans. "E pluribus unum" (out of many, one) - that is what makes America great for all its people.
Wai Wah Chin is an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank focused on domestic policy and urban affairs, and the charter president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY), an all-volunteer organization advocating for equal rights, especially in education. A graduate of Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, with a professional background in private equity, Wai Wah is a dedicated advocate for equal rights and for all to be judged for their individual merits.
Explore our digital publication, which includes more coverage from the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse”.
