The Asian American assimilation paradox

Abstract

The fastest growing ethnoracial group in the United States, Asian Americans are the most highly educated, the highest earning, and the most likely to intermarry. Once deemed diseased, morally deviant, unfit for citizenship, and unassimilable, Asian Americans have attained unprecedented racial mobility, now boasting socioeconomic outcomes that surpass those of native-born Whites. Their attainment has led some social scientists to conclude that Asians are rapidly assimilating into American mainstream and remaking it in the process. While Asian American attainment defies theories of racial disadvantage, their experiences with xenophobia, racism, and anti-Asian violence vex theories of assimilation–pointing to an assimilation paradox. At no recent time has the paradox become more apparent than during COVID-19 pandemic. We maintain that the paradox reflects three tensions: the ahistorical nature of sociologists’ research on Asian American assimilation; the tautology of using educational attainment acquired from immigrants’ countries of origin as a measure of structural assimilation in their country of destination; and the disjuncture between the way sociologists normatively measure assimilation and the way ethnoracial minorities experience it. By integrating legacies of exclusion into theories of Asian American assimilation, addressing the tautology, and incorporating a subject-centered approach into empirical measures, we advance theory and research, and reclaim narratives of Asian American assimilation.