Editor's note: Although this passage is primarily a critique of prevailing misinterpretations of data from the 1970 U.S. Census, it remains relevant today because the model minority stereotype was founded on such misinterpretations.
By Sucheng Chan
Excerpted from Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Gale Group, 1991)
According to [U.S. Census] figures, Chinese and Japanese
Americans had outpaced whites even in terms of median family income by 1970.
Japanese American median Family income was almost $3,000 higher, and Chinese
American $1,000 higher than the U.S. median family income. But the federal
government's study failed to place these figures alongside other relevant
information, such as the fact that 60 percent of the Japanese American and
Chinese American families (compared to only 51 percent among the U.S. population
as a whole), more than one person worked, which helps to account for their
higher family income. If per capita income, rather than family income, had been
used as the measure, then the public would have learned that Chinese Americans
(thought not Japanese Americans) were making considerably less than the national
average. Moreover, if Hispanic groups, which earned much lower than other
whites, had been removed from the aggregate white figures, then Asian Americans
would not have outranked whites.
Social scientists who analyzed the 1970 census data reached various
conclusions depending on whether they used statistics for the nation as a whole
or for states with particularly high Asian concentrations, whether they
separated the American-born from the foreign-born, and whether they
distinguished between males and females. Studies based on national data, such as
those by Barry Chiswick and by Charles Hirschman and Morrison Wong, invariably
showed that American-born Chinese and Japanese men had a higher income than
white men, but as Robert Jiobu, Amado Cabezas, and David Moulton have
documented, such was not the case in California, where 58 percent and 45
percent, respectively, of the Japanese and Chinese in the contiguous states
resided in 1970. In that state, American-born Chinese and Japanese men indeed
had significantly more years of school than non-Hispanic whites, but their
median incomes were no higher than that of the latter, because their returns to
education - that is, the additional income derived from increased years of
schooling - were lower than those for whites. According to Robert Jiobu's 1976
study of American-born men in California in 1970, for each additional year of
education, whites earned $522 more, compared to $438 for Japanse, $320 for
Chinese, $340 for Mexican Americans, and $284 for blacks. Thus, the Asian-white
parity in income was made possible mainly by the Asian American's higher level
of education.
Other criticisms have been raised against the model minority thesis, mainly
by researchers associated with the Asian American community organization, ASIAN,
Inc., in San Francisco. First, more than half of the Asian/Pacific American
population in the United States lives in only five metropolitan areas -
Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York - and of these, more
than nine-tenths are found in urban centers. These cities are not only
high-income areas but also high-cost-of-living-areas. Thus, while Asian
Americans (and others) living there may earn more, they also have to spend more.
Second, in areas with the highest density of Asian Americans, the percentage
of Asian Americans in low-status, low-income occupations - that is, service
workers, laborers, farm laborers, and private household workers - is
considerably higher than among whites. In 1970, for example, fully 25 percent of
all gainfully employed Chinese men in the United States were cooks, waiters,
busboys, dishwashers, and janitors. Such a figure gives an impression of Asian
American economic well-being that is quite different from based on consideration
of median income alone.
Third, a detailed study of the San Francisco-Oakland Standard Metropolitan
Statistical Area (SMSA) showed that Asian Americans were unevenly distributed in
the economy. Professionals clustered in accounting, dentistry, nursing, health
technology, and engineering and were underrepresented in law, teaching,
administration, social services, and the higher levels of the medical
professions. Managers were more likely to be self-employed than employees of
large firms. Salespersons were retail clerks but seldom brokers or insurance
agents. Clerical workers were mostly file clerks, typists, or office machine
operators, and not secretaries or receptionists. Few Asian Americans held jobs
in the heavy-machine, electrical, paper, chemical, or construction industries.
Most female operatives were garment workers. In short, Asian Americans were
concentrated in occupations that did not pay as well as other jobs in the same
industries.
Fourth, the low unemployment rate of Asian Americans- another measure often
used to depict their economic success - merely camouflages high underemployment.
Wary of being of welfare, many Asian American workers apparently would rather
hold low-paid, part-time, or seasonal jobs than receive public assistance.
Fifth, the high labor force participation rate of Asian American women in
both 1970 and 1908 - supposedly a sign of their ready acceptance by employers -
is in reality a reflection of the fact that more Asian American women are
compelled to work because the male members of their families earn such low
wages. It is true that working Asian American women earn a higher median income
than do white working women, but they also have superior educational
qualifications and live in localities with higher wages. Furthermore, compared
to white women, a larger percentage of them work full time, which helps to drive
their median income upward. But despite their high educational level, they
receive lower returns their education than do white women, while the disparity
between their returns and those of white men is even greater. In other words,
they are not receiving earnings that are commensurate with their years of
schooling. Sixth, with regard to the educational attainment of Asian Americans,
the sizable influx of highly educated professionals after 1965 has inflated the
average years of schooling completed. Critics of the model minority stereotype
point out that the most important consideration should not be educational level,
but returns to education, which more clearly reveal the existence of
discrimination. For Asian Americans, even in 1980, these returns were still not
on par with those received by white men.
The entry of professionals has had another effect. Since some of them have
not been able to find professional jobs, they have bought small businesses,
thereby increasing the number of "managers" in the Asian American --
particularly the Korean American - population. However, many of them operate
only small mom-and-pop stores with no paid employees and very low gross
earnings. Unlike journalists who tout Korean entrepreneurship as a sign of
success, scholars who have examined the situation argue that the kind of
business Korean immigrants engage in is, in fact, a disguised form of cheap
labor: owners of small businesses run a high risk of failure and work long
hours. Many of them could not stay afloat were it not for the unpaid labor they
extract from their spouses, children, and other relatives. Nonetheless, small
business currently is an important channel of upward mobility open to nonwhite
immigrants who face obstacles in obtaining well-paying and secure jobs.
Finally, other groups of Asian Americans do not share the improved economic
standing achieved by Japanese and Chinese Americans. In 1970 in the San
Francisco-Oakland SMSA, according to Amado Cabezas and his associates, Filipinos
(lumping together foreign- and American-born) earned only 58 percent of what
white men earned, while Filipinas earned only 38 percent. The respective figures
in the Los Angeles-Long Beach SMSA were 62 percent and 47 percent. In 1980, in
the San Francisco-Oakland SMSA American-born Filipino men made 64 percent of
what American-born white males made, while American-born Filipinas made 45
percent. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach SMSA, the comparable figures were 72
percent and 48 percent. Foreign-born men fared about the same as their
American-born peers, while the foreign-born women did slightly better than their
American- born sisters. A larger proportion of American-born Filipinos hold
working- class jobs than do Chinese and Japanese Americans. They also seem to
receive no discernible returns to schooling.
