History of Asian Americans

History Of Asian Americans

Asian American history is the history of an ethnic and racial groups in the United States who are immigrants or descendants of persons from the continent of Asia. Spickard (2007) shows that "Asian American" was an idea invented in the 1960s to bring together Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans for strategic political purposes. Soon other Asian-origin groups were added, such as Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong and South Asian Americans. They had arrived as unskilled workers in significant numbers 1850-1905, and largely settled in Hawaii and California. They were the subject of intense hostility on the mainland into the 1940s. Since the change in the immigration laws in 1965, middle class Asians from many countries arrived in large numbers as college students, engineers and businessmen. Their image of success was portrayed with headlines of the "Model Minority". For the contemporary situation see Asian American.