Globalization

Asian American racial formation is determined not only by the social, economic, and political forces in the United States but also by U.S. colonialism and imperialism in Asia. Asian American lives thus need to be understood in relation to globalization: the transnational circulation of labor, capital, and culture, the restructuring of world politics, and the expansion of new technologies of communication and transportation.

The global penetration of Western economic systems, technological infrastructures, and popular cultures into Asian countries has produced imbalances in their internal social and economic structures and subsequently has spurred massive migration to the United States and elsewhere. Indeed, all the nation-states from which the largest number of Asian immigrants originate—China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia)—have had sustained and sometimes intimate social, political, and economic relations with the United States. Accordingly, the destabilizing effects of globalization can be documented via a critical examination of the changing patterns of Asian migration to the United States.

Many sociologists and geographers have used the term globalization to describe a specific set of late 20th-century conditions: the economic, social, and political effects of the high-speed circulation of labor, capital, and culture across societies, nations, and regions precipitated by an unprecedented development of capitalism on a global scale. However, the focus on the late 20th-century misses the much earlier connections between colonialism and globalization. Western penetration into Asia and, later, Asian markets, can be dated as far back as the 1500s. The Spanish colonization of the Philippine Islands in 1521 spurred a migration of Asians to the Americas as early as 1565.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States pursued an aggressive policy of expansionism, extending its political, economic, and cultural influence around the globe. Economic interest pushed the United States to cross the Pacific. The particular role that the United States imagined Asia to be playing was as a market for the accumulation of goods and capital. By the first decades of the 20th century, with burgeoning trade and investments in Asia (and Latin America), the United States had emerged as the leading imperialist power in competition with western European countries and Japan.