Asian Americans

Asian Americans are defined by the federal government as Americans who trace their ancestry back to the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005, there were about 14.4 million Asian Americans living in the United States, representing about 5 percent of the total population. The largest concentrations of Asian Americans are in California, New York, Hawaii, Texas, and New Jersey. Asian Americans are a diverse group of people with regard to national origin, customs, language, genetic makeup, acculturation, and economic and social status in the United States, and any statistics computed for this group as a whole must be interpreted with caution, particularly in reference to any particular ethnic subgroup. In fact, creation of the ethnic category Asian American is based more on bureaucratic convenience and sociological validity, because it would not be practical to collect and report data on so many small ethnic and tribal groups.

Because Asian Americans constitute a relatively small proportion of the U.S. population, for reporting purposes, data concerning them are often combined with that gathered from another relatively small group, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (NH/PI), creating the classification Asian and Pacific Islander (API). Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are people whose origins lie in the original people of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or the other Pacific Islands. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were just under 1 million NH/PI people residing in the United States in 2005, representing about 0.1 percent of the U.S. population; about 46 percent were native Hawaiians, with the next largest groups being Samoan and Chamorro/Guamanian. About 280,000 NH/PI people live in Hawaii; other states with substantial NH/PI population include California, Washington, Texas, New York, Florida, and Utah. In 2000, according to the Census Bureau, the six largest ethnic categories within the API group were Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese.

Although the combination of the Asian and NH/PI groups may be a practical necessity and can be defended on some geographical, historical, and cultural grounds, it also creates an even more diverse and heterogenous group of people (including at least 50 identifiable subgroups) for whom summary statistics may be misleading. However, individual API subgroups in the United States usually constitute too small a proportion of any national sample to allow accurate estimation within the subgroups, and even the combined [Page 57]API category often represents so small a percentage of the total that it is not reported separately. This lack of data is a serious problem in studying the health of Asian or API Americans, and scholars must often draw on several sources, including results from national surveys, results from smaller and more narrowly targeted studies, and results from studies collected on Asians living in outside the United States.

Asian Americans are sometimes considered to be a “model minority” who have achieved the highest social and health status of any U.S. ethnic group, exceeding even that of Caucasian Americans. However, this characterization overlooks the diversity of experience within the Asian or API groups. For instance, life expectancy in 2002 was higher among the API group than any other racial/ethnic group in the United States, but showed considerable variability: Female life expectancy among API subgroups ranged from 86.1 for Caucasians and 74.9 for African Americans. To take another example, Asian Americans overall are 20 percent less likely than non-Hispanic Caucasians to die from diabetes, but Native Hawaiians living in Hawaii are over 5.7 times as likely as Caucasians living in Hawaii to die from diabetes.

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