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Asian Pacific American Essay

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What Does It Mean to be an Asian Pacific American? The Asian American community has proven itself resilient, and has continued to bloom up until today – just a few years ago, Asian Americans had overtaken Latin Americans as the fastest growing minority in U.S. Society. In today’s time, one can hardly imagine how much Asian cultures influence in our day-to-day lives, but prior to that, the APA community had been subjected to suspicion and bigotry that was hardly justified, and its echoes still resound until now. In just a single lifetime, most of the scars of the past are hardly felt today, with Asians forming one of the integral threads of American society today. But in order to understand how our rights and privileges came to be, we first …show more content…

Chinamen migrating in the 19th century were by most accounts suffering from constant war and famine in China. The same sentiments can be seen among other ethnic groups who moved out for the same reason: to have a means to find their fortunes and make a living, as well as to pursue higher education within the States. These motivations hardly changed over the years. Metrics that show U.S. demographic data consistently rank APAs above other ethnicities in terms of educational attainment and achievement, as well as forming a sizable chunk of the American middle class. Moreover, Asians are more likely to be a part of the professional and technical workforce, while Pacific Islanders are concentrated on service and operator jobs (Ancheta 133). This was also one of the reasons why suspicions were raised against them in the first place: that these immigrants worked diligently for wages lower than Americans would accept comfortably. Venture capitalists in the late 1800’s exploited this sudden manpower boon, and eventually fuelled the economic expansion of the west coast. Regardless of the Anti-Asian sentiments of the U.S. public, the Asian Americans still built a stereotype of diligence and contentious action leading them to obtain the title of “model minority” of the U.S. public (Oyserman & Sakamoto

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