ABSTRACT
Asian Americans are touted as the successful model minority next in line to assimilate into the expanding pot of ‘white’ America. Asian-origin Americans are classified along with European-origin Americans for equal opportunity programmes while other minority groups such as Blacks, Latinos and Native American Indians are not. Asian Americans have high levels of academic achievement, high median family income and rising intermarriage rates. In 1999, their median household income was the highest of all racial groups while their poverty rate was the lowest of all racial groups. In 1998, Asian Americans made up more than 20 per cent of the undergraduates at universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology.1 By the second generation, most Asian Americans lose fluency in their parents’ native language and speak only English. They also intermarry extensively with whites and more than 25 per cent of Asian Americans have a partner of a different racial background.2 Thus public officials, along with some immigration scholars, suspect that Asian Americans are assimilating and ‘becoming white’ like the Southern Eastern European immigrants of the turn of the twentieth century.3 Meanwhile, pluralists disagree. They contend that ethnicity is alive and well – ethnic identifications and group affiliations can be continuously reconstructed and revived, particularly in today’s multicultural and globalised America.
