ABSTRACT
The fifth-largest Asian American group after (in de-scending order) Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, and Vietnamese-Korean Americans are both one of the oldest of Asian communities in the United States and one of the newest. Small numbers were recruited by Hawaiian sugar growers at the beginning of the twentieth century. More came as brides of American soldiers stationed in Korea after the Korean War of the early 1950s. But it was only with passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending national quotas on immigration into the United States, that large numbers of Koreans began moving to the mainland United States. In the years since, hundreds of thousands of Koreans have moved to locations-especially metropolises-across the country. The largest cohort settled in Los Angeles, where, in the Mid-Wilshire district, they established the most populous enclave of Koreans in the world outside the Korean Peninsula itself.
