ABSTRACT
In this chapter we explore how Asian Americans and Latinos 2 have been imagined and constructed in education discourse in the United States from 1980 to the present. These constructions are strongly rooted in how migration flows from Asia and Latin America have been understood, framed, and defined by U.S. immigration policy over the course of the twentieth century. Junn (2008) points out the ways that U.S. immigration authorities, since 1965, have tended to award more high-skilled visas to Asian-origin workers, thus creating the material basis for the “model minority” myth through immigrant selection. Relatedly, Feliciano (2006) shows how the educational capital immigrant parents bring to the United States is directly related to the educational success of their children, and that immigrants who must travel longer distances in order to migrate, such as those from Asia, tend to have higher levels of capital. Thus, migration patterns and U.S. government selection has directly affected what immigrants come to the United States, their migration status in the country, and their probability of educational success in subsequent generations (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002, Louie 2004, Zuñiga and Hernández-León 2006, Pang 2007, García Bedolla 2009). These macro-structural processes, in turn, affect how these immigrants are constructed within U.S. public and policy discourses.
