My father rode his bicycle around the final hours of Saigon in the early morning of April 30, 1975. South Vietnamese army uniforms lined the streets. Guns were left abandoned. Thumping helicopter blades whirled above him as Operation Frequent Wind evacuated remaining Americans and at-risk Vietnamese. My father told me how people looted stores while others ran with no destination in sight or in mind — just as long as they could run away. Both my parents would later become part of the nearly 590,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos who came to the United States between 1980 and 1990.
But before they came, life for Asians in America looked quite different. In the early days of the United States, Chinese immigrants helped build the transcontinental railroad, working in dangerous conditions for low pay. America thanked them with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) which created a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States, and later the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially excluded all immigrants from Asia.
These laws stood for decades before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished quotas and prioritized highly skilled immigrants and family reunification. The number of Asian immigrants in the country more than doubled within 10 years, most of them educated, highly skilled immigrants who fulfilled labor shortages in the United States. Thus, a tale of multiple Asian Americans emerged, one shaped by racism and discrimination in the United States since its early days; one by a self-selecting immigration system that brought over those who would prosper by design and one by war. It’s these different experiences that define what it means to be an Asian in America.
However, our different struggles are masked by a more nefarious movement in response to the civil rights movement. Comparisons cherry-picked success stories of Asian Americans in contrast to Black Americans in the 1960s. The core argument is that if America really were racist, then Asian Americans would have also struggled. But Asians in America never faced the same level of inhumane treatment and systemic racism that Black Americans have faced since the 1600s. However, the stereotypes stuck, and the “model minority” myth took hold: that Asians, in contrast to other minority groups, succeed in the United States.
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That is exactly the danger of viewing us as a “successful” monolith. While it may be true that some of us “succeed,” such as the often-cited metric that the average Asian American household has a higher median annual income than the national average, different Asian subgroups experience drastically different outcomes. The Pew Research Center reports that poverty rates range from 6 percent for Indian Americans to 17 percent and 19 percent for Hmong and Burmese Americans. For context, the national poverty rate is 11.5 percent.
Similarly, according to the US Census Bureau, a larger proportion of Asian Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to the general population (57.4 percent compared to 35.7 percent). But the disaggregated data show that only 24.1 percent of Cambodians and 19.3 percent of Laotians have a bachelor’s degree or higher. One can see these differences and understand that a certain segment of Asian Americans prospers much more than others.
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To be sure, there is some benefit to grouping us together. We face the same racism, bigotry, and discrimination, because racists still can’t tell us apart. Scarce depictions of Asians in Hollywood — mostly negative and racist until recently — contribute to a sense of us as forever foreigners. However, the collective problems we face don’t mean they are the only problems we face. To truly address all of our needs requires a concerted effort to disaggregate the data.
The movement to disaggregate data is not entirely new. Americans who identify as Black or Latino have advocated against the monolithic view for decades. While common experiences have helped boost national-level policies, different subgroups face different challenges, whether it’s because of when and how they immigrated to the United States, where they chose to live, or what local laws have impacted them. These different experiences result in not only different outcomes but also different viewpoints on a variety of issues. That’s why the recent revisions to Directive 15 of the Office of Management and Budget are noteworthy. It updates standards for federal agencies to allow for more detailed reporting of ethnicities. However, this change is limited to federal agencies, when in reality state and local governments, colleges and universities, and even workplaces should be adopting this.
The policy implications of disaggregating data are numerous. It shows who continues to be left behind in society and highlights where outreach or recruitment should be concentrated. Regardless of one’s views on affirmative action or whether diversity and inclusion efforts work, we can all agree that ignoring the existence of underrepresented populations is unacceptable.
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My parents’ stories, like many others, enrich our collective identity — and contribute to the meaning of being American. As the United States marks AAPI Heritage Month, let’s remind ourselves that we have so much to contribute with our individual stories, and that we need to elevate those that have been historically marginalized. That starts with data disaggregation and using this information to better inform public policy. What we perceive in the national numbers often obscures the realities of what happens in our neighborhoods.
David Dam is a second-year graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School.
