From: hirota@sluggo.sdsc.edu (Bryan Hirota)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: Model Minority [long]
Date: 28 Jul 92 20:48:19 GMT
Organization: San Diego Supercomputer Center
NNTP-Posting-Host: sluggo.sdsc.edu

Statistics and figures have been floating around this group, that
when taken out of their proper context can be misleading.
The asian model minority myth is nothing more than a myth.  The following
comes from the book titled "Asian Americans - an Interpretive History"
by Sucheng Chan - and I highly recommed the book to anyone who wants
to begin any kind of study on the asian american experience.  It even
covers Asian Indians [although not in an extremely indepth manner]

Anyways... Here goes...

===========================================================================
Bryan Hirota						    hirota@sdsc.edu
							   bhirota@ucsd.edu
===========================================================================

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Ten years later the U.S. census Bureau released data that further under-
dergirded the model minority image.  According to these figures, Chinese
and Japanese Americans had outpaced whites even in terms of median
family income by 1970.  Japanese American median Family income was almost
$3,000 higher, and Chinese American $1,000 higher than the U.S. median
family income.  But the federal government's study failed to place these
figures alongside other relevant information, such as the fact that 60
percent of the Japanese American and Chinese American families
(compared to only 51 percent among the U.S. population as a whole), more
than one person worked, which helps to account for their higher family
income.  If per capita income, rather than family income, had been
used as the measure, then the public would have learned that Chinese
Americans (thought not Japanese Americans) were making considerably
less than the national average.  Moreover, if Hispanic groups, which
earned much lower than other whites, had been removed from the 
aggregate white figures, then Asian Americans would not have outranked 
whites.

Social scientists who analyzed the 1970 cenus data reached various conclusions
depending on whether they used statistics for the nation as a whole or for
states with particularly high Asian concentrations, whether they separated
the American-born from the foreign-born, and whether they distinguished
between males and females.  Studies based on national data, such as those
by Barry Chiswick and by Charles Hirschman and Morrison Wong, invariably
showed that American-born Chinese and Japanese men had a higher income
than white men, but as Robert Jiobu, Amado Cabezas, and David Moulton
have documented, such was not the case in California, where 58 percent
and 45 percent, respectively, of the Japanese and Chinese in the contiguous
states resided in 1970.  In that state, American-born Chinese and Japanese men
indeed had significantly more years of school than non-Hispanic whites,
but their median incomes were no higher than that of the latter, because their
returns to education - that is, the additional income derived from increased
years of schooling - were lower than those for whites.  According to
Robert Jiobu's 1976 study of American-born men in California in 1970, for
each additional year of education, whites earned $522 more, compared to
$438 for Japanse, $320 for Chinese, $340 for Mexican Americans, and $284 for
blacks.  Thus, the Asian-white parity in income was made possible mainly 
by the Asian American's higher level of education.

Other criticisms have been raised against the model minority thesis, mainly
by researchers associated with the Asian American community organization,
ASIAN, Inc., in San Francisco.  First, more than half of the Asian/Pacific
American population in the United States lives in only five metropolitan
areas - Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York - and
of these, more than nine-tenths are found in urban centers.  These cities
are not only high-income areas but also high-cost-of-living-areas.  Thus,
while Asian Americans (and others) living there may earn more, they also 
have to spend more.

Second, in areas with the highest density of Asian Americans, the percentage
of Asian Americans in low-status, low-income occupations - that is, service
workers, laborers, farm laborers, and private household workers - is
considerably higher than among whites.  In 1970, for example, fully 25
percent of all gainfully employed Chinese men in the United States were
cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers, and janitors.  Such a figure gives an
impression of Asian American economic well-being that is quite different from
based on consideration of median income alone.

Third, a detailed study of the San Francisco-Oakland  Stanard Metropolitan
Statistical Area (SMSA) showed that Asian Americans were unevenly dis-
tributed in the economy. Professionals clustered in accounting, dentistry,
nursing, health technology, and engineering and were underrepresented in law,
teaching, administration, social services, and the higher levels of the
medical professions.  Managers were more likely to be self-employed than
employees of large firms.  Salespersons were retail clerks but seldom brokers
or insurance agaents.  Clerical workers were mostly file clerks, typists,
or office machine operators, and not secretaries or receptionists.  Few
Asian Americans held jobs in the heavy-machine, electrical, paper, chemical,
or construction industries.  Most female operatives were garment workers.
In short, Asian Americans were concentrated in occupations that did not pay
as well as other jobs in the same industries.

Fourth, the low unemployment rate of Asian Americans- another measure
often used to depict their economic success - merely camouflages high
underemployment.  Wary of being of welfare, many Asian American workers 
appparently would rather hold low-paid, part-time, or seasonal jobs
than receive public assistance.

Fifth, the high labor force participation rate of Asian American women
in both 1970 and 1908 - supposedly a sign of their ready acceptance by
employers - is in reality  a reflection of the fact that more Asian
American women are compelled to work because the male members of their
families earn such low wages.  It is true that working Asian American
women earn a higher median income than do white working women, but they
also have superior educational qualifications and live in localities with
higher wages.  Furthermore, compared to white women, a larger percentage
of them work full time, which helps toodrive their median income upward.
But despite their high educational level, they receive lower returns
toheir education than do white women, while the disprity between their returns
and those of white men is even greater.  In other words, they are not
receiving earnings that are commensurate with their years of schooling.

Sixth, with regard to the educational attainment of Asian Americans,
the sizable influx of highly educated professionals after 1965 has inflated
the average years of schooling complted.  Critics of the model minority
stereotype point out that the most important consideration should not
be edcational level, but returns to education, which more clearly reveal
the existence of discrimination.  For Asian Americans, even in 1980, these
returns were still not on par with those received by white men.

The entry of professionals has had another effect.  Since some of them
have not been able to find professional jobs, they have bought small
businesses, thereby increasing the number of "managers" in the Asian
American - particularily the Korean American - population.  However,
many of them operate only small mom-and-pop stores with no paid employees
and very low gross earnings.  Unlike journalists who tout Korean
entrepreneurship as a sign of success, scholars who have examined
the situation argue that the kind of buisiness Korean immigrants engage
in is, in fact, a disguised form of cheap labor: owners of small businesses
run a high risk of failure and work long hours.  Many of them could not stay 
afloat were it not for the unpaid labor they extract from their spouses,
children, and other relatives.  Nonetheless, small business currently is an
important channel of upward mobility open to nonwhite immigrants who face
obstacles in obtaining well-paying and secure jobs.

Finally, other groups of Asian Americans do not share the improved
economic standing achieved by Japanese and Chinese Americans. In 1970
in the San Francisco-Oakland SMSA, according to Amado Cabezas and his
associates, Filipinos (lumping together foreign- and American-born) earned
only 58 percent of what white men earned, while Filipinas earned only 38
percent.  The respective figures in the Los Angeles-Long Beach SMSA were
62 percent and 47 percent.  In 1980, in the San Francisco-Oakland SMSA
American-born Filipino men made 64 percent of what American-born white
males made, whilte American-born Filipinas made 45 percent.  In the 
Los Angeles-Long Beach SMSA, the comparable figures were 72 percent and
48 percent.  Foreign-born men fared about the same as their American-born
peers, while the foreign-born women did slightly better than their American-
born sisters.  A larger proportion of American-born Filipinos hold working-
class jobs than do Chinese and Japanese Americans.  They also seem to 
receive no discernible returns to schooling.

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