From Many Shores: Asians in Census 2000

Report by the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research
University at Albany
October 6, 2001

This report was prepared by Dr. John R. Logan with the assistance of Jacob Stowell and Elena Vesselinov.

Census 2000 documents a 69% growth of the Asian population in the United States in the last ten years, up to over 12 million persons. The Asian presence in this country was once symbolized by Chinatowns in major cities; there are now as many as six distinct Asian national-origin groups with more than a million residents. And whereas Asians have often been thought of uniformly as a single “model minority,” it is time to recognize the very large differences that exist between the Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, and other major Asian groups.

This report summarizes briefly what we know about America’s Asian minorities at the start of the 21st Century: their origins and growth, their heterogeneity in social background and economic achievement, and trends in their location within the country.

Growth in the 1990-2000 decade

In the last decade the total Asian population increased from 7.2 million to 12.3 million. The Asian share of the total population rose from 2.9% to 4.4%, still much smaller than the country’s African American or Hispanic minorities, but a much more considerable presence today than in the past, and very prominent in some states and metro areas.

Table 1 shows that the Chinese remain the largest single national-origin group, now about 2.7 million and nearly a quarter of the Asian total. They are followed by Filipinos (who maintained about a 20% share), now 2.4 million. Asian Indians are the fastest growing group - fifth largest in 1990 but now third, more than doubling in the decade, and reaching 1.9 million in 2000.

Three other groups have more than a million residents, and each represents about a tenth of Asians. Of these, the Japanese have the longest history in the country, but their growth has been modest. The other two are Koreans (up by half) and Vietnamese (who doubled since 1990).