|
| MAIN | HISTORY |
NEWS | VIEWPOINTS |
COMMUNITY | NARRATIVES |
ART/CULTURE | |
U.S. Policy on Asian Immigration
by Tom Surh
(reprinted from East Wind - Fall/Winter 1982)
In 1971, for the first time in U.S. history, the number of immigrants from Asia was greater than the number from Europe. This was the result of the changes in the U.S. immigration laws in 1965 which began to eliminate the most racist features of these laws and, for the first time since the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, permitted an equal number (20,000) of immigrants to enter from each independent country. This trend has continued until today, when China, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong have all oversubscribed their annual quotas. Add to this the several hundred thousand people who have come from Southeast Asia since the mid-1970's, and we see that the 1970's were indeed the decade of unprecedented growth in our Asian/Pacific communities.
Travel overland across the country from coast to coast and you will see that Asian/Pacific people are no longer confined to the two coasts. They are visible in some numbers in nearly every hamlet throughout the South and Midwest, usually in the form of at least a Chinese restaurant or an "Oriental food store." The urban centers on the coasts have witnessed the birth of entirely new communities of Koreans and Southeast Asians, and the great expansion and revitalization of existing communities.
A recent analysis of immigration patterns and fertility rates by the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy in Los Angeles projects the Asian population in the U.S. at 10.6 million, or four percent of the total by the year 2000. Such projections are, of course, highly speculative - particularly when based upon assumptions as to future immigration patterns, which are subject to changing federal policy. Indeed, we begin to realize that immigration policy is the very key to the future of Asian/Pacific and other Third World communities in this country when we note several factors:
1) The current fertility rate of the U.S. population stands at about 1.8 births per woman - a rate which results in a declining population. If it were not for immigration from other countries, the U.S. population would stand at about 201 million in 2080, or 88% of the 1980 figure. Despite the popular perception of a current baby boom, demographers have little reason to expect the birth rate to climb as women continue to enter the labor force in greater numbers out of necessity as well as out of choice.