Caveat: Model Minority

I was reading an essay by Oliver Wang, who has been guest-writing for Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at The Atlantic magazine website (and, incidentally, Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the highest-quality blog that I've run across, both in terms of quality of writing and depth of topics).  Wang is talking about a social issues class he teaches (apparently he's a university professor of some sort).  He talks about a lot of issues, but he touches on one of the ones that most interests me.

Surprisingly, illegal immigration has not been a big topic but what is surprising is that the majority of my students who write about illegal immigration as a social problem are Asian American and presumably, either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. Moreover, there's invariably at least one or two papers that use familiar boilerplate such as "illegal immigration is bankrupting the state" even though when I actually covered immigration, earlier in the semester, I specifically try to defuse overheated talking points such as these.

In any case, these papers by Asian American students have been a curious phenom; I've seen it happen now at least three semester in a row but I don't have a great explanation for it besides some half-hearted theory about it being some internalized model minority mentality. This is one of those, "this topic requires more research" moments.

My thoughts, regarding this: I don't think that  it's Asian-Americans' role as "model minority" that creates these reactionary politics vis-a-vis immigration issues, but rather the fact of their having come from Asia in the first place – because in much of Asia (most notably in Korea and Japan, in my experience, but hardly limited to those countries, I expect), ideologies of racial purity and narratives about the overwhelming "cost" of all types of immigration (i.e. not just the financial burden but also the social costs within relatively homogeneous societies) are quite dominant.

These ideologies, I suspect, are not easily discarded by just a few generations' removal to a new and very different society / ideological setting.  The contrast might be that, in comparison to East Asia, other large immigrant groups in the U.S. these days mostly hail from societies that are to one degree or another multicultural themselves, perhaps not always on the "melting pot" model of the U.S., but nevertheless…  consider the mestizismo narratives of the Mexican "Raza" concept, or the castes and hierarchies (often leading to heterogeneous social subgroupings) found in many south Asian or African cultures.

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