Changes in the Assimilation of Asian Americans from 1860–1940

Abstract

Asian immigration to the United States motivated the first instance of federal immigration legislation with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but little is known about Asian immigration during the period despite a robust literature on their European counterparts. I use linked cohorts drawn from complete-count census data to find that Asian immigrants displayed the “u-shaped” pattern of occupational assimilation characterizing contemporaneous European immigrants. I also find that they displayed a “catch-up” assimilation phenomenon: successive Asian cohorts steadily reduced their outcome gaps with the native population, and despite starting at a lower occupational tier than European immigrants, they assimilated more than European immigrants in all cohorts but the post-Exclusion cohort of 1880–1900. These findings provide insight into the assimilation process of an understudied immigrant community, furthering the understanding of assimilation in the United States.