Houston Area Asian Survey:

Transcription

1 Houston Area Asian Survey: DIVERSITY AND TRANSFORMATION AMONG ASIANS IN HOUSTON

2 February 2013 Kinder Institute for Urban Research Rice University, MS Main Street Houston, TX Telephone: (713) For additional copies of this publication and for further information, please contact the Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Copyright 2013 by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. All rights reserved. On the Cover: Clockwise from top, left - George Fujimoto, Ratna G. Sarkar, Rathna Kumar, Rachel Soyon Otto, Eric Shin and Huan Le. All photos courtesy of the Houston Asian American Archives Chao Center for Asian Studies, Woodson Research Center, Rice University. *The copyright holder for this material is either unknown or unable to be found. This material is being made available by Rice University for non-profit educational use under the Fair Use Section of US Copyright Law. This digital version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

3 DIVERSITY AND TRANSFORMATION AMONG ASIANS IN HOUSTON: Findings from the Kinder Institute s Houston Area Asian Survey (1995, 2002, 2011) By Stephen L. Klineberg, Principal Investigator Co-Director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research Jie Wu, Research Project Manager

4 Houston Area Asian Survey Sponsors Asia Society of Texas Center Dr. and Mrs. George C. Yang / Asia Chemical Corporation Chinese Community Center Southern News Group Mr. Barry D. Warner / Saigon Tex News Ms. Grace Lynn Mr. David Leebron and Ms. Y. Ping Sun Thanks also to the following for their support of the Houston Area Asian Survey research effort: Gordon Quan, Donna Cole, Dr. Long S. Le, Dr. Beverly Gor, Glen Gondo, Dr. Patrick Leung, Kim Szeto, Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University, Rice University Office of Public Affairs, and the Woodson Research Center, Rice University Fondren Library. Special thanks to the Asia Society of Texas Center, Richmond Printing, and Rogene Calvert and Mustafa Tameez of Outreach Strategists for facilitating the survey release.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS.Page INTRODUCTION...5 Houston, from 1900 to THE DEMOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION...6 Figure 1 The U.S. Census Figures for Harris County, 1960 to 2010 Figure 2 The Geographic Distribution of Harris County s Ethnic Populations, from the U.S. Census of 1980 and of 2010 The Houston Numbers...9 Figure 3 The U.S. Census Figures for Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties in 1990, 2000 and 2010 Figure 4 The Geographic Distribution of the Asian Populations in Harris and Fort Bend Counties, from the U.S. Census of 2010 The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 that Changed America...11 Table 1 Harris County s Asian Populations in the U.S. Census of 1990, 2000 and 2010 Conducting the Surveys Figure 5 Harris County s Asian Populations by Country of Origin, in the U.S. Census and in the Three Asian Surveys Combined ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN MIGRATION PATTERNS, AGE AND EDUCATION...15 Migration Patterns in Four Communities...16 Table 2 Age and Migration Patterns in Four Ethnic Communities Age and Ethnicity in Houston...16 Figure 6 Ethnicity by Age in Harris County, from the U.S. Census of 2010 A Bifurcated Immigration into a Bifurcated Economy...18 Figure 7 Distributions by Education in Five Communities The Model Minority Myth...19 DIFFERENCES IN LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES AMONG THE ASIAN COMMUNITIES...20 Figure 8 Distributions by Education among the Four Largest Asian Communities Income Differences among the Asians...21 Figure 9 Distributions by Household Income among the Four Largest Asian Communities The Primary Reasons for Coming to America...22 Figure 10 The Most Important Reasons Given for Immigrating to America among the Four Largest Asian Communities Still a Glass Ceiling?...23 Figure 11 Distributions by Education and Income among Anglos and Asians in Harris County The Houston Area Asian Survey 3

6 Ethnic Divides in Perspectives on Immigration and Intergroup Relations...24 Figure 12 Figure 13 Distributions by Beliefs about Immigration and Ethnic Diversity among the Four Major Ethnic Communities The Average Ratings Given by Asians to Relations with the Three Other Ethnic Communities on the 10-Point Scale CONTRASTS IN RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES...27 Figure 14 Distributions by Religious Preference in Four Asian Communities and among all Asians Political Affiliations...28 Figure 15 Figure 16 Political Party Affiliation among Harris County s Three Largest Asian Communities in 1995, 2002 and 2011 Distributions on Attitudes toward the Role of Government among the Four Major Ethnic Communities SOME FURTHER GLIMPSES INTO THE FUTURE...32 The Changing Waves of Vietnamese Immigration...32 Table 3 Selected Differences among Successive Streams of Vietnamese Immigrants The Rise of the Second Generation...33 Figure 17 Figure 18 Distributions by Immigrant Generation and by Time in the U.S. among Harris County s Asian Populations in 1995, 2002 and 2011 Distributions by Education and Income among the First and Second Generations of Asian Immigrants in Harris County SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS...36 REFERENCE...40 APPENDIX: DISTRIBUTIONS OF RESPONSES AMONG THE FOUR ETHNIC COMMUNITIES ON SELECTED ITEMS FROM THE KINDER INSTITUTE S 2011 HOUSTON AREA SURVEY Kinder Institute for Urban Research

7 INTRODUCTION This report presents some of the most important findings from three expanded versions, in particular, of the Kinder Institute s annual Houston Area Survey ( ). In all but one of the years between 1994 and 2012, the basic random samples of Harris County residents have been expanded to reach large representative samples, numbering about 500 each, from the county s Anglo, African-American and Hispanic populations. In 1995, 2002 and 2011, generous additional contributions from the wider Houston community made it possible to include equally large representative samples of the region s varied Asian communities, with one-fourth of the interviews being conducted in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin or Korean. In the pages that follow, we first describe the remarkable demographic trends that have transformed this Anglo-dominated biracial southern city of 30 years ago into what is today the single most ethnically diverse large metropolitan region in the country (Emerson et al. 2012). Drawing on the three Asian surveys spanning 16 years (from 1995 to 2011), we document the distinctiveness of the Asian experience in comparison with Harris County s Anglos, blacks and Latinos; we explore the most important differences in life circumstances, attitudes and beliefs among the area s four largest Asian communities Vietnamese, Indians/Pakistanis, Chinese/Taiwanese and Filipinos; and we consider some of the implications of the survey findings for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Houston, from 1900 to 1982 Throughout most of the twentieth century, and especially in the years after World War II, Houston was America s quintessential boomtown. This was basically a one-horse industrial city, with 82 percent of all its primary-sector jobs tied to the oil business, focused on refining hydrocarbons into gasoline and petrochemicals and on servicing the oil and gas industry (Thomas and Murray 1991). Gene s Food Market, Houston, Texas, interior view, Photographer unknown. Gene & Hedy Lee Chinese language newspapers & photographs, (MS 556), Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.* *The copyright holder for this material is either unknown or unable to be found. This material is being made available by Rice University for non-profit educational use under the Fair Use Section of US Copyright Law. This digital version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The Houston Area Asian Survey 5

8 While the rest of the country was languishing in the national recession known as the stagflating 70s, Houston had already become the energy capital of the world, widely regarded as the Golden Buckle of the Sun Belt, its prime industrial products growing many times more valuable with no lessening of world demand. Thanks to the Arab oil embargo and then the Iranian Revolution, the price of a barrel of Texas oil increased from $3.39 in 1971, to $12.64 in 1979, to $31.77 in During the decade of the 1970s, the value of foreign trade through the Port of Houston grew ten-fold, local bank deposits tripled in value, and the region led the nation in housing starts, real estate investments, and the growth of manufacturing (Feagin 1988). During those heady years between 1970 and 1982, Harris County gained almost one million additional inhabitants. Newcomers from across America overwhelmingly non-hispanic whites were pouring into this booming city: 1,380 people a week were being added to the county s population; every day on average, more than 230 additional cars and trucks were pouring onto its streets and freeways. Then suddenly, in May 1982, the oil boom collapsed. The global recession in that year had suppressed demand for oil just as new supplies were coming onto world markets. The price of Texas crude fell from around $32 per barrel to less than $28 at the end of The all-important rig count entered into the free fall that took it from a peak of 4,530 rigs drilling for oil on U.S. territory down to less than 3,000 by the close of 1982 (Fallows 1985). The value of the Mexican peso also plummeted in that year, reducing the number of affluent Mexicans coming to the city to shop, and the overvalued dollar made American products more expensive abroad, causing a rapid decline in exports from the Port of Houston. Over the next few years the recession deepened and then spread across the entire economy. One of every seven jobs that were in Houston in 1982 disappeared by early 1987, marking this as the worst regional recession in any part of the country at any time since World War II. After years of drawing aces, Thomas and Murray (1991:62) observed, Houston s economic luck had turned sour. A new and very different chapter in the city s history was about to begin. THE DEMOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION The Houston region recovered from the prolonged recession of the mid-1980s to find itself squarely in the midst of a restructured, two-tiered, knowledge-based, fully global economy and a truly remarkable transformation in its ethnic and cultural composition. Figure 1 depicts the U.S. Census figures for Harris County in each of the last six decades. The figures show clearly that the region s surging population growth during the oil-boom years of the 1960s and 1970s was brought about primarily by the influx of Anglos, the non-hispanic white Americans who were streaming into this energy capital from other parts of the country. The Anglo numbers grew by 31 percent in the 1960s and by another 25 percent in the 1970s. By 1981 Houston had overtaken Philadelphia to become the fourth largest city in America, with a population that was still almost twothirds Anglo and only 2 percent Asian. Jade Buddha Temple. Southwest Houston. Photo by Megan Dillingham, January Kinder Institute for Urban Research

9 Figure 1 The U.S. Census Figures for Harris County, 1960 to Asians/Others Hispanics Blacks 6.7% 7.7% POPULATION, IN MILLIONS Anglos 4.1% 2.1% 32.9% 40.8% 15.5% 22.7% 0.8% 19.7% 19.1% 18.2% 18.4% 9.9% 0.3% 6.0% 20.1% 19.8% 62.7% 54.0% 42.1% 33.0% 73.9% 69.2% (1,243,258) (1,741,912) (2,409,547) (2,818,199) (3,400,578) (4,092,459) Source: U.S. Census. Classifications based on Texas State Data Center conventions. After the collapse of oil prices in 1982, Harris County s Anglo numbers stopped growing and then declined. Yet the county s population expanded by another 17 percent in the 1980s and by 21 and 20 percent in the ensuing two decades. The county s continued growth during the past three decades is attributable almost exclusively to immigration from abroad as well as to new births often the children of earlier immigrants and of U.S.-born Latinos, Asians and African Americans. During the decade of the 1990s, while the county s Anglo population was actually declining by more than 6 percent, its black population increased 15 percent, its Hispanic population by 75 percent and its Asian population by 76 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, the Houston metro region grew by more than 1.2 million, making it America s fastestgrowing large metropolitan area. Harris County s Anglo population declined by another 6 percent during that decade, while the number of blacks grew by another 22 percent, Latinos by 49 percent and Asians by 45 percent. In 2010 the U.S. Census counted 4.1 million people in the county, of whom just 33 percent were non-hispanic whites. Harris County s population was now 41 percent Hispanic, 18 percent African-American, and 8 percent Asian or other. The GIS maps presented in Figure 2 illustrate this demographic revolution. In the U.S. Census of 1980, the tracts that were majority Anglo (shown in red) overwhelmingly predominated. The majority African-American census tracts (in black) were confined to the black corridor (Bullard 1987) along the eastern side of Downtown, primarily in the Third Ward and the Fifth Ward. The predominantly Latino tracts (in brown) were concentrated in the Segundo Barrio along the Houston Ship Channel, and there was just a smattering of census tracts around the downtown area in which there was no majority (shown in yellow). The Houston Area Asian Survey 7

10 Figure 2 The Geographic Distribution of Harris County s Ethnic Populations, from the U.S. Census of 1980 and of 2010 Source: Outreach Strategists, LLC. By 2010 Harris County s geography had changed dramatically. The red areas (majority Anglo) are now largely confined to the west of Downtown and the census tracts on the periphery of the county. The majority Latino tracts have expanded out to the north and east of Houston s downtown areas. The continued hypersegregation of African Americans can be seen in the virtually unchanged configuration of the black corridor, and the multicultural tracts are now spreading everywhere around the edges of the City of Houston and beyond. BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. Stafford, Texas. Photo by Jie Wu, January Kinder Institute for Urban Research

11 The Houston Numbers While Harris County was growing by 20 percent between 2000 and 2010, the surrounding counties grew even faster. Fort Bend County expanded by 65 percent in the past ten years, and Montgomery County by 55 percent. Most have also increased dramatically in diversity. As indicated in Figure 3, Fort Bend County in 1990 was less than 7 percent Asian and almost 54 percent Anglo. By 2010 it was 19 percent Asian, 24 percent Latino, 21 percent African American and 36 percent Anglo, coming closer than any other county in the United States to having an equal division among the nation s four major ethnic communities. The county s Asian population grew the most rapidly of all, expanding by a remarkable 150 percent between 2000 and 2010; Sugar Land, its largest city, was 37 percent Asian in Montgomery County, the least diverse of the region s five most populous counties, had a non- Hispanic white population of 88 percent in 1990 and 81 percent in During the past decade, the county s Anglo population grew by another 36 percent, but it added more non-anglos, so that today the Montgomery County population is just 71 percent Anglo. The demographic revolution is fully under way across the entire metropolitan region. Figure 3 The U.S. Census Figures for Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties in 1990, 2000 and , , % Asians/Others Hispanics Blacks Anglos 500, % 400, % 23.7% 20.8% POPULATION 300, , , % 19.5% 20.3% 53.8% Fort Bend-1990 (225,421) Fort Bend-2000 (354,452) 21.1% 19.6% 46.2% 21.1% 36.2% Fort Bend-2010 (585,375) 1.0% 7.3% 4.2% 87.5% Montgomery-1990 (182,201) 2.5% 12.6% 3.4% 81.4% Montgomery-2000 (293,768) Source: U.S. Census. Classifications based on Texas State Data Center conventions. 4.1% 71.2% Montgomery-2010 (455,746) The Houston Area Asian Survey 9

12 The GIS map depicted in Figure 4 shows the geographical distribution of the Asian populations in Harris and Fort Bend counties in The dark green areas indicate the census tracts where the Asian population accounted for more than 20 percent of the tract s total population, the medium green color designates areas where the Asians were 12.5 to 20 percent of the population, and the light green represents the areas where Asians constituted 8.0 to 12.5 percent. As indicated in the map, the region s Asian populations are disproportionately concentrated in the Braeswood-to-Bellaire sector close to the Texas Medical Center, in the Clear Lake area in southeast Harris County, in the Alief and Katy areas of western Harris County, in the Cypress-Tomball area in northwest Harris County, and in the Sugar Land-Missouri City region of Fort Bend County. Note, however, that despite the rapid Asian growth in Fort Bend County, in sheer numbers there are more than 2.5 times as many Asians living in Harris County as in Fort Bend: Asians constitute about 8 percent of Harris County s 4 million inhabitants, and 19 percent of Ford Bend County s 500,000. Figure 4 The Geographic Distribution of the Asian Populations in Harris and Fort Bend Counties, from the U.S. Census of 2010 Source: Outreach Strategists, LLC. 10 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

13 The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 that Changed America We need to stand back for a moment and ask about the historical background for these dramatic transformations in the ethnic composition of the Houston area and to only a slightly lesser extent of Texas and throughout America. Between 1924 and 1965, under the notorious National Origins Quota Act, immigration into this country slowed to a trickle. Asians were effectively banned from coming to America, and explicit preference was accorded to Northern Europeans. With that legislation in effect, 82 percent of all the immigrant visas issued during this period went to northwestern Europeans and 16 percent were allocated to other Europeans, leaving 2 percent for everyone else. In 1965, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and of Kennedy s assassination, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (a.k.a. the Hart-Celler Act ) finally undid the nation s previous immigration policy, with its explicitly racist assumptions, and opened immigration to the rest of the world for the first time in the twentieth century. More generous limits were established, and visas were no longer allocated on the basis of ethnicity or national origin. Preferences were now to be based primarily on family reunification, with additional priority given to immigrants with professional skills or proven vulnerability to persecution. The act s proponents did not expect it to bring much change, either in the numbers of immigrants or in their composition, but the effects were dramatic. Soon after the new law was enacted, the number of newcomers began to grow rapidly again, ending a fifty-year hiatus on large-scale immigration, and the European proportion fell precipitously. During the 1990s and again in the first decade of this century, more than 10 million immigrants came to America, of whom only 12 percent were arriving from Europe. More than 85 percent of the new immigration was now coming from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. The 2011 American Community Study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the number of foreign-born residents in the United States at more than 40 million, representing 13 percent of the total U.S. population. Immigrants from Latin America accounted for more than half (53 percent) of the foreign-born. Another 29 percent were from Asia, 12 percent from Europe, 4 percent from Africa, and 3 percent from everywhere else (Gryn and Gambino 2012). The United States, which throughout all of its history had been an amalgam of European nationalities, is rapidly becoming a microcosm of the world. In several of America s largest cities, the majorityminority future is already here. Newly arriving immigrants tend to cluster in a small number of metropolitan areas, attracted by family and linguistic connections and benefiting greatly from the social and economic support that co-ethnic communities provide. Over half of all the foreign-born residents in America live in four states California, New York, Texas and Florida. In the year 2000, two metropolitan areas contained more than one-third of the entire foreign-born population in the United States (Waldinger 2001): 5.2 million foreign-born residents were living in the New York City metropolitan region, and 5.1 million in the Los Angeles area. These two immigrant capitals were followed by five smaller but important gateway cities San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Houston. The new immigration spread next to Dallas, Boston, San Diego and Phoenix, and is now reaching into virtually every city and town across the nation. Nowhere has the demographic transformation been more sudden or dramatic than in the Houston area. The Asian surge. Table 1 presents the population figures from the U.S. Census in 1990, 2000 and 2010 for each of the major Asian communities in Harris County. In the latest census, 253,032 residents of Harris County checked an Asian nationality on the race question and an additional 27,309 checked Asian in combination with one or more other races, for a total of 280,341 Asian-origin residents. This represents an increase of more than 45 percent from the 193,059 Harris County Asians who were counted in the 2000 Census; and the 2000 figures represented a growth of 76 percent from the 1990 numbers. Among those who self-identified as only one Asian nationality on the race question, the Vietnamese, The Houston Area Asian Survey 11

14 already the largest of Harris County s Asian communities, grew by another 45 percent between 2000 and 2010, followed by the Filipinos (also at 45 percent), the Indians/Pakistanis (at 39 percent), the Koreans (35 percent), and the Chinese/Taiwanese (27 percent). The number of Asians coming from other countries in the Far East and in Southeast Asia (e.g., Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand) almost doubled during the past decade to reach a total of 40,684, representing 15 percent of all the Asians currently living in Harris County. In 1980 the Chinese were the largest Asian community in the county. By 1990 they trailed the Vietnamese, and by 2000 they had slipped into third place, now numbering slightly fewer than the region s Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi population. In Fort Bend County, the 2010 Census counted 106,263 Asians. Unlike in Harris County, the Indians and Pakistanis, at 31 percent, are the largest of Fort Bend s Asian communities. Next come the Chinese and Taiwanese, at 21 percent; the Vietnamese constitute just 15 percent of all the Asians in Fort Bend County. The Indians and Pakistanis were also the largest population of Asians in Montgomery County, followed by the Chinese and the Filipinos. Table 1 Harris County s Asian Populations in the U.S. Census of 1990, 2000 and 2010 * These figures include the Asians who identified with more than one race. Source: U.S. Census 1990, 2000 and 2010, Demographic Profiles ( 12 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

15 Conducting the Surveys Across 31 years of systematic survey research ( ), the Kinder Institute s Houston Area Survey has tracked America s fourth largest city in the self-conscious process of reinventing itself for the twenty-first century. No other metropolitan region in the nation has been the focus of a long-term study of this scope. None more clearly exemplifies the remarkable trends that are rapidly refashioning the social and political landscape across all of urban America. In order to ensure that every Harris County adult living in a household with a telephone (either landline or cell phone) will have an equal probability of being interviewed, survey respondents are selected each year through a two-stage procedure. In each household reached by randomly generated telephone numbers, the eligible respondent is selected randomly from all household members aged 18 or older, with initial preference given to an adult male. Using back translation and the reconciliation of discrepancies, the questionnaire is translated into Spanish, and bilingual interviewers are assigned to the project at all times. In 18 of the past 19 years (from 1994 through 2012; the one exception was 1996), the surveys have been expanded with supplementary interviews in Houston s three largest ethnic communities. Using identical random-selection procedures, and terminating after the first few questions if the respondent is not of the ethnic background required, additional interviews were conducted in each of these years to enlarge and equalize the samples of Anglo, African-American and Hispanic respondents at about 500 each per year. It is much more difficult to obtain large representative samples from Houston s Asian communities, because they still constitute a relatively small proportion of the Houston population as a whole, and Asians are twice as likely as Anglos to be living with at least two adult generations under the same roof (Pew 2012). One out of every two randomly selected households in Harris County can be expected to contain an African-American or Latino adult, but only four or five of every one hundred households will reach an Asian. In 1995, 2002, and 2011, with the generous support of the wider Houston community, researchers at Rice University were able, in conjunction with the annual Houston Area Survey, to dial the 60,000 or so randomly generated phone numbers required to identify a sufficient number of Asian households to complete systematic telephone interviews with representative samples of approximately 500 Asians across Harris County, with more than a quarter of the interviews conducted in the native languages. The Survey Research Institute (SRI) at the University of Houston s Hobby Center for Public Policy conducted all the telephone interviews for the expanded 2011 survey. Between February and May of 2011, a representative sample of 506 Harris County Asians participated in the interviews, along with 511 Anglos, 502 African Americans and 501 Latinos, with 65 percent of the respondents reached by landline and 35 percent by cell phone. Of the 506 Asian interviews in the 2011 survey, 14 percent were conducted in Vietnamese, 4 percent in Cantonese, 9 percent in Mandarin, and the rest in English. Presented in the Appendix at the end of this report are some of the most significant questions that were asked in the 2011 survey, organized by central themes, along with the distributions of responses to each question given separately for the Asians, Anglos, African Americans and Latinos who participated in the study. Figure 5 compares the countries of origin of the survey participants in the three Asian surveys with the U.S. Census figures for the different Asian nationalities in the decennial census of 1990, 2000 and As indicated in the figure (and as seen in Table 1), the distributions by country of origin among all the Harris County Asians in 2010 who named only one race on the census form were as follows: 32 percent said they were Vietnamese, 20 percent Indian or Pakistani, 17 percent Chinese or Taiwanese, 9 percent Filipino and 5 percent Korean. The Houston Area Asian Survey 13

16 The distributions by country of origin among the respondents who participated in the three surveys combined were consistent with the census figures: 28 percent of the Asian respondents were Vietnamese, 25 percent were Indian or Pakistani, 26 percent were Chinese or Taiwanese, 8 percent were Filipino and 4 percent were Korean. This close correspondence with the census data strengthens confidence in the representativeness of the survey samples. The careful procedures that were followed here can be expected to provide about as accurate a picture as it is possible to obtain through scientific survey research of the experiences and perspectives of Harris County s varied Asian communities. To further strengthen confidence in the survey findings, we engaged Social Science Research Solutions (SSRS), the Philadelphia-based research firm, to conduct a systematic weighting of the data. The procedure uses all available information from the U.S. Census to correct for nonresponse and coverage biases in the samples. It assigns weights to each of the responses to ensure that the final distributions in the surveys are in close agreement with the actual Harris County distributions with respect to such parameters as race and ethnicity, age, gender, education level and home ownership. The slight corrections that result from this process will provide a more accurate and reliable reflection of the actual attitudes and experiences to be found within the Harris County population as a whole. Unless otherwise indicated, the results presented in this report are based on the weighted data. Figure 5 Harris County s Asian Populations by Country of Origin, in the U.S. Census and in the Three Asian Surveys Combined 40 Vietnamese Indians/Pakistanis Chinese/Taiwanese Filipinos Koreans Other Asians PERCENT OF ASIAN POPULATION Census 1990 (N=109,878) Census 2000 (N=174,626)* Census 2010 (N=253,032)* Asian Survey (1995, 2002 and 2011 combined) (N=1,506) *These figures do not include the Asians who identified with more than one race Kinder Institute for Urban Research

17 ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN MIGRATION PATTERNS, AGE AND EDUCATION Through telephone interviews averaging more than 20 minutes apiece, the three expanded surveys record a rich array of information on the respondents life circumstances, attitudes and beliefs, as well as their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Table 2 compares the basic background variables across Houston s four major ethnic communities, as recorded in the most recent (2011) survey. The differences among the populations reflect the interconnections of the two most consequential demographic trends of our time popularly known as the aging and the colorizing (aka: the graying and the browning ) of the Houston and the American populations. Table 2 Age and Migration Patterns in Four Ethnic Communities, from the 2011 Survey ASIANS (N=506) ANGLOS (N=511) BLACKS (N=503) LATINOS (N=502) 1. How old were you on your last birthday? 18 to to to % % % % For how many years 9 years or less 24.5% 18.8% 12.6% 16.8% have you lived in 10 to 19 years the Houston area? 20 to 29 years years or more Where did you live just Born in Houston 22.7% 33.4% 49.7% 44.2% before coming to the Elsewhere in Texas Houston area? Elsewhere in U.S Outside the U.S Where did you live Houston area 35.1% 47.1% 63.8% 58.6% when you were growing Elsewhere in Texas up (i.e., when you were Elsewhere in U.S years old)? Outside the U.S Were you born in Yes 29.8% 94.7% 95.1% 68.2% the United States? No Were both of your Yes, both of them 8.1% 91.6% 91.5% 37.8% parents born in the Only one of them United States? No, neither of them The Houston Area Asian Survey 15

18 Migration Patterns in Four Communities The data recorded in Table 2 reflect the patterns of immigration that have transformed the ethnic composition of the Houston area s population. As we have seen, this was a city primarily of Anglo migrants during all the years of the oil boom. After 1982, however, as the Anglo population stopped expanding and then declined, all the rapid growth of the Harris County population has been due to the influx of non-anglos. The age differences among the ethnic communities reflect these new realities. More than 45 percent of all the Anglo respondents in the 2011 survey were aged 50 or older at the time of the interviews, compared to 41 percent of blacks, 34 percent of Asians and 24 percent of Latinos. At the other end of the spectrum, 35 percent of all Hispanic adults and 32 percent of the Asians were under the age of 30 at the time of the interviews, but this was the case for less than 17 percent of the Anglos. Black Houstonians are more likely than area residents of other ethnicities to have been born or raised in the Houston area: 64 percent of the African-American respondents report that they grew up in this region, compared to 59 percent of Latinos, 47 percent of Anglos, and just 35 percent of the Asians. The U.S.-born members of the two predominantly immigrant communities, however, are the most likely of all area residents to be Houston born and bred. The surveys reveal (not shown in the table) that 69 percent of all U.S.-born Asian Houstonians and 74 percent of the U.S.-born Latinos grew up in the Houston area. Hispanics, of course, were living in the Houston region well before the city was founded in 1836 (De Leon 1989). Yet almost one-third (32 percent) of all the Hispanic respondents in the 2011 survey were first-generation immigrants, having been born outside the United States. Table 2 indicates further that 21 percent of them grew up outside America and came to Houston after the age of 16. Even more striking, 70 percent of all the Asian adults in Harris County who participated in the 2011 survey were first-generation immigrants. More than half (51 percent) grew up outside the United States; and 37 percent immigrated to Houston directly from abroad, without having lived anywhere else in America. More than half (53 percent) of all Hispanics and almost nine of every ten Asians (89 percent) report that both of their parents were born outside the United States. Age and Ethnicity in Houston As a direct consequence of these demographic changes, today s seniors across America are predominantly Anglos. This is also the case for the 76 million American babies who were born during the remarkable postwar period of broad-based economic expansion, between 1946 and The average American male literally doubled his income in real terms during that postwar quartercentury ( ), while the average American female in the years between 1946 and 1964 was giving birth to 3.6 children. In 2012 the leading edge of the 76 million members of the babyboom generation were now 66 years old. Over the course of the next 25 to 30 years, the number of Americans over the age of 65 will literally double. That bulging population is disproportionately composed of non-latino whites, because it was not until 1965, after the baby boom had subsided, when for the first time in the twentieth century non-europeans were allowed in any meaningful numbers to come to America. Younger adults, of course, are more likely than older individuals to brave the difficult immigrant journey in pursuit of better opportunities for themselves and their children. Inevitably, the younger cohorts who will replace the baby-boom generation are far more likely to be Asian, black or Latino. The aging of America is turning out to be a division not only by generation, but also by ethnic background. The new realities are reflected in Figure 6. The 2010 Census counted 333,487 Harris County residents who were aged 65 or older, among whom a clear majority (57 percent) were Anglos; fewer than a fifth were African Americans or Hispanics (at 17 and 19 percent, respectively), and 7 percent were Asians. 16 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

19 The median age of the Harris County population as a whole is a youthful 33.2, among the youngest of the nation s major metropolitan areas. Of all area residents in 2010 who were aged eighteen to twenty-nine, 46 percent were Hispanics and 28 percent were Anglos. Among the more than one million children under the age of 18, more than half (51 percent) were Latinos, and less than a quarter (24 percent) were Anglos. Even more striking is the ethnic composition of the students in HISD classrooms. According to the web site of the Houston Independent School District (www. houstonisd.org), 203,066 students were enrolled during in the 279 schools that comprise the district. In all these schools, in classes from kindergarten through senior year in high school, 62 percent of the students were Latinos, 25 percent were African Americans, 8 percent were non- Hispanic whites and 3 percent were Asians. Almost nine of every ten children in HISD schools (87 percent) are African American and Latino. These are the two groups that are by far the most likely to be living in poverty 80 percent of all HISD students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs and these are the families that have been the least well served historically by the city s educational institutions and its social-service delivery systems. Clearly, if the socioeconomic and educational disparities with Anglos and Asians are not reduced, if too many of Houston s economically disadvantaged young people are unprepared to succeed in the high-tech, knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to envision a prosperous future for the region as a whole. On the other hand, if the education and income gaps can be bridged, Houston will be in a position to capitalize fully on the advantages of having a young, multi-cultural and multi-lingual workforce, able to help build the bridges to the global marketplace, and this major port city will be well positioned for competitive success in the new economy. Figure 6 Ethnicity by Age in Harris County, from the U.S. Census of Anglos Blacks Hispanics Asians/Others PERCENT BY AGE GROUP AGES 65+ (N=333,487) AGES (N=785,457) AGES (N=960,450) 28 AGES (N=638,036) 24 5 AGES 0-17 (N=1,147,835) The Houston Area Asian Survey 17

20 A Bifurcated Immigration into a Bifurcated Economy The current immigration differs from all previous immigrant streams in American history, not only in its predominantly non-european origins, but also in its striking socioeconomic disparities. One group of immigrants (mostly from Asia and Africa) is coming to Houston and America with higher levels of educational credentials and professional skills than ever before in the history of American immigration. Another, larger group (mostly Hispanic) is arriving with major educational deficits relative to the rest of the American population. As shown in Figure 7, fully 59 percent of all Latino immigrants in Harris County have not completed high school. Only 7 percent have college degrees. The comparable figures for Houston s Americanborn Latinos are 26 percent without high school diplomas and 13 percent with college degrees or more. The U.S.-born African Americans have slightly higher levels of education than their Latino counterparts, but much lower levels than the Anglos or Asians: 22 percent of the African-American adults in the Houston area do not have high school diplomas, and just 19 percent are college-educated. In sharp contrast, a remarkable 59 percent of all the Houston-area Asian immigrants have college or postgraduate degrees. Only 37 percent of the U.S.-born Anglos in Harris County are collegeeducated. In the 2011 survey, the respondents who were employed were asked to describe their occupations. More than four out of ten Asian immigrants (45 percent) said they were working in professional or managerial positions and 48 percent were employed in the technical, sales, or service industries. Only 7 percent of the Asian immigrants in 2011 were working in low-skilled occupations. In contrast, fully 27 percent of all Latino immigrants were employed as construction workers, machine operators, truck drivers, or in other low-level production or service jobs. Figure 7 Distributions by Education in Five Communities, from the Surveys Combined 70 Less than H.S. 60 H.S. diploma Some college College degree Post-graduate PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS Asian Immigrants (N=976) US-born Anglos (N=5,354) US-born Blacks (N=5,214) US-born Latinos (N=3,298) Latino Immigrants (N=2,125) 18 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

21 The Model Minority Myth The success that so many Asian immigrants have achieved in America has given rise to the myth of the model minority. This widely held image is built on the assumption that today s Asians are much like the European peasants who came to this country during the great third wave of immigration between 1890 and As was the case with these earlier immigrants, Asians are thought to have arrived in America with little money and few skills. If they have succeeded, it must therefore be solely by virtue of their hard work, high intelligence and strong family values. These assumptions are often taken as additional confirmation that America is still a land of equal opportunity for all. Hence, at least by implication if not explicitly, if blacks and Latinos have not attained equal success they have only themselves to blame. The data depicted in Figure 7 make it clear, however, that Asians have been relatively successful in Houston and America mainly because they come from families in their countries of origin whose educational and occupational attainments far exceed the average for U.S.-born Anglos. When asked in the 1995 and 2002 surveys what occupation their fathers had when they themselves were 16 years old, four out of ten Asian respondents (39 percent) said their fathers were doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, corporate executives or other professionals. This was true for a third of the Anglos (32 percent), for 17 percent of African Americans, and 12 percent of Latinos. Only 22 percent of all the Asians in 1995 and 2002 said their fathers were employed in lowpaying production jobs or worked as agricultural or day laborers, but this was the case for 45 percent of Anglos, 63 percent of blacks and 74 percent of Latinos. The immigrants from Africa (mostly Nigeria and Ghana) have been coming to Houston and America with educational levels as high as those of the Asians. Fully one-half (51 percent) of all the African immigrants reached in the expanded Houston surveys ( ) had college degrees, and 21 percent of them had postgraduate educations. Why are the immigrants from Africa and from most of Asia coming to America with levels of education and professional credentials that are so much higher than the newcomers from Mexico, Central America or Southeast Asia? The answer, in large part, is that the restrictive immigration laws before reform in 1965 declared Asians to be inassimilable aliens. Asians were effectively banned from coming to this country, and Africans were never allowed before 1965 to immigrate freely. As a result, once the laws were changed, entry into America through family reunification was unavailable to these potential immigrants although it would be the primary avenue of legal immigration for Mexican nationals. The only other ways to be eligible for preferential access after 1965 were by virtue of refugee status (e.g., the Vietnamese), by qualifying as professionals of exceptional ability (e.g., most of the Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Taiwanese, Nigerians and other Africans), or by having occupational skills that were sorely needed and in demonstrably short supply in the United States (e.g., Filipino nurses). The unprecedented socioeconomic disparities among today s immigrant communities reflect the history of American immigration policy. Betty Yeh, a young girl at a classroom gathering of the Institute of Chinese Culture, Houston, Texas. May Photographer, T. Wong. Gene & Hedy Lee Chinese language newspapers & photographs, (MS 556), Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. The Houston Area Asian Survey 19

22 DIFFERENCES IN LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES AMONG THE ASIAN COMMUNITIES Figure 8 shows that the high levels of educational achievement among Asians in general mask important differences by country of origin. The contrasts have much to do with the different pathways to legal immigration that were available to the varied Asian communities. Thus of all the Filipinos who participated in the three Asian surveys, 64 percent were women. The data suggest that most of them were trained in American-based nursing schools in the Philippines and came here primarily under the occupational provisions of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act and the 1989 Immigration Nursing Relief Act conspicuously for jobs as health technicians and nurses in the many Houston-area hospitals. Unlike most of the other post-1965 Asian immigrants, the Vietnamese (60 percent of whom are males) came as refugees. They fled to this country after the fall of Saigon in 1975 as part of the largest refugee resettlement program in American history. Like most refugee communities in the United States (the Cubans in Miami are a prime example), they came in at least two waves. Most of the early arrivals were highly educated professionals, politicians, or military officers who had served in the former American-backed governments in Vietnam. Many more of the Vietnamese came here in the 1980s and 1990s with little formal education and few resources, having survived horrible conditions in refugee camps and terrifying voyages across the seas. Hence, it is not surprising to see in Figure 8 a far greater variability in educational attainment Figure 8 Distributions by Education among the Four Largest Asian Communities, from the Three Surveys Combined Less than H.S. H.S. diploma Some college College degree Post-graduate 38 PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS Vietnamese (N=390) Chinese/Taiwanese (N=373) Indians/Pakistanis (N=348) Filipinos (N=108) 20 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

23 among the Vietnamese than in the other Asian communities. More than 20 percent of the Vietnamese in the three Asian surveys combined do not have high school diplomas, compared to just 10 percent of all Asians in Houston. Only 30 percent of the Vietnamese have college or professional degrees, but this is the case for more than 50 percent of all the Asians. As seen in Figure 8, a remarkable 71 percent of the Indians and Pakistanis have college degrees, as do 67 percent of the Filipinos although the Indians and the Chinese are much more likely than the Filipinos to have post-graduate degrees. The surveys indicate further that only 12 percent of all the Asian respondents were in low-paid production or day-labor jobs; but this was the case for 26 percent of the Vietnamese. The latter were also the most likely of all the Asians to have completed the surveys in their native language rather than English, to have no health insurance, and to report that they had a problem in the past year buying the groceries they needed to feed their families. Clearly, many Vietnamese are having a difficult time in the Houston area, and they may be less likely to receive the help they need, in a language they can understand, from a wider community that continues to believe that all the Asians are doing fine. Income Differences among the Asians Because education is so critical to economic success in today s high-technology knowledge-based economy, it is not surprising to find corresponding differences in household income among Houston s Asian-American communities. As indicated in Figure 9, the Indians/Pakistanis report the highest incomes, with 36 percent living in households making $75,000 or more; 29 percent of the Chinese/ Taiwanese and 28 percent of Filipinos also report household incomes in excess of $75,000. Figure 9 Distributions by Household Income among the Four Largest Asian Communities, from the Three Surveys Combined 40 Less than $15,000 $15,001-25, $25,001-35, $35,001-50,000 $50,001-75, PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS More than $75, Vietnamese (N=287) Chinese/Taiwanese (N=263) Indians/Pakistanis (N=264) Filipinos (N=84) The Houston Area Asian Survey 21

24 A clear majority of the Filipinos (56 percent) and the Indians/Pakistanis (57 percent) report incomes above $50,000, but this is true for just a third of the Vietnamese families. Among the Chinese/ Taiwanese, nearly half (45 percent) report incomes above $50,000, but more than a third (39 percent) also say their household income is less than $35,000. The Filipinos and Indians are the most educated among Houston s Asian communities, and they are the most likely to be fluent in English, so it is not surprising that the two groups also report the highest household incomes. At the other end of the spectrum, nearly one-half of all Vietnamese families (47 percent) report household incomes of less than $35,000 annually. Almost one fifth (18 percent) have annual incomes of less than $15,000. These vast socioeconomic differences should call into further question any monolithic image of all the Asians as a universally successful model minority in America. Large segments of the Asian population are far from prosperous. The Primary Reasons for Coming to America The Asians have come from different backgrounds and for divergent reasons. When asked what it was that brought them or their parents to this country, Figure 10 indicates that fully 56 percent of the Vietnamese respondents said they immigrated because of political persecution, as a result of war, or in search of freedom. Only 11 percent of the Chinese gave political reasons of this sort, and virtually none of the Indians/Pakistanis or Filipinos did so. The Filipinos said they came overwhelmingly in pursuit of work opportunities; they were also somewhat more likely than the other groups to cite marriage or family reasons for immigrating. Both the Chinese/Taiwanese and the Indians/Pakistanis gave reasons of education and work in roughly equal proportions, although the Chinese were more likely to say they came for education, and the Indians more often cited job opportunities. Figure 10 The Most Important Reasons Given for Immigrating to America among the Four Largest Asian Communities, from the Three Surveys Combined 70 Economic hardship, Work opportunities Education War, Politics, Freedom Relatives, Marriage Other reasons PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS Vietnamese (N=377) Chinese/Taiwanese (N=335) 1 Indians/Pakistanis (N=335) Filipinos (N=105) 22 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

25 Still a Glass Ceiling? Besides the income differences among Harris County s Asian communities, the surveys point to something else as well. Figure 11 compares the levels of educational attainment and of household income among all the Anglo and Asian respondents in the combined 1995, 2002, and 2011 surveys. Despite levels of education that are considerably higher than those of most Anglos 51 percent of all Asians (both immigrant and U.S.-born) have college degrees, compared to just 36 percent of the non-hispanic whites Asians report much lower family incomes. Only 28 percent of the Asians, compared to 36 percent of Anglos, said their total household incomes exceeded $75,000. The surveys also reveal that Asians are significantly less likely than Anglos to have health insurance (77 vs. 88 percent), to own their own homes (69 vs. 73 percent), or to live in the suburbs (46 vs. 64 percent). The differences loom even larger when family size is taken into account. More than half (53 percent) of the Asian respondents indicated that four or more people were living in their households; just 26 percent were in households with only one or two persons. Among Anglos, in contrast, only 28 percent were in households with four or more people, and 52 percent lived alone or with just one other person. Asian Americans in Houston are as likely as Anglos to be employed in professional or managerial positions (39 and 40 percent), but they earn less and report considerably lower household incomes. Some part of this discrepancy is surely a consequence of Asians being younger and at an earlier stage in their careers, and of having arrived as immigrants with educational credentials that may be difficult to transfer into a new society. Part of the disparity may also reflect the impact of continuing discrimination. The so-called glass ceiling, through which Asian professionals can see the top management positions in both private and public institutions but are unable to reach them, has been documented in studies across the country (Fong 2008). Asian Americans may well face continuing structural barriers that Figure 11 Distributions by Education and Income among Anglos and Asians in Harris County, from the Three Surveys Combined High school or less Some college College degree $35,000 or less $35,001 to $75,000 More than $75,000 PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS Anglos (N=1,459) Asians (N=1,502) Anglos (N=1,188) 28 Asians (N=1,100) The Houston Area Asian Survey 23

26 prevent them from earning salaries equivalent to those that Anglos receive. In sum, any reliable analysis of the Asian-American experience needs to be contextualized. The stereotype of the model minority overlooks the class advantages enjoyed by the high proportion of Asian immigrants who come from upper-middleclass families in their countries of origin, and it diverts attention from continuing discrimination. It also lumps together into a single image individuals from 27 different nationalities, who speak different languages, follow different religious and cultural traditions, and came to America under contrasting circumstances, for divergent reasons, and with vastly different resources. Above all, the model minority myth glosses over the fact many Asian Americans are far from prosperous, and it makes it less likely that Asians in need will be offered the help that others receive. Ethnic Divides in Perspectives on Immigration and Intergroup Relations The 31 years of the Kinder Institute s annual Houston Area Survey have shown that positive views among area residents in general have been gradually, unevenly, but consistently increasing when respondents are asked to evaluate Houston s burgeoning diversity and its growing immigrant populations. Not everyone, of course, is equally enthusiastic about the arrival of so many newcomers. Figure 12 illustrates the basic pattern of intergroup differences in attitudes toward immigration and ethnic diversity. Not surprisingly, Latinos (more than half of whom are themselves immigrants) and Asians (threequarters of whom are immigrants) express far more positive views toward the new immigration Figure 12 Distributions by Beliefs about Immigration and Ethnic Diversity among the Four Major Ethnic Communities, from the Surveys Combined Anglos Blacks Latinos Asians PERCENT 'AGREEING' Admit more or same number of legal immigrants in next ten years. The increasing immigration "mostly strengthens" American culture Against imposing fines on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The increasing ethnic diversity brought about by immigration is a "good thing." The increasing diversity will eventually become source of great strength. 34 Immigrants contribute more to American economy than they take. 24 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

27 in general than do blacks and Anglos: 78 percent of Asians and 69 percent of Hispanics, but only 52 percent of Anglos and 43 percent of African Americans, would like to see the U.S. admit more or the same number of legal immigrants during the next ten years as were admitted in the last ten years. Similarly, 77 percent of Asians and 65 percent of Latinos, but just 49 percent of Anglos and 45 percent of blacks, believe that the increasing immigration into this country today mostly strengthens (rather than mostly threatens ) American culture. Hispanics are especially concerned about the treatment of undocumented immigrants: By 57 percent to just 26 to 35 percent in the other three communities, Latinos are far more likely to reject imposing fines and criminal charges against employers who hire illegal immigrants, and (not shown) to be in favor of granting illegal immigrants in the U.S. a path to legal citizenship, if they speak English and have no criminal record (by 82 percent compared with 63 to 69 percent in the other groups). more difficult for blacks to be hired and putting downward pressure on the salaries paid to all lowlevel production and service employees in today s economy. Ratings of intergroup relations. In an effort to clarify further the way the different communities assess the nature of ethnic relationships in Houston, participants in all three of the expanded surveys (1995, 2002 and 2011) were asked to evaluate on a 10-point scale (where 10 means excellent and 1 means very poor ) the relations that generally exist in the Houston area between their group and each of the other three major ethnic communities. Confirming the increasingly positive changes the surveys have documented in measures of ethnic relations over the years, the ratings given by the respondents from all four communities without exception grew more positive in each successive study. Figure 13 depicts the ratings given by the Asian respondents across the three surveys. It is interesting to note that many non-hispanic whites are particularly sensitive when issues of immigration are explicitly raised. Thus 90 percent of Asians but just 68 percent of Anglos think the increasing ethnic diversity in Houston brought about by immigration is a good thing rather than a bad thing. However, when immigration is not salient in the question wording, the gap is much smaller: 80 percent of Asians and 69 percent of Anglos agree with the more general proposition that the increasing ethnic diversity in Houston will eventually become a source of great strength (rather than a growing problem ) for the city. Figure 12 shows further that African Americans are the most concerned about the economic impact of immigration. They are considerably less likely than the other communities to believe that immigrants to the U.S. generally contribute more to the American economy than they take, and they are the most likely to call for fewer new immigrants to be admitted in the decade ahead. Such views undoubtedly reflect African Americans far stronger feelings of vulnerability in competing for semiskilled jobs primarily with Latino immigrants. The latter are prepared to work for lower wages than most Americans would expect to earn, making it Chinese family on an Easter egg hunt, Chinese Baptist Church, Houston, Texas, Photographer unknown. Gene & Hedy Lee Chinese language newspapers & photographs, (MS 556), Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. *The copyright holder for this material is either unknown or unable to be found. This material is being made available by Rice University for non-profit educational use under the Fair Use Section of US Copyright Law. This digital version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The Houston Area Asian Survey 25

28 Figure 13 The Average Ratings Given by Asians to Relations with the Three Other Ethnic Communities on the 10-Point Scale, from the Three Surveys Combined AVERAGE RATING IN EACH YEAR Asian-Anglo Relations Asian-Hispanic Relations Asian-Black Relations The Asians have been giving increasingly more positive ratings over the 16-year span of the surveys to all three relationships (Asian-Anglo, Asian- Hispanic, and Asian-black), and their evaluations have consistently been more positive than those of any of their non-asian counterparts. Of all the intergroup relationships being evaluated on these scales, Anglos and Asians generally give the most positive ratings to the relations between their two communities. Asian-black relations have been the most problematic. Indeed, the lowest ratings given by any group to any of the relationships are the ones given by blacks to Asian-black relations, although these evaluations, too, have grown more positive over the years. National surveys have also found that Asian Americans are most positive about relations with whites, less positive about relations with Hispanics, and most negative about relations with blacks (Pew 2012:87). The findings point to areas of tension and potential conflict within an overall generally positive and improving picture of interethnic relationships in the Houston area. It will be important to encourage the development of closer and more trusting interactions between African Americans and Asians, as well as between blacks and Latinos (which receive the next lowest ratings). Such cautionary findings should not, however, detract from the overall conclusion that area residents, including Asians and blacks, appear to be growing more comfortable over the years with their city s burgeoning diversity. 26 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

29 CONTRASTS IN RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES Houston (and America) is turning into a microcosm not only of the world s peoples, but also of the world s religions. Figure 14 depicts the diversity among Houston s Asian populations in their religious affiliations. The influx of Asian immigrants has been accompanied by a growth in the prevalence of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, as well as of the many other non-christian religions that are rapidly taking their place along with the Protestants, Catholics and Jews who once defined the extent of religious diversity in America. As indicated in the figure, each of Houston s largest Asian communities presents a quite different religious complexion. The Filipinos are by far the most likely of all the major Asian communities to be Catholic (at 75 percent) and to be strongly religious: 88 percent in this group asserted that religion was very important in their lives, and 71 percent said that they had attended a religious service in the past 30 days. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of the Korean respondents (not shown here) are Protestants. By 37 and 33 percent, the Indians/Pakistanis are evenly split between Hindus and Moslems; only 13 percent are Protestants or Catholics. The Vietnamese are divided, by 35 and 45 percent, respectively, between Catholics, who (as we will see shortly) were more likely to have come in the earlier waves of immigration during the 1970s, and Buddhists, who have generally moved to America in more recent years. The Chinese/Taiwanese, in contrast especially to the Filipinos, are the least likely of the major Asian communities to express strong religious commitments. When asked about their religious preference, fully 35 percent of the respondents from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong said they Figure 14 Distributions by Religious Preference in Four Asian Communities and among all Asians, from the Three Surveys Combined 90 Protestant Catholic Hindu 80 Moslem Buddhist Other religion 75 No religion PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS Vietnamese (N=380) Chinese/Taiwanese (N=364) Indians/Pakistanis (N=335) Filipinos (N=108) All Asians (N=1,453) The Houston Area Asian Survey 27

30 had no religious affiliation; 30 percent confirmed that religion was not very important in their lives; and 59 percent (compared to 47 percent of all Asians) said that they had not attended a religious service during the preceding month. Figure 14 also reveals that approximately 40 percent of all Asians in Houston have a non-christian religious affiliation, and almost a fifth (18 percent) claim no religion. These religious orientations may well be changing in the second generation, however. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S.-born Asians report that they are either Protestant (41 percent) or Catholic (20 percent). Only a quarter identified with a non-christian religion such as Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam. Another 14 percent of the American-born Asians claimed no religion. Political Affiliations Respondents were asked if they would call themselves a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent or something else. Those who did not give a political preference were asked if they thought of themselves as closer to the Republican or to the Democratic party. Figure 15 shows the political affiliations of Houston s three largest Asian communities across each of the three surveys, documenting one of the few clear changes in Asian attitudes that the surveys have revealed in the course of these 16 years. In the 2011 survey, a clear majority (63 percent) of the Indian/Pakistani community self-identified as Democrats, with only 17 percent claiming to be Republican a pattern that is largely unchanged from the earlier years. In contrast, Houston s Vietnamese and Chinese populations were predominantly Republican in 1995, when 60 percent of both groups identified with the GOP and just 28 and 25 percent with the Democrats. By 2011, however, the proportion of Republicans had dropped significantly in the two communities to just 40 percent and 37 percent respectively, Jade Buddha Temple. Southwest Houston. Photo by Megan Dillingham, January Kinder Institute for Urban Research

31 Figure 15 Political Party Affiliation among Harris County s Three Largest Asian Communities in 1995, 2002 and Declared or leaning Republican Declared or leaning Democrat 60 Independent/Don't know PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS (N=113) (N=94) (N=85) (N=96) (N=98) (N=108) (N=84) (N=96) (N=113) Vietnamese Chinese/Taiwanese Indians/Pakistanis while support for the Democrats grew slightly, and increasing proportions now self-identified as Independents. Why did the general Asian tendency in 1995 to support the Republican Party wane in the ensuing years? We have seen (in Figure 10) that immigrants from Vietnam and China were more likely than other Asians to cite political persecution from communist regimes and the search for freedom and democracy as their motivation for coming to America, named by 56 percent and 11 percent, respectively. Like the Cubans in Miami, they may have been especially attracted to the Republican promise of a firmer anticommunist foreign policy. In recent years, however, anti-communism has faded in its political importance and concerns about restrictive immigration policies, growing economic inequalities and perceived discrimination against Asian Americans have increased (Fong 2008). This may help to explain the fall-off in support for the Republican Party among these two populations. The actual votes in recent presidential elections confirm this general partisan shift. In 1992, George H. W. Bush won 55 percent of the Asian-American vote. In 1996, 48 percent of the Asian electorate voted for Bob Dole and 43 percent for Bill Clinton. The proportions reversed in 2000, when Al Gore won 54 percent of Asian support to George W. Bush s 41 percent. The Democratic share of the Asian vote has continued to increase in every subsequent election, growing from 56 percent in 2004, to 62 percent in 2008 and to 73 percent in the The Houston Area Asian Survey 29

32 2012 presidential election (Warren 2012). The Asian vote for President Obama was even more lop-sided than the Latino vote (at 71 percent); 93 percent of African Americans also voted for Obama. In sharp contrast, 59 percent of all non-hispanic white voters supported Mitt Romney (The 2012 National Election Exit Polls). Figure 16 offers a plausible explanation for these ethnic differences in party affiliation by pointing to some key policy issues on which the views of Anglos differ sharply and consistently from those of the three other major ethnic communities. The differences have to do primarily with the role of government in working for economic and social justice, with the sense of community responsibility, and with the underlying belief that collective action is needed to strengthen the safety net and to moderate the inequalities generated by an unfettered free-enterprise system. The differences in political affiliation between Anglo voters on the one hand, and blacks, Latinos and Asians on the other, follow directly from these contrasts in their policy views. Voter turnout matters enormously. According to the 2008 Current Population Survey, less than a third (32 percent) of all Asian Americans of voting age actually voted in the 2008 presidential election. The Hispanic turnout (at 32 percent) was equally dismal. Meanwhile, 65 percent of all eligible non- Hispanic whites voted, as did 61 percent of African Americans. Even if nothing happens to change the low voter turnout among Asians and Latinos, the demographic transformations that are taking place across the country make it inevitable that the Anglo share of the American electorate will continue to decline in the elections to come. Consistently across all six of these attitude items, Anglos express far stronger opposition to government initiatives than do blacks, Latinos or Asians. Only 48 percent of the Anglo respondents in the 2011 survey, for example, believed that the government should see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job, but this view was held by 63 to 75 percent of the respondents from the other three ethnic communities. More than half (56 percent) of all Anglos asserted that government regulation of business always does more harm than good, compared to just a little over a third of the other respondents. A similar pattern prevails on questions asking whether the government is trying to do too much or should do more to solve the country s problems, and whether or not government has a responsibility to help reduce the inequalities between rich and poor in America. Also consistent with the Anglo (and Republican) resistance to government intervention is the far stronger belief among non-anglos that global warming is mainly caused by human activities, which can presumably be mitigated through collective action, rather than by normal climate cycles, which are independent of human agency. In addition, Figure 16 indicates that Anglos are significantly more likely than those from other ethnic backgrounds to support the death penalty. Three Indian girls in traditional dress, Houston, Texas, ca Photographer unknown. Gene & Hedy Lee Chinese language newspapers & photographs, (MS 556), Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. 30 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

33 Figure 16 Distributions on Attitudes toward the Role of Government among the Four Major Ethnic Communities, from the 2011 Survey Anglos Blacks Latinos Asians PERCENT 'AGREEING' The government should ensure that all who want to work can find a job Government regulation of business always doesmore harm than good. 32 The government should do more to solve the country's problems. 39 Government has a of responsibility to reduce in equalities between rich and poor in America. 35 The high global temperatures in recent years are mainly caused by human activities. In favor of the death penalty for persons convicted of capital murder. If the growing non-white populations persist in rejecting the Republican Party, the GOP s dominance among non-hispanic whites will not be enough to offset its losses among Asians and Latinos. Republicans will need to find new ways to appeal to these rapidly growing segments of the Texas population if they hope to keep their hold on the statewide electorate, and Democrats will need to find ways to boost turnout if they hope to secure their advantage with the newer voters (Lizza 2012). It will be interesting to watch how these trends unfold in the years ahead. Hong Kong Food Market. Bellaire Boulevard, Houston. Photo by Megan Dillingham, January The Houston Area Asian Survey 31

34 SOME FURTHER GLIMPSES INTO THE FUTURE The Changing Waves of Vietnamese Immigration More than for any other Asian community, the dates when the Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States are associated with important variations in their general characteristics. Table 3 presents some of the most significant differences among the several waves of immigration. Like most refugee communities, the Vietnamese came in multiple waves. The first wave, as we have seen, was far more likely than later arrivals to be members of the economic elite in war-torn Vietnam, with close ties to the U.S. military. Historian Douglas Pike (1998) characterizes this group as urban, upper-class, well-educated, and familiar with American lifestyles. As shown in Table 3, fully 55 percent of the Vietnamese who came before 1980 were college-educated. More than half completed the interviews in English, and they were primarily Catholic in their religious preference. The Vietnamese who came in the 1980s and 1990s were far less likely to be college-educated or to speak English, and more likely to be Buddhists rather than Catholics. The 2011 survey reached only 20 Vietnamese who have come to America since the turn of the century, so any conclusions about this group must be treated with caution, but the data are suggestive. These most recent immigrants have even lower levels of education than those who arrived in the 1990s, but they are more fluent in English. They are less apt to be Catholics and more likely to be Protestants. Most interesting of all, the data point to the definitive ending of the repercussions of the Vietnam War. Unlike their predecessors, not a single one of these recent arrivals refer to war, politics, or the quest for freedom when asked why they came to America. Their answers are now like those of most other Asian immigrants: 86 percent said they came to this country for education or work opportunities, and the remaining 14 percent cited marriage or family reasons. Table 3 Selected Differences among Successive Streams of Vietnamese Immigrants, from the Three Surveys Combined DATES OF VIETNAMESE IMMIGRATION TO THE U.S (N=104) (N=105) (N=105) (N=20) 1. What is the highest grade of school or year of college that you ve completed? High school or less Some college College degree 27% % % % Language of the interview: English Vietnamese 52% 48 43% 57 26% 74 44% What is your religious preference, if any? Protestant Catholic Buddhist No religion 5% % % % What was it that led you or your parents to leave their country of origin and come to America? Work/education War/politics/freedom Marriage/family Other reasons 15% % % % Kinder Institute for Urban Research

35 The Rise of the Second Generation The three Asian surveys have tracked over these 16 years the coming of age of the second generation, the increasing share of the Harris County Asian population who are U.S.-born. Figure 17 shows the distributions in each of the three surveys of the Asian immigrants by the length of time they have lived in the United States, and by the percentage of Asians in each year who were American-born. In the first survey (conducted in 1995), 28 percent of all the Asian respondents had lived in this country for less than ten years; just 22 percent had been here for more than 20 years, and only 10 percent were U.S.-born. Sixteen years later, by the time of the 2011 survey, those figures were dramatically different. Only 12 percent of the Asian adults who participated in the most recent survey had come to America in the past ten years, fully 35 percent had been living in this country for more than two decades, and almost a third (31 percent) were born in the United States. It will be fascinating to watch the continuing rise of the second generation of Asian immigrants, born in this country from generally privileged backgrounds, young people who are 100-percent American yet with deep connections still to their countries of origin. The Asian immigrants who came to Houston and America after reform in 1965 have generally come, as we have seen, with unusually impressive educational and income credentials, ones that are far superior to those of the U.S.-born, non-latino white Americans. How successful have the Asian immigrants been, despite barriers of language and culture, in passing their privileged backgrounds on to their American-born children? Figure 18 compares the levels of education and income obtained by the foreign-born first generation of Asian immigrants and by the U.S.-born second Figure 17 Distributions by Immigrant Generation and by Time in the U.S. among Harris County s Asian Populations in 1995, 2002 and Asian immigrants, in the U.S. for less than 10 years Asian immigrants, in the U.S. for 10 to 19 years Asian immigrants, in the U.S. for 20 years or more U.S.-born Asians PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS (N=498) 2002 (N=496) 2011 (N=489) The Houston Area Asian Survey 33

36 Figure 18 Distributions by Education and Income among the First and Second Generations of Asian Immigrants in Harris County, from the Three Surveys Combined Asian immigrants aged 25 and older U.S.-born Asians aged 25 and older PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS High school Some college College degree or less or higher Immigrants (N=997) / U.S.-born (N=132) Less than $35,001 to More than $35,000 $75,000 $75,000 Immigrants (N=781) / U.S.-born (N=91) generation, considering only the survey participants who were aged 25 and older. The data make it clear that the second generation of U.S.-born Asian Americans is doing even better than the highly successful first generation of Asian immigrants. The American-born Asians are even more likely than the foreign-born to have graduated from college, and they are far more likely to have continued their formal education beyond high school. Despite being younger and thus at an earlier stage in their careers, the U.S.-born generation is already earning significantly higher salaries: Fully 42 percent report household incomes of more than $75,000; only 29 percent of the first-generation are in that income bracket. The first-generation Asian immigrants, reflecting their relatively high socioeconomic status, are generally proficient in English, many of them long before they set foot on this continent. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of all the foreignborn Asians who participated in the 2011 survey completed the interviews in English. This was the case for just 43 percent of the foreign-born Latinos. Asians are also more likely than Latinos to be well on their way toward full assimilation into American society. More than half (51 percent) of the Latino immigrants in the most recent survey said they thought of themselves as primarily Latino rather than American, but fewer than a quarter (24 percent) of the Asian immigrants saw themselves as primarily Asian; another 57 percent thought of themselves as equally Asian and American. Asian Houstonians in this age of transnational economies, instantaneous communications and inexpensive travel are becoming fully American while also retaining deep connections to their country of origin. Asked about any efforts they might have made in the past year to preserve their cultural identities, the Asians were significantly more likely than Latinos (by 37 to 28 percent) to say they often participated in an Asian (or Hispanic) holiday or cultural event. By 50 to 41 percent, the Asians were also more likely than the Latino 34 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

37 respondents to say they had often communicated during the past year with friends or relatives in their country of origin. Building the multiethnic future. The U.S.-born Asians (by 87 to 73 percent) are more likely than first-generation immigrants to report having a close personal friend who is Anglo. Significantly, the generational differences in friendship networks are even greater with regard to the more problematic relationship between Asians and blacks: 78 percent of the American-born Asians, but only 53 percent of the first-generation Asian immigrants, said they had a close personal friend who was African-American. The Asian respondents in the 2011 survey were also asked if they had ever been involved in a romantic relationship with someone who was non-asian: 61 percent of the U.S.-born respondents said they had, compared with only 32 percent of the Asian immigrants. In keeping with these findings, the U.S. Census reports that Asian Americans are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines: Of all the Asian newlyweds between 2008 and 2010, for example, almost three out of ten (29 percent) had married a non-asian (Pew 2012). Clearly, this rising group of second-generation Asian Americans will play increasingly important roles in all aspects of American life as the twenty-first century unfolds. Their parents came to America with educational and income backgrounds that were far superior to those of U.S.-born Anglos, and they have succeeded in passing those advantages on to their American-born children. The Asians in general are readily assimilating, joining the ranks of uppermiddle-class Americans and moving rapidly into leadership positions. They are also people of color, sensitive to the realities of continuing discrimination, broadening their friendship and even family networks across all the ethnic communities, and more committed than Anglos to strengthening collective efforts to expand opportunities and reduce the growing inequalities in America. For all these and other reasons, Houston s Asian Americans will be major contributors to the efforts under way across the Houston region and throughout America to build a successful, inclusive, equitable, and united multiethnic future in the twenty-first century. BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. Stafford, Texas. Photo by Jie Wu, January The Houston Area Asian Survey 35

38 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The census data and survey findings reviewed in these pages offer a compelling picture of a major American metropolis in the midst of fundamental transformation. This Anglo-dominated biracial city, which was riding the most important resource of the Industrial Age to continual prosperity during most of the last century, emerged from the oilboom collapse of the mid-1980s to find itself in the midst of a restructured two-tiered, knowledgebased, fully globalized economy, and of a truly remarkable transformation in its ethnic and cultural composition. The demographic revolution. Through the first eight decades of the twentieth century, Houston s rapid population growth was basically due to the inmigration of Anglos. By 1980, this had become the fourth largest city in America. Harris County that year was 63 percent Anglo, 16 percent Latino, and 2 percent Asian. After the oil boom collapse, the Anglo population stopped expanding and then declined. All the growth since 1982 has been due to the influx of Asians, African Americans and Latinos. In the latest census, only 33 percent of the 4.1 million people now living in Harris County were Anglos. The Houston area in 2010 was 41 percent Hispanic, 18 percent African-American and 8 percent Asian. Fort Bend County, just to the South and West of Harris County, is now the single most ethnically diverse county in the nation. In the 2010 Census, Fort Bend was 19 percent Asian, 24 percent Latino, 21 percent black and 36 percent Anglo. The Houston region as a whole is the most ethnically and culturally diverse large metropolitan area in the country, at the forefront of the new diversity that is radically reconstructing the social and political landscape across all of urban America. The United States is in rapid transition from having been an amalgam almost exclusively of European nationalities into becoming a microcosm of all the peoples of the world. Nowhere is this transformation more clearly seen or more sharply articulated than in Houston, Texas. The new stream of American immigration began in 1965, after reform of the notoriously restrictive laws that sought to limit immigration predominantly to northwestern Europeans. The current wave differs from all previous immigrant streams in American history, not only in its predominantly non-european origins, but also in its striking socioeconomic disparities. One group of immigrants (mainly from India, China, and Africa) is coming to Houston and America with higher levels of educational credentials and professional skills than ever before in the history of immigration to this country. Another, larger group (mostly from Mexico and Central America) is arriving with striking educational deficits into the new two-tiered economy, where these immigrants are generally confined to low-paying, dead-end, production and service-sector jobs. Fully 59 percent of all the Latino immigrants in Harris County have not completed high school; only 7 percent have college degrees. In sharp contrast, 59 percent of the foreign-born Asian immigrants have college or postgraduate degrees; these are far higher levels of educational achievement than among the U.S.-born Anglo adults in Harris County, only 37 percent of whom have college degrees. Researchers at Rice University s Kinder Institute for Urban Research have been conducting the annual Houston Area Survey for 31 years ( ). In all but one of the years since 1994, the basic random surveys of Harris County residents have been expanded to reach large representative samples, numbering 500 each, from the county s Anglo, black and Latino populations. In 1995, 2002 and 2011, the researchers were able to include equally large representative samples of the region s varied Asian communities, with one-fourth of the interviews being conducted in Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin or Korean. Presented in the Appendix of this report, organized by central themes, are most of the questions asked in the 2011 survey on which there were statistically significant and substantively important differences in the responses given by the Asians, Anglos, African Americans and Latinos who participated in this research. 36 Kinder Institute for Urban Research

39 Chinese dragon dancer lifting dragon mask over his head, ca Photographer unknown. Gene & Hedy Lee Chinese language newspapers & photographs, (MS 556), Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. The 2010 Census counted 280,341 residents of Harris County (6.9 percent of the county s 4.1 million inhabitants) who identified as Asian on the census form. The Vietnamese (at 29 percent) are the largest Asian community in the county, then the Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (18 percent), and the Asians from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (16 percent). These were followed by the Filipinos (8 percent) and Koreans (4 percent); the rest have come in relatively small numbers from the many other countries and cultures of Asia. The distributions by country of origin in the Houston surveys closely correspond with the census data, strengthening confidence in the representativeness of the Asian samples. Immigration patterns and socioeconomic status. This report draws on the three Asian surveys spanning 16 years ( ) to assess the distinctiveness of the Asian experience in comparison with Harris County s Anglos, blacks and Latinos. One of the most significant consequences of the ongoing demographic revolution can be seen in the relationship between ethnicity and age. Across the country, and particularly in Houston, older residents are disproportionately Anglo, whereas the younger cohorts are predominantly Asian, Latino and African-American. These age distinctions will become even more evident as the 76 million baby boomers, born in The Houston Area Asian Survey 37