Sociology - Asian-Americans - Essay Example

Asia's products had reached the Americans from then on until eventually it reached Europe. Since 1565, economic trade among Asian countries and the United States was already existent. America's silver reached China, as well as lacquer in its American colonies and in Spain. Crops - corn and potatoes - from the United States had been transported to China to support its growing population passing through the Manila, Philippines. The galleon trade as well inhibited a connection between China and the Philippines such that the sailors from Manila to Acapulco remained and traveled to Spain's other colonies in other parts of America.

Due to this continuous access to some parts of America, Filipinos, who were the first Asian settlers in the United States, established fishing and shrimping villages in bayous near New Orleans possibly as early as 1765, when they reached Louisiana. From then on, other Asian settlers followed after the Filipinos. "South Asians settled in port cities along the Eastern seaboard by the 1780s, followed by the Chinese shortly thereafter, and Hawaiians negotiated the coasts and camps of California and the Pacific Northwest by the 1790s.

" (Okihiro, 2001) Initially, men were the initial settlers in the US. . In 1778, at the same time when Captain James Cook came across Hawaii, Chinese sailors came in and immigrated as well. They too settled and intermarried with Hawaiian women. Some of the Chinese however reached the country along with the Koreans and Japanese as laborers to work on sugar plantations in the 19th century. Although there was still a large number of Chinese and Japanese began immigrating to the U.S. in the mid 19th century and worked as laborers on the transcontinental railroad.

The surge in Asian immigration in the late 19th century had caused the "yellow peril", a term used to refer to the fear in the growing number of Asians in the country. ("Asian") The increasing tumult in the immigrants' respective countries was deemed as the main cause of such event in the American history of immigration before it even had its independence. "National independence failed to sever Asia's moorings within the world system and its circuits of capital, goods, labor, and culture, and political and economic refugees and migrant laborers still accompany products from Asia to Europe and North America as they did in the past.

Since 1980, the rate of growth among Asian Americans far surpassed that of other groups, including whites, African Americans, and Latinos." (Okihiro, 2001) The United States' during the time that the Asian Americans were migrating into the country, America was at the same time facing its own economic and societal struggle. Along with the United States' capital deals with its systemic crisis of declining profits, the country seek out for cheaper labor that would live up to the government's infrastructural budgets.

One way out of this crisis was to recruit and hire immigrants that were composed of