To celebrate Welcoming Week 2022, a week when communities and organizations across the entire country come together to recognize America’s diverse heritage and to reaffirm that everyone is welcome here, today's conversation focuses on one of the largest immigrant groups in the U.S.: Asian Americans. This episode's guest is Dr. Neil Ruiz, associate director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, who has spent his career studying the international movement of people across borders, high-skilled immigration globally, and in recent years his focus has been studying the Asian American population in the US, something that resonates with him as he is himself Asian American. Prior to joining the Center, Neil has held roles at George Washington University, the Brookings Institution, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Today’s episode focuses on a large and new research initiative that he has been leading called Being Asian in America and that released new findings just last month in August 2022.
Episode Themes:
The Being Asian in America initiative, its narrative and storytelling approach, and how it contributes to our understanding of Asians in America
Why we need to use “hard” and “soft” data to understand immigrant communities and their stories and how the project has shaped Neil’s own growth and understanding as a researcher
The challenges of summarizing and extracting common themes from conversations with 264 Asians across the US, representing 18 distinct Asian ethnic origin groups and numerous languages
How the mainstream American understanding of Asia as a region and what constitutes Asia has changed and evolved over time, and what the Pew project adds to our understanding of the diversity of Asians and the Asian identity in America
The challenge of cultural adaptation vs identity: key differences between different generations of Asian American immigrants.
How racial and ethnic identity intersects with other aspects of identity such as gender or being LGBTQ+
How Asians in the U.S. perceive their own identity? Where are we now and do Asian Americans feel a sense of belonging in the U.S., especially given the recent wave of hate crimes against Asians?
What leading a project on Asian Americans means for Neil personally, as the child of Filipino immigrants to the U.S.
Episode Resources:
The Pew Research Center's Being Asian in America project
Check out the documentary film from the project!
My book: America Calling: A Foreign Student in a Country of Possibility
Sign up for America Calling: my take on the intersection of education, culture and migration
