When Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, an outpouring of excitement among Indian Americans foretold potential gains for Democrats among Asian Americans, the fastest growing minority group. But Asian Americans neither turned out in record numbers nor moved toward Democrats. In fact, Indian Americans moved toward Trump. Janelle Wong has followed the trajectory and diversity of Asian-American voters. She does not see a realignment in the making but does see significant moves rightward and divergence across country of origin subgroups. This adds to the evidence of racial dealignment, but also the complexity of American racial categories.
Guests: Janelle Wong, University of Maryland
Studies: AAPI Data
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Why Asian-Americans did not swing to Harris, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
When Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, an outpouring of excitement among Indian-Americans foretold potential gains for Democrats among Asian-Americans, the fastest growing minority group. But Asian-Americans neither turned out in record numbers nor moved toward Democrats. In fact, Indian-Americans moved, alongside others, toward Trump. This week I talked to Janelle Wong, of the University of Maryland, to get the background and the latest trends on Asian-American voters. Is there a realignment in the making, divergence across country of origin subgroups, or are most Asian-Americans likely to be steadfast Democrats? She also advises AAPI Data and brings fresh information on Asian-American views and diversity. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
All right, so let’s start with the basics. How large is the Asian-American electorate? How do Asian-Americans compare to other groups in terms of their levels of participation and which side they usually support?
Janelle Wong: Thanks. Yeah, so the American population, as a whole, not just voters, is a little under 7% of the US population. In terms of elections, they make up between three to 4% of the electorate. There’s a little bit of fluctuation. When I look at the data from this year, it looks like they were about 3% of the electorate as a whole. And then, in terms of their patterns, we have seen this really interesting pattern where, in 1992, Asian-Americans voted about 34% for the Democrat, Bill Clinton, and then, by 2012, the exit polls were showing over 70% of Asian-Americans voting for Obama. And then we’ve seen a decline since then, a softening of that Democratic vote choice and we saw, in different kinds of data, I think you could estimate, between 35 and 40% of Asian-Americans voted for Trump. That was, I think, interesting to think about in relation to other groups as well.
Asian-Americans tend to be… In the last two decades, they’ve been fairly consistent in terms of Democratic support, but we’re seeing, I would say, a erosion of that over time. It’s not dramatic. We still see a serious leaning towards Democratic candidates. And if you think about it, be where do Asian-Americans live? They live mostly in these blue places, but they’re also telling us a lot about the trends nationally. In terms of participation, historically, they have been participating at lower rates in terms of voting than other groups. They are also, at the same time, the fastest growing group of new voters because of their population growth. That’s a lot to throw at you, but that gives you a picture of the Asian-American electorate.
Matt Grossmann: And what about within the group? What are the largest national origin subgroups and what are the big differences in terms of their participation and partisanship?
Janelle Wong: Yeah, this has been very interesting to watch over my lifetime. Chinese, for a very long time, were the largest Asian-American group. After the 2020 census, about a year after that, we started to see that Indian-Americans were the largest Asian alone group, and that is quite interesting because Indians and Chinese have pretty different politics, even though, their background, they have a lot of people who came through professional skilled visas and then through family reunification, so their immigration pathways are fairly similar. Most of both groups have come since the 1990s, so more than half of both groups have come since the 1990s, even 2000s. And they are both predominantly foreign-born with pockets of people who’ve been here, like myself, for five generations. But we also see that these groups demonstrate different political orientations. Up until this election, Indians have been one of the most progressive groups in Asian America.
And so, we saw up to, sometimes, 80% of Indians voting for the Democratic candidate. Consistently, in poll after poll, they have demonstrated the most progressive views on almost every issue, ranging from immigration to climate change, and that’s partly because their partisanship is so solidly Democratic. Chinese have been much more moderate, I would say, still leaning Democrat, and I bring them up because they’re the second-largest group now, and they have been much more moderate, especially on issues having to do with race and immigration. Still, though, they have leaned less dramatically so, but have still leaned towards the Democrats.
When we look at groups that have been historically more conservative in the Asian-American community, Vietnamese, for many cycles, were the most Republican group. Actually, a majority were Republican in 2020 and a majority supported Trump. But then, in this election, I’ve seen several polls, not just AAPI Data’s, but other polls, including Matt Barreto’s poll, that shows that Vietnamese are slightly looking a lot more Democrat than I would expect. I don’t know if it’s our samples or what is going on. It’s a little bit too much of a switch to, I think, attribute to real deep change in the population. But something has changed, I think, with the way that we’re collecting data and sampling Vietnamese, but they are looking more democratic.
What has changed is that Indians are just a little bit less Democratic leaning in this cycle. That makes a big difference because they are the largest group, and we can unpack that a bit more, given that there was an Indian-American candidate at the top of the ticket.
Matt Grossmann: And sorry, just to fill out the picture, talk a little bit about Korean and Japanese and how large are these groups and how different are they?
Janelle Wong: Yeah. Vietnamese are actually one of the smaller groups, as our Japanese. Japanese have been historically leaning Democratic. Korean-Americans, we’ve seen actually become more Democratic over time. They’re also, I would say, middle of the pack in terms of… On the smaller size side. It’s really Indians and Chinese dominate the Asian-American community, in terms of population size. This is an interesting issue because when we try to capture Asian-Americans, especially in polling, you have to make a lot of decisions.
And so, you can get a good sense of how the population’s going to behave, overall, if you just focused on Chinese and Indians. But there’s also another 30% of the population that you want to look at and, in this case, we, at AAPI Data and other high quality attempts to reach the Asian-American population, which, again, is a really small proportion of the electorate, very geographically concentrated, we try to also pull smaller origin groups so that we can get a sense of this kind of diversity that you’re talking about.
We also try to survey as much as we can, recruit and survey in an Asian language. That is something that the exit polls don’t do. The exit polls survey in Spanish and English only. They do not account for the geographic concentration of Asian-Americans, and they also will be capturing quite a few Indian and Chinese. Chinese are the group that’s most likely to answer these exit polls. In some ways, you’re getting just a very different kind of sampling when you look at those national exit polls.
Matt Grossmann: To what extent do Asian-Americans have distinct policy priorities and to what extent are they just mirroring the overall population in terms of its priorities?
Janelle Wong: I think we see both. In all of the polls I saw leading up to this election, of course, inflation was at the top of the most important problem list, and that looks very much like the population more generally. General population is very concerned with jobs and the economy. Asian-Americans also very concerned with jobs and the economy.
But when you dig down, what we see is really distinct among Asian-Americans, is Asian-Americans are more likely than the general population to say that universal healthcare is a concern, that the environment, and especially government intervention to prevent environmental degradation, is also a concern. We see Asian-Americans much more open to, for instance, raising taxes on the rich to provide a middle class tax cut than the general population.
And so, some of these things are very interesting because these issues challenge some assumptions about Asian-Americans. A lot of people think Asian-Americans are going to be fiscally conservative, but when you present them with questions about the minimum wage or taxes or even the very basic question of “Do you prefer a bigger government with more services versus a smaller government with fewer services,” Asian-Americans are actually more like other people of color than white voters on those issues.
Matt Grossmann: You found that support for Kamala Harris was much larger than support for Joe Biden over the summer when you took multiple surveys there. And I know we’re wary of relying on geographic analysis or exit polls, but it sure seems to me that there was a shift towards Republicans from the 2020 to the 2024 election based on precinct analysis and the exit polls and other polls. How do we think about those things? On the one hand, Harris probably performed better than Biden would have, this year, but the shift from 2020 to 2024 was in the Republican direction.
Janelle Wong: Yeah. No, I think there’s definitely some issues with the exit polls in terms of capturing Asian-Americans. And there’s also… I think we’re finding, in polling in general, it’s really hard to get a good sample of these smaller groups. And even with a large sample of thousands of Asian-Americans, you’re still not getting quite who is answering a survey these days. I think it brings a cold fist around our hearts to think about this issue. We did see, as you say, when we asked about Joe Biden, earlier in 2020, and-
Janelle Wong: Biden earlier in 2020, and when we were pulling in 2023, in the beginning of 2024, we saw that Biden was just not getting attention from Asian Americans. There was not a lot of enthusiasm. When Kamala Harris joined the ticket or became the candidate, there was a bump, I think, in enthusiasm and excitement, especially among those who were answering these polls. And then what we saw in actual, and I think all the data show that there was more support for Trump than was expected. Less support for Harris than we would’ve guessed based on earlier polling. Why is that? I mean, I think a couple of things are going on. One is that we have seen in the past that Asian-Americans were a group like Latinos that had a very large proportion of people who said that they were no party or independent or didn’t think in terms of these parties.
And we’re starting to see the kind of sorting that we’ve seen in the general population, where in 2020, about 30% of Asian Americans said that they were true independents. Now it’s about 20%, and we’ve seen the population break. That group of leaners is breaking pretty much evenly, and historically, they’ve broken for the Democrats, and so that’s one issue. So among Asian Americans, Republicans are voting for Trump, right? There’s over 90% are voting for Trump. That looks a lot like the general population. Those with less education were voting for Trump compared to those with more evangelicals, more likely to vote for Trump. And we saw, just like the general population, men were more likely to have voted for Trump and then Filipinos to some extent when we look at different polls.
I mean, this is something that we’re all actively looking at. We see what the drivers are, but are there more Asian Americans with less education now than there were in the past? Not at all, right? So it’s kind of a mystery in that way. There’s a substantial number of evangelicals, but Asian Americans are the group, that is among all racial groups, that is the least likely to be religiously affiliated. So there’s a lot of contradictions in this electorate. We did see Indian Americans, I think, shifting towards Trump versus in past election cycles, and I don’t know what to make of that. It’s again, a huge contradiction because there was an Indian American, and many people who are Asian American saw her as a remarkable Asian American candidate. So I think as we begin to understand the electorate as a whole, we will also see who the Asian American Trump voters are. What is drawing them? Is it issues or is it partisanship? Then shifting views towards the issues that is very difficult to tell with these kinds of data.
What we do know is that when I look at the foreign-born population versus the US-born population, there doesn’t look to be a lot of differences in terms of support for Trump. Lower income Asian Americans are not more likely to have voted for Trump and compared to, let’s say, white… So a lot of these kind of markers of the white Trump voter, like rural residents, that is not something that is popping out among the Asian American electorate. The other thing that’s kind of interesting about Asian Americans is that they tend to be one of the groups that shows a lot of support for reproductive rights and reproductive justice.
So contrary to the idea that Asian Americans are kind of conservative on these social issues, if you take a step back and think about some of these countries like China, there’s not a lot of prohibitions on reproductive rights in terms of abortion that is. So, Asian-Americans are not a group that seems particularly conservative on issues like abortion. The one exception are Korean American Christians. But outside of that, there’s a fair degree of support for very liberal reproductive rights, and still we see in this election, Asian Americans shifting a bit towards the GOP and towards Trump.
Matt Grossmann: So as you said, some expected that Kamala Harris’s Indian American ancestry would move Asian American voters, or at least Indian American voters towards the Democratic candidate, and that doesn’t appear to have happened. What should we make of that? Were we wrong to expect that? How does that compare to other instances of Asian American support for Asian American subgroup candidates?
Janelle Wong: Yeah, what I saw on the ground among Indian Americans, and we saw a fair amount of, when we polled on favorability, Indian Americans were the group that showed the highest favorability towards Kamala Harris. So it’s not that people were really rejecting her in terms of just affect, I guess. And we had some very interesting data on what aspects of Kamala Harris were most appealing. So one of the things I noticed is that when we were asking people, what’s most important to you about the Harris candidacy? Asian Americans were as likely to say they thought her being Indian or her being Asian American was as important as her being a person of color or her being a black candidate. There wasn’t much, much more enthusiasm for the Asian American aspect of her identity.
Just being non-white I think was important to a large segment of Asian American voters. At the same time, we also saw that the most appealing part of her candidacy, of her identities, was really being a woman. So even among Indian Americans, they were more excited about the fact that she was a female candidate than about other aspects of her identity. Maybe it came down to the issues. We did see that the economy was a driver of people’s votes, but also among Asian American Republicans who were about a third of Asian Americans, immigration was way up there. I had maybe had the wrong idea that for Asian American Republicans, they weren’t as mobilized as Asian American Democrats because of these identity aspects of the election. But actually when we looked at data, they were participating at very high rates. They were donating, they were activated.
And so some of the issues that we see came up the economy, immigration, to some extent, maybe crime. Those were driving a good deal of Asian Americans to the polls, and even among Democrats, we saw crime was not nearly as high an issue, but was one of the issues. I will step back though and say in terms of the precinct level analysis on Asian Americans, I mean, I think it’s really important to note that when we look at precinct level data in places like New York, it looks like Asian Americans in those places were more Republican than ever. But it’s also critical to note that Asian Americans do not face the same kinds of barriers to integration that many other non-white groups face. And so a majority of Asian Americans in New York, in Orange County, in LA, they do not live in majority Asian precincts.
So more than 70% of Asian Americans do not live in a majority Asian neighborhood. So when you’re looking at precinct data, you’re looking at a very small segment of the Asian American population. So I’m hesitant to draw a lot of conclusions from that kind of data, given that that’s not the typical Asian American.
Matt Grossmann: Hispanic Americans also moved towards Republicans in 2024 and have now done so in two elections in a row. And there is caveats to the geographic analysis, but there is evidence that areas of high foreign born populations overall have also moved towards Republicans or moved the most towards Republicans this time. So talk about the sort of role of Asian Americans compared to the Hispanic community and the sort of role of the immigrant experience or family heritage in the way that those sets of voters have entered the political system.
Janelle Wong: Yeah, I think as I mentioned, we’re not seeing the same kind of break with US-born and foreign-born Asian Americans. They do not look different in terms of their vote choice. What we see, I think that’s pretty striking, is that when we look at the evangelical vote, we see 80%, possibly more, of white evangelicals voting for Trump. For Black evangelicals, obviously it’s very low, and that’s been an area of fascination for many, given that the theology is very similar. But if we look at Asian American and Latino evangelicals, we also see a difference between these two groups. Asian Americans look more like Black evangelicals. About 40% of Asian American evangelicals, in at least one of the polls I saw were voting for Trump. That’s still much higher than the non-evangelicals, right? And I think it’s probably an underestimate. But maybe we could say that half of Asian American evangelicals are voting for Trump, whereas 60% of Latino evangelicals are voting for Trump. It’s solidified more in that group, and that’s because for various reasons.
Possibly Latino evangelicals have had a lot more outreach from groups that are actively [inaudible 00:23:40] them Republican groups. Trump has not shown up at an Asian American evangelical church in the way that he has at Latino evangelical churches. The other issue that I see is racial resentment. I don’t know the direction exactly, but we see a super high correlation in terms of issues of racial resentment. Let’s take this question, do you believe racial inequality is due to black people not working hard enough or to generations of slavery? And we see among whites that that’s a big association with Trump vote. For Latinos, it’s about, I would say half of those who have that attitude voted for Trump. And among Asian Americans it’s a little bit lower. So we’re seeing slightly different, I think, dynamics in the Asian American and Latino communities. That is a level of detail I’m not sure your listeners are going to be interested in, but it is interesting to me that among these groups, it’s not just a cookie cutter explanation for why people are turning towards Trump.
Matt Grossmann: Forgive me for trying another cookie cutter, but what about political incorporation that this is, as you said, people establishing a partisanship, it’s ideological sorting, so we should expect it to have a kind of ceiling in that there’s plenty of Hispanic and Asian American voters that are Democrats and liberals for good reasons, but there were also people who were Democrats even though they were on the conservative side or maybe sided with Republicans on some issues and those folks are slowly sorting in both groups toward the Republicans.
Janelle Wong: Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure we’re going to see a massive realignment among Asian Americans. If you think about where they live, if you think about the levels of education, I just don’t see it. When we looked at, there was the same kind of attention to a rightward shift in the midterms when we looked at, let’s say 2018 to 2022. And when I looked at Asian Americans in 2022 versus 2018, those midterm elections, they had ticked up a little bit for the Democratic candidates at the congressional level. And so what I see is a lot of stability. Actually.
I mean I’m not a huge fan of these exit polls, but I do think over time, because they are the same kind of methodology, we can definitely track, there is a sorting going on. There are more Asian American Republicans. I do not see necessarily a new kind of upward swing towards the Democrats. At the same time, I see a fair amount of stability over the last 12 years. And I just think there are a lot of factors that are still, this is an interesting community, right? It’s highly educated and it has a lot of resources, why are they Democrats to begin with? And I think we’re not capturing some of that. That non-white status among Asian Americans is important to consider. It explains why they’re not looking exactly like whites of the same socioeconomic status.
Matt Grossmann: So Republicans thought that these successful lawsuits against major universities that highlighted Asian American losses from affirmative action would help them win over Asian American voters. To what extent was that true? And what other outreach attempts or attempts to provide more specific outreach to this community on a policy issue might’ve made a difference?
Janelle Wong: Well, I don’t think it hurt Republicans. For a long time I was looking at data and Asian Americans on a sort of general level did support affirmative action and raise conscious admissions but when you ask them about this Supreme Court case, they, like many other groups, say that the decision was made in the right way. And so Asian Americans, as a whole I think, did support this Supreme Court case but I’m not sure that is the kind of impetus for this kind of softening of Democratic support. And that is because I believe that people make an assumption about Asian Americans’ interest in education issues. And as I’ve kind of noted before, there is this stereotype, the model minority stereotype, that assumes that Asian Americans are hyper focused on education and much more so than other groups. And that’s why you see every campaign, including when I looked at Harris’s ads to Asian Americans, they included many other issues, but they led with education or immigration.
And that is because of the model minority stereotype, which says Asian Americans care so much about education and also the forever foreigner stereotype that says, okay, we’re going to really care about immigration. But if we dig deeper, we do see that Asian Americans are no more likely to list education as a top issue than Americans more generally. And it’s not even their top issue. For Asian Americans education is usually not in the top five of their priorities.
So I’m not sure that that case, I think that case really shows an assumption and what people think about Asian Americans is education and because the media focuses on education, but where I saw Asian Americans showing a lot more alignment with the Republican Party is really around immigration. And this is to me fairly, it’s not shocking, but it shows you that just because the group itself is majority immigrants, so the majority of Asian American adults, voters, are in fact foreign born, that does not mean that immigration is going to be either they’re priority or that they’re going to be necessarily left leaning on this issue.
So what we saw in polling of Asian Americans around immigration is that the group that said that immigration was their top issue were Asian American Republicans. And so I think that immigration is an inroad for the GOP among Asian Americans. I also think that for some Asian Americans, an appeal to sort of law and order in the face of perceptions of anti-Asian violence also could be an appeal. And then of course, we have to just go back to the bread and butter of inflation.
Matt Grossmann: You found some concern about misinformation among some Asian-American subgroups. I wonder if you’d comment on that, but also comment on sort of where Asian American voters get their political information, if they’re divided based on either partisan media or based on language media and how much that matters?
Janelle Wong: Yeah, I haven’t taken a deep dive into where Asian Americans are getting their information, whether it is a partisan divide, I’d be really interested to see that because I think we can look at that and I suspect there will be some kind of information cones that would help us better understand what is happening. What we do know is that certain groups like Vietnamese for instance, are getting the majority of their information from YouTube. We see this obviously among younger Asian Americans as well.
In terms of the sort of Fox News Republican, I haven’t quite seen that breakdown among Asian-Americans, but misinformation is a serious concern, especially among Asian-American civil rights groups and Asian-American advocates because we have seen so much information, especially anti-communist messaging, linking the Democrats to communist parties, to communist ideologies in ethnic media. The other kind of messaging that has gotten a lot of attention and research is there’s a lot of racist messaging that goes out to Asian American communities and because the ethnic media is very siloed, there’s no counter messaging. And so we see some anti-black messaging really taking hold in Asian American communities related to crime, related to affirmative action. And there have been numerous attempts to counter more accurate messaging through these civil rights groups, things that allow you to do fact checking across different communities.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve been talking mostly about the presidential data, but there were some new Asian American members of Congress elected and other officials, and not everyone did the same as Kamala Harris. So what can we learn from the sort of who is winning over Asian American voters and Asian American representation?
Janelle Wong: Yeah, I mean, I think you were probably paying closer attention to this than I was. I saw you did very well in the election madness and the races that were drawing my attention, obviously Andy Kim. Andy Kim did very well and I think is a Democrat that did win even though Harris didn’t win. We also saw this really interesting race playing out, which, I think, tells you a little bit about where Asian American politics is in the current moment, which is that California 45 House race that featured two Asian American candidates, Michelle Steel and also Derek Tran was one of the most interesting races I’ve seen, because that district in Orange County has a fair number of Korean Americans, a fair number of Vietnamese Americans. And Vietnamese, mostly we think about them as leaning Republican and Derek Tran ran as a Democrat there and won. I mean, I think that district was also redistricted and so included more Latino voters. When we look at Asian American elected officials, what really stands out is most districts are not like the California 45. Most districts where Asian Americans run are districts that might include some, but never a majority Asian Americans, tend to be multiracial districts. And that is very different from other non-white candidates, where they tend to run and if they win, win in districts that are a majority minority. And so, here we saw Andy Kim is running. It’s a multiracial district. He’s having to appeal way beyond the Asian American community.
And that is really, I think, the story of Asian American candidates at the national level. Even if they’re in a state that doesn’t have a lot of Asian Americans, they still get a lot of attention from Asian Americans. They’re still expected to represent Asian Americans to some degree on a symbolic level. And if they’re outside of Hawaii, they also are representing many people who are not Asian American. And that I don’t see changing very much in the future.
We do see a very few majority Asian American districts, but the overall story is that Asian American candidates are having to appeal outside of the Asian American community, and they can do it. If you look at the literature on Asian American electeds, especially experimental literature, it’s so interesting to see that Asian Americans, when they’re in a head-to-head race with white candidates in an experimental context, they seem to benefit, right? They seem to benefit from presumed competency. They seem not to be penalized for the forever foreigner stereotype, and yet it seems much harder for them to win actually in the real world. So I’m interested in sort of how far that kind of experimental research takes us in terms of understanding the experiences of Asian American candidates.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve talked a little bit about class and religion, but I want to go back to it again, that among white Americans, there’s been a big class reversal, where high income used to be this big predictor for Republican voting. Now it’s less so, and education for Democrats is more so. Among religion, we’ve seen this big increase in religious nuns and their affiliation with the Democratic Party, and of course the divide between evangelical and other Christian communities. How well do those changes in class and religion map on to the Asian American community?
Janelle Wong: Yeah. For class, the latest poll I saw, which is Matt Barreto’s poll, that that was like an election day poll. There’s a lot of controversy obviously over different methodologies, but the Asian American sample was large and had a lot of variation. And so, those data showed that there wasn’t a lot of difference between those Asian Americans that had incomes over $100,000, let’s say, versus the lower income. It was 36% of Asian Americans who had incomes over $100,000 voted for Trump, 30% among those who were $35K or less.
When we look at education though, that divide looks more dramatic. So high school or less, about 50% of Asian Americans voted for Trump versus 34% of those who had a four-year degree or higher. So 49% versus 34%, that seems it’s tapping into something, right, with that larger sample. And that it looks a lot like the pattern we see across different groups, especially whites.
But again, you’ve got to remind ourselves, Asian Americans are a group that is most likely on average to have a four-year degree, more likely than white Americans. So that group of voters who have less education is fairly small in the Asian American community. And we don’t see the same kind of class differences. And so, that’s all in some ways working for the Democrats still. That’s one of the explanations for why you don’t see more Asian American Republicans.
And then, I do think I might, since I wrote this book on evangelicals, things have changed a bit. I had assumed that evangelicals of color, it’s still the case. They look very different from white evangelicals. They are more moderate. They’re not just coming into the white Evangelical fold and adopting all the views. And this was the case in 2016 as well, we do see that Evangelicals are fertile ground for Republicans.
Republicans are going to have to work much harder though to appeal to Latino and Asian American evangelicals than white evangelicals. And it seems to me, looking at the data, that they’re even going to have to appeal harder to Asian American evangelicals than to Latino evangelicals. So this is a pretty interesting time when, I think this is the first election I’ve seen, maybe first or second, where I guess in 2012 it was also the case, where Asian Americans were actually more to the left than Latinos. And it is an interesting comparison. Those immigration trajectories do not look the same. And the recruitment to the US from Asia looks very different from that from Latin America. And Asian Americans are the only predominantly foreign-born group. Latinos are not predominantly foreign-born, right? So I think Asian Americans are telling us a lot about the kind of immigrant vote, because Asian-Americans are now like half of the immigrant vote.
Matt Grossmann: So you said that there was a ground made by Republican complaints about immigration under the Biden administration, but there was a real change in policy and a large immigration flow. In the new Trump administration, of course, there are threats and promises of mass deportations or big changes to immigration policy. That might actually be seen on the ground. How would you expect… What did we learn from the first Trump administration, if anything, about that? And how would you expect it to go if there is signs of a dramatic reversal in immigration policy?
Janelle Wong: So it is the case that about one out of seven immigrants, Asian immigrants is undocumented, right? And that is significant. And the group with the largest numbers, just raw numbers, of undocumented immigrants are Indian and Chinese since they have the largest numbers. And of course, it’s interesting to think about they are not coming in through the border as much. Some of them are, but many are visa over-stayers, right? That’s getting a lot less press and attention than border crossings, even though they make up a large number of undocumented people, people who overstay visas.
That said, the Asian American community is a little bit unpredictable on immigration. My colleague and I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that showed that even though a majority of Asian Americans are immigrants, even though they are the most likely to have benefited from family-based migration, Black voters, or Black respondents in our survey, were more likely to hold liberal views on immigration than Asian Americans. And that’s partisanship, but it’s not all partisanship. It’s also because at that time, Asian Americans were also very heavily towards the Democrats.
But progressive immigration is not always the way to win the hearts and minds of Asian Americans. That was on legal immigration that we saw that Black Americans were more progressive than Asian Americans; legal immigration, of which Asian Americans have fully built our community based on these laws and policies.
I think the more pressing issue for Asian Americans is going to be anti-China rhetoric and policy. And again, it’s pretty complicated. Chinese Americans are very wary of these laws, and they do mobilize around anti-China type initiatives. But other Asian Americans don’t have strong feelings. They could be anti-China, given China’s role in the region. And so, it plays out in a pretty complex way. And I wish I had more answers for you, but I’m just a political scientist.
So one of the things that was always shocking to me between 2016 and 2020 is that polls showed that Asian Americans, and especially Chinese Americans, blamed Trump for anti-China rhetoric that led to anti-Asian discrimination in the US, that they saw as contributing to a rise in anti-Asian hate in the US. And yet, more Chinese Americans and more Asian Americans vote for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. So they may attribute blame to Trump for anti-China rhetoric, for even more harsh immigration policies that do in fact, as you say, affect their communities. And yet, when it comes to voting, I’m not sure they punish the GOP.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center. And I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website: Anti-Immigration Politics is California’s Past, the Republican’s Future, Why Latinos Move Toward Trump, and Why Most are Still Democrats, Multiracial Electoral Coalitions for Minority Candidates, What Research on Black Women Candidates Means for Kamala Harris, and Why Are Black Conservatives Still Democrats? Thanks to Janelle Wong for joining me. Please check out AAPI Data and then listen in next time.