CHAPTER 5

Mental Health Care for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Historical Context

Asian Americans

The Chinese were among the first Asians to come to the United States. Small numbers came as early as the late 1700s on trade and educational missions, but the discovery of gold in California brought 300,000 more Chinese immigrants between 1848 and 1882 (Huang, 1991). Most were indentured to work in the mining and railroad industries. Later in the 1800s, Japanese immigrants filled the need for cheap contract laborers on Hawaiian sugar plantations. Many left Hawaii and settled in California, where they contributed substantially to the state’s agricultural success. Then the U.S. Government began passing various laws to strictly control the flow of Asian immigrants and restrict their rights. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limited the admission of unskilled Chinese workers. In 1907 and 1908, a Gentlemen’s Agreement placed similar limits on Japanese and Koreans, and in 1917, another Immigration Act restricted the entry of Asian Indians. In response to a growing population of Filipino immigrants who worked as daily wage laborers in California agriculture, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 denied entry to Filipinos. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which incarcerated over 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, including more than 70,000 U.S.-born citizens, in internment camps and Federal prisons. This order was a reaction to the public’s strong anti-Japanese sentiment and to mistaken beliefs that Japanese Americans presented a threat to national security during the War.

Figure 5-1 shows the percent distribution of the Asian American and Pacific Islander population by ethnic subgroup, based on Census 2000 data. Data are given for Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Pacific Islander ethnic groups. For Pacific Islanders, data are broken out for individuals of Native Hawaiian, Samoan, and Guamanian/Chamorro ethnicity.

With the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which favored family reunification and discouraged systematic discrimination against Asians, Asian immigration to the United States grew rapidly. While Asians comprised less than 7 percent of total immigrants to the United States in 1965, they accounted for nearly 25 per-cent in 1970. In 1971, new legislation eliminated all quotas on countries of origin and replaced them with a general limit of 290,000 immigrants a year. Although the proportion of Asian immigration to the United States is now relatively large, it must be noted that Asians comprise about 60 percent of the world’s population.

Today immigrants come from China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries in search of better educational and economic opportunities. For example, most Korean Americans are not American-born descendants of the first wave of immigration from the early 1900s. Rather, they are part of the tens of thousands of immigrants that have entered the United States every year since 1965. Similar numbers of Filipinos have immigrated annually since 1965, so most Korean and Filipino Americans today are first or second generation. Because of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines until 1992, Filipino immigrants are more likely than other Asian immigrants to be acculturated to American ways and to speak English. During the late 1970s and 1980s, many Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were accepted by the United States for political and humanitarian reasons. This brief history of Asian immigration reveals the heterogeneity of the Asian American population in the United States.

Pacific Islanders

Unlike Asian Americans, most Pacific Islanders are not immigrants, but are descendants of the original inhabitants of land claimed by the United States. Thus, Pacific Islanders share the history of American Indians and Alaska Natives, whose lives dramatically changed upon contact with various European explorers. In the late 1760s, for example, Captain James Cook and his crew arrived in Hawaii and brought with them formerly unknown diseases that devastated much of the indigenous population. By the late 1840s, after colonists had taken and redistributed the land in Hawaii, American missionaries and businessmen controlled most of the land and trade of these islands. A similar fate befell the Tongans. When Cook discovered the Tonga islands in 1773, English missionaries followed. Tonga became a British protectorate in 1900 and gained its independence in 1970.

Figure 5-2 provides an estimate of the Foreign-Born U.S. population by race and Hispanic Origin. It shows that only the Asian American and Pacific Islander group includes more people who are foreign-born than U.S. born.

United States. Each area is responsible for the administration of local government functions. Under the Compacts of Free Association, the U.S. Department of the Interior has administrative responsibility for coordinating Federal policy in the Pacific territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where most residents have U.S. citizen-ship. The Department of Interior also has over-sight of Federal programs and funds in the freely associated states of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau.