 Welcome to the Racial Foundations of Public Policy Speaker Series, hosted by the Center for Racial Justice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I am Celeste Wicentzays, Director of the Center, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School, and a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy. At the Ford School, we seek a world in which people are able to achieve their full human potential, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories that have been used to divide and systematically marginalize. We train leaders here who understand the critical role of public policy in improving our world. We recognize the power of public policy to bolster or undermine our life opportunities and experiences, and we see policy analysis as a critically important tool for us to measure, reflect, historical examine, and help us define the way forward. At the Center for Racial Justice, we seek to illuminate evidence-based solutions to address deep challenges around racial inequity and to support the change-makers who advocate for sound, just, evidence-based, and fair public policies. We take an intersectional approach seeking to expand knowledge and highlight strategies and tools that address the complex intersections between public policy and racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, and other societal problems. As we examine the fraught histories and consequences of some of our policies and the transformative power of others, we learn a valuable lesson. Effective and just public policy can only be achieved if we bring diverse perspectives to the table. This fall, the Center has invited a cadre of brilliant scholars to participate in virtual conversations on the historical roots and contemporary currents of race and economic criminal justice, education, and immigration policy. We encourage you to review our website for recordings of our past events. So now, I am delighted, and I am honored, and I am so thrilled to introduce to you the final speaker of our inaugural Center for Racial Justice Racial Foundations of Public Policy event, Dr. Jennifer Lee. Dr. Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University and past president of the Eastern Sociological Society, an award-winning author of four books, most recently of the Asian American Achievement Paradox. Dr. Lee is this year's recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to the Field Award from the American Sociological Association's Asia and Asian American Section. Her wide-ranging research addresses morally urgent questions about the implications of contemporary U.S. immigration policy, particularly Asian immigration on the native-born population. She studied this from a variety of analytical lenses, including in immigrant entrepreneurship and ethnic conflict, intermarriage and multiracial identification, educational opportunities and outcomes, and most recently affirmative action and the rise of anti-Asian hate. She is a board member of the Obama Presidency Oral History, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a senior researcher at AAPI Data, which recently received a $10 million grant to study anti-Asian discrimination and hate. Committed to public engagement, Dr. Lee is a contributor for the Brookings Institution and is written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other outlets. Earlier this year, she was invited by the Biden-Harris Administration to present her research on xenophobia, discrimination, and anti-Asian hate to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. Dr. Lee, it is an honor to be with you this afternoon. Thank you so much for being here. What an honor and a privilege to be here with you, Dr. Watkins. Wonderful. So what I really want to start off thinking about is you are a sociologist who focuses on contemporary U.S. immigration and Asian immigration in particular. And I wonder if you can walk us through the importance of grappling with history and understanding race in the context of immigration policy. That's been a thread throughout all of your work. Tell us why that approach, both the historical lens, but also the foregrounding of a racial analysis, has been so important in understanding and thinking about immigration and immigration policy. That is a brilliant question. And let me just start off by saying how wonderful it is to be a part of this program and how much I appreciate your including immigration as part of the Racial Foundation series and also taking seriously Asian immigration. So let me walk you through some of the racial foundations of immigration policy that produced certain kinds of outcomes that we see. And so I think one of the things that I realized in doing this research is how little Americans, including Asian Americans know about the immigration experience, our history and why certain stereotypes about Asian Americans, the racial foundations of those stereotypes are a product of immigration policy. And so let me explain what I mean by that. So one of the things you mentioned was the rise of anti-Asian hate. And so I wanted to start with that even though that's something happening in the present so that I can link it to some, I would call racial foundations of immigration policy. So as many people might recall, there was a mass murder in Atlanta where eight individuals were killed, six of whom were Asian women in March of this year. And even though Asian Americans had been very concerned about the rise of anti-Asian violence and hate since the onset of COVID almost two years ago, it really took the murder of six Asian women to catapult anti-Asian hate onto a national platform. So at that moment it was really interesting to me that it took that and then all of a sudden I was bombarded with a number of news inquiries with what's going on. How do we explain this? Why is there all of a sudden anti-Asian hate and violence? And I thought, my goodness, this is the foundation of US history. Anti-Asian bigotry, violence and misogyny are deeply rooted in American history and it's been codified by US immigration law. So let me start. You asked a question about the history. A lot of people know 1882 as the date of the Chinese Exclusion Act but prior to that there was the 1875 Page Act which is lesser known. But what that did was forbid Chinese women, Japanese women or women from any Oriental country from immigrating to the United States on the presumption that they were prostitutes. And so this idea of exclusion came before the 1882 Exclusion Act and it targeted women because women were presumed, Chinese women in particular were presumed to be prostitutes. What that did was it really skewed an already skewed gender ratio for the Chinese population. It was already skewed at 13 men to one Chinese woman in 1870. By 1880 after the Page Act it was skewed to 21 to 1. And so that has tremendous ramifications for population growth, family formation and there since then there have been a series of exclusion acts that have excluded Asian nations throughout our country's history. And there's so much in terms of when we think about immigration policy we often think about this kind of open door America is the land of the free, the home of the brave, open to all. That's so prominent in our popular imagination but I hear you talking about the notion of exclusion as a policy tool. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that as a concept. How do we grapple with a legacy of exclusion as a policy concept? Again another brilliant question and I think this is very much gets at the heart of how we like to see ourselves as a nation as one that's open. That's one that's founded on inclusion and this idea that anyone can come here regardless of one's station in life, regardless of one's national origin and make it. Yet there have been a series of immigration laws that have targeted Chinese as a national origin and Asians as a group. I could go through all of them but all the way up to 1924 where you had an immigration act that barred that really contained national origin groups to 2% of whoever was already here from the country of origin to the United States. So what they wanted to do was whatever the country in the United States however it looked in 1890 that is the kind of country that the U.S. Congress wanted to reproduce in the United States. As I mentioned Asians were excluded for decades before so there was a very much a closed door policy. There have been a number of different restrictions that have made it very difficult for people who are of non-European descent to come to this country. That changed only recently in 1965 which got rid of the national origins quotas and opened the door to immigrants but even there what's interesting is that they privileged family reunification and then they privileged people with professional skills and so they the Congress didn't expect that the change in immigration law would diversify the country as it did. In part it's an unintended consequence with Asian immigration how that factors in is that because we were only half a percent of the U.S. population by 1960 even though we've been here for decades centuries really because of so much exclusion we were only half a percent so the way the U.S. Asian population grew was selected on professional skills which is why you see the first wave in particular of the post 1965 wave of immigration highly educated highly skilled thus creating this idea that Asian Americans are a model minority. And that really leads us to the Asian American achievement paradox the book that has been award-winning has really reframed how a lot of people think about academic achievement the assumptions we make about academic achievement. And I wonder if you can take us through that argument because not only does that connect to immigration policy but it also speaks to education policy. And as you know we had our friend Dr. Rucker Johnson was our last speaker and we were thinking about the composition of schools and the assumptions that we make of who's worthy of educational investment and who's not and what your work does is trouble a black white binary and get us to think about a much more kind of holistic frame for thinking about these issues. So I know he's a big fan of your work and I wonder if you can introduce us to some of the concepts in the Asian American achievement paradox. Thank you for bringing that up I'm so glad you did I'm a huge fan of Rucker Johnson's of course and a huge fan of yours of course Celeste. But let me say that I think it's critical to understand that Asian American academic achievement has been legally engineered and that's a concept that I came up with only after the publication of the Asian American achievement paradox meaning that one of the biggest myths about academic achievement among Asian Americans and this is constantly ratified in papers it's ratified by the tiger mother and a number of different myths is that Asian Americans value education more than other groups there's something about Confucian culture there's something about Asian culture that promotes educational achievement what we did in the Asian American achievement paradox was really problematized this so what we started to do was look at who immigrates from Asia and if you look at the five largest immigrant groups who are the five largest Asian groups Chinese Vietnamese Indians Koreans Filipinos all but Vietnamese are hyper selected and that is just a term we coined to describe the extreme positive immigrant selectivity of Asian immigrants so let me give you an example which will help so people if you think Chinese as a group are highly educated because that's who you see on your campuses for instance or that's who you're coming into contact with one of the things we find is that in the US about 55% of Chinese immigrants have a BA or higher compared to less than 4% of China's population so the Chinese immigrants who are coming to the United States are 15 times more likely to be college educated than their non migrant counterparts in China they're also more likely to be college educated than the US mean and so that's what we call double positive selectivity or hyper selectivity as sociologists we know that the greatest predictor of a child's education is her his or her parents education so the fact that Asian immigrants are highly educated and then the second generation is also highly educated should not be such a surprise one of the things that we also found is that there are stereotypes associated with coming from a group that's hyper selected the perception that you're smart that you're deserving of second chances that you're morally worthy of investment in education and we found that we coined this term stereotype promise to really get at this so one of the things we couldn't understand is why it is that Asian Americans for instance were more likely to be put in advanced placement classes into gifted classes sometimes without even having tested into them sometimes even after performing poorly in middle school they were given the benefit of the doubt because of their ethnicity because of their race because they come from hyper selected backgrounds because of the stereotypes associated with the model minority and so one of the things we found is once placed in an environment in which people believe in you people believe that you will perform a lot of the students did rise to the occasion and they perform better because they wanted to they changed their reference group the teachers believed in them the guidance counselors provided more help with their college applications so we coined this term as stereotype promise to focus on the social psychological benefits that others deem upon certain populations who are hyper selected and this is so fascinating because unpacking all of those mechanisms around stereotype promise is so interesting and compelling and I have to ask you why trouble a positive stereotype about a particular group it's what you're describing as positive it's protective right in all kinds of ways I would imagine that it's the envy of a lot of parents from other racialized groups who don't experience that kind of benefit of the doubt why trouble that paradox why why as a scholar did you think that was important to do well one I mean I think as a scholar we go where the research goes and so that is I felt like it was important to note in document and I remember having a conversation with Claude Steele when I was first seeing this in my research and I said I'm finding something really interesting and what I think it is is stereotype promise and it's different from stereotype threat in these ways and he said something really powerful which is for him this was the low hanging fruit that people weren't talking about yet at the same time you if there is stereotype promise it's against some other group right if there is one group who is exceptional it's measured against another group and it's typically a minoritized group the other thing that I found problematic of course even with the Asian American achievement paradox is that most Asians do not fall into the exceptional category the majority of Asians are not going to Ivy League schools they're not even going to the top top public universities like the University of Michigan so I'll give you another statistic in California we looked at where students are going to college and they're not going to the top about a quarter of them go to the UC system a quarter of them go to the Cal State but the majority over 50% are going to community colleges in California and so this idea of positive stereotypes it completely elides the heterogeneity within the population so there were a number of people who said they understood the stereotype but they felt like ethnic failures or racial failures because they did not meet the kind of bar that other people expect of them they oftentimes talked about being the whitest Chinese guy I'd ever meet and that wasn't about race it was about linking ethnicity to achievement and when people don't perform as is expected they start to opt out of their ethnicity they feel like they're they don't belong but the norm is not achievement it's not excelling but that is again the danger of a positive stereotype so just to think about this genealogy to think about those early policies of exclusion and racialized exclusion to you know mid 1960s 1965 policy that opened the door and to think about how that then shows up in a classroom setting right in terms of you called it legally engineered how that shows up in an experience for a student how that shows up in our perceptions of particular groups and how that then shows up in what policy prescriptions we support on the basis of our assumptions and stereotypes and perceptions is this fascinating thread throughout your work and I wonder if you can you know flip what you said on its head to think about those perceptions how they inform policy in the area of say affirmative action which was a which was the next place that you went to yeah you know it's interesting because in my classes especially my undergraduate classes I always have them think about okay we have this research where do we go in terms of policy and we just did that in an in my last class on monday because if we think about this research what I just described and what you articulated how we've legally engineered Asian-American academic achievement to look a certain way um there are a number of resources that children of hyper selected immigrants are privy to class resources ethnic resources that ethnic communities create like supplemental education tutoring systems all sorts of things that are accessible and available that are also available across class lines so that the children of working class chinese are sometimes able to participate in supplemental tutoring or after school academies that middle class chinese create when you don't understand the resources that come with being a part of a hyper selected community you fall back on this question of values that certain people just don't value education they don't work as hard and so what I said to my class okay how we frame this debate how we understand inequality and educational outcomes has direct implications for the policy prescriptions that people are going to endorse and support so if we focus on inequality and resources that's one set of policies if we focus on different values then that's a whole different conversation and so the affirmative action debate is such a thorny one because it was typically in this black-white framework and all of a sudden asians are front and center of a debate and I have to say that they are not the one Asian-american plaintiffs are not the one who actually orchestrated and engineered the debate so what many people might not know is that the students for fair admissions which is the organization that has sued harvard and also unc chapel hill is actually founded by edward bloom who is a white male former stockbroker turned what I call issue entrepreneur who has been on the rampage to dismantle affirmative action for over 20 years he's behind the abigail fischer case in ut austin and so his mission is to remove race from consideration race and ethnicity from consideration in um university admissions his pretense is that he's trying to help Asian-americans who he feels are unfairly bias who experience unfair bias because of their race ethnicity but what I want to say a couple of things one this is the wrong argument and and I feel like Asian-americans have been weaponized in this debate to serve a different cause the second is that the real issue that legal scholars like jerry kang at uc la and others have said is that we're focusing on affirmative action as if ridding affirmative action would rid anti-asian discrimination would rid anti-asian bias where he has suggested we turn our attention and I agree with him is negative action that is unfavorable treatment based on race using the treatment of whites for comparison so if we look at policies that promote negative action action including legacy policies this is where we should turn our attention and talk to us about legacy policies it's it's something that um isn't often talked about it's it's hidden and just assumed right this notion that um a college or university is going to think about um admitting people whose parents grandparents etc matriculated through the institution it's a philanthropic strategy at a lot of institutions they want to keep wealthy families engaged um but you're pointing to it as an important area for us to think about in terms of replicating inequity and particularly um in this context of of negative action so say a little bit more about that and why that needs to be part of our conversation as as well to not just focus on what I hear you saying is not just focus on the policies that are directly targeting minoritized populations but to also think about the policies that have unfairly benefited other people in the for these kinds of historical reasons can you tease that out for us no I I love that question first I want to say a couple things and I could I have to keep my thoughts straight because I can talk forever about all of this but one of the things I wanted to say is that affirmative action has been on trial for decades legacy admissions and giving an advantage based on nothing else but the fact that you are born into a family that is already privileged to have gone to university is something completely different so when we think about affirmative action it is allowing universities to consider ethnicity and race as only one variable of a slew of variables in order to make um an institution more diverse because we understand that more diverse voices and perspectives benefit all of us which is something you've also said in the beginning Celeste which I absolutely agree with negative action is anything that that actually um its policies that focus on in the context of Asian Americans it can be in the form of outright discrimination it can be quotas on Asian Americans to leave more room for whites with the belief that there is no reason why we should think that a predominantly white institution is more diverse or offers more educational benefits of diversity than a predominantly Asian American one so the groups who have actually benefited most when affirmative action actually um is no longer in play is not Asian Americans it has been whites and so this is something to also understand I also wanted to make one other point about dispelling myths and so one of the things we find in our research and AAPI data that our colleagues consistently find that about 70 percent of Asian American registered voters support affirmative action in higher education and the workplace and so the narrative that Asian Americans are both victims and opponents of affirmative action is so at odds with the data and so that's one of the things I really appreciate you talking about this series and thinking about the racial foundations and thinking about the myths that keep certain kinds of tropes alive and particularly when we think about politics and political engagement in this context the talk to us about the ways in which Asian Americans have found themselves and Asian immigrants have found themselves in the middle of political conversation and have grappled with the question of how to be politically agentic and to be advocates and at the same time finding these tropes and these narratives being used in policy discourse and policy debates and not always being at the table to help shape those those narratives um what what is that kind of political genealogy looked like in terms of political voice yeah another great question I wanted to say a couple of things about what makes Asian Americans unique is that two-thirds of us are immigrants and among Asian American adults four out of five are immigrants and so and again this is a product of the exclusionary practices and policies of our country and so because we are a fairly small population by legal engineering we're six percent and when you include Asian multiracial population we're seven percent of the population um we are actually fairly small but what has been really fascinating to see is the mobilization that has been taking place one of the most fascinating trends about Asian Americans is that people assume that Asian Americans are conservative and Republican leaning but when you look at our for instance Obama over 70% of Asian Americans voted for Obama about the same over 70% have voted for Biden and so one of the fascinating things about Asian American political mobilization is that despite our heterogeneity and despite the high socioeconomic status of some groups we converge in a number of policy positions and we're much more liberal on a number of policies than people would assume we believe in um one of the most surprising findings is how much we support gun control for instance how much we support environmental issues how much we support a strong safety net um and part of it has to do with understanding our legacy but part of it is also because our population is incredibly heterogeneous we also have the highest proportion of limited English proficient speakers among Asian Americans that that rate is higher than among Hispanics so the policies that we support directly support our communities and there has been a huge push among the children of immigrants the second generation to get mobilized to get politicized and not that there's not division among them but there is a strong push to understand that um we need to get involved politically but part of it is also um candidates are least likely to reach out to Asian Americans so it's very much a two-sided issue but what I'm inspired by is the younger generation the U.S. born who are vocal who are political who are um winning mayoral races we see Michelle Wu in Boston and and people are so excited about that and a number of others so before we talk about some of the um contemporary questions around immigration I want to go back to something that you said about the gendered nature of immigration policy and that is a part of the history that I bet a lot of people did not know that um there were strategic attempts to include men and for particular reasons and I wonder is there do you see that showing up in contemporary immigration policy is that gender dynamic a thing of the past um and something that we no longer reckon with or does it show up in our contemporary debates around immigration or our contemporary debates about um Asians and Asian Americans yeah I would say it is um it's something we've not reconciled with in the past and it's not showing up today because a lot of the immigration as I mentioned is based is selected on professional skills so if I think about um the way many Asian American women come a lot of them have been nurses the first wave so if we think about Filipino migration a lot of nurses my own mother a nurse trained in Korea and this is how we came to the United States but I wanted to get back to the question of the gendered exclusion and the page act in particular one of the things I found as I was doing research to actually my surprise I always understood that misogyny was part of the immigration with the page act what I didn't realize until I started digging into the archives is the role of science and medicine in creating and socially constructing all Asian women and Chinese women in particular as prostitutes who were moral and medical threats to white men in particular white boys and so what they argued and these are the leading positions of the time that Chinese prostitutes were spreading of especially toxic form of syplis that was not able to be cured and white boys as young as 10 and 8 and 5 would be serviced by Chinese prostitutes and so the page act was in part a response to this idea that Chinese women's bodies were diseased contagious and Chinese women were morally depraved and at the time the presumption was that if you were Chinese women woman you were a prostitute unless you are of a particular merchant class but they rarely that was a very small population so with the page act came gendered racialized exclusion and while many people don't know this history the the stereotypes that emerge from it are very familiar so that Asian women are easy that Asian women are morally depraved that Asian women are cheap so these are certain the stereotypes that emerge from immigration policy that even when you don't know the policy or anything about the policy the stereotypes that emerge from it continue to live and continue to haunt the present and what you're pointing to which is so important is we've talked a lot about the impact of society on public policy right the assumptions that get made the prejudices and how they influence public policy what you're highlighting so beautifully is the reverse relationship the ways in which policies that are grounded in those assumptions then fuel and create other kinds of assumptions that seep into the culture so that even when the policy goes away you still have in the soil if you will a lot of those assumptions and stereotypes and we've talked about how that has shown up most recently and it takes us right back to where we started in terms of the the murders of the women in Atlanta and also the rise in anti-Asian hate so I wonder if you can talk about your role in helping to better inform that conversation how a policy legacy is absolutely shaping material lives even a policy legacy from a century ago is shaping material lives so can you can you talk about that and what we've seen over the last couple of years that question and I have to say that this is also personal I mean it's it's very hard to talk about anti-Asian hate anti-Asian violence and misogyny without thinking of this personally so even though those the six Asian women murdered their lives seemed really distant from mine as a woman as an Asian woman as an immigrant as a daughter of immigrant entrepreneurs I feel that their lives are very closely connected to mine and that of many others and so when Trump and others started calling the coronavirus the china virus for instance the Wuhan virus kung flu and started ethnicizing the virus many of us got very nervous and by us I mean Asian Americans and particularly Asian American women and so I can't even express other than in talking to other Asian American women how we all felt incredibly vulnerable and how we didn't even recognize completely the source although we understood the pay jack we understood how ethnicity was linked to disease in order to exclude certain populations I don't think I even fully understood how science and medicine interacted with law in order to create the construct of Asian and Asian women as a threat to both health and morality and how this construct continues to affect how we think about disease how we think about science how we think about reticence to science and doubt and science so for me it's incredibly personal and I think I lost the train of thought of the question itself well just this question of you know how how do we then think about that in the context of you know even with COVID-19 and how we thought about policy how we thought about the question of whether to close the borders and whether to close it to particular countries or not and the the sentiment of people who are living here in the United States who had to live work traverse communities when a policy narrative was forming around disease and illness and the ethnicization of it as you put it so hopefully and people worried about what kinds of rules what kinds of policies would be imposed so I wonder if if you can just speak to you know as a sociologist and as a person who has the lived experience that you have how do how do we grapple with this and how do we reckon with what's happened particularly over the last couple of months do we just not talk about it anymore and hope that it goes away or do you think we need to have a more profound conversation I understand okay so let me tell you say a couple of things that a few days after the murders in Atlanta the massacre in Atlanta the team at AAPI data partnered with SurveyMonkey and launched a national survey to see how many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds experienced a hate incident since COVID-19 so among Asian American adults one in eight had experienced some kind of anti-Asian hate incident since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020 and then in 2021 one in 10 had experienced something in the first three months of 2021 what I found surprising was not that result that was actually expected and in fact probably lower than I I thought the instance would be even higher um but what I realized is how little Americans and Asian Americans know about this history as you said Celeste that the history we have to reckon with history we have to reckon with science we have to reckon with medicine and the role of immigration policy in science and medicine in ethnicizing and gendering disease so that we understand when a trope comes up the origins of that trope so that we're better able to dismantle it and so I tried to do that also with the Asian American achievement paradox and that's what I'm trying to do in this project so I think one of the first things that came to mind for me is that I didn't even know fully the history and hear someone who studies this right so the first thing I did was design a course to title reckoning with Asian America that I will teach next semester in the spring for graduate students and I will redesign it for undergrads the following year and so I think part of this as as your entire series has been has been illuminating how policies laws policy science medicine have constructed racial groups to be one way or the other this presumption that Asians are super smart that they're my they're the model minority that is a load of proc of course but how do you dismantle that how do you dismantle this idea that if you are Chinese you're more likely to spread coronavirus I mean for many of us during COVID we didn't even want to sneeze outside because we didn't want to be in some ways shunned or verbally harassed and so how do you dislodge certain assumptions it's through education through through outreach through community outreach and and I would say the other thing that made it very difficult during this time is we had a president who was spooing not only anti Asian rhetoric but anti race but racist rhetoric all around so we had COVID hit at a time when we were very divided we couldn't even get on board about the utility of masks and I recently saw some fantastic data from South Korea and they quickly masked so they were able to contain COVID in a way that we were not able to we train students here to be policy analysts and many will be at the table where policies are being made where policy rhetoric and communication is being sculpted and created and I wonder you've given us such a great overview of the historical context of immigration policy and particularly for Asian Americans I wonder what do you think a fair just equitable immigration policy should look like oh my goodness the last no no that's a big question but given everything that you know in terms of the historical dynamics and the sociological dynamics of play and the reality that we're grappling in this country of this question of what should immigration policy look like and people are on very different sides of this issue I wonder if you can just help us think of what what could a vision be or what could some guiding principles be that would help us get to a better state of play as it relates to our immigration policies than where we are right now I would say one of the first things that comes to mind is thinking about a path of citizenship for those who are already here and not just for dreamers and and because we often think that they are deserving again creating this binary of these people are deserving these are not deserving we have to remember first of all that for the majority when people say my parents came here my grandparents came here legally well there was no stopping European immigration as there was Asian immigration as there were all sorts of other immigration and so what that has done has create this narrative that some immigrant groups and the lineage of some immigrant groups came here the right way and they did things the right way one of the things that legalization does and the path of citizenship does for especially for the children of undocumented immigrants is it creates more educational opportunities and this gets directly related to what we were talking about earlier and also Rutgers talk and so one of the things we found is that the children whose parents so Mexican Mexican children whose parents were undocumented who stayed undocumented they only achieved on average about 11 years of education through 11th grade excuse me if your parents were undocumented but they were able to obtain naturalization during the child lifetime that child completed up to not only graduated high school but earned at least one year in college and so this is a perfect natural experiment in some ways in which you show how legalization how naturalization not only affects the first generation but also the second generation so when we think about fair equitable immigration policies and something that would have a direct impact on communities on educational attainment on the labor force legalization is a very simple one and it's one that would benefit all of us and the other thing that your work highlights so beautifully is in our conversations around policy and the racial foundations of public policy we can't stay in a kind of black white binary and I wonder if you can talk about why that is so important why we need more and better data data why we need a historical analysis that includes a broader history of all of the different groups within the United States what are the struggles around that that you find as a scholar being able to to put forth those ideas how do we both recognize the experiences of black people for example but also make space for the experiences of indigenous Native American populations and Latinx populations and Asian American populations and Asian populations without falling into a who's more oppressed without seeing it as a zero-sum game if we talk about your experiences does it mean we can't talk about my experiences anymore how what are some values some principles some kind of strategies that we can engage to think about how to have a more comprehensive picture of the kind of state of affairs yeah that is an excellent question and I have a several different responses the first is a simple demographic response so the groups that are growing most rapidly are Asians and Latinos in the United States and so Asians are actually the fastest growing population in the United States and Asian immigrants will surpass Hispanic immigrants at this rate by 2055 the Hispanic population has grown from about four percent of the population in 1970 and they're about 18 percent today so they're larger than African Americans and if we want to understand the complexity and the diversity of the United States we have to move beyond binaries and the United States was never a binary anyway right but the other point I would make is that if we don't carefully understand the different kinds of advantages and disadvantages of certain groups then Asian Americans for instance can continue to be weaponized as the model minority can continue to serve as the foil for which other groups don't do well and this is what I call narrative scarcity that minoritized groups actually all experience narrative scarcity we don't have enough narratives about our groups the diversity of our groups we don't have enough data about the diversity of our groups and so a lot of the narratives that are written about us are written in ways that resonate with particular tropes that already exist and so one of the things that's so important is about disrupting narratives for instance the statistic I showed you I mentioned about Asian Americans overwhelmingly supporting affirmative action without data if you just looked at particular trope if you just looked at headlines you would assume that Asian Americans are affirmative actions most ardent opponents that we are victims of the policy it's really understanding the data brings light a better more accurate narrative and it also disrupts the tropes on which certain narratives are based and that's so important because I love this idea of narrative scarcity because we have to acknowledge that as as policy thinkers we make decisions based on data but we also are informed by narratives and we're deeply informed by narratives we're human beings right who are thinking about this so this idea of narrative scarcity I think is so interesting and compelling because you can't identify fair just an equitative policy if you're operating with a very narrow set of narratives about the particular group and if the data also don't exist you're either further in a kind of hole of knowledge and information so I think that these are just such interesting and important points so we have several questions from from the folks listening and watching so question one I wonder Dr. Lee's thoughts on the role immigration policies such as DACA in the dream act you spoke to those play in further perpetuating these stereotypes of Asian Americans specifically children of immigrants as exceptions and representative of respectable immigration processes further what does this mean for not only Asian American children but for other immigrant groups who are measured against these qualifications of respectability and exceptionalism in various processes so the idea of respectability in public policy is a kind of overarching dynamic so this again I would have to I'm going to return to this idea of narrative scarcity and I have to admit that I did not coin that term that's a term by the brilliant novelist vietnam who wrote that all wars are fought twice the first time on the battlefield in the second time in memory and so our narratives of the vietnam war for instance are often told from the perspective of the dominant group and the majority and we very rarely hear narratives about vietnamese and their experiences and when we do they're often written by the dominant group so he argues that minoritized groups experience narrative scarcity and he's pushing for minoritized groups to reach an area of a point of narrative plenitude so that there are diverse narratives about our populations that are not only written for us but they're written by us and so this is a perfect point so one of the other data points that are always always surprising about immigration is that one in seven Asian immigrants is undocumented this is never a data point that come I mean we talk about the data point at AAPI data but it's always a surprise in part because the face of undocumented immigration tends to be Hispanic, Latina, Latinx and so when we think about expanding narratives it has to be expanding the narratives of the Asian immigrant population there are refugees there are a number of groups who are not hyper selected who actually have higher poverty rates and higher rates of welfare receipt than the U.S. mean and so that has to be a part of the narrative and so when I think about narrative plenitude and narrative scarcity it's also thinking about representing Asian Americans in all forms and all and that also includes Asian Americans accepting the diversity in our communities because there are Asian Americans who are comfortable with stereotype promise there are Asian Americans who are comfortable with these troops and for whom the troops serve them well for me it's about presenting data that shows exactly who we are and we are an incredibly diverse group and once we show that then it's not Asians hailed as the model minority against another group that we are just as diverse have poor socioeconomic outcomes have a large percentage who is undocumented who don't get services because we're not perceived as needing certain kinds of services speaking about the policy issue really really important this idea of that model minority trope leaves hidden so many people who are in need of assistance and services and policy solutions because they are not seen right so that that is such an important point when we think about narrative next question how can individuals within and alongside the AAPI community work to build coalitions that reimagine what equity empathy and moral worth look like what are some proposals or policies that come to mind that further this movement that are targeted not only on unifying multiracial groups but also classes and political ideologies this notion of coalition building is seems really prominent in this question yeah I love this I love this conversation I love the questions I really love this idea of reimagining how we can build and and what I was on another panel earlier this semester about linked fates and linked futures and I thought that was a really terrific way of thinking about this one of the things that talking about troops and I feel like we're just dismantling a bunch of them here tonight Celeste we are doing some work is um we started talking about anti-Asian hate and one of the things that uh one of the tropes that came out was that African-Americans were the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate and this happened in part because there were certain viral videos that went around where certain violent incidents were caught on tape and the perpetrator appeared to be black and the victim was Asian and so that certain kinds of videos went viral and people immediately started thinking about this as black Asian conflict and then forgetting about the whole context the history the political context in which we got where we were and one of the things I have to say is that when Asian-American community organizations started thinking about okay let's have marches of solidarity the first community to come and support us sorry we're African-Americans I'm sorry I'm getting emotional but it was also when I think about my colleagues who came out and reached out to me it was African-American women who immediately understood and immediately helped actually guide me through this process and I'm sorry I'm getting emotional I apologize please do not apologize because I think you know Jennifer it is so important because we've got to recognize that policies are about lives and we've got to recognize that how we talk about groups and communities um has implications the the images that we put up has implications for people's lives and um if they're negative if they're hurtful they make us feel so alone and so unseen so what I see and feel so deeply in your emotion is the way in which through marginalized the shared experience of marginalization as painful as that is the ability to find strength in community and the ability to find strength in connection and the ability to find strength and support and you know it's a it's a recurring theme in my work on the HIV community in terms of we're talking about marginalized populations who have every reason to be at odds with each other because they're often pitted against each other for very very scarce resources but nevertheless being able to find solidarity and find community um it's a very powerful thing but it's also a critically important and potent policy tool that we cannot underestimate so I just I so appreciate how you're talking about that experience and and what that what that meant for you because I too when I heard the rhetoric coming out um at the beginning of the pandemic I thought this is not going to end well and this is not about rhetoric people are going to get killed with this kind of conversation see you understood this and I I think um I remember having dinner with several friends and they looked at me like I was I was overreacting that I was getting hysterical they didn't believe anything was going to happen and you start to doubt yourself like am I being hysterical and I understood that I wasn't especially when I talked to other Asian Americans I also understood that I wasn't when I started talking to African Americans and particularly African American women who understood what I felt and then also understood when Atlanta happened how I was bombarded with so many media requests and I just you didn't even have time to grieve because you were asked to comment as if you know uh to explain to the world why we saw what we saw even though for over a year and a half so many of us were afraid and so one of the questions I am trying to I'm wrestling with um not that I'm wrestling with in my mind but as I think about writing this as a book project is why did it take that massacre for the world to pay attention or the nation to pay attention to what so many of us feared why is it that um when we presented survey data that about 75 percent of Asian Americans worried somewhat about anti-Asian hate at the onset of COVID why was that not enough why did it take this massacre this murder to really launch anti-Asian hate and our fears about it onto a national platform and I realize in part this is why we're having this conversation Celeste about disrupting tropes we assume that a group like Asian Americans are doing fine that they don't need help it's a completely distorted narrative but it's a particularly dangerous narrative when we are targeted as we have been we're targeted as foreigners in part because we are our population has been suppressed by immigration laws we're targeted as um perhaps spies um the china initiative which is disproportionately affected Chinese scientists and and created a lot of fear and a sense that they're being racially profiled and a lot of this has to do with geopolitics and immigration policies and not about the individuals but this is where I think you and I agree the narratives are incredibly powerful and narratives with data marrying the data and the narratives and producing action which we call at API data DNA data narrative action is really how you move forward I love that data narrative and action I think that's great speaking of narratives and tropes could you speak to the intersectionality question of how the model minority myth reinforces anti-black sentiment yes so I think um when you think of when a couple of things my first book was actually on black Korean relations and it's called civility in the city and in it I wanted to I did an ethnographic account of merchant customer relations in neighborhoods like Harlem and West Philadelphia and I did that in part because so many of the images that we've seen about black Asian relations and black Korean relations at the time were about framed around the Los Angeles riots were flamed around boycotts and it was always framed as a conflictual relationship and when you go into these communities one of the things I found immediately was how routine and quotient quotidian and how civil the majority of relations are between merchants and customers in predominantly black communities when you think about it it makes sense you can't have conflict you can't have riots you can't have boycotts every day yet one of the things I find fascinating about even sociological research or social science research we tend to focus on the extremes I think more research we can think about how is civility maintained every day that I think is a really fascinating question but getting to the question that you had if you have one of the things I did was also in the Asian-American achievement paradox think about the whole when did the culture of poverty argument take off it really took off at about in the late 1960s with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Moynihan report at that time at the same time about 1966 you had an article in the New York Times written by a sociologist named William Peterson who wrote about the success of Japanese that how is it possible that a group that had been incarcerated just 20 years earlier had all of a sudden become the successful group and so you had what I call a culture of poverty argument emerging at the same time as you had a culture of success argument emerge oh and so these two groups yeah have always been pit against one another that one is deserving one is morally deserving one is undeserving so next question I'm interested in learning more about this legally engineered and oppositional relationship between Asian-Americans and other marginalized groups particularly African-Americans the question says how did these key differences emerge from policy and how does policy continue to affect the relationships between these groups and their political interests that I mean these are such great questions again they're really really good questions and I shout out I think many of these are coming from we have a class right that meets right after this I think many of the students are offering these questions so excellent job students I know no I love it because one I what I love about these questions is that they're comparative and they're asking us to do the work of thinking about these tropes don't exist in a vacuum they exist because there is another group for whom they are a foil so as I said when we think about the construct of the culture of poverty in part it was supported by this idea of a culture of success and this happened at the same time in the late 1960s and so the model minority trope and the legal engineering of Asian immigrants as highly educated highly successful driven focused on education family values this was weaponized in part to delegitimize the civil rights movement and this is something when you think about the timing of events Asian immigrants who are here after 1965 we are here because African Americans have fought to broaden civil rights so then the immigration act of 1965 was one year after the civil rights act so we I understand that in part that there are these twin tropes of when when certain things happened in the 1960s and how that narrative has been usurped to pit certain groups against one another yet when you look at the laws that produced certain kinds of outcomes especially for Asian immigrants we have to understand that the legal engineering in part serves a certain kind of discourse it it helps to minimize race so if Asian Americans who are not white who are a minority group can achieve in spite of their non-whiteness then why can't other groups and so when you talk about why is it important to move beyond a black white framework well if we don't reckon with Asian America then these tropes about certain groups being undeserving will not be very clear or will always be confusing I should say. Excellent point so in your work you mentioned that by 2055 Asian Americans will represent the largest immigrant group in the country can you speak more to current immigration laws and what this means for Asian Asian immigrants to the United States so for example there's a per country quota on the number of green cards and permanent residencies that can be given from a country each year but does that have any impact on work visas or the total number of immigrants and similarly how has the population of Asian refugees arriving in the United States changed and I don't think we've talked much about refugees this evening and together what does this mean for the ethnic distribution of Asian Americans for 2055 and consequently the narratives and perspectives of Asian Americans and the perceptions of the perceptions and narratives and perspectives of Asian Americans that's a big question a lot of amazing things there what do you think yeah no I I mean first of all I I mean when we look at demographic trends a lot of things can disrupt those trends but based on what we see we see that Asian Asian Americans are the fastest growing group but they're also growing from the smallest base so by 2055 it's projected that Asian immigrants will outnumber Hispanic immigrants but Asians will only be about 10 percent of the population so even though we are growing because we're growing at such a small base we're not going to be will be about 10 percent of the US population I think the question that's very interesting that we hadn't talked about is that as the US Asian population grows and as family reunification becomes a greater part of how Asians come to the United States we're also become we're also more diverse Asian refugees for instance Vietnamese are the largest Asian refugee group in the country and they are incredibly diverse in terms of socioeconomic origins and so you have the first wave of Vietnamese refugees who are highly educated in subsequent waves far less so but this is actually happening across Asian American Asian immigrants that it's not just the hyper selected who immigrate now it's hyper selected immigrants who are also bringing family members who may not be hyper selected on their own terms and so what we're seeing is more of a diversity of Asian immigrants but one of the things I also wanted to point out is getting back to the narrative it's important to think about who is controlling the narrative for Asian Americans and so one of the things we try to do at AAPI data is present data that actually speaks to the diversity of this population so if you look at educational attainment for instance there are certain refugee groups like Hmong, Loations, Cambodians who have extremely poor high school graduation rates, extremely poor college attendance rates and college graduation rates and so there is tremendous diversity in this population that is masked by certain kinds of narratives about Asian Americans. Getting to the question about work visas I think one of the things that there is a huge backlog in work visas for for Asian Americans and so one of the things that is high on the Asian American political agenda is getting rid of the backlog of visas. One of the also things I'd also say is that companies like to hire Asian H1B visa holders I mean they will hire them for their labor but this is where I think the path of citizenship for not for all immigrants makes sense for willing to hire them we need to invest in them so that they stay in our so that immigrants not only stay in our country but feel like they should stay and can continue to contribute to our country so we can't just think about immigrants as labor migrants how do we make immigrants feel like citizens. Can you talk about AAPI data I'm so taken with the idea of with a with a dearth of data you go out and build an infrastructure to be able to gather the data and information and I'm I'm just imagining all the ways in which policy schools and scholars and thinkers from a variety in a variety of different environments and contexts need to know about this operation and to and to leverage it as a really important source of data and information for our analyses and I wonder if you can just talk about it and how a place like the Ford school and as we're teaching students and we're drawing upon data and encouraging them to do policy analysis that's driven by the demographics of the country how they could leverage a place like AAPI data. I'm so glad you asked that I should say AAPI data was founded by my colleague Karthik Ramakrishnan who is a political scientist and and in a school of public policy at UEC Riverside and as he tells it he said he was talking to a reporter and the reporter wanted some basic demographic information about a group an Asian group and Karthik said to the reporter well you can really find that very easily through the census and the reporter said you know that's really easy for you but I don't really know how to navigate the census website I don't know how to get that data and it was through that interaction that this idea was born that as social scientists we understand the power of data and how to get the data what is but we need to then it's easy for us we're trained to do this so the idea of AAPI data is it was initially to make data accessible and visually appealing and also publicly accessible for journalists and other people who wanted data on the AAPI population Asian American Pacific Islander population it has since really evolved and so Janelle Wong is now co-director with Karthik Ramakrishnan and I'm a senior researcher with Sarah Sidwani and Nina's Ponce who is director of CHIS at UCLA and it's evolved from not only just presenting data but also collecting data and this is just what happens when you have a group of people who are just absolutely committed to allowing the data to drive the narrative rather than narratives being driven because of narrative scarcity so that was really our commitment so if you go on our website we actually have mounds of data and one of the things that's great working with the younger people we have a team of researchers who know how to make it visually appealing so they know how to use maps I mean I feel like I'm kind of old school so I don't really know how to do all that but their goal is to make it very visually appealing and then you can actually play with the data in there and getting to that point because I think Atlanta was also this crazy watershed moment where people started to realize oh my goodness we should be investing in learning about Asian American populations so the state of California actually gave us a grant of 10 million dollars to study Asian American experiences particularly with discrimination and we're not interested in just looking at Asian Americans most of our data is looking at Asian Americans in in in comparison to other groups so I wanted to give you another fact which I didn't present earlier but during COVID it wasn't just Asian Americans who experience anti-Asian hate or hate incidents because of their race so one of the surprising findings from the data and I say surprising it wouldn't it didn't surprise me but it surprised a lot of people the group that has experienced the most racist attacks during COVID has been African Americans and so this again when we think about linked fates and linked narratives our fates and our narratives linked fates and linked futures excuse me are so much more linked than the narratives would have us believe and so that is something that I think about all the time and why is it that the narrative is always that these groups are in opposition when actually our experiences are born from similar foundations and similar dynamics absolutely so um we have been asking as you know Dr. Lee, Jennifer, all of our speakers the following question so at the Ford School we've been engaging in conversations as a faculty about what anti-racist teaching looks like and how we diversify what and how we teach to be more comprehensive to be more inclusive and to be more fitting with the diverse realities of of life and I wonder what advice would you give us um as we uh engage in this journey of thinking about anti-racist teaching how can we better educate our students and what should we be thinking about as we craft our syllabi introduce core ideas facilitate discussions in the classroom particularly about immigration policy well first they should continue to invest in you Celeste and this series but apart from that um I really do believe that we when we think about race when we think about immigration asian americans are often excluded from that discourse um either because we are smaller in size because there's not enough research on this population I think one of the things that I hope comes out very clearly from this dialogue is that when you don't pay attention to a particular group that group can be weaponized not only to as a disservice to that group but to as a disservice to a number of groups in particular other minoritized groups so I would really um push when people are constructing syllabi about race racial foundations of education racial foundations of criminal justice racial foundations of immigration that there needs to be a component focusing on how asian americans fit into that narrative and that also means thinking about hiring more asian americans one of the things I present when I think about we think about faculty and we never have a problem with a majority white faculty and having one afric american one hispanic one asian think we've met the quota why is it that we don't think we think of that as okay diverse and not think about over representation of some groups and so thinking holistically about diversity thinking about how diverse experiences how hiring just one you didn't you that's just the start right and and investing not only the hiring but also investing in research and research agendas and research grants and for foundations to understand that without studying when you ignore particular populations because you say this is not a urm group or this is not a minoritized group you are actually closing the door to really problematize certain kinds of tropes that will continue to emerge there is nothing to be gained by not thinking about how inequality reproduces itself and the mechanisms at all ends of the spectrum and so we have to think I think broadly comparatively holistically about that and my push would be and this is not self-serving but really to think about how to seriously include apis in the discourse dr jennifer lee thank you so much thank you for this discussion thank you for your love of data thank you for the power of your ideas thank you for bringing your whole self to this discussion um thank you for bringing conversation about community and justice and support and care and history into this policy space um we just can't thank you enough and thank you so much for and hello thank you so much for being our final speaker of our inaugural launch of our racial foundations of public policy series for fall 2021 thank you so much I can't think of another person I would love to I mean this is just this has been phenomenal thank you no thank you so much this was absolutely lovely and it was just I feel I mean I feel like I mean it's too bad we can't see one another because we'd go out and have like a cocktail or something yes we would okay so thank you so much yes and just that that sense of and I you know I laugh because you know one of the things that we try to impart in our students is these are really difficult topics to write about to study about to sit with they're they're they're difficult difficult topics and one of the things that I so appreciate and take power and solace in is the community of scholars who are doing it alongside with me um and to be able to celebrate each other and to delight in each other's company and to gain strength from that to keep going so when you talked about all of the reporters calling after the the murder of the women in Atlanta the way in which you're called upon to step up and speak um and to use your talents and your skills to be able to illuminate but also what that means in terms of the the toll that it may take on you on you um we as scholars and scholars who represent and come from racially minoritized communities know all too well that experience and I so appreciate the fact that nevertheless we are able to find community in that experience and to find strength in it and to be able to use that to do the work in so many different places and so many different settings all for the goal of getting us to a more just and equitable society so that all of us not just some of us all of us can live to our full human potential so thank you for that friend and colleague wonderful this has been racial foundations of public policy we thank you so much for joining us here at the Center for Racial Justice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan we encourage you to visit us at the Center for Racial Justice website at the Ford School uh check out our previous events our previous conversations they're all also available on YouTube and please continue to follow us as we will be launching other events and other conversations to come Dr. Lee thank you again all right everyone take care