Asian Americans May Hold Key to Multiethnic Politics

Democratic Party fund-raiser John Huang used to tell potential Asian American donors that the nation’s political establishment would take greater notice of them if their contributions exceeded their percentage of the population. Huang’s fund-raising tactics certainly moved Asian Americans to the political center stage--if under the probing light of scandal. As a result, many Asian American leaders are looking for new strategies to give the nation’s 9 million Asian Americans a more prominent role in politics. They may discover that they are uniquely positioned to lead a multiethnic society.

In Southern California, home of the largest Asian population in the nation, many Asian American civic leaders fear the scandal will, in the short term, dry up political contributions. But they disagree on whether it will keep average Asian American voters away from the polls or spark greater participation in the hope of ensuring representation at the highest levels of government.

Despite the well-publicized creation of National Asian Pacific American Coalition, a network of activist groups that seeks to be to Asian Americans what the Anti-Defamation League is to Jews, most Asian American political activists will probably devote more time to building regional political infrastructures. The Huang affair, among other things, has exposed just how little energy has gone into cultivating an electorate and recruiting candidates locally.

Even so, Asian American political participation reached a high point during the 1996 campaigns. In Washington state, the election of Gary Locke as the first ever Asian American governor on the mainland was a huge symbolic victory. Public debates over curtailing immigrant-family reunification and denying welfare benefits to legal immigrants spurred both a rush to naturalization and heightened political activity. Between 1992 and the present, the Asian portion of the California electorate doubled from an estimated 3% to 6% of the total.

Despite these gains, most observers of and participants in Southern California’s Asian American political scene do not see the burgeoning Asian electorate becoming a potent political force any time soon. Asian Americans have the distinction of being the most geographically dispersed and residentially integrated ethnic minority. While it may seem puzzling that Asian Americans lack significant political clout given their considerable socioeconomic mobility, it is precisely because of this mobility that they lack greater political power.

Having the highest rates of academic achievement and the highest median household income of any racial group in the region, Asian Americans, overall, have more easily moved into upscale suburban neighborhoods than perhaps any immigrant group in the nation’s history. Unlike other minority or immigrant groups, they do not have a history of looking to politics as a route to either individual or community upward mobility. Thus, lacking both demographic concentration and a cultural proclivity toward politics as a solution, Asian Americans have not formed a power base as have Jews and blacks. Even the three largest Asian concentrations in Southern California--the southern San Gabriel Valley, central Orange County and the South Bay--don’t tip the ethnic balance of a state Assembly or Senate district, which represent 375,000 and 750,000 residents, respectively.

Yet, Asian Americans are not without future political advantages. The region’s Asian population, which grew by 451% between 1970 and 1990, is relatively new to America and will likely become more civic-minded as years and generations pass. In 1990, only 28% of Southern California’s Asians were U.S.-born. Large-scale Asian immigration, starting in the 1970s, transformed what had been a small, mostly U.S.-born and predominately Japanese American Asian population into a large, highly diverse and overwhelmingly foreign-born group. Chinese and Filipinos make up the two largest Asian groups, followed by Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese.

Continued voter-registration drives of the kind that signed up 20,000 new Asian American voters in Los Angeles and Orange County, and 75,000 nationwide, before the last presidential election could go a long way toward reversing the current low rate of voter registration among Asian Americans. A UCLA study released last year indicates, moreover, that once registered, Asian Americans have the highest rate of voting of any group.

Whether Asian groups of different national origins would ever, and reliably, vote as a bloc on an issue or candidate seems to be a peculiarly American idea of pan-Asian identity and, as such, enjoys greater currency among U.S.-born children of immigrants. Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians and Filipinos do not share a common language, history or religion. Filipinos and Japanese Americans tend to vote Democratic. Vietnamese refugees lean toward Republicans. Chinese mark the “decline to state” category on their registration cards more than either major party. Koreans split down the middle, with their strong entrepreneurship resonating Republicanism.

The pan-Asian political unity that does exist is more a consequence of pragmatism than of ideological or cultural solidarity. No single Asian national group has the numbers alone to elect one of their own to office, so Asian American voters have been known to support Asian candidates of any background in the belief that they will be more sensitive to their national group than a non-Asian. Former Secretary of State March Fong Eu regularly benefited from the support of Asian American voters from both parties and a variety of national origins. Her son, state Treasurer Matt Fong, says he is counting on pan-Asian support in his bid for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Ironically, once the number of Asian candidates and voters grow, national loyalties could play a stronger role in deciding votes than the idea of pan-Asian solidarity. Last March, for example, in the city of Carson, Filipino Mayor Peter D. Fajardo marshaled Filipino votes to defeat the Japanese American incumbent, Michael L. Mitoma. A more significant trend, however, is the ability of Asian candidates to appeal to non-Asian voters. California’s two Asian American congressmen, Jay C. Kim and Robert T. Matsui, both represent predominately white districts. Assemblyman Mike Honda, whose San Jose district has nearly three times more Latino than Asian voters, used the old United Farm Workers rallying cry “Si se puede!” as his campaign slogan.

Locally, Asian American candidates are running for and winning seats on city councils and school boards, often in cities with insignificant numbers of Asian voters. City council members Michael Gin of Redondo Beach, Benjamin Wong of West Covina and Carol J. Liu of La Canada-Flintridge did not cultivate an ethnic voting base in their runs for office. East L.A. Municipal Court Judge Ruth A. Kwan retained her appointed seat in a race against a Latino challenger in an overwhelmingly Latino district.

This seeming political talent of Asian American candidates to transcend racial and ethnic lines in their appeal to voters may destine them to play an ever expanding role in the governing of Los Angeles. As the county’s nonwhite population grows and diversifies, they may be ideally positioned to build the multiethnic coalitions that the city so urgently needs.*