Simona Nissan
San José State University
The report The Rise of Intermarriage, of the Pew Research Center from February 2012, presents that the popularity of intermarriage in the United States increased compared to the past. The report mentions that “about 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another” (Wang, 2012), while it is more than double comparing to the 1980 when the intermarriage was just about 6.7%. Segmentation of the population by ethnic groups shows that “9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out” (Wang, 2012) what places the Asians as a group with the highest …show more content…
The first massive migration of Asian Americans to the United States was in 1850 of young singles from China who came to work in the gold mines in California and later in 1865 to construct the railway (Fong, 1998). At 1870, the Chinese accounted for 20% of the workforce in California while they were only 0.02% of the US population. The Chinese who wanted to start a family were faced with two options: marry with White women or bring a spouse from China. In both cases, the American public has showed a lack of sympathy, since they saw the Chinese population as an economic and social threat on the American society and nation. This situation led to violence against the Chinese throughout the West Coast and to legislation of anti-Chinese laws that includes limitation about the immigration, employment, and marriage. Two laws that affected of the intermarriage were the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that prevented emigration from China to the United States and reduced the Chinese population within the United States; and the Anti-Miscegenation Law in 1906 that prohibits Chinese from marrying non-Chinese. If was still a window of opportunity to the Chinese to marry to Whites or women from other ethnicities after 1882, it vanished in 1906. Chinese Exclusion Act gave push to many young men from Japan and a small number of Indians and …show more content…
The change in trend Intermarriage is a necessity in the society which contains a diversity of cultures; however, the attempts to explain the Intermarriage of Asian American with Whites seems logic on one side, but on other side still tinged with stereotypes that perpetuates the "model minority". On the other hand, the willing of the American Asian to adapt again to the local culture raises sympathy, pride and even some jealousy on the part of those who want to do it but do not have the