by Aunt Lou

Created on: May 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 28, 2007

Close to 66% of all Asian-Americans live in five states: California, New York, Hawai'i, Texas, and Illinois. Around 54.7% live in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Honolulu, Washington DC-Baltimore, and Chicago. Chinese Americans are the largest subgroup of Asian Americans: the 2000 U.S. census states that 22.6% of all Asian-Americans are of Chinese descent; this is about 1% of the population of the United States. About 53% were born in this country. The 2000 census identifies 2,432,585 Americans of Chinese descent, approximately 2 million of whom speak Chinese at home.

Spatial Conclusions: California has a Chinese population of 1,122,187, out of 2,432,585 in the United States as a whole; this means that 46.1% of the Chinese American population lives in California. New York has 451,859 Chinese-American residents, or 18.6% of the total number in the United States. The ten states with the most Chinese American residents are (in descending order) California, New York, Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Overall, the largest concentrations of Chinese Americans are found on the West (including Hawai'i) and East Coasts, but Illinois and Texas are exceptions to this rule.

Temporal Analysis: Small numbers of Chinese immigrants started arriving in the United States during the 1820s. However, nearly all of these early arrivals were men, and they often married European-American women. Only after 1850 did significant numbers of Chinese people arrive in this country, mostly for railroad work. These Chinese Americans tended to live close together in Chinatowns in the major cities, and the largest community was in San Francisco. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (repealed in 1943) stopped immigration of people from China to the United States until the 1950s and 60s. Immigration rates have been rising, especially, since 1977, when China officially began to permit emigration. Many of these more recent immigrants have been settling in suburban areas of the country and avoiding the Chinatowns of the major cities. Very recently, there has been another group of Chinese immigrants to the United States, mostly poor manual laborers from Fujian province, many of whom are in this country illegally. Very few Chinese Americans come from Hong Kong, since until very recently, it was much easier for residents of Hong Kong to immigrate to Canada.

References:
Chinese American. Wikipedia, 8/20/2005. Retrieved 8/30/2005 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_American.

Ch inese American Demographics. Amredia: Integrated Asian Marketing, 2005.
Retrieved 8/30/2005 from http://www.ameredia.com/demographics/chinese.html.

Ch inese American Population, Census 2000. Chinese American Data Center, 2000.
Retrieved 8/30/2005 from http://members.aol.com/chineseusa.00cen1.htm.

Fetto, John. Chinese at Home: Increasing Number of Chinese-Speaking Americans.
Media Central, 2003. Retrieved 8/30/2005 from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_1 _25/ai_96734625.

Le, C. N. Population Statistics and Demographics. Asian-Nation: The Landscape of
Asian America, 2005. Retrieved 8/30/2005 from http://www.asian-nation.org/population.html.

Mapping Census 2000: The Geography of U.S. Diversity. U.S. Census Bureau, 2000.
Retrieved 8/30/2005 from http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html.

Mievi, Duanka, & Kwong, Peter. Chinese Americans: The Immigrant Experience.
Hong Kong: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 2000.

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