Les asiatiques-américains aux Etats-Unis

The term Asian-American was first used in the 1960s by activists who disliked the term Oriental, saying that it was derogatory and colonialist. It is a historian, Yuji Ichioka, who popularised the expression. Asian-American is today a common term. In the U.S. Census, the word "Asian" refers to people having origins in the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. It also means that groups are not limited to nationalities but include ethnic terms. So Asian-Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry. They include sub-ethnic groups such as Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Indian-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans etc.

We can notice that, in the data collected by Census 2000 on race, the Asian-Americans can be divided into two broad categories : people who answered they belonged to only one race are referred as the "single-race Asian population". The others who answered they were belonging to the Asian race, but also to another one are considered as the "race in-combination population". This is important because, referring to the "single-race Asian population", the Asian-American population has increased by nearly 50% in ten years, but by 70% if considering the "race in-combination population". In fact, if the Asian-Americans are today still a small minority, representing around 4% of the American population, they are also the minority that increases the most. They were less than 1% of the population before 1965. In 2000, after Mexican, most immigrants were Filipino, Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese.