Who Are the Asians in the U.S.?

by Ray Colorado

During the US Census of the year 2000, Asians were counted two ways. The first way was if their ethnic group was Asian only. The ethnic groups included were Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indo Chinese, Indonesian, Iwo Jiman, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Maldivian, Nepalese, Okinawan, Pakistani, Singaporean, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai and Vietnamese.

The second way was if their ethnic group was Asian combined with a non-Asian ethnic group. These would include, for example, any Asian married to a European, African, or Hispanic.

Because the 2000 US Census allowed for this difference, there were two numbers used to indicate the total number of Asians in the US. The total of Asian only was 10,242,998. That was equivalent to 3.6 percent of the US population.

The total of Asians mixed with a non-Asian group was 1,655,830.

The total of Asians, if the two ways of counting were combined, was 11,898,828. This bigger total was 4.2 percent of the US population of 248,709,873.

The Asian groups and their population are shown in the following table. The numbers used here are based on combined count of Asian only and mixed Asian.

If you compute the numbers in the above table, the numbers by detailed Asian group do not add to the total population. This is because the detailed Asian groups are tallies of the number of Asian responses rather than the number of Asian respondents. Respondents reporting several Asian groups are counted several times. For example, a respondent reporting "Korean and Filipino" would be included in the Korean as well as the Filipino numbers.

source: U.S. Census Bureau