Why Are Asians 60% of the World But Only 7% of USA?
NYT: White racism, obviously.
Asians make up about 60% of the world’s population, so it’s racist that they don’t (yet) make up 60% of the U.S. population.
From the New York Times news section:
In the Birthright Citizenship Hearing, a Story of Asians Fighting for Rights
In the Supreme Court’s oral arguments, lawyers and justices cited a litany of cases reflecting how long it took for Asians to win the right to be American.
By Amy Qin
Amy Qin is a national correspondent for The Times, writing primarily about Asian American communities.
April 2, 2026
It came as no surprise that the discussion of birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court this week focused on the landmark 1898 precedent set by Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen.
But notably peppered throughout the oral arguments on Wednesday were many references to lesser-known cases: Fong Yue Ting. Lau Ow Bew. Yick Wo. Bhagat Singh Thind.
Each of these names refers to an Asian immigrant at the center of a Supreme Court case in the late 19th century or early 20th century.
In the decades before and after the Wong lawsuit, immigrants from China, Japan and India fought an immigration system that tried to keep people like them from entering the United States and from becoming American citizens. Taken together, the cases reflect a body of case law, beyond that of Wong Kim Ark, that has shaped the American immigration system for more than a hundred years.
“The reason why there are so many cases involving Asian immigrants or the children of Asian immigrants,” said Amanda L. Tyler, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “is because immigration law in this country for a very long time was incredibly unreceptive to Asian immigration and naturalization.”
The web of federal immigration restrictions was so comprehensive that, throughout the first half of the 19th century, there were relatively few Asians in the United States.
White racism is why Asians didn’t discover America.
White Supremacy forced the mandarins to crack down in 1433 on the eunuch admiral Zheng He’s oceanic voyages that had succeeded in satisfying the Chinese ruling class’s main interest in foreign lands: bringing back two giraffes from Africa.
Seriously, a third of a century ago I was fascinated by historian Daniel Boorstin’s chapter on how at the beginning of Portugal’s 15th Century Age of Exploration, China had sent a vast fleet as far as Africa in search of giraffes, but had then lost interest in the outside world.
Note that Zheng He’s temporary triumph was not because giraffes are amazing beasts that elicit reasonable curiosity. Instead, perhaps they looked kinda like a qilin, a mythological beast, second in the Chinese mythological bestiary to a dragon, whose appearance was considered auspicious to the success of the current emperor’s reign.
In truth, the Chinese were extraordinarily uninterested in the outside world.
At the bottom of this post, I post my 1993 essay on Zheng He, “The Eunuch Columbus.”
The NYT carries on:
Paywall here.
