ASIAN-AMERICAN STUDIES1965 revision of the immigration laws. Earlier
immigrants from China and the Philippines were
predominantly single males. As a result of racial
prejudice that culminated in the passage of
antimiscegenation laws directed primarily against
people of color in many western and southwestern
states, the majority of these earlier Asian immi-
grants remained unmarried. The lack of family life
caused unattached immigrants to depend on one
another, creating an apparent great solidarity
among people of the same ethnic group. Many of
the earlier studies of Chinese and Filipino commu-
nities depicted themes of social isolation and lone-
liness, which did not apply to the Japanese com-
munity. Paul Siu (1952) portrayed the extreme
social isolation of Chinese laundrymen in Chicago
in his doctoral dissertation, that was published at
the time only as a paper in the American Journal of
Sociology, with the title ‘‘The Sojourner.’’ Although
Siu’s work was written under the direction of
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, it was not
included in the Chicago School sociological series
published by the University of Chicago Press that
focused on urban and ethnic social structure of the
time allegedly because Siu argued that the Chinese
immigrants did not fit the Park-Burgess assimila-
tion model because of the ‘‘race factor.’’ Thus a
major piece of Asian-American research, The Chi-
nese Laundryman: A Study in Social Isolation (Siu
1987) remained unpublished until after the au-
thor’s death in the mid-1980s.
The existence of single-gender communities
of Filipinos and Chinese is clearly demonstrated in
the U.S. censuses between 1860 and 1970. In 1860,
the sex ratio for Chinese was 1,858 men for every
100 women. By 1890, following the peak of Chi-
nese immigration during the previous decade, the
ratio was 2,678 males for every 100 females—the
highest recorded. Skewed sex ratios for the Chi-
nese population later declined steadily as the re-
sult of legislative revisions in 1930 (46 U.S. Stat.
581) and 1931 (46 U.S. Stat. 1511) that enabled
women from China to enter the United States.
A second factor that helped to balance the sex
ratio in the Chinese community, particularly among
the younger age cohorts, was the presence of an
American-born generation. In 1900, U.S.-born per-
sons constituted only 10 percent of the Chinese-
American population. By 1970, the figure was 52
percent. Nevertheless, in the 1980 census, the sex
ratio remained high for some age groups within
certain Asian-American subpopulations: among
Filipinos, for example, the highest sex ratio was
found in those sixty-five and older.The demographic characteristics of Japanese
Americans present yet another unusual feature.
Under the ‘‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’’ between
Japan and the United States, Japanese women
were allowed to land on the West Coast to join
their men though the immigration of male labor-
ers was curtailed. The majority of the women came
as picture brides (Glenn 1986, pp. 31–35) within a
narrow span of time. Thus, the years following
1910 were the decade of family building for the
first (issei) generation of Japanese Americans. Since
almost all issei were young and their brides were
chosen from a cohort of marriageable applicants
of about the same age, it was not surprising that
issei began their families at about the same time
after marriage. The historical accident of con-
trolled migration of brides resulted in a uniform
age cohort of the second-generation Japanese
Americans (nisei). The relatively homogeneous age
group of the nisei generation meant that their
children, the third generation (known as sansei),
were also of about the same age. The fourth gen-
eration followed the same pattern. The amazingly
nonoverlapping age and generational cohorts
among Japanese Americans is not known to have
had parallels in other population groups.Fourth, while Asian Americans in general con-
tinue to grow in number as a result of new immi-
gration, the size of the Japanese American popula-
tion increases primarily by the addition of new
generations of U.S.-born babies. It is generally
believed that the offspring of Japanese women
who marry Caucasians have lost their Japanese
identity, even though there are no estimates of the
impact of intermarriages upon the shrinkage of
the Japanese-American community. An educated
guess would be that about two-thirds of Japanese
Americans marry non-Japanese partners. Given
the fact that Japanese immigrants had lower fertili-
ty rates than women in Japan during the period
prior to and shortly after World War II, and that
the number of new immigrants since the war has
remained small, Japanese communities have larg-
er percentages of older people than do other
ethnic minority populations, including other Asian
Americans. In short, Japanese Americans will be a
much smaller ethnic minority in the future. The