Everyday Americans

Based on a landmark 2022–23 survey by the Pew Research Center, Everyday Americans: Asians in the U.S. Today paints perhaps the most complete portrait to date of Americans of Asian ancestry, now 24 million strong. They are the fastest growing—and in many ways the most transformative—racial and ethnic group in the United States. They are also the only population that comprises a majority of immigrants or children of immigrants. They represent dozens of ethnic groups with different origins, languages, cultures, and traditions.

But much of American culture, including social science research, treats Asian Americans as a monolith. Doing so erases the multifaceted experiences of Asians in America; it ignores the fact that, a racial group, Asian Americans have the greatest income inequality in the U.S., or that wide gaps in access to education. From the arrival of Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century to the influx of Southeast Asian migration in the twentieth, the Asian American experience is deeply nuanced and constantly evolving.

This book is the culmination of Pew Research Center’s multi-year initiative to make Asian Americans more visible by filling those data gaps, conducting the largest nationally representative survey of the community to date. What resulted is a comprehensive understanding of how Asian Americans navigate the U.S., and how they understand their unique identities, experiences, and struggles. In Everyday Americans, head researcher Neil G. Ruiz braids his own experience with that of the individuals his team interviewed and the data they collected to connect statistics to human voices. The result is an eye-opening text rooted in personal narratives.

Simultaneously informational and approachable, this book tells the story of how Asian Americans, being in between two worlds, navigate what it means to be both: Asian and American.