• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, June 28, 2012

According to a comprehensive new nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success.

A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination. Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.

These milestones of economic success and social assimilation have come to a group that is still majority immigrant. 74% of Asian-American adults were born abroad; of these, about half say they speak English very well and half say they don’t.

The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans, foreign born and U.S born, adults and children, to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8% of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1% in 1965.By comparison:

• Non-Hispanic whites are 197.5 million and 63.3%
• Hispanics 52.0 million and 16.7%
• Non-Hispanic blacks 38.3 million and 12.3%

On the basis of the evidence so far, this immigrant generation has set a bar of success that will be a challenge for the next generation to surpass. As of now, there is no difference in the share of native- and foreign-born Asian Americans ages 25 and older who have a college degree (49% for each group), and there is only a modest difference in the median annual earnings of full-time workers in each group. The two groups also have similar poverty rates and homeownership rates.

When it comes to language fluency, there are significant differences between the native- and foreign-born adults. Only about half of the foreign born say they speak English very well, compared with 95% of the U.S. born. Family formation patterns are also quite different. The U.S. born are much less likely than the foreign born to be married, a difference largely driven by the fact that they are a much younger group. (Among adults, the median age is 30, versus 44 for the foreign born.)

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. The educational credentials of these recent arrivals are striking. 61% of adults ages 25 to 64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, making the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history.

Asian Americans have a pervasive belief in the rewards of hard work. 69% say people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard, a view shared by a somewhat smaller share of the American public as a whole. And 93% of Asian Americans describe members of their country of origin group as “very hardworking”; just 57% say the same about Americans as a whole.

The immigration wave from Asia has occurred at a time when the largest sending countries have experienced dramatic gains in their standards of living. But few Asian immigrants are looking over their shoulders with regret. Just 12% say that if they had to do it all over again, they would remain in their country of origin. And by lopsided margins, Asian Americans say the U.S. is preferable to their country of origin in such realms as providing economic opportunity, political and religious freedoms, and good conditions for raising children. Respondents rated their country of origin as being superior on just one of seven measures tested in the survey—strength of family ties.

For complete data, background and a to view a full report, please visit PewResearch here.