Today on Air Talk we'll look at a new Pew Study which finds Asian Americans to be the fastest growing immigrant population, a compare and contrast of conflicting studies on the effects of same-sex parenting, dissecting US foreign-policy after the results of Egyptian Presidential elections and the latest news out of Syria and a conversation with author Jonah Goldberg about his book "The Tyranny of Clichés." Plus, the latest news
Move over Latinos, Asians are now the fastest-growing group in the US
A Pew Research Center report released today shows that Asian Americans have surpassed Latinos as the majority immigrant population. According to the study, this is due to the fact that the U.S. economy is becoming increasingly dependent on workers with specifically developed skills in science, engineering and math, which dovetails with Asian Americans being the nation’s best-educated minority group.
Meanwhile, Latino immigration, particularly from Mexico, has slowed due to a conflation of increased border enforcement and a weaker U.S. economy. Asian immigrants have overtaken Latinos annually since 2009, and in 2010 the rates were 36 percent to 31 percent influx respectively. There are 18.2-million Asian Americans in the U.S., comprising 6 percent of the total population.
"We went to great lengths in this survey methodology to get representative samples of the six largest Asian countries that immigrants have come from. We have samples of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian. Overall, we had 3,500 Asian Americans," said Kim Parker of the Pew Institute.
Parker said that Asian Americans are still a rare population from a survey perspective and there is more work to be done. However, the study does show that, in general, Asian Americans, "…do sort of hang together, and they have a set of values and opinions about their lives and their experiences in America and their hopes for the future that are sort of consistent in a way, and different from the general public."
Nearly half of all the 18.2-million Asian Americans in the U.S. are found in, you guessed it, California. So what does this mean for California politics?
"Given the findings of the Pew report and the tilting of the Asian American population to the Democratic party, I think we're going to see this impact politically, of course in the state of California we see this profoundly in the educational sector in the economy as trans-Pacific trade has become one of the most important drivers of the economy" said Edward Park Ph.D, professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. "On multiple fronts I think we're going to see a growing and more profound societal transformation as Asian-American numbers grow."
Weigh In
What do these new numbers mean for the Golden State? Will these findings negotiate a sea change in the way we view immigration itself? How are Asian American immigrants fundamentally different from Latinos? How will this play out politically, socially, educationally and otherwise? Are you an Asian American immigrant? What brought you to America and what do you hope to achieve here?
GUESTS
D’Vera Cohn, co-author of the new Pew Research Center report on Asian Americans
Kim Parker, co-author of the new Pew Research Center report on Asian Americans
Edward Park, Ph.D, professor of Asian Pacific American Studies, Loyola Marymount University
Gay parenting studies under the microscope
Recently, a study on the children of gay and lesbian parents made headlines, but not just because of its findings.
The study author Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, wanted to find out whether kids of homosexual parents were more likely to have social and emotional problems. He said his findings showed kids from LGBT households fared worse than children of mom-and-dad homes. Regnerus and Cynthia Osborne, a fellow scholar who helped design the data collection, also went to pains to say the study cannot explain why. As Osborne elaborated, "Children of lesbian mothers might have lived in many different family structures, and it is impossible to isolate the effects of living with a lesbian mother from experiencing divorce, remarriage or living with a single parent.
Or it is quite possible that the effect derives entirely from the stigma attached to such relationships and to the legal prohibitions that prevent same-sex couples from entering and maintaining 'normal relationships?' Nevertheless, opponents of same-sex marriage seized on the study as arsenal. While many on the other side called the study "flawed, misleading and scientifically unsound." How was the study conducted exactly? What have other studies found out about gay parenting? And how were those studies designed?
GUESTS
Cynthia Osborne, Scholar, New Family Structures Study published in the journal of Social Science Research; Assoc. Professor, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
Gary Gates, Scholar, Williams Institute, UCLA (joins us from Paris)
Update on Egypt, Syria and the role of the U.S. in international conflicts
A season of unrest remains in the Middle East, leaving the United States to question its level of involvement in the region.
There was evidence of this at the G20 meeting in Mexico; a frosty exchange between Russia's president, Vladimir Putin and President Obama caught on camera.
The former Cold War nations are at odds over Russia's support of the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, while the country slides into civil war. Over the weekend, the United Nations suspended mission patrols in Syria due to the escalating violence.
Meanwhile in Egypt, there are renewed calls for protest, following a military decree that weakens the role of the presidency. This, after the country’s first democratic elections since the ousting of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
What is the United States' role in overseas disputes? How does U.S. involvement in areas such as Syria and Egypt help or hinder the democratic process? Should countries such as Syria be left to devise their own solutions?
Guests:
Borzou Daragahi, Middle East and North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times based in Cairo
Hussein Ibish, Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine & Executive Director of the Hala Foundation for Arab-American Leadership
Danielle Pletka, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies,
American Enterprise Institute
Steven A. Cook, author of “The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square” (Oxford University Press). Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also author of “Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria and Turkey”
The tyranny of clichés
“Diversity is strength.” “Violence never solved anything.” “We are only as free as the least free among us.” We’ve all heard these feel-good, liberal-minded clichés – maybe even spouted them ourselves during a Thanksgiving dinner argument. But what do they really mean?
Author Jonah Goldberg’s new book aims to shoot down the straw man of accepted political thought and expose the reality behind over-used tropes of the left. Goldberg considers these stand-ins for reason as self-delusion at best, dangerous camouflage for a radical agenda at worst.
He considers Barack Obama one of the most egregious offenders; by casting himself as a disciple of reason, concerned not with dogma and ideology but with “what works,” Goldberg maintains, Obama is leading America further down the path of self-destruction. Liberals need to examine the ideas behind their words, writes Goldberg, and stop convincing themselves that their non-ideological stance is nothing but a ruse.
What clichés do you hear – from either side – that drive you up a wall? Which ones do you find yourself using too often, or too carelessly?
Guest:
Jonah Goldberg, Author of "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (Sentinel)"; founding editor of the National Review Online; Los Angeles Times columnist, Fox News contributor