Are ballot box issues enough? Nakanishi’s indication and the case for Asian Pacific American transnational politics in an age of domestic disruption

ABSTRACT

The occasion of honoring Don Nakanishi presents an opportunity to reflect on the challenge of understanding Asian Pacific American politics amid the dueling forces of rapid globalization and disruption to domestic institutions. Observing that the study of APAs in political science has largely developed along the lines of voting behavior, the case is made for recognizing Nakanishi’s long standing call for an inclusive, internationalized field that defines participation broadly and positions it transnationally. A review of what survey research has yielded on APA transnational politics suggests significant variations among sub-groups as well as several directions for future work in this burgeoning scholarly domain.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American politics
• transnational
• survey research
• political science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Christian Collet http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1611-1007

Notes

1 As “global” will refer here to the whole of world politics, “globalization” can be viewed as a process of increasing information and capital flows and thickening of networks that connect political societies and decrease the distances between them. “Transnationalism”, Vertovec writes, “is a manifestation of globalization” that focuses on “sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-state actors based across national borders – businesses, non-government organizations and individuals sharing the same interests” (2). Where the focus of transnational studies is often on the practices used by individuals, groups, communities and institutions that develop and sustain these linkages, transnationalism, according to Vertovec, can be broadly understood in at least six different ways: “as social morphology, as type of consciousness, as mode of cultural reproduction, as avenue of capital, as site of political engagement, and as (re)construction of place or locality” (4).

2 The word cursory should be emphasized, for there are several limitations to this approach. The first is that comparative studies that may have included APAs as one of several groups may have been omitted in title and abstract searches; full content queries would likely reveal the degree to which APAs were given prominence in the study. A second, and perhaps more significant, limitation is that “Asian” and “Asian American” only searches likely omit studies of individual ethnic groups. Third, of course, is that this approach omits entirely the ample work that appears in books, edited volumes, and in journals of Asian American Studies.

3 This is confirmed by full-text searches of the six international politics journals in the list: IO, WP, IS, JCR, JPR and ISQ. Only in ISQ does “Asian American” appear (on two occasions).

4 Nakanishi’s original view of political transnationalism would today side with broader conceptualizations of the term, as he explicitly deemphasizes some factors (elite actors or the intensity of exchanges) that characterize more delimited and narrow definitions (e.g., Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999). “Transnational relations,” he writes, “is not confined solely to those actors which are engaged in a ‘significant’ (however defined) transaction of values across state boundaries but includes all actors which are engaged in transactions across such boundaries” (1975: 82–83).

5 The sample, arguably, could be expanded if one were to include the many questions in APA surveys relating to ethnic self-identification, pre-migratory socialization (e.g., education in origin countries) and ancestral language retention. While these items are certainly important as social characteristics potentially related to transnational attitudes and acts, they are not discussed here so as to keep the inquiry focused on the direct cognitive and behavioral elements that constitute transnational politics itself.

6 Boccagni’s typology describes the identitarian-attitudinal level of immigrant transnationalism as consisting of “‘bifocal’ identifications and senses of belonging, pointing both to the home and the host society” and the relational-behavioral level as including actions based on “social relationships persisting at a distance; social practices creating systematic connections between origin and destination countries” (2012: 36). The measures in the table span across three domains of action: economic, political and socio-cultural.

7 It is worth considering that the otherwise small proportions of those reporting that they are involved in origin country politics (4-6 percent) is not notably different from the proportion of APAs identified by Wong et al. (2011) as “super participants” (9 percent).

8 The inferences drawn here from the Japanese American (JA) samples should be taken with the caveat that there are variations across the surveys in terms of generational distribution. The PNAAPS shows the highest proportion who are first generation (96 percent; N = 190 (first gen)/198 (total JAs)), followed by Pew (44 percent, N = 225/515), NAAS 2008 (37 percent, N = 282/540), KFF (28 percent, N = 20/71), NAAS 2016 (17 percent, N = 52/310).