Asian-Americans tend to vote for Democrats. True, they're a relatively small portion of the voting population: just 3 percent in 2012. But they are a solid piece of the Democratic coalition, especially in presidential years. In 2012, they voted 73-26 for Obama over Romney; that's up from 2008, when they voted 62-35 for Obama over McCain. According to Pew, Asians tilt Democratic 65 to 23.
So, Asian-Americans: Democrats. This is something to keep in mind as Democratic lawmakers wage their war on Asian tech workers.
Oh, sure, these lawmakers couch their crusade in the language of "diversity." Here's USA Today with the opening salvo in the Democratic Party's war on Asian Americans:
SAN FRANCISCO — Members of the Congressional Black Caucus flew to Silicon Valley this week to turn up the heat on the nation's largest tech companies to hire more African Americans.
Caucus members met with Apple's Tim Cook and Intel's Brian Krzanich as well as executives from Google, Pandora and SAP to discuss how technology companies plan to fix their troubling hiring record.
Leading the tour was Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who called the dearth of African Americans in Silicon Valley just miles from her home district a "shameful lack of diversity." She said improving the diversity of the tech industry is a moral as well as a business and economic imperative. ...
Joining Lee was the caucus' chairman G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.
Said Butterfield of the tech companies with whom they met: "All of them are deficient" on diversity.
Let's ignore for a moment loaded words like "troubling" and "fix." Instead, let's focus on some statistics. Consider the diversity stats for Google, one of the companies under fire from the Congressional Black Caucus. As it happens, I've written about Google's diversity stats before. Funny thing: Google's actually extremely diverse. Let's check the numbers:
I’m going to set aside the question of gender for today and instead focus on race. Because while it is technically true that Google is "mostly white," this is a remarkably misleading way of putting things. In reality, whites are underrepresented at Google. No, really! According to the Census, the United States is 63 percent white while Google’s workforce is 61 percent white. Google isn’t exactly the Third Reich Reborn.
So if Google is suffering from a "diversity problem"—and, frankly, given all the facts at hand I’m not convinced that they are—it’s not because white folks are locking minorities out of jobs. Nope. It’s because Asians are massivelyoverrepresented at Google. Thirty percent of staffers at Google are Asian, roughly six times their proportion in the general population.
So I guess the only question left to ask is this: Why do Google’s critics hate Asian people and begrudge them success in the tech industry?
Huh. What about Yahoo?
Yahoo’s workforce is half-white. That’s not "mostly," unless you take "mostly" to mean "the highest single percentage."* But that’s a semantic point: the headline/lede are misleading because they want you to think that Yahoo has an abnormally or disproportionately high number of white employees. This is—and I can’t stress this enough—total poppycock. Indeed, if we look at the population as a whole, whites are actually underrepresented at Yahoo. Massively so. Non-hispanic whites make up 63 percent of the American population, well more than the 50 percent at Yahoo. Asians, meanwhile, make up about five percent of the general population but 39 percent of Yahoo’s workforce.
Huh. What's the deal at Apple?
According to a report published on Apple.com, the company's workforce is 70 percent male and 30 percent female. Of Apple's approximately 98,000 workers, about 55 percent are white, 15 percent are Asian, 11 percent are Hispanic, and 7 percent are black.
Huh. So what you're telling me is that these companies are all actually not at all "deficient on diversity"? And that whites and blacks are both underrepresented? And that Asians are massively overrepresented? And that the Congressional Black Caucus seems to be annoyed that Asians are overrepresented while black employees are underrepresented?
That's odd. Of course, this isn't the first time Asian Americans have been forced to suffer in the name of "diversity." Still, one has to wonder why the Democratic coalition is turning on itself like this ahead of the 2016 presidential election. And why the Asian-American community is so happy belonging to a party that seems so angry about its success.