Pew Report: A third of Asian Americans living in fear; 80% believe anti-Asian attacks increasing

Attacks against Asian Americans have prompted demonstrations against xenophobia.

Racist attacks against Asian Americans are increasing making almost a third of them looking over their shoulder, fearful of being assaulted, spat upon, punched in the face, pushed to the ground or told to "go back to your country."

Since the coronavirus pandemic took grip of the U.S. a year ago, Asian Americans have become a scapegoat for the spread of the deadly contagion.

Almost a third, or 32%, of Asian adults say they have feared someone might threaten or physically attack them – a greater share than other racial or ethnic groups, a new Pew Research Center poll finds.

“There has never been a situation during my lifetime that I've felt this level of fear, and this level of vulnerability, and also the level of isolation that I do right now,” said Rp. Andy Kim, D-NJ., during a recent press conference in Washington D.C.

Four out of five Asian American adults (81%) also say anti-Asian violence is increasing, far more than most other U.S. adults (56%). The poll comes as the U.S. Senate is set to vote today (April 22) on the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act that aims to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans.

The Pew poll was taken after the shooting rampage that took the lives of six Asian women and two other people in the Atlanta area on March 16 and the rash of assaults on Asian Americans that occurred that same month.

 
Overall, 45% of Asian adults say they have experienced at least one of five specific offensive incidents since the start of the coronavirus outbreak. At the same time, 32% say someone has expressed support for them since the start of the pandemic.

Some 27% say people acted as if they were uncomfortable around them, down from 39% who said the same in June 2020. Another 27% say they have been subject to slurs or jokes, the same share as in 2020. Meanwhile, lower shares say someone has made a remark that they should go back to their home country (16%) or that they are to blame for the coronavirus outbreak (14%).

Similar shares of Asian (16%), Black (15%) and Hispanic (16%) adults say someone has remarked that they should go back to their home country since the start of the pandemic. Just 2% of White adults say this has happened to them.

Asian respondents who say violence against their group in the U.S. is increasing give many reasons for the rise, according to an open-ended question in which people responded in their own words. 

The largest number, 20%, blame Donald Trump' and the racist rhetoric he used in describing the coronavirus and immigrants, in general.

Some 16% cited racism in the United States against Asian people as the source of violence, and another 15% said the rise in violence is due to COVID-19 and its impacts on the nation. An additional 12% said scapegoating and blaming Asian people for the pandemic, especially the rhetoric that came from the Trump administration, has spurred the rise in violence against tAsian Amercans.

The survey was conducted in English and Spanish using the Center’s American Trends Panel with a margin of error of 2.1 percentage points for the full sample of 5,109 US adults and 8.9 percentage points among the sample’s 352 Asian American adult respondents.

The U.S. Census approximates that there are 22 million to 23 million Asians Americans as of 2020. Another Pew study says that Asian Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S.

Bias against Asian Americans is nothing new. Experiences with discrimination among Asian adults were widely reported before the pandemic. The April 2021 survey of 73% of Asian Americans say they have personally experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. This share is unchanged from June 2020 and is about the same as prior to the pandemic, when 76% of Asian adults in February 2019 said they had personally experienced discrimination or unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity.

The biggest difference between 2020 and 2021, is that the rest of America is beginning to acknowledge the anti-Asian violence and xenophobic attacks because of the wide attention given to smart-phone videos of those assaults.

President Biden, who picked Kamala Harris as his Vice President, the first Asian American to hold that position, has acknowledged and condemned the attacks against Asians since the early days of his administration and made racial equity a priority of his administration.

Pew Research Center will also explore this and other data on Asian Americans with a panel of experts in an online event on April 29. Information about the event and registration is available here.