In this episode of Leading by Association, Generation1.ca CEO Arundati Dandapani hosted Neil Ruiz, Head of New Research Initiatives at the Pew Research Centre in Washington, D.C. for an important discussion about Asians in America, drawing from his forthcoming book, Everyday Americans: Asians in the U.S. Today. Together, they extended the conversation across the Americas and Canada.
Asians represent approximately 7% of the US population and close to 18% of Canada’s population. Yet the extraordinary diversity of their national, cultural and socioeconomic origins across the Americas is often eclipsed by a perception of homogeneity shaped by the most visible or dominant groups.
They also challenged the “model minority” myth, the assumption that all Asians are uniformly successful. Ruiz’s motivation for writing the book was grounded in the need to illuminate Asian communities, experiences and inequalities that remain poorly understood or frequently overlooked. In reality, one in ten Asian Americans lives in poverty, with outcomes varying considerably across origin groups.
Their discussion demonstrated why aggregated labels must never conceal profoundly different lives, barriers and opportunities. Drawing on the deeper stories captured in Ruiz’s forthcoming book, the episode intersected in inquiries Dandapani advanced in her award-winning work Voicing the New Global Immigrant Realities: Empowered Insights for an Underserved Market: whose realities are visible, whose remain hidden and what becomes possible when the full diversity of immigrant experiences is finally heard?
Watch this space for the entire video and audio streaming.
Sources: Pew Research Center, Statistics Canada, Pew’s research on Asian Americans living in poverty
About the Guest
Neil G. Ruiz is Head of New Research Initiatives at Pew Research Center, where he served as the principal investigator of their multiyear study of Asian Americans. A political economist with a PhD from MIT and degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley, Ruiz is an expert on immigrant and understudied populations, focusing on amplifying their voices through research. He has been recognized by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) for filling the industry’s data gap on Aslan Americans. Ruiz previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the World Bank. The son of Filipino immigrants, he was born and raised in Oxnard, CA, and lives in Washington, D.C.
