A clear majority of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adults now believe the United States used to be a great country for immigrants but has lost that status, according to a new survey released June 15 by AAPI Data and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
About 6 in 10 AAPI adults said America was once a great place for immigrants but isn’t anymore. Roughly 3 in 10 said it is still a great place to come. Just 5% said it was never a great place to begin with. Taken together, the numbers describe a community that has not given up on the idea of America so much as watched the country move away from it.
A Community Built on the Promise of America
For generations, Asian American and Pacific Islander families have been told a version of the American story in which hard work, education, and patience eventually pay off. That promise drew millions of immigrants and built communities across the country. The new polling suggests that belief is now colliding with a harder reality, and that the people who once held it most firmly are the ones expressing the deepest disappointment.
This was a survey of AAPI adults specifically, not of all Americans. That distinction matters. It captures how one of the country’s fastest-growing populations sees the nation that many of them or their parents chose, and the answer is sobering.
Fear, Not Just Opinion
The most striking finding is not about sentiment at all. It is about behavior. About half of those surveyed said they or someone they know has been detained or deported, started carrying proof of legal status, or changed their daily routines over the past year because of immigration enforcement.
Those are not abstract policy preferences. They are descriptions of how people are actually living. Carrying documents to run an errand. Rerouting a commute. Thinking twice before a routine trip. When roughly half of a community reports changes like these, it points to a climate of fear that reaches well beyond anyone who has been directly detained.
The survey reached 1,075 AAPI adults between April 20 and 28, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. AAPI Data and the AP-NORC Center are established research organizations, and the AAPI-specific sample is what gives the findings their weight.
What the Numbers Signal
Polls measuring optimism about the country come and go. What sets this one apart is the gap between what people believe and what they say they are doing to stay safe. A community can lose confidence in a nation’s direction while still going about its day normally. When that same community starts changing routines and carrying papers, the shift has moved from opinion into daily life.
Civil-rights advocates have warned that aggressive immigration enforcement does not only affect people who are undocumented. It ripples outward, touching citizens and longtime legal residents who share neighborhoods, families, and workplaces with those being targeted. This survey puts data behind that warning.
What This Means for Americans
When half of any community feels it has to alter how it lives to avoid being swept up, the conversation stops being a political debate and becomes a question about the kind of country we want to be. The people in this survey are not outsiders looking in. They are Americans describing how it feels to live here right now. The accountability question is straightforward: who is responsible for a climate in which belonging suddenly feels conditional?
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