Demystifying Multiculturalism: Easy Money, Lost Traditions

CHINESE immigrants on welfare? The very idea seems wildly counter to the Model Minority image of the Chinese. Yet in spite of their conservative, self-reliant instincts—Rosemarie Fan, a social-service manager in Oakland’s Chinatown, described them as “closet Republicans”—elderly Chinese immigrants are flocking to the welfare rolls in alarmingly high numbers. Census data show that 55 per cent of the elderly Chinese immigrants in California who had come to the U.S. between 1980 and 1987 were on welfare in 1990—a striking contrast to the figure of 9 per cent for native-born seniors.

Equally alarming, the welfare culture is contributing to the destruction of the fabled Chinese extended-family structure. This is a new twist on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s analysis 25 years ago of welfare’s destructive effect on black families, with the added irony that in the Chinese case the new welfare recipients are from upscale families, not the underclass.

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Norman Matloff

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CHINESE immigrants on welfare? The very idea seems wildly counter to the Model Minority image of the Chinese. Yet in spite of their conservative, self-reliant instincts—Rosemarie Fan, a social-service manager in Oakland’s Chinatown, described them as “closet Republicans”—elderly Chinese immigrants are flocking to the welfare rolls in alarmingly high numbers. Census data show that 55 per cent of the elderly Chinese immigrants in California who had come to the U.S. between 1980 and 1987 were on welfare in 1990—a striking contrast to the figure of 9 per cent for native-born seniors.

Equally alarming, the welfare culture is contributing to the destruction of the fabled Chinese extended-family structure. This is a new twist on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s analysis 25 years ago of welfare’s destructive effect on black families, with the added irony that in the Chinese case the new welfare recipients are from upscale families, not the underclass.