The economic impact of the pandemic on Asian Americans is unusual because historically their unemployment rates have been very low—even lower than those of white Americans. In December 2019, when the overall unemployment rate was 3.5%, Asian American unemployment hovered at just 2.5%.

“It’s especially notable because among Asian Americans, the average unemployment rate was the lowest before the pandemic,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy and political science professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the founder and director of AAPI Data. Even at the peak of the last recession, Asian American unemployment remained below that of Black and Latinx workers.

One reason the pandemic’s toll on Asian Americans demands more attention, Ramakrishnan says, is because it’s such a departure from the norm. But that’s also why it’s difficult to increase awareness of how the pandemic has affected Asian American communities. “Essentially, it’s a version of that model-minority framing,” he says. “Asians are better off than whites, so there’s nothing really to pay attention to here. They are not a struggling community of color.”

It’s true that collectively, Asian Americans are the most educated racial and ethnic group in the U.S. But there is no singular Asian American experience. “Those averages hide a lot of variation,” Ramakrishnan says. Even the term itself—first coined to help the community build political power—barely begins to capture the diversity of the group, which includes Americans who trace their origins to dozens of Asian countries.

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