> Asian immigrants are not struggling to escape the clutches of centuries old intergenerational poverty
The children of people we put in concentration camps or accepted as refugees from e.g. the Khmer Rouge should be punished so the daughter of a hedge fund manager can get into a university named after an executive of the British East India Company? Give me a break.
I am pretty sure a lot do. First, a lot of immigrants came to pursue the "American Dream", trying to break free from poverty, or oppression, or both.
Then you have specific instances of Asian people (systematically) being mistreated in the US. Chinese railroad construction workers come to mind, who were basically treated as serfs and whose lives were considered "expendable". People with Japanese origins were put into concentration camps during WW II, along with societal repressions against anybody who "looked" Japanese, on top of the general racist stance of the time.
Asian-Americans were effectively as segregated as Black Americans for a long long time. While the Asian-American population might not have experienced slave-labor to the same degree, Asian-American communities certainly were for a long time pushed to the edges of society, usually even physically segregated, systematically and ideologically denied access to upwards social mobility, and so on.
But I believe plenty of Asians feel the pain of racism, right? And let's not forget about interring Japanese-Americans during World War II. Sure, the Japanese experience in the United States didn't begin with slavery, but let's not assume they do not suffer the effects of racism.
Many Asians are dealing with intergenerational poverty including multi-century. Much of the discrimination before the 1900s were in other countries, but Asians have frequently faced discrimination.
In the US there has been discrimination for over 100 years.
You are suffering from the same optimistic delusion that the Supreme Court suffered from in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003):
> In her majority opinion, O'Connor wrote that "race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time," adding that the "Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
AA will not permit anyone to escape intergenerational poverty. By the numbers, it hasn't done anything to combat it.
Asian immigrants are not struggling to escape the clutches of centuries old intergenerational poverty. It's not even remotely the same thing.