“We (Native Hawaiians) continue to suffer from old stereotypes and assumptions, especially around being incapable, lazy, and suited for only particular kinds of work. But what does the data tell us? Have we made inroads into the professional ranks?”
We figured we should broaden this and dig through 63 million responses to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and decennial census to see which race or ethnicity has recorded the most significant professional advancement. As inveterate context junkies, we try to start wide and zoom in. After all, it’s possible Hawaiians aren’t the story here.
Well, the joke’s on us! Hawaiians are definitely the story here.
Over the past decade, from 2012 to 2022, the share of Hawaiians in management or professional roles has skyrocketed, increasing faster than any of 20-plus other groups for which we have comparable data.
What’s behind the boom? It’s not any single job. Or industry. Or age group. Or gender. Or marital status. It’s not remote work. Having eliminated all else, we were only too happy to zoom back out and consider geography. We’ve got a thing for maps, and readers have been asking for a deep dive on America’s Pacific Islanders for a while now. Thanks to the new, detailed releases from the 2020 Census, we can finally provide it!
About 670,000 Pacific Islanders lived in the United States in 2020, from Carolinians to Yapese. They make up 0.2 percent of the population. If that seems vanishingly small, that’s because we’re comparing it with the entirety of these United States, one of the most populous polities the planet has ever produced.
Relative to the region from which they hail, however, America’s Pacific population looms large.
The Pacific Islands, as we define them, claim 0.06 percent of the world’s people (3.5 million) and 0.09 percent of its land area. In size and population, they resemble the commonwealth of Kentucky — if Bluegrass country had been smashed to smithereens, scattered across almost half the globe and endowed with significantly better weather. (For our somewhat idiosyncratic definition of Pacific Islands, see the fine print on the chart.)
Hawaiians make up the largest share of U.S. Pacific Islanders, with 200,000. They’re followed by Samoans and Chamorros, both of whom, like Hawaiians, originate in islands the United States annexed in the age of imperialism (Chamorros hail from Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands, while Samoans come from either American Samoa or, less often, independent Samoa. Due to data limitations, we can’t include in this count the estimated 136,000 Pacific Islanders who live in U.S. territories.)
Islander migrant and immigrant populations make for offbeat maps because they often concentrate in very narrow areas. We could do entire columns on Samoans in Alaska or Tongans in Utah, but nothing compares to the Marshallese.
On a city-by-city basis, no Pacific Islander population from a single source, other than Hawaiians in Honolulu, beats the Marshallese in Springdale, Ark. And we’re looking at sheer numbers, not adjusting for population. Springdale had just 84,000 people in 2020, and almost 8,000 of them were Marshallese.
The Marshalls were named for a British captain who fought against American revolutionaries, dropped the first loads of convicts off in Australia, and charted a few Micronesian atolls and outcroppings on his way home. Pockmarking the Pacific north of the equator, a bit closer to Hawaii than to Asia, the islands rise an average of seven feet above sea level. So how did a major chunk of their population end up landlocked at the foot of the Ozarks?
The long answer probably involves the horrific legacy of U.S. nuclear testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshalls, but the short answer is simply “John Moody.”
In the early 1980s, Moody worked for Tyson Foods, the Springdale-based poultry powerhouse that now employs about 120,000 U.S. workers. Impressed by the steady albeit dangerous work — he started at $3.25 an hour and lost the tip of his finger in a saw, according to the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel — he returned home to the Marshall Islands to preach the gospel of what Arkansas has proclaimed, somewhat tenuously, to be the Poultry Capital of the World. Thousands of his compatriots followed. (The islands became independent in 1979, but under the Compact of Free Association, residents can work and travel freely in the United States.)
Thinking about Moody and similar stories, we wondered if we could explain Hawaiians’ success by analyzing them as a group of immigrants. It hadn’t occurred to us before because, of course, they’re the opposite of immigrants. They’re an independent kingdom overthrown in a coup and annexed by the United States. White Americans immigrated to them.
“Our experience of colonialism, similar but not identical to the Native American experience, has left its imprint ever since James Cook landed in Kawaihae in 1778, followed ceremoniously by Protestant Christian missionaries bent on converting Hawaiians from our own highly structured spiritual life to Christianity, a violent, unforgiving change,” Fernandez wrote. “As with all pretty places, we were overrun with outsiders that exploited us for their own success.”
But today, most Hawaiians (about 53 percent) live outside their ancestral archipelago. Maybe they’d found success by, like the Marshallese, moving to new opportunities? (Here and throughout the story, we’re looking at people who claim only Hawaiian heritage. A large and growing group claim partial Hawaiian and Pacific Islander heritage, as well, but we won’t dwell on them as they might have been affected by definitional issues not unlike those that sent Native American or multiracial populations soaring.)
Our initial explorations weren’t fruitful. The Hawaiian version of Springdale, Ark., would be Las Vegas. Surrounding Clark County, Nev., has more Hawaiians — both overall and as a share of the population — than any county outside Hawaii. Heck, it has more Hawaiians than Kauai. But Hawaiians there aren’t succeeding at much higher rates than the friends they left behind at home.
But in mapping their populations, we noticed Hawaiians spread far more widely across the mainland than other Pacific Islanders. And when we accounted for that breadth by comparing Hawaii to all other states combined, everything snapped into focus. We found that the rise in Hawaiians in management came entirely outside of Hawaii.
Furthermore, it wasn’t all Hawaiians outside of Hawaii who were climbing corporate ladders. The climbers were, specifically, Hawaiians born outside the state.
The sample size is pretty small: We have data on fewer than a thousand working Hawaiians each year, and much of the shift into management happened in 2021, so it could be an aberration. But with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, often cut from analyses due to data limitations, we have to embrace some uncertainty to answer the call from readers eager to know more about these groups. Additional data to be released this fall should help confirm (or confuse) the trend, which is starting to look to us like a classic immigrant story, minus the immigrants.
We already know immigrants have much higher “intergenerational mobility” than native-born Americans. Translated from Economist Vernacular English, that means immigrant kids are more likely to be better off than their parents.
As we wrote in one of our first columns, based on the work of all-star economic historians Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky, it’s not due to immigrants’ superior culture or parenting skills. It’s because, lacking roots in this country, immigrant parents are more willing to move to high-opportunity places — native-born kids in those places do just as well as immigrants.
“This notable upward mobility is due primarily to where immigrants choose to settle,” Boustan told us recently. “They tended to move to dynamic labor markets that exhibited high upward mobility for everyone.”
Boustan said folks who move inside the country show a similar pattern. The first generation finds the opportunity, and the second generation moves up in the world. Fernandez said Hawaiians might seek opportunity outside the islands because of what she says is Hawaii’s quiet caste system. In Hawaii, she said, Native Hawaiians, Filipinos and Pacific Islanders might be less likely to be seen as management material, regardless of their ability.
Folks who grow up in that system might have a limited view of where their lives can take them, Fernandez said. But to their kids raised on the mainland, almost any promotion seems possible.
If that’s the case, said University of Texas economist Eric Chyn, a leader in calculating the benefits of moving to opportunity, it could be seen as a smaller modern analogue of the Great Migration, in which Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for Northern cities. In a recent American Economic Journal: Applied Economics paper, Chyn and his collaborators found that by moving North, especially to certain high-opportunity cities, Black Americans substantially improved their children’s prospects.
The bigger story, shown again and again by waves of recent economic research, is that the type of place you live matters, Chyn said. “That matters for immigrants, and also matters for minorities, and it also matters for lots of other types of people, too.”
Of course, the proximal cause of leaving Hawaii for higher-opportunity places is often quite simple. For well over a decade, the idyllic island chain has suffered from the highest home prices in the nation, according to Zillow.
Many folks in Hawaii do not, of course, make enough to afford those homes. Since 2008, the state has been consistently cursed with the worst relationship in the nation between annual median household income and home prices. In related news, the state has lost population in six of the past seven years.
“Every single Hawaiian I know that moved, including family, went because they knew they could never buy a house here, and were tired of the struggle,” Fernandez told us.
Aloha! The Department of Data seeks suggestions. What are you curious about: Are Zoomer men really being left behind? Why is Hawaii losing population? Why are there so many fewer people in the Southern Hemisphere? Just ask!
If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we’ll send a big, fat envelope across the Pacific to Susan Lehua Fernandez. We’ll also send buttons to Bob Carrere in Pahoa, Hawaii, and Karen Walson in Ashburn, Va., both of whom asked about Hawaiian or Pacific Islander demographics.