Southern California's Vietnamese population grew sharply in the 1990s despite ebbing immigration, drawing newcomers from elsewhere in the state and nation into a powerful cluster that now exceeds 230,000, census information released today shows.
That includes 135,548 in Orange County alone, where the Vietnamese American community surged almost 89% and won demographic bragging rights over rival centers in the San Jose area and Texas.
FOR THE RECORD
Los Angeles Times Thursday May 24, 2001 Home Edition Part A Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 2 inches; 53 words Type of Material: Correction
Vietnamese centers--A graphic accompanying a Wednesday story about the growing Vietnamese population in the United States did not include Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Georgia among the states with the largest number of Vietnamese residents. They are respectively the fifth, seventh and eighth ranked states for greatest number of residents of Vietnamese ancestry.
The latest cache of census data gives the most nuanced picture yet of the last decade's changes in California's large, increasingly heterogenous Asian population.
Overall, the number of Asian residents rose 35.2%, to almost 3.7 million (not counting the about half a million people who identified themselves as multiracial and part Asian), but did so unevenly, both numerically and geographically.
The 2000 census reflects the continued suburban diaspora of Chinese Americans, who neared the 1-million mark in pushing past Filipinos to become the state's largest Asian group. Though the Chinese population dropped 6% in the city of Los Angeles, it grew more than 34% in the county and strongly throughout the rest of the region.
Mirroring a national trend, California's Japanese American population fell almost 8% in the 1990s, affected by intermarriage and a low birth rate. Regionally, the sharpest drop occurred in the city of Los Angeles, where the number of Japanese fell 18.5% to under 37,000.
The new economy left its stamp as well, fueling a 97% advance for Asian Indians, particularly in Northern California, where a host of highly skilled immigrants answered the technology industry's need for computer programmers and engineers.
In the quarter-century since the first Vietnam War refugees arrived at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, Southern California has been transformed from an entry port to a final stop for Vietnamese Americans.
After the tsunami of the 1980s, when the state's Vietnamese population more than quadrupled, international immigration largely dried up, shrinking in Orange County from 10,510 in 1992 to 1,017 in 1998, INS records show.
But a wave of domestic migration appears to have taken up the slack somewhat, creating what Van Tran, an attorney and Garden Grove's first Vietnamese City Council member, calls "the mecca of all things Vietnamese in the United States."
Tran regards himself as one of many "new Pilgrims" to Orange County. He settled first in Grand Rapids, Mich., then was lured westward in 1980 by beach and sun.
