Thai immigrants

SIGNIFICANCE: As one of the most stable of the Southeast Asian states, Thailand has served as a conduit for thousands of immigrants fleeing oppressive governments in other countries. However, immigration of Thai nationals to the United States was limited prior to the Vietnam War.

Prior to the twentieth century, Thailand, or Siam as it was long known, was a political backwater, a country that had avoided colonialism and had limited contact with the West. Few Thais had compelling reasons to come to the United States until the US became involved in Vietnam’s civil war during the 1960s, which exposed Thais to American culture. Many soon saw the United States as a potential refuge from political and economic turmoil, leading to the first of several waves of Thai immigration. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country to escape destruction during the Vietnam War. Its own military government allied with the US during the war, but managed to keep the conflict from crossing its borders or bringing a destructive communist insurgency like those that devastated its eastern neighbors. 

Throughout the Vietnam War, American service members used Thailand as a haven for rest and recreation from the fighting. Thais were thereby introduced to American culture, and a few thousand Thais began immigrating to the United States every year. Among the most numerous Thai immigrants were wives of American soldiers and sailors. They contributed to a growing concentration of Thai Americans around military bases in California, Texas, and Georgia, but this initial wave of immigration was too small to create a substantial Thai community in the United States.

Marriages between American military personnel and Thai women produced two of the most accomplished and famous athletes of early twenty-first-century America: baseball player Johnny Damon of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, and golfer Tiger Woods. The fathers of both served in the US military during the Vietnam War. 

The Thai American community remained small through the 1970s, as large numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were admitted to the United States as political refugees. Because Thailand had a pro-Western government, Thais wanting to go to the United States could not claim refugee status. Consequently, the number of Thais in the United States remained a small fraction of the number of other Southeast Asian immigrants. The already low rate of Thai immigration slowed further during the 1980s and 1990s, as Thailand’s growing political stability brought democratic reforms and economic growth that promised better lives for most Thais. However, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and a new military coup in Thailand in 2006 spurred increased immigration to the United States.

Thai Americans

The 2000 US Census reported that more than 110,000 Thais were living in the United States—a figure one-tenth that of Vietnamese residents and barely 1 percent of the total Asian American population. Because of its small size relative to other Asian racial groups, the early Thai American community received less attention than most other Asian American demographics. The few Thais living in the United States were spread too thinly across the country to maintain strong cultural ties. Los Angeles, California, was the only American city to develop a “Thai Town.” By the 2010 US census, 237,583 people of Thai heritage lived in the country. By the 2020s, approximately 340,000 people living in the US identified as Thai, with 195,000 claiming Thai alone. Between 2000 and the mid-2020s, the Thai-alone population increased by 79 percent.

According to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of Thais were proficient in English in the 2020s; however, English proficiency varied significantly within the community, with 49 percent proficiency among immigrants, compared to 89 percent of Thai people born in the US. Of Thai Americans over twenty-five, 49 percent had a bachelor’s or advanced degree. The majority of people of Thai descent continued to live overwhelmingly in the Los Angeles area, with smaller pockets in New York City and Seattle. The states with the highest number of people of Thai heritage are California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Washington.

Two specialized forms of Thai immigration were typically associated with underground economies: mail-order brides and undocumented workers. With poverty widespread in parts of rural Thailand, some women saw an attractive path to prosperity in marrying Americans, which could earn them American citizenship with all its benefits and a new life in the United States. Although the number of Thai women who became mail-order brides was smaller than that of Filipino and Russian women, they still accounted for a significant share of immigrants. Smuggling workers into the United States to work in sweatshops was also part of the story of Thai immigration. 

Despite their relatively small numbers, Thai immigrants and the cuisine they introduced achieved outsized popularity in the United States. In 2023, Thais accounted for around 0.1 percent of the US population, but Thai restaurants numbered more than 10,000. When the size of a racial demographic is compared to the number of restaurants that serve its namesake style of food, by ratio, ten times more Thai restaurants exist than Mexican restaurants. 

One account suggests that the popularity of Thai restaurants began in Los Angeles around the early 1980s. Like the American Thai community itself, the Vietnam War and returning service members helped introduce Thai cuisine to the American mainstream. Nonetheless, many people associated Thai restaurants with the already-established Chinese food genre. Many early Thai restaurants were unable to source Thai ingredients, so they substituted Chinese variants instead. Around 2000, Thai cuisine came into its own. It was no longer associated with Chinese food or as a type of secondary Asian cuisine, but rather one with its own unique style and merit. 

Bibliography

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