Recent legislation targeting immigrants in various states, and the Supreme Court's decision to uphold some of the questionable elements of Arizona's SB 1070, raise questions about the nature and pace of immigrant incorporation in the United States. These laws highlight the variance in receptivity of foreign-born residents and those who look like them. Thus, it is important to consider not only individual-level characteristics of immigrants but also the social, economic, and political realities that these immigrants face day to day. Media and pundits largely focus on the likely racial profiling of Latinos and concomitant Latino political participation in reaction to the perceived political threat. However, it is unclear whether other voters with immigrant backgrounds will be activated into politics in reaction to such legislation or if their participation is primarily determined by socioeconomic resources.

In Asian American Political Participation, Janelle Wong and her coauthors provide much-needed insights about Asian Americans as the fastest-growing emerging constituency. Specifically, they explore where they live, their partisan inclination, their racial identity, and their religious affiliation to present a nuanced theory about how these factors uniquely impact the patterns of Asian American political participation. Their insights about Asian Americans are important because they allow us to consider the future of America's diverse electorate. Beyond the timely nature of the book, it simply is also very well done. The range of readers will be quite broad. Scholars interested in political behavior, immigration, and “race, ethnicity, and politics” will find this book of great use.

There are two approaches to the study of participation and race, ethnicity, and politics. The first identifies extant theories in political science and simply tests how and when participation patterns vary across race and ethnicity. The second approach acknowledges the unique experience of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States and evaluates whether existing accounts of the determinants of participation should be revised. Not only does this approach require more work, but it is also more innovative and offers greater potential for new analytical/theoretical insights. The authors opted for the second approach, and unlike much of the earlier work on Asian Americans, this is not a “retrofit project.” That is, the authors did not start with scattered hypotheses about participation of other groups and then seek out piecemeal data that pool together respondents across time or space to get enough respondents to analyze Asian American participation. Instead, it is clear that they started with an overarching theoretical framework that is consistent with the existing literature, yet were cognizant of the unique experience of Asian Americans.

The book consists of eight chapters that can be linked to an initial question concerning who engages in five different acts of participation: voting, donating to political parties and candidates, contacting government officials, working with others in one's community to solve a problem, and protesting. The theoretical innovation is not in the overarching question “Who participates?” If it were, the intuitive response among political participation scholars would suffice: It is those with resources and those who are asked. Instead, one of the initial questions that the authors grapple with is why high levels of socioeconomic resources do not appear to engender correspondingly high levels of political engagement for Asian Americans. In a very real sense, the authors pick up where comparative participation studies leave off. Rather than focus on the disparity in participation relative to whites, African Americans, or Latinos, they look within the diverse Asian American community to help explain the overarching patterns of Asian American participation.

The authors use the 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS), the most comprehensive data on Asian Americans and politics to date. The sampling frame, based on geography, national ethnic origin, language, and voting eligibility, will allow for further analyses to be conducted and will prompt other scholars to explore additional questions about this emerging constituency. In combination with the theoretical insights provided in this text, the next generation of American politics scholars will be able to question existing assertions about Asian Americans that are often based on inadequate sampling frames.

My one overarching critique is related to the possible confounding effects of some key factors highlighted by the book. The authors make clear that the internal diversity among Asian Americans, based on national origin groups, is crucial to any explanations about their political identities, partisan affiliation, and civic engagement. However, in several instances, nativity (i.e., native vs. foreign born) is also determinative of the nature and extent of their political participation. I was often left wondering if the differences across national origin groups persist into the second or third generation. They do explore this factor with respect to attendance at religious service, but do not provide comparable analyses in other sections of the book. Similarly, it would make sense to provide similar multivariate analyses of national-origin differences among only the foreign born with respect to immigrant adaptation, party affiliation, pan-ethnic identification, and civic engagement. Finally, if racial identification is consequential for political participation, what is the role of language in national origin or pan-ethnic identification? How much are identity formation and preferences determined by the ability or inability to speak the parents' or grandparents' mother tongue, and are these patterns driven by residential context?

Overall, the authors provide a wealth of information and astute analyses. However, the book could not explore each of the relevant factors with all of the richness available in the 2008 NAAS. And although it is a strong foundation upon which to build, there are some things that can and should be addressed in future work. To their credit, the authors acknowledge that there is work yet to be done when they look to the future of Asian American political participation in the concluding chapter: “Not only must we consider immigrant generation, but also how immigrant generation interacts with age, length of residence, and the size of a particular community” (p. 236).

With respect to trajectory, I would add that additional administrative data are needed to uncover the national-origin differences in naturalization and voter registration rates across state and local contexts. Do Asian Americans, individually or as groups, become politically active as a result of legislation that is perceived to be politically threatening, as has been the case with African Americans or Latinos?

Finally, some might look at Asian Americans and wonder why their political participation does not comport with expected rates given their socioeconomic resources. Rather than seeing this as something that is different or wrong with Asian Americans, future scholars should incorporate the insights about Asian American partisan affiliation and the residential context found in this book and then explore why local and regional institutions have failed to fulfill the same socializing role of emerging constituencies that they performed historically.