As History Repeats, JACL Members Are United – Key Findings from the 2025 JACL Membership Survey

COMMENTARY

As History Repeats, JACL Members Are United: Key Findings from the 2025 JACL Membership Survey

By Erika Braun, with Karthick Ramakrishnan and Saki Mori
July 7, 2026

When Fort Bliss – an active military base once used as an internment camp for first-generation Japanese immigrants – opened as the nation’s largest ICE detention center in August 2025, the Japanese American Citizens League responded immediately: “Whether it be 1942 or 2025, the mass incarceration and detention of immigrants based upon false narratives of ‘military necessity’ or ‘national security’ is entirely indefensible.”

For many Japanese Americans, this is not an abstraction. Community members across the country have been drawing direct parallels between the government’s current immigration enforcement and the incarceration their own families experienced during WWII — and organizing accordingly. The 2025 State of the JACL Membership Survey, fielded that same fall, shows that this response runs deep across the organization’s membership.

The survey is JACL’s first comprehensive membership assessment in sixteen years, capturing perspectives from 510 verified members across all seven chapter districts. To understand what the findings mean, it helps to know who JACL’s members are in 2025.

Who are JACL members in 2025?

Founded in 1929, JACL is the oldest and largest Asian American civil and human rights organization in the United States and among the several oldest civil rights groups in the nation. Its mission is to secure and uphold the human and civil rights of Americans of Japanese ancestry, preserve the cultural heritage and values of Japanese Americans, and to combat social injustice against all people regardless of color or circumstances. Today, JACL has approximately 7,000 members across 96 chapters in the United States and one chapter in Tokyo.

JACL’s membership is predominantly Sansei (third generation), comprising 59% of respondents, which is a share that has remained largely stable since 2009, when Sansei made up 46% of the sample. The mean age is 64, with the largest group falling between 65 and 74 years old.

Multiracial and multiethnic members make up about 21% of the membership, consistent with 2009 figures. By contrast, over half of Japanese Americans nationally identified with more than one race in the 2020 Census, according to AAPI Data’s AANHPI Community Counts Dashboard, suggesting a growing opportunity for JACL to expand its reach to mixed-heritage Japanese Americans.

JACL members lean heavily Democratic — 69% identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, compared to 55% of Japanese American voters and 49% of Asian American voters overall in the 2024 Asian American Voter Survey. The gap is most pronounced on Republican identification with just 6% of JACL members identifying as Republican or lean Republican, compared to 32% of Japanese American voters nationally. 24% of JACL members identify as independent, more than double the 11% figure among Japanese American voters in the same survey.

A Membership Activated by the Current Moment

Nearly four in five member respondents (78%) say the current U.S. immigration policy debate has made discrimination against AANHPI communities more of a problem. For a community whose parents and grandparents were forcibly incarcerated during WWII, these parallels carry particular weight. And the impact is personal: 1 in 6 members report that they or someone in their household felt vulnerable due to immigration status in the past twelve months, a striking figure for a membership that skews older, highly educated, and financially stable.

Experiences of race- or ethnicity-based hate crimes and incidents reinforce this urgency. More than half of JACL member respondents (58%) report having been a victim of a hate incident, including verbal harassment, racial slurs, cyberbullying, or hate mail because of their race or ethnicity. Nearly a quarter (22%) report having been a victim of a hate crime, including physical assault or property damage. Hate incidents were reported across every chapter district and every age group. Hate crime experiences are similarly widespread, with the exception of the Central California District Council, whose small sample size precludes reliable inference.

What Unites Members

Perhaps the most striking finding in the survey is how much members agree across generational lines. Asked to select their top three priorities from a list of 15 issues, racial justice and equity is ranked first overall as the top policy priority at 15%, followed by healthcare (12%), environment (9%), distribution of wealth and income (9%), and education (8%). Racial justice and equity is the only issue that ranks consistently the highest from first-generation members through fifth-generation and beyond, though healthcare and environment remain consistently high across generations as well. Economy stands out as a notable exception, resonating far more strongly among second-generation members (13%) than among any other generation. 

JACL members are equally united on the question of pan-ethnic and cross-racial advocacy. At least 90% of members in every age group agree that Japanese Americans should engage in cross-racial advocacy efforts. And while support is high across every age group, it deepens among younger age groups – nearly 7 in 10 members aged 18 to 34 strongly agree, compared to about half of those 65 and older. 

What’s Next

The stakes have only risen since the survey was fielded. In January 2026, JACL responded to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents during protests in Minneapolis, stating: “We recognize the dangers of unchecked federal power and how it can quickly erode the protections guaranteed to us all by the Constitution… We must not stand idly by as more communities face violence and forced removal at the hands of our government.” The survey data shows members are ready to stand behind that statement.

As JACL approaches its 100th anniversary in 2029, this survey offers both a reality check and a source of optimism. Members are engaged, largely unified on core values, and ready for the organization to reach further. The full white paper, including detailed breakdowns by generation, district, and age group, is available at [link].

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About the survey

This survey was conducted by Erika Braun with support of the Japanese American Citizens League, AAPI Data at the U.C. Berkeley Asian American Research Center and the Bolder Futures Initiative at Community R&D. The survey was distributed via Qualtrics to 4,181 verified member email addresses between October 11 and November 11, 2025, yielding 510 verified member responses, a 12.2% response rate consistent with organizational membership survey benchmarks. The survey used a nonprobability convenience sample with self-selection; because the 2025 and 2009 surveys used different sampling approaches, year-over-year comparisons should be interpreted as indicative trends rather than precise measurements. Three randomly selected respondents received $50 Amazon gift cards as incentives, sponsored by AAPI Data through Community R&D.

Erika Braun is a recent graduate of George Washington University and an incoming student at the London School of Economics. She is a 2024 OCA National Summer Intern matched with the Japanese American Citizens League and a 2025 Bolder Futures Fellow at AAPI Data.

Karthick Ramakrishnan is the founder and executive director of AAPI Data at UC Berkeley.

Saki Mori was the interim executive director of JACL.