In the 1990s, many Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander—known as NHPI or NHOPI—organizations advocated for a separate racial category—and for good reason. Unlike the migration history of most Asian Americans,5 the history of Pacific Islanders in the United States has been one of colonial contact and conquest, with the growth of plantation economies and U.S. military power in the Pacific playing important roles.6 Te process of NHPI becoming a recognized racial group in the United States was thus very different from the experiences of Asian Americans. Furthermore, the NHPI population was, and remains, much smaller than the Asian American population. Tis masked important disadvantages in educational attainment, health, and labor market outcomes among NHPIs because they were lumped into a much larger API category. Since 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau has treated NHPI as a distinct racial category, and there are close to 1.5 million Pacific Islanders in the United States today
